The other chefs gave her a minute in the bathroom that was available by going through the locker room. She coughed and heaved bile into the sink, clutching the sides as her only support, her hair was already up in a ponytail when she put on her uniform, muscle memory, and it was thankfully dangling a good distance away from all the substances coming out of her mouth in that panicked moment.

Noemie stared into the mirror with tears in her eyes after spilling out her nausea and shock in that moment, the tears probably weren't sympathy or sadness for the head of the coworker she suddenly recognized, sitting bodyless on that counter, but from the stress of puking. Weird, how some humans will tear up from throwing things up out of their mouths, though to be fair, most don't do it often and are very unused to it.

With the water and some tissues taken from a large box on the wall by the sink, she cleaned herself up and held herself back together again, making herself presentable. Her face was blank, sometimes that implied that a person was thinking; I wonder what she was thinking of.

Was it perhaps about how her coworker, now recognized as Lilia, ended up just a head when she only saw her a few hours earlier today? I wonder how they killed her to receive an expression like what Lilia's face currently wore. Or, perhaps the better question, when did the young lady get hunted, so quickly, and so close to Noemie? 

The woman stared into mirror as the tissue cleaned up the rest of the water droplets on her neck, eyes foggy and dazed. 

A knock is heard from the doorway, right behind the woman, and she flinched. She stared at the door through the mirror, waiting for something to pop-up. 

"You alright now? We need your help here, the letter from the manager said that it was a round table party tonight." A muffled voice said from behind the door. 

It sounded feminine and of a higher, yet monotone pitch. 

".... Yes. Come in if you want, I'm about to go back out." Noemie responded. 

The door opened to reveal another woman, her blonde hair about as curly as Roman's ponytail, but not as red, eyes were soft like Alonzo's, yet still and holding a bit of apathy. Her skin was dusty looking, almost a little peachy gray even though she seemed young.

Noemie stared, seeming to wonder which position the woman held as one of the six chefs of the night, scrunching up the wet tissue into a ball and threw it into a nearby trashcan as she steadily walked closer to the door and the woman. 

"The, new dish washer?" She questioned, holding her hands together cautiously as she walked past the woman, who was the same height as her. 

"Yes, now if you don't mind, I'll be here." The woman gestured to one of the stalls of the washroom. 

Noemie nodded and quickly left, walking quickly back to the kitchen and adjusting the collar of her chef jacket, having forcefully unbuttoned and shuffled it with a hard pull earlier. She was smoothing out the wrinkles.

The door connecting to the locker room and the kitchen had a figure leaning by the wall next to it, the stoic baker man from last night, Roman, had his arms crossed as he leaned back. He too was staring off into space, imagining something by staring at the side of one of the lockers, until he heard Noemie's footsteps come closer and turned his head. 

Noemie eyed him cautiously as she kept her hands closed and fiddling with the buttons of her uniform, giving him a curt nod as she left through the door. The man looked at her with an almost unreadable expression, but it was easy to sense that he too was concerned about her and was waiting for her to come out of the bathroom, yet for some reason, they didn't say anything to each other. Not a lot of humans are good at reading body language.

Noemie passed by Alonzo, who was carrying some plates and fancy holders that could hold more than one candle with the help of some waiters, to the dining area, and then coming back to grab some linens from one of the cabinets of the only large and long shelf of miscellaneous, fancy items, utensils, and cutlery ware. The longest shelf in the whole cooking area, yet easily blends in with the wall when all its cabinets are closed, it was a large room.

"Are you alright?" He asked, his voice shaky and nervous. 

"The smell just bothered me." She lied to him. "Don't worry about me, be careful carrying those."

She gave a curt nod as he hesitantly nodded back and tried not to bump into the third lady in the kitchen, who was carrying a knife that she needed to grab from another station, her and Gavin's. Not sure if it was already stated before, but their carving station was the only one with the most knives, and the most creative looking ones too. 

