"It really seems like things are coming together," he says. "Meat is just really really into animal flesh for some reason. The Lukases are doing human sacrifice to the Fog-- I expect Naomi is lucky that her fiance saved her-- and given the funeral and the fact that Naomi was called to a funeral I wouldn't be surprised if they're resurrecting the dead. The Lightless Flame is just really into religion and ominous chanting and making things go dark and closed eyes, and they tried to kill Gertrude Robinson. Or maybe were celebrating her death. Anyway, they hate us."

“I’m really glad!” Kiss. This seems like the sort of thing that should be celebrated with kisses.

"Wonder if they're all just doing different things because they're... people. And have weird and different interests."

Shrug. “Maybe? Seems like the sort of thing that would be... hard to check, at least with what we have so far.”

"Yeah, but that's not going to stop me from being curious about things." Kiss. "The unclassified statements are... mostly fine? The guy with the bloody doorknob is just too vague to be able to classify it as anything. I think I might classify the thing that replaced Graham and erased everyone's memories of what he used to look like as a creature maybe-- a doppelganger? And note that there might be an artefact involved, because he had a hypnotizing table and lots of books."

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

"Melanie's statement is a problem though. It's weird. I'd say it was a creature, but it didn't eat Sarah. And I'd say it's a spirit but... what kind of spirit is that? It makes people staple their skin to themselves? That's not really an aesthetic, even if I'm counting 'meat, meat everywhere' as an aesthetic."

“Wasn’t Sarah weird before that, too? Maybe it was a creature and she had... something going on... and it was mad it couldn’t eat her. Or... something.”

"Yeah, I don't know. And her name sounds really familiar."

“...It does to me too, maybe we should check the other statements, see if any of them mention her?”

"We should make a spreadsheet of all the names in non-digitizables and then crossreference. --I really hope it'll at least let us digitize the names."

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t? Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to do digital research on statements, either, and Sasha certainly manages that.”

"Well, sometimes the Beholding is unhelpful. --Another research project: I want to go through and look at other sudden deaths in the statements. Doorknob Guy allegedly died of a stroke, which makes me think that spirits can kill people via inducing a stroke. I remember Naomi's fiance died of something like that and I'm very suspicious about it, I want to look and see if there are any others." 

“That’s a good idea. People in statements definitely have... not a great life expectancy?”

"I wonder if the life expectancies are closer to normal if you remove all the gruesome deaths and also all the mysterious heart failures or strokes or people dying for some reason unknown to science."

“...How are we deciding if a heart failure or a stroke or—medical stuff like that—counts as mysterious?”

"...Good question. I can probably take an afternoon or two and build a simple epidemiological model and then we can see what causes of death are more common among statement-givers than among British people of the same age and sex in the same year?"

“Yeah, okay. I’ll make the spreadsheet, you can work on... that.”

He is torn between saying "the reason I can do this and you can't is because I went to school for it for years" and "I can show you how if you want!" and then decides both of those would probably make Martin upset and instead puts his head into Martin's shoulder.

Awwwww. Hugs for Lev. "Um, you can continue if you want? Or we can keep cuddling if you don't? Sorry."

"Tell me about what you've been writing?"

"I'm working on one about London right now? About living here. It's kind of--"

Martin goes on for a while; he visibly relaxes a little when talking about poetry in general instead of about his poem in particular. He doesn't seem to know any words about poetry besides "rhyme" and "alliteration" and "syllable", but he's picked up on a lot of the patterns.

Lev also doesn't know any poetry words but the patterns are fascinating. 

When Martin talks about sounds Lev is very good and does not say the words "liquid" or "fricative." (He is kind of impressed that Martin apparently independently discovered them though.)

Martin starts smiling pretty quickly, gaining confidence. After he's done: "...I really do love you. And you don't have to--stop yourself from being smart around me, just because I get anxious about it sometimes? I'll get used to it, I promise."

Lev pets his hair and cautiously says, "the S and Z and SH sounds are called sibilants? I thought you might like that because the word is pretty."