"I fail to see why this means you should give me a toe bone."

"Fine. You can have... a thumb."

"Pog."

"Does anyone here actually have experience with, like, skinning and dressing a corpse, or are we going to be DIY-ing this shit."

"I don't, Tommy doesn't, I'd be surprised if Jack or Niki did."

"Well, fuck it. If we botch it too bad at least we'll get ingredients out of it."

"That's the spirit!"

“I have… cooked a chicken, before?”

“It can’t be that different, right? I mean I guess people don’t have feathers. We have hair, though.”

“What does that… mean.”

“You know, like, the bits you shouldn’t eat.”

“He’s in my room, I found him in the cafeteria but I had to, just, preserve him and hide him so the mals wouldn’t get him. Or, y'know, decay."

Niki does-- a broadly okay job, all things considered, of butchering Schlatt's body. She ends up going with making jerky; her affinity works in her favor here, so she's able to make a marinade for it that should taste good and also remove any poison, and jerky will last longer than other ways of cooking the meat. The skinning isn't clean, exactly, but they've got enough skin out of it to make at least some leather, and they have hair and bones and vials of blood which get distributed--well, mostly to Alex, but everyone gets enough to make it worth their while.

Tommy runs out of the room during the butchering, retching, and when he comes back in he focuses very intently on his sewing and refuses to look no matter how much Toby teases him about it. He does coo at his newly obtained bones, though, so it balances out in its own way.

They cook the liver and heart, for eating right away, and Alex freezes the rest of the organs with a spell. He's pretty sure the brain's bad, and he has no clue how to cook the intestines or stomach or anything, so that will get left out after curfew for the mals, but he's also pretty sure that the tongue and kidneys are good, and he pokes dubiously at some miscellaneous organs he is unsure the purpose of before declaring them Probably Fine To Eat. Toby takes the liver--he's pretty sure he heard something about it being healthy?--and Alex eats Schlatt's heart while making half-jokes about their relationship. ("I took his heart, man," he says, holding it up proudly, and Toby laughs. "In more ways than one.")