Kiss. "Sibilants. It sounds... nice, yeah, I like it." 

Mm, kissing. 

Is Martin aware that he is pretty. Lev would like to make him aware of this in a way that would generally be considered not suitable for work.

Okay, but is Lev aware of this? Martin has decided that Lev should be very aware of how pretty he is.

Lev is extremely skeptical of this claim but willing to be convinced!

Good! Martin can do so much convincing.

In the morning Lev goes to work! He reads about how to do lucid dreaming. He starts checking regularly whether he's dreaming.

Then he spends the rest of the morning putting together the model of whether statement-givers' causes of death differ from normal people's. 

Out of 30 statements, 21 are still alive; one, Albrecht von Closen, died in 1831, and Lev can't find any records of how or why. (Even finding the date takes some digging.) Similarly, there are no records of any Antonio Blake, dead or alive, matching the description of the statement giver. Out of the seven remaining, four died or disappeared in ways that seem obviously connected to their statements (Timothy Hodge, Lee Rentoul, Carlos Vittery, and Sebastian Adekoya). That leaves Trevor Herbert, who died of lung cancer; Staff Sergeant Clarence Berry, who died of heart disease; and Paul McKenzie, who died of a stroke.

Seven is... not a huge sample size. Three is even smaller. It increases if you include everyone mentioned in a statement, but mostly only to the 'ways that seem obviously connected in their statements' category--mysterious disappearances, murders, "animal attacks". Notable additions of people with more 'normal' causes of death on their record are Bethany O’Connor, who died of a brain hemorrhage; Evan Lukas, who died of a congenital heart defect; and Nikolai Denikin, who died of an unspecified 'illness'.

Yeah, that's not helpful but at least he has the model now.

He pulls out his notecards and the unclassified non-digitizable statements and starts to look through them. Makes an entry in the monster manual for Graham's doppelganger. Rereads Melanie's statement over and over again.

Notices that the monster is floating slightly above the floor so its feet don't touch the ground.

........Pulls out the anglerfish statement. Looks for Sarah's name. Finds it.

Goes to Martin's office.

"Holy fuck, Martin," he says, "the monster in Melanie's statement is an anglerfish."

“Wait, what?”

"Sarah Baldwin was probably eaten by an anglerfish. That's why her name is familiar. And look at the description-- it's floating somewhat above the ground, and no one except the target can see it, and it doesn't show up on electronics."

“Sarah Baldwin. I can’t believe I didn’t remember where I knew her from, I spent ages looking at her missing persons photos—the anglerfish did show up in the picture, though? Once Sasha messed around with it in photoshop, at least. And Melanie’s footage shows two figures.”

"Right, but it fucks with them... the same sort of way. Fuck. My system is just totally wrong!"

“Wait, why?”

"Anglerfish doesn't really act like a creature and also doesn't really act like a spirit, which means it is some kind of third thing or I don't understand how spirits work at all."

“Could be a servant, I guess? I mean, the being invisible is—weird—but Michael not having bones in mirrors is also kind of weird?”

"Servants generally seem to be more human than that, spirits don't have physical manifestations other than fog... I guess it's making a person hallucinate something? That's not that weird?"

“...I guess that’s true. I wonder what would happen if you tried to take a picture of its reflection—? Probably just break the camera, I guess, given our luck, but. Anyway, we were talking about the anglerfish.”

"Yeah, I don't know at all how I'd enter it into the monster manual. Maybe just write a paragraph describing what it's like? --Makes me worried I'm just wrong about things in general though."

Shrug. “I mean. We’re probably going to be wrong at least a little about everything at first, right? At least you’re trying, which is apparently more than anyone else here has done in the past 200 years.”

He bites his lip and tries to figure out how to put it into words. "It's good to notice when things-- aren't the way you expect," he says. "Because it's easy to just kind of fit them in, right? And go 'well, maybe it's a servant, maybe the anglerfish is just weird.' But actually no the system I have wouldn't have predicted that, and that means my system is wrong. In science, if something is right, then it's always right. If your equation is true ninety-nine times out of a hundred then it's just wrong. And that's fine, I can't do better yet, but-- I have to write it down and make it very clear to myself that I'm wrong. Because I want to keep my ideas. Being confused and uncertain is unpleasant, feeling like the genius who solved the puzzle is great. And normally in science you would get some young hungry grad student to overthrow my theory but we don't have grad students, we have two people, and figuring out what's up with magic is all up to me. And so knowing I tried is not good enough. The only thing that's good enough is being right. And as long as I'm not right I have to know that I'm not if I want to have any chance of becoming right."

“That... that makes sense, yeah. —There are grad students who do research with the Institute, maybe some of them could help? ...Sorry, probably not the point. Especially since we’re... not really telling people.”

"Yeah. ...It's weird what's up with Sarah Baldwin. She apparently is alive but she's not talking to her family... no friends, no home, no job, no sign she exists at all..."

“—I mean, she’s done at least two jobs? A podcast and a YouTube show. Though I doubt that either of those, uh, paid well.”

"That's true but--" He waves a hand. "No sign she exists. And the same thing was true of that skydiving guy. And then there's Raymond Fielding, who said the house was his even though he'd been dead for years..."

“Huh. Yeah, I guess that’s true.”