As soon as she sees a broken rail, she points it out to Maria. "How bad is that? Should we be repairing it first before we work on the creature?"

"No, it needs to be removed before proper repairs can be made, just be careful." She moves towards the carcass. "We're going to pry it's teeth out, and secure the body with wires as it comes loose."

"All right."

She can pry things, she's pretty sure. Prying things is not difficult. She will pry the creature teeth.

The broken rails disrupt straightforward paths, forcing the two to take circuitous routes to navigate the bulk of the corpse. Prying it off is tedious work, a matter of hooking onto a tooth and applying a little more force than one thinks necessary. The teeth are made from hard bone and enamel, so it's a good thing that the rest of the monster is held together by flexible cartilage, otherwise Ellen would have to break bone each time she were to pry a tooth off due to how much she has to deform the mouth to do so. Maria directs Ellen tooth to tooth, fang to fang while she alternates between doing the same and tying it to the railings via sturdy looking rope.

Through the work, it's hard to not peak at the horizon, the impossibly distant geology, and the abyss below. Over the course of, frankly, too many miles, the features of the horizon are obscured by the atmosphere itself, wreathing them in the blue tint reserved for mountains seen in the distance. In that distance, many times further away than the serpent was, does Ellen spot movement, down below.

Maria makes navigating the gravityless environment look easy, she seems to always know how and when to move from one position to the next. After a couple of hours it has completely been detached from the ship. At this point Maria leaves and comes back with a couple of crew members to assist. She unties ropes, directs one of the three of them to hold ropes in place so she can tie it closer to the cargo hold, then quickly and efficiently maneuvers to secure the beast to a different railing. Through this method the four inch the thing closer and closer to the cargo hold and it's not long until they are pulling the serpentine thing into the maw of the vessel. It closes, and gravity reasserts itself upon Ellen for the first time in hours.

It's a fascinating process—tedious and effortful, but fascinating all the same. She develops her tooth-prying technique over the course of those hours, first gamely applying as much force as it takes each time, then gradually learning how to place her pry-bar more and more effectively until she feels like a bona fide expert in getting just the right leverage to extract tooth from hull with a minimum of fuss. There are really a lot of teeth on this creature. An absurd and somewhat disturbing number of teeth.

Is movement in the abyss the sort of thing one comments on, normally? Maybe she'll just focus on her tooth-prying and not say anything about it. That seems socially if not abyssally safest.

When gravity resumes, she stumbles, nearly catches herself, then overcorrects and falls on her ass with an 'oof' and a wry chuckle.

"Ah, I should've given you more warning." Maria says. The lack of emotion in her voice makes it difficult to tell whether or not she's actually remorseful, but she helps Ellen up all the same. "Now to pry it apart for secrets, would you like to watch?"

"YES," she says, much too enthusiastically, to her immediate regret. An embarrassed cough follows.

"Ah, enthusiasm is good!" The captain says, voice slightly distorted by the protective suit he wears, similar to the ones Maria and Ellen wear. He carries a case that he deposits upon a small metal table. "We're on our way to Riotinto to get repairs." He opens the clinking case, revealing an intimidating amount of shiny, sharp objects. The captain frowns. "Or at least enough for a patchwork job to tide us over until we can make our way to Inocencia."

Ellen is slightly distracted from their itinerary by trying to guess how all these objects apply to the situation at hand. Are they going to let her dissect the horrible beast? Probably not. Probably that job is reserved for people who have any idea what they're doing. She wants to dissect the horrible beast though. It's so fascinatingly horrible.

There appear to be scalpels of various sizes, lengths and shapes; one has a curious hook shape about it. A bonesaw, syringes, vials, forceps, tweezers, some sort of small metal paddle, scissors, a magnifying glass, a whole bunch of replacement blades for the scalpels, thin rods with bends in them and more, though it's difficult to tell what else is in there.

"Alright then." The captain said, knife in hand. "Shall we?"

"I want to find out what's inside the creature!"

She's nearly certain she should have said a different thing, but the thing she said is this. Oh well.