She walked to her position next to Gavin at the metal counter, he nodded to her, looking with the most sympathy on his face seen that night before slipping it off and becoming unreadable again, going back to finish cutting the top of the skull off the final head with a bone saw. On this night, the party of patrons ordered heads, one for each person, so all the hair was shaved off in a corner where a large trashcan stood and are currently being cut and carved to sit on their own and flatly hold stuff inside.

The lady put on some new gloves.

"Thanks for doing all the work, I'm sorry for earlier." Noemie said without facing him.

"It's alright, besides you wouldn't have been able to help me anyway. These heads are a bit more complicated than limbs or torsos."

She grabbed a thick plastic sounding tray from underneath the metal counter, sliding it over for him to put all the contents from the cut open heads inside. More blood, but a little funny to look at when he tips the heads over to spill the organ out, only to then see a tiny stem still keeping it attached that he also has to cut. Awkwardly funny. 

Not very funny for the woman however who was looking away and covering her nose. 

"I still feel bad, you could show me how if you ever get tired yourself, that way we don't always have to depend on you to cut the difficult parts." 

"Unless you went mortuary school, I doubt I'll be able to show you in a way you'd understand. I'm not much of a teacher myself, just a doer." He said as he used the cleanest part of his wrist to nudge his glasses into place.

The woman smiled as she took the tray all full of brains and slid it to an empty space, pulling out a smaller metal tray, and taking out a thin, hook needle, leaning forward just enough to be on level with the eyes. 

"I've taken some classes in med school for a year, and some culinary classes in university for two, I'm sure I can take another subject." 

She tilted the first head back and stretched the eyelids far enough apart to see those pink flesh sides attached to eyes, stabbing in between the eye and the pink parts before twisting and pulling, the eye slowly popping out with a weird sound, couldn't tell if it was wet noise or dry sounds of stretching muscles. It looked like it was about to break like an egg yolk.

"Can you, do the other please? The woman with the green eyes. I'll take care of the rest if you can do that." She said as she dropped the eye into the tray, it bounced a little as she quickly worked on the other and carefully placed the eyeless head to the side, grabbing another that had the face of a stranger to her.

"Sure." Gavin said as he shuffled through all the feminine looking heads.

"Or, I can just take care of all the women's heads while you take the men's."

"That would be nice too, thank you." 

As they finished plucking the eyes out, a pair of eyes from eight heads making a total of sixteen, Noemie took the small metal tray of eyes and walked over to the station where Elias was cutting up fruit and there was a small container of thin, metal sticks. This was one of the rare times where the soft looking man was seen being busy at his own station instead of helping others to make their dishes look more presentable. 

The tray was placed down at his counter, he merely looked at the eyes which still had some of the pink lines that likely connected it to the brains, still attached, and he shivered and winced his own eyes shut. Gavin came over and put each of the heads on Alonzo's table as well, one by one, not letting Noemie help, and gently turning her by the shoulder to go deal with the tray of brains. They didn't notice until last minute, Elias had walked away from his station that now had a tray of eyeballs and heads and was taking a moment to breathe in the corner. 

He had a hand placed on the wall for support, and sounded like he was having trouble breathing.

"It's just heads, you've seen plenty of skulls. It's just heads, you've seen plenty of skulls." He mumbled to himself, like a whispered chant.

Gavin grabbed his station partner's shoulders before she could go to comfort him. 

"He'll be fine, just give him a minute." 

"But what if he's actually getting sick? Maybe I should just prep them for him-" 

"No, no. He will learn to look at them and not be squeamish eventually." He pulled her away from the man doing breathing exercises in the corner and had her come back to the metal counter. 

He pulled an iron looking mechanism from somewhere that was hard to see, it was getting crowded, and eyes would naturally have a difficult time trying to keep track of who's doing what in this kitchen. It was a meat grinder.

"Afterall, he works at a museum, right? Full of articles and pictures about dead people?"

