"No, I'm fine. Thank you though. Nice to know that someone believes me, at least."

"I do," he says, and "...sorry for the behavior of the me in the dreams. I promise I'm not a creepy weirdo in real life."

"--It's not your fault, really. I'm sorry I said anything, I know it must be weird."

"No, it's very useful. Thank you for your time," he says.

It's probably suspicious to demand Martin take him to lunch immediately so he spends the rest of the morning hypocritically working on the sexual harassment policy and reading a management book. Apparently you are supposed to have one-on-ones with your employees every week. This sounds horrible and he wonders if he can reasonably delegate it to Martin. 

And eventually it will be lunchtime and they can non-suspiciously go to lunch together!

"Taking live statements also mind controls me and additionally gives both me and the statement-giver shared nightmares."

"That sounds! Not great!!!"

"It really isn't! Especially since we kind of do need to take statements!"

"...I mean, Research was taking them before and managing, right? So we could always just--tell them we changed our minds and they shouldn't send us the people who mention relevant people or have non-digitizable statements after all. But I guess that might just... transfer the nightmares and mind control to someone in research.... which is maybe not better?"

"I'm not sure. A lot of magic stuff seems centered around the Archive-- and the Archivist-- specifically. I think you should take the next live statement-giver."

"O......kay. Why?"

"Antonio Blake saw the black tendrils going into the body of the Archivist specifically, it seems at least plausible that the magic shit just affects me. And if it did it would be really convenient. --One statement isn't that bad, you'll mostly just be slightly more excited about spider facts." 

"Yeah. Yeah, okay. We--wanted to check if all the statement givers speak in paragraphs, too, should I just--talk to Research, see if I can interview the next statement giver they get, digitizable or no? I'll tell them Elias sent me, nobody'll check."

"Yeah, I think you should interview one digitizable and one non-digitizable at least. And-- I was going to ask if you could ask around in Research about some of the more recent non-digitizables we've found-- but I assume you were not so much close with your coworkers."

"I know them pretty well, actually? I wasn't close like, close close, but I could definitely ask around, yeah."

"Well, then. First thing is to ask around, I think we're going to get a lot more data from other people's experiences than we can get from you."

“Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I’ll ask around when we head back.”

"I wish we could do more rigorously controlled experiments but... mind control... is not exactly safe... If you want to you can try reading a statement into a tape recorder in the Archives and see if your experience is like mine when everything except who's reading it is the same. But it'd be fair to not want to do that."

“No, that’s— that’s fine, yeah. I can do that.”

Bounce bounce. 

"Thank you, Милый! --We're going to find out some things!"

“Yeah! Hopefully they’re even good things!”

"I wonder what the nature of mind control tells us about minds... like, does it mean anything that I have weird dreams specifically? --I bet if you had a lot of mind control you could figure out a lot about how personality works by seeing what things change together but, uh, an IRB would probably frown on this research proposal."

Snort. “Yeah, I can imagine. Either that or they’d laugh you out of the building.”

"...I didn't take notes on what Naomi said about her dreams which was-- an oversight-- but I recall she said something about me being a... creepy weirdo who was just watching and didn't care about what happened to her... and that when she was in the office she felt like she was being dissected... which is making me think that the Watchful Thing, or the Beholding, or whatever you might want to call it also has an aesthetic."

“...That seems like it’s probably not great!”