"Ha! That's the spirit." Captain Giles rummages around in the case, pulling out a large knife, hooked inwards. "The light from above, is, in a sense, life. Under that light, wounds close and plants grow, and if that's all it did, then all would be fine and dandy. But the light, the light is indiscriminate." He holds the knife handle first to Ellen. "Here, take it, I'll show you how this works."

She takes the knife, doing her best to stifle what she suspects is an expression of unwarranted glee, and pays close attention.

The pale skin is shiny and rubbery, between distant patches of purple scales, and littered with stretch marks. The eyes are the more prominent feature, but it's only now in the gloom of the cargo bay that a peculiar quality of the wounds is revealed: That they seem to glow ever so slightly with inner light.

"You want to start with a shallow incision. You are an explorer, and must act cautiously. You do not know how thick the skin is, what organs are where, whether or not anything is at high pressure. Cut, then cut in the same place a little deeper, and so on until you have just barely pierced skin."

She nods thoughtfully, and follows this procedure. A tiny shallow cut, barely a cut at all; and then a little more, and a little more...

"The light won't restrict itself to merely touching wounds, maladies, or other deficiencies. It seizes everything." Under careful, repeated cuts, the skin and fat parts to give way to the viscera of organs. The aggressively vibrant reds, purples and oranges that paint the surface make it harder to make out individual parts. "A body with more life than it knows what to do with will grow to accommodate it. And once it has done so there is no turning back, that is it's new baseline, and leaving the vitality of the environment high above would kill it. Normally anyway."

He pauses, to survey the incision, and its contents. Using two sets of tweezers, he carefully picks out a strand of gore, holding the section between them taut. "Sever this, carefully."

He said to be careful, so she's careful. She's not quite sure what to be careful about, exactly, so she settles for just being very precise with the knife, holding it firmly but with caution, feeling out the level of resistance the strand of gore has to offer and only applying as much force as necessary to get through it.

It parts cleanly, it's a tube, like a vein. But the substance inside is thick, viscous, crystal clear and glowing. Something holds it together, such that when the pressure of the tweezers eases, the droplet is pulled back in to its vein. "Aha, yes, look at this!" When the glowing drop is pulled back in, the light it emits is focused, into a spot of light that grows brighter and smaller, illuminating a patch as big as the width of the tube itself. The organs seem to ripple when Giles points at them with it.

"—is that... the light? Is it dangerous?"

"Yes, and yes!" He says cheerfully.

"Your suit will protect you." Maria says. "The light-tempered have few ways to categorize them, few broad commonalities between them, this is one of them." Maria passes the captain a couple of clamps, which he uses to force the light-veins shut, then an opaque black syringe.

She continues. "Since they die outside of the light, they need some way to carry it with them," Giles fills the syringe with the vitreous fluid, with some effort, then sets it aside. "such as a system of veins lined with a reflective surface such as these." She pauses to think. "I suppose it would be more accurate to say that those that survive coming down are ones that have some method of keeping light in their system."

"I see. Yes, that makes sense."

"A creature like this will have one or more nodes where the light becomes trapped, and is then released slowly throughout its body. Many of the eyes have probably been repurposed to catch the light." Maria says. The captain examines the body of the serpentine beast, moving away from the incision made at its midsection. Mismatched eyes glare balefully at the walls, the mouth is so long it almost looks like a wound, like a knife was dragged lengthwise across its skin and teeth grew instead of scar tissue.

He turns to Ellen. "Well Lass, the point of this little bit of butchery is exploration, what bit are you curious about?"

"...that vein didn't leak any light until we cut it. I want to see how they release their light normally. There could be transparent parts, or... the fluid was thick enough that it probably wouldn't leak much if there was an outright break in the vein, if it was small enough..." She studies the area around the vein, trying to trace where it goes and detect any such apparatus.

The vein in question quickly disappears between lumps of viscera, both sides of the severed vein, she'll have to dig in there to some extent if she wants to trace it.

"Don't be afraid to get in there!" The captain says, as he examines what could generously be called the head.

Well, all right, if she's supposed to, then sure. She goes digging.