"Why're you still here, bro," Latula repeats patiently. Kankri glances up accidentally -- midriff, oh dear -- and glances away, fast. Sitting in the surf is a man with too many visible ribs and shoulders too wide for his frame, strings-and-cables musculature in stark relief through the lack of even the smallest coating of insulating flesh. He looks starving and steel-strong both and there are little chalk-white nicks of scars everywhere on him. Foam runs up to his waist; Kankri stares, thinking stupidly, he is naked. Did he decide in a fit of whimsical, ah, otherness, to take off that last bit of -- but no, there is the edge of his waistband, and Kankri turns his gaze down to the sand between his own knees, ears burning with shame at his own salacious, depraved disappointment. They want me gone, he thinks, and he knows why. This is a perfect place, a perfect moment; he's intruding.

"I need to—" you can't, you can't say it with Mituna there. "It's my mutation," you say instead. "There are complications." "Okay, dude, open the door," Latula says. The knob rattles, and you miss whatever Mituna says next. "Yeah, I know, but he's still one of us. We can't just let him suffer, you know?" (Kankri misses a social outing. Some of his friends come to check up on him.)