Sympathetic smile. "Yeah. Sorry. At least our section on vampires in the monster manual is fairly complete?"

"Why are you sorry, did you kill him? Do I have a serial killer boyfriend?"

"What? No! Sorry, I didn't mean--" He realizes that he just apologized again and decides to just cut himself off. "Um. I mean. I'm just gonna... go look up Gerard Keay, I guess." He pulls out his phone and "...There's an obituary. Died in 2014 in America of a brain tumor. I guess everyone who might be useful gets cancer."

He quashes his first response which was "see, I told you your life expectancy was five years."

"Well, that's incredibly disappointing. Only vaguely benevolent being in the monster manual and he's dead. --I guess his mom didn't exactly stay dead."

"...Yeah, that's a fair point. Maybe he's out there somewhere with even more weird tattoos."

"Although if there's one thing I've learned from reading entirely too many Stephen King novels it's that sometimes death is better."

They sit at the Indian restaurant! The waitress knows their orders immediately.

She's a really nice waitress! Martin thanks her. "I, uh, know it's our day off, and you don't have to decide anything now if it's still too painful, but, uh. I was wondering how you were planning on doing archiving and research and stuff for the live statement?"

"Eh, I think a morning off is all I can handle. --I transcribed her statement in shorthand. I should be able to type it up and file it with the other non-digitizable statements. And you and Tim and Sasha can do the rest of the research? Try to talk to the family, see whether there's a church in the area, check out whether the car crash actually happened, that sort of thing?"

"Okay, yeah, definitely! Yeah, that sounds like a good plan. Um, as long as you can type it up. --I'll look more into Gerard, too, just in case there's more there than just the obituary, but no promises."

"Typewriter works! It's how Gertrude typed up the others."

"And we still have it? ...I guess we'd have to, now that I think about it. It's so weird to me that magic reacts to technology like that."

"It blows out lightbulbs, I'm pretty sure it broke Naomi's phone... it's really weird because technology just runs on physics, there's no discrete concept of 'high technology.' I wonder if it works badly with electricity, or with some concept of 'advanced tech'... I mean the lightbulbs thing might also be the magic-darkness connection."

"Trevor Herbert's statement was a photocopy, right? So they must work with photocopiers. In Amy Patel's statement, digital photos were effected and polaroids weren't. It seems weird that a lightbulb would be considered higher-tech than a photocopier or a polaroid camera. ...I don't really know where I'm going with this other than that it's really weird."

"I should clearly get back into teaching myself physics."

"...You were teaching yourself physics? Why do I even ask, of course you were teaching yourself physics."

"I was bored in college!"

"A kind of bored that led to teaching yourself physics! You are... kind of a ridiculous person! I will grant that you are much less ridiculous than Asher, but still!"

"Physics is one of the rare hobbies that never involves talking to anyone."

"...Okay that's really cute actually." Handsqueeze! 

Compliments! Bounce bounce. 

"I was thinking about Naomi's statement this morning."

"Oh?"

"So it's weird that Naomi wound up going to the funeral without having any idea where it was or who invited her. That seems like a mind control thing. And when you start looking at her early statement assuming that things could be mind control... well, Naomi opens up to Evan and it's the only time she ever opened up to anyone. She doesn't remember the week after he died. And he dies of something totally random and undiagnosable, a heart issue... but we know that magic kills people." 

"...Huh. When she was talking to you, did she seem like she'd never opened up to people before? Because that... doesn't really sound like how you described her, right after."

"...not really but no one talks the way she talked."

"--And I guess we can't really investigate that much more until we go back in, right. Um. Sorry to get us off track, you were talking about her statement?"