“That bad, huh? I can grab you some tea or coffee if you want, something to wake you up a little.”

He wakes up slightly more. 

"...not really, I'm just... bad at... stopping working."

“Not the worst flaw to have, I guess. Anything I should be doing, then, or should I just leave you be?”

"I was thinking of taking a look at Artefact Storage today."

“Good luck, then. I’ve only been there once, place gives me the creeps. Not that the rest of the Institute is much better, but, hey.”

Lev considers the risk of polluting his dataset and says--

"Yeah, the whole place gives me a strange feeling."

"It's built on top of the ruins of Millbank Prison, did you know that? Designed and built by Robert Smirke. I did most of my research on him--he was one of the leaders of Gothic Revival architecture, though he dabbled a bit in everything--but the weird thing is, all his buildings have a higher percentage of reported paranormal activity than average. Hauntings, disappearances, statements, strange deaths, historical reports, all of it. Weird, right?"

When Martin gets in he is going to scream about this decision. 

"Huh. Do you have any idea why?"

"Nope! It's consistent, though. And the Institute isn't even on top of one of his innocuous buildings, like--a church or a club or something. Millbank Prison was based on Bentham's panopticon, it's some seriously creepy stuff. I just hope it was--Jonah Magnus's sense of humor, and not anything worse. Nobody else I know that works here has died, but that's not exactly a statistically significant study, you know?"

Lev mentally adds Jonah Magnus to the list of people he does not trust as far as he can throw them. 

"It seems like you'd expect some deaths," he says mildly, "just because we're working with very dangerous material. What did you do before?"

"Publishing, believe it or not! Worked in it for five years before deciding to come here. You?"

"Psychologist. I stopped adjuncting because I got tired of eating ramen."

Sympathetic smile. "Yeah, I know that feeling. My degree is in Anthropology, but, well, here I am."

"Well, it's not entirely unlike social science."

"True enough! And it pays better."

With that, Lev is going to return to studying until Martin arrives.

Martin comes in not too long later. "Hey!"

"Hey! I was thinking about asking Sasha for a tour of Artefact Storage. Want to come?"

"Sure!"

Lev is going to go on a quest to find Sasha, but first he is going to get out of earshot of anyone and go, "apparently the Institute is built on the remains of a prison! That violated people's human rights! And was made by an architect all of whose buildings show an elevated level of paranormal activity! Why? Why would you do that?! HAS NO ONE IN MANAGEMENT HERE SEEN A HORROR MOVIE?"

"I... don't... know? It sounds like.... maybe.... not???" 

"--of course," Lev corrects himself, "there is no reason to think that horror movies would accurately reflect the real paranormal, any more than romantic comedies reflect how romance actually works or action movies show what war is like. But it does seem like running an extreme risk for literally no reason."

“Yeah, uh, that seems not great! So, uh... artefact storage?”

"Yeah, let's go find Sasha."

Sasha is in her office! “Oh, hi! I was just about to start doing follow up on a statement— what is it?”