Same changes as every other time he's taken a live statement.

Well, fuck. 

He sends an email to his staff telling them that if they have any more paranormal events happen to them they should go to Research and give a statement at Research. He sends an email to Research telling them that non-digitizable statement givers should type up their statements on a typewriter and then the statement should be taken to the Archive, and the statement-givers themselves should not come to the Archive. 

Then he does archiving until Martin is free.

Here's a non-digitizable!

The statement is by Leanne Denikin, given in 2005 about events from 2004. Leanne is the granddaughter of a circus man, Nikolai Denikin, who she was closer with than her parents. When he died, he left her his possessions. In the attic, she finds a steamer trunk full of wooden dolls; all but one have their jaws torn off. The lid of steamer trunk keeps opening on its own. There is also a calliope organ which works even though, mechanically, it shouldn't. There is an inscription on it: "be still, for there is strange music." Her boyfriend, Josh, is freaked out by the clown dolls, and after she plays a song on the calliope, he goes pale and asks her to stop. Afterwards, he keeps hearing the music, far off, when he’s alone; it slowly gets closer and closer. She breaks up with him, and soon after, she finds a clown doll in the trunk, which looks exactly like him. The calliope organ and steamer trunk were stolen a week later. Four days after that, Josh was found dead with his jaw torn off.

Institute records confirm that Artefact Storage obtained a calliope organ matching Leanne's description in 2007. It is kept very firmly locked, but does not seem to need other precautions.

And here's Martin. "Hey, you wanted to see me?"

Indian place!

"...do you think statement-givers can lie?"

"I... don't know, honestly. I mean. It's kind of hard to tell? They can definitely be mistaken, or else we wouldn't have as many that are provably false, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lying. And I kiiiind of doubt that anyone thought to test it."

"...I'm thinking about Sasha's statement. Which is definitely the sort of statement I would expect to file with research that says 'and then her body was found six months later and it was ruled to be an animal attack by the coroner even though no known animal could attack that viciously.'"

"That's! Not great!"

He hands it over to Martin so Martin can read it and then gazes at him adoringly.

"Okay. This is... okay." Shaky breath. "Why didn't you interrupt me earlier?"

"It didn't seem... super... urgent? And I wasn't sure how to get you away from Tim without leaking information to Tim, who has also recently had an experience in which he was menaced by a person possessed by an evil spirit."

"Yeah, that's fair, I guess. ...What are we going to do if one of us is menaced by a person possessed by an evil spirit, it seems kind of... inevitable, at this rate..."

"I already am possessed by an evil spirit. And if it happens to you and you develop social skills other than apologizing, bringing people tea, and lying casually about everything, I will throw you out of my apartment."

"...Yeah, fair enough, I guess. So--what do you think? I... don't really know what to do with it, to be honest."

"I want to know whether statement-givers can lie or not. If they can lie, then... either the things in this statement are true or they're calculated by Michael to get us to do something. If they can't lie, then I'm very suspicious about that part that's all a blur."

"I mean, the obvious thing that they would be calculated to do would be to get us to keep CO2 around. I'm not sure how that would help Michael but it, uh, does seem the obvious thing. There's probably an easy test to do with whether statement-givers can lie, we can just ask them to include a blatant lie and then see if they can? --It's also possible that Michael is opposed to the Hive for reasons of its own, like how the Hive hates the Institute, but I don't really want to count on that. And it doesn't necessarily mean Sasha's safe."

"My guess is that all the spirits probably hate each other? So Michael probably does actually hate the Hive but that doesn't mean that he's safe to interact with for Sasha or for us. --I messaged Elias about the CO2 but I wouldn't be at all surprised if we already have CO2 fire extinguishers."

"That makes sense. Does make it at least a bit more likely that the CO2 tip was genuine, at least, even if it was also a calculated move? I guess the next step is probably to see if statement givers can lie or not."

"I'm thinking about Laura Popham particularly. Because... if any of the non-digitizable statement-givers lied, she did. She didn't say that she said 'take her not me,' but we have three hours of recording of her saying it. And... that's the sort of thing you'd leave out, if you're giving a statement. That you begged for the spirit to take your sister and then she died."

"There might also be a difference between leaving things out and actually lying? I guess I don't know how the magic is... measuring... lying..."

"It's shaping things into very nice little stories for us! I think it must be trying to make the stories as interesting as possible. --Have you noticed they all have climaxes?"

“...No, I hadn’t.”

"Look at Sasha's statement," Lev says. "You see the scenery setting here... and here it reminds you that Michael is inhuman in case you'd forgotten from the previous statement... and there's more description, and foreshadowing with the fire extinguisher, and then it narrows in on the flesh-hive and you have the climactic moment and the big reveal that the flesh-hive was Timothy Hodge, which Sasha tells us at the most dramatically appropriate moment even though obviously she knew it the whole time. And Michael reaching into her shoulder is the falling action, and then it wraps everything up at the end." 

“Huh. Yeah, I guess I see what you mean.”

"...I guess the question is whether it wants to give us accurate information in addition to story-shaped information. Can you ask someone in Research to have a person try to put a lie in their statement?"