"I don't think studying aged corpses is equal to dissecting bodies." Noemie shook her head. 

They took the brains, the tall man picked one up and rotated it, looking at which side to stick before setting it gently back down, it was difficult to hold as it was like a weird, firm jelly made of rubber. In a way, I was curious what it would be like to claw into it.

"I'm actually surprised that we don't do this more often, not that I'd want to, but I thought cannibals would want to eat the head more than anything." Noemie said quietly to him.

"Yeah, or make a special order to fulfill their fantasy of eating someone else's, kind of like they did your coworker?" He asked without looking at her. 

She froze a little, still holding one of the brains as she was about to stick it into the sink. It was dripping spinal fluid between her fingers.

"How'd you guess?" She answered, a sad tone mixed into her voice. She continued transferring the other brains from the tray to the sink. 

Their gloves must have been very thick for them to touch all of those organs no problem, their chef jackets as well, as more blood was now leaking all over the white clothes. 

"You didn't start sobbing, so I knew she wasn't family or friend, but you did go run to puke, so she must've been close in some way. It was either that or a person you hated but not too much." He shrugged. 

All the blood mixed with water was going down the drain, and they picked the brains up to put into the meat grinders. They were turned into strings and then squished together again into a more malleable type of meat, easy to mold and flattened into something square and evenly flat on the cutting board. Instead of knives, there were multiple metal cylinder shapes, they used those to press into the grounded-up brains, making these circle shapes out of them. It almost looked like the shape for hamburger meat, but it was a bit too tall, and they put them onto plates by themselves without being sandwiched, so it was something else.

"I'm just glad I didn't get too close to her to want to sob, I never befriended most of my coworkers before, and now I fear I found the reason." 

Some of the scraps were put into meat grinders, turned into these long strands of noodle looking meat and then put in bags, clearly going to be used for a later time, the rest of the scraps from the brains were collected in a bowl and passed over to a chef who was by a station with an oven with a pit inside, filled with this boiling oil and a metal basket being held above it. She took the scraps and covered them in layers of flour and egg before putting them in the basket. 

How the oil was boiling was likely thanks to the machines, making the area around it warm while other areas of the room were cold, an odd feeling when going a circle in that place.

Elias, with shaky hands, had stabbed each pair of eyes with the long metal sticks and put them on a rectangular plate, the heads were filled to the top with chopped fruit, and the holes that used to have eyes in them were now plugged up with cherry tomatoes. 

Roman, who only worked with blood it seemed, was making drinks with the blood, mixing them with those alcohols that most people loved to drink so much, even though some tasted awful but made them act funny. The man seems to be multi-faceted, skills in confectionary sweets and skills as a bartender.

"Does being a mortician also help you read people?" 

Noemie asked Charles, as she helped Elias put each of the heads onto plates, they were now turned into some kind of fancy holder for fruit and mystery red cream that another pastry chef in the kitchen was responsible for. It looked similar to some kind of other dish that consisted of a fancy cup filled with fruit and cream, but the name was hard to remember. 

Another thing that may also be hard to remember, Elias is Alonzo's first name, Gavin is Charles' first name, no one knows Roman's last name because his first name is common, and the only name he gave when the chefs first met. Why am I switching between calling first and last names? Well because, we don't know how close Noemie is to each of them, first name basis? Or last name basis? I'd say they should recognize each other by smell, if it weren't for the strong metallic smell at the moment.

"As a mortician no, as a funeral director yes." Gavin chuckled lightly. 

Noemie tried to smile; it came out hesitantly as she gave a comforting back rub to a lightheaded looking Elias, who was, by the look of his Adam's apple and his hands planted at the edge of the table, trying not to gag. Roman who was still making all of the drinks, looked over his shoulder, seeing the lady try and have a light-hearted conversation to distract the soft looking man. He frowned and shook his head.

The dishes were finally prepared and served when a familiar waiter from the previous night came in, Everett I think his name was, told all the chefs that the eight patrons were here.