Piper chuckled once more, making dismissive gestures, "Yeah, that's what I thought too at first." He inclined his head towards one wall where the rats were all of a distinctive gray-green color. "Notice anything about those rats over there?"
Peter moved closer and squinted at them. Up close the animal smells were overcoming the scents of carrion and blood from behind the curtains. "... these rats have feathers instead of fur."
Piper nodded cheerfully. "Yep. One of the kids has a power that lets him absorb living things into his body. Ends up with a rat tail sticking out of his elbow kind of deal, or whiskers out his back, or paws up and down his face. That sorta thing. The thing is, when he lets 'em back out he can kind of mix and match 'em. It was just kind of a lark at first with him smooshing pigeons and rats into him and seeing how they'd come out merged together, but after a while he got the hang of it and we got the little beasts to breed true."
The older man jerked a thumb at the cages the feathered rats were in. "That's where these fellows came from."
Peter stared in fascination, noting that the cages for the feathered rats actually did have a set of smaller doors where an egg could slide down a short ramp into a woven straw basket that was half-filled with wood shavings.
"Egg laying rats." Peter murmured. "Amazing."
"Normally they would be available scrambled for breakfast," Caliban explained, before glancing towards Piper, "But we didn't have any today?"
Piper made a sour face. "We lost a batch of eggs this morning when Glow Worm dropped 'em on the way to the kitchens. She was supposed to get a talking to from Masque, but as I understand it, breakfast got a bit… rambunctious." Piper shot Peter a speculative look.
Peter replied defensively. "That wasn't my fault."
Piper snorted. "I'm surprised you've still got all your arms and legs and the right number of eyes."
Caliban offered a decidedly neutral statement. "Callisto sorted everything out."
Piper shrugged. "If you say so. I don't care if you've got a beef with Masque, but Glow deserves whatever he does to her. She lost us enough eggs to feed everybody til dinner. It was a huge waste. We're lucky I was able to get the other rats to eat up the spill."
Peter glanced around the station and nodded slowly. "If you say so." He kept his voice neutral.
A few more people went into the curtained section, pulling it aside long enough to go in and pull out another tarp covered cart. Peter caught a glimpse into a literal rat slaughterhouse.
There were rows of bookshelves onto which hundreds of rats crowded. Peter could only clearly see the ones closest to the front. At the ends of each shelf, was a rat wearing a makeshift apron, holding very tiny blades. They looked like disposable razors, but in the rat's forepaws they may as well have been cleavers.
One at a time rats from the crowd would move closer to present themselves to the apron wearing rats and they would have their throats systematically sliced open, the blood allowed to drain off the side of the bookshelf onto a tarp on the floor. The dead rat would then be disassembled by the aproned rats, separating them into individual parts.
The flayed rat hides were dumped into an industrial sized drum next to each bookshelf, the offal and innards were sent down a complicated series of plastic hot-wheels tracks that fed from multiple shelves and book shelves into one cart, while the meat slid onto a different, larger cart.
The whole process was efficient. The few seconds that Peter could see past the curtain were enough to give him a complete view of the process from start to gruesome finish.
Peter swallowed bile down as Caliban gave him a sympathetic look and Piper nodded. "Yeah, it takes a bit of getting used to. It was worse when we tried alligators."
"Alligators?" Peter asked, happy for the distraction as the curtain slid back into place, hiding the rat abattoir from view.
Piper nodded. "We tried farming the gators in the sewers, but their breeding cycles were a mess and it took forever for them to get to a decent size."
Peter ventured, "And the lack of opposable thumbs probably made it awkward to get them to slaughter each other."
Piper barked a laugh. "Exactly!"