The lamps hanging from the roof of the warehouse were turned off, and the high windows were all boarded up tightly but one, where the boards had split in the middle and were hastily nailed together. Snow blew in from outside, and with it came a cold bluish light.

The only noises were the hiss of running water and some off-tune whistling. A thickset man was standing at a deep sink, rinsing blood from a fleshing knife and whistling as he worked. He was grey-haired and sported thick sideburns that ran down halfway along his jawline, and his face was broad and severe. His ears were not human but instead were tufted feline ears, and he also sported a thick, heavy, two-pronged, furry tail, but the shirt he wore beneath his bloodstained apron promoted a UFO conference in Joshua Tree.

The workshop around him was quite tidy and sterile-looking. Large skulls of different types sat on a steel countertop; clean pelts of different creatures hung from the tile walls; the shelves held neat bunches of bright red feathers and boxes of shining spiral horns; a compartment under the steel countertop housed a collection of bones with meat still clinging on them, sealed away behind a glass front. Even the collection of skinning knives was clean and hung in an orderly fashion above the sink.

A loud buzzing noise caused the man to pause what he was doing. "'S bout fuckin' time," he muttered.

He exited the workshop, which was housed in a smaller room in the large warehouse, and walked through rows of hooks hanging from ropes. The warehouse was dark but the shapes of many different sorts of bodies were just visible hanging in rows behind the hooks, held upside down to let blood of different colors drain quietly away into the floor.

"All right, all right," the man said grouchily, as the buzzing continued. The noise came from a door with a red light just above it, next to the hangar door. "Keepin' me waitin' all afternoon..."

He threw open the door, showing large, sharp teeth, intending to tell his visitor off. "Hey, y'know, I don't have all--oh." he paused. "Who da hell are you?"

Standing at the door in the snow was a slim humanish figure. They wore a thick jacket over a sweatshirt with the hood up, over black leather gloves and a tight orange scarf and a sort of crude surgical mask. They didn't seem to be particularly dressed for the cold, but even so the only part of them that was visible was above the surgical mask and below the hood--skin almost as gray as their sweatshirt, almond-shaped pale greenish eyes, slender arched eyebrows.

"Howdy," they said, throwing a sort of careless salute. "Your buyers aren't coming. I'm here instead."