"I'll keep an eye out. --Do you have any idea what my crimson fate that Jane Prentiss was being cryptic about was?"

“Unfortunately, I know little more about Jane Prentiss than you do. She gave a statement, before she became—the thing she is now—but with the Archives in such disarray... Gertrude had many virtues, but organizing the Archives was decidedly not among them.

That said, I would assume that she is threatening to kill you? Killing people is rather her modus operandi, and her texts as Tim were not exactly subtle.” 

That... doesn't feel right. Lev increases his credence in the hypotheses "Jane Prentiss wants to kill me," "Elias Bouchard is surprisingly ignorant about the Archives," and "Elias Bouchard is a lying untrustworthy fuck."

"What were Gertrude's virtues? She does not seem to have had many as a, uh, conventional archivist."

Elias pauses for a moment, considering. “Extremely good at staying alive. She was the Archivist for almost fifty years, and it wasn’t because she was particularly averse to getting involved.”

"...see, I told Martin I shouldn't guess my life expectancy from Gertrude."

“Well. You’ve just started here, no need to be too pessimistic just yet. Perhaps you’ll be another Gertrude Robinson, just with better filing practices.”

"...I am going to do my best to turn the Archives into an actual research institution and if there is a reason I shouldn't do that, instead of it just being unimportant whether I do that, you should probably tell me not to."

“No, do go ahead. It’s no more dangerous than anything else, it was just never one of Gertrude’s priorities. I’d be curious about your findings.”

"Having the ability to cheat on figuring out whether things are fake is going to help a lot."

“I wish you the best of luck. Anything else you wanted to ask about? And in the future, please do use email, it’s far more reliable. Not to mention easier for us both.”

"...how did you know what I was doing."

“You were trying to communicate with what you call the Watching Thing, no? Let’s just say it sent me.”

"...The cryptic mysteriousness of literally everyone magic is getting on my nerves. --Although I guess if I had the opportunity to be cryptically mysterious I couldn't resist it either."

“Well. I did at least tell you that I can’t give you all the answers just yet. I do dearly hope you live long enough and learn enough about the world to be cryptically mysterious yourself one day; I suppose that will have to be enough.”

"...why did you tell me that trying to talk to the Watchful Thing is stupid? If I'm being cryptically threatened by Jane Prentiss, trying to talk to the least malevolent spirit I can find, which can already basically do whatever it wants with me, is actually a totally reasonable decision. Given the rest of its observed character, I thought it would probably not punish me for curiosity, which it didn't. You told me that being curious is going to increase my life expectancy, so I was in fact totally right. And this did cause me to have somewhat more useful information than I had previously. --Also, it's far from unreasonable to guess that the Watchful Thing might be able to move a planchette or control my small involuntary muscle movements and thus use the Ouija board to communicate usefully."

“I hadn’t considered your involuntary muscle movements. I don’t think the attempt was stupid—the automatic writing might even have done something, if you’d been working here longer. And you’re right that it worked. I was unimpressed with the ouija board because cursed artifacts are generally not mass produced, whatever some of our, ah, digitizable statement givers might claim, and I was also slightly annoyed at being interrupted during work in such an... unconventional way.”

"...I'm not going to try to contact a spirit with a cursed artifact, I have any sense of self-preservation. --And if you would like not to be contacted in an unconventional fashion then you should tell me what activities just contact you and I will know that I don't get interesting results from doing them."

"Declaring your intent to converse with the Watching Thing, especially if you do so within the Institute, is very likely to contact me and very unlikely to do anything else; you can keep trying if you like, but you'll have to be okay with the fact that I'm not going to interrupt my paperwork for every experiment. Though I expect you won't get very interesting results from trying to contact it in general, especially this early on. I don't mean to discourage you, it is always possible that I'll be surprised, but in my experience it rather prefers watching to interference."

"That's not what I asked, but if it turns out that speculating about the interaction of magic and general relativity also interrupts your paperwork I guess you will have no one to blame but yourself."

"You asked what activities contact me. I told you that declaring your intent to converse with the Watching Thing, especially within the Institute, would contact me. I doubt that other speculations will do the same. Does that answer your question?"

"...yes, and I don't want to keep you from your paperwork for too long."

"I appreciate that. Let me know if you need anything or have any questions." And Elias leaves!

Lev sends everyone an email!

Since Jane Prentiss attacked Tim and is threatening me, and we don't know very much about her, I want to drop what we're doing and instead search the Archive for and research statements that mention Jane Prentiss. (She also gave a statement at some point-- if we can find that one, I think it'd be particularly valuable.)

If you find a statement that mentions her, check whether it's digitizable. I believe, based on my previous experience of them, that non-digitizable statements are always true. 

(He types out "if that's okay with everyone" and then deletes it on the grounds that it is not very managerial.)

Then he looks for statements that mention Jane Prentiss until lunch. 

Does he check while going through them if they're digitizable, or is he just looking for her name?

If he finds any statements with her name he puts them in a pile so he can check whether they're digitizable all at once.