"Oh-- I didn't even think--"

She's not very good at speaking body language but she can communicate "do you need a hug."

Being as fast and silent as a ninja, Kai Li can start hugging her back before Inaaya has managed to actually initiate this.

Hugs are very reassuring. 

"What kinds of things do you need? Or should I just-- ask Alfred--"

"I need to learn."

(Learning isn't even the hard part. It can be complicated and frustrating and tedious but it isn't difficult. The hard part is everything that's gated by it.)

"Could you... say. If he is bad."

She wishes Dick were here. Dick was the people person, Inaaya doesn't do people, she does books and she does science and she does magic, Mr. Wayne had crafted them into a team that was supposed to survive him and now they still have a Mr. Wayne but they're missing two-fifths of the team and she keeps reaching out and expecting Dick to be there and he's not--

"I think he's having some trouble adjusting to no longer being a human but if anyone was going to adjust smoothly to suddenly becoming a bat-man it would be Mr. Wayne. If anything he's having more trouble with the fact that he fulfilled the entire purpose of his life since he was eight years old. I don't think he intended to survive banishing Iag-Sotha." A thought she had never quite thought until she spoke it, at which point it had been the perfectly obvious conclusion ever since Mr. Wayne first adopted the two Indian urchins who were picking his pocket. "I don't think he's evil. But who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" She makes the joke automatically and then quickly hurries to her next sentence before she could think too hard about who would have laughed at it.

"Gotham is a very good place to learn. They have world-class libraries and universities. Lucius Fox knows everyone in the city, we can hire tutors who are... discreet."

That's not quite what she meant by learning, but since Inaaya will be doing it regardless she might as well see what it can do. "The dead man. He was a bat scientist."

"We have his final confession. I was planning to look at them. --Apparently he talked to bats like Mr. Wayne did."

"I want a bat scientist to tell me about bats."

"Well, he's dead."

And somehow that's what gets her to start crying.

Oh no she was too focused on getting across that she cares specifically about knowledge relevant to bat-men and managed to say exactly the wrong thing.

Here is a benefit of hugging over talking: in this domain she actually knows what she's doing.

Through sniffles, she says: "I can read it to you, would that help, or would it be--"

Probably not. It isn't why she brought him up and it won't be written for her and it might just dredge up the whole apocalypse business again. But Inaaya wants to read them and reading them for Kai Li might make the grief attached to them less sharp and right now she'd rather do that than take another crack at her own problems. "Okay."

"All right-- I left it in the wine cellar--"

She's reluctant to leave the warmth by the fireplace. But she was going to have to eventually.

Partway to the wine cellar she remembers what the wine cellar actually is and moves ahead of Inaaya, no longer reliant on her for direction. It'd be nice if they'd stop using multiple names for it and just settle on calling it the cave.

Mr. Wayne is in the wine cellar. This is a fact of Inaaya's life going forward, and she is going to have to accept it. She must treat this fact with the same equanimity that she treats any other fact about Wayne Manor. Inaaya's room is on the third floor. Alfred lives near the kitchens. The library has the complete works of Jonathan Swift. Mr. Wayne lives in the wine cellar.

(There's no wine there anymore. Hasn't been for twenty years.)

Despite their ongoing efforts, the space below the manor is still cold and dark. The various lamps they've brought down only reach so far, and their light doesn't touch the ceiling or the distant side of the cavern; the majority have ended up clustered in a single area near the entrance a few dozen feet across, lighting up a few tables, several boxes of books and documents, an ice box as near the ladder leading upstairs as can be managed, and what arcane devices they've managed to unpack. (The shipments of specialized equipment have been piling up in here for the last few years, carefully transferred downstairs by Lucius Fox and left sealed away in their crates until Mr. Wayne could make use of them.)

Mr. Wayne himself has his own set-up deeper into the cave. There's a dim light visible from behind a bend in the cave wall, that might illuminate some furnishings half-hidden away. At some point Alfred set up a cot over there. It is unclear whether Bruce uses it.

He isn't at the moment, in any case. Right now he's carefully unpacking another crate.

From some angles, in some positions, in lighting like this, Bruce Wayne might almost look human. His legs are the same length, bend the way they ought to, even if they now end in claws. Torso's roughly the same shape, maybe broader at the top, more conical. There's the fur, of course, thick and almost smooth, dark grey in the lamplight, and the eartips visible even in silhouette, but one could achieve something mistakable for it with fabric and a mold -- he had, in fact, done that, had been wearing it until the moment he became the disguise.

The wings do not look human. They're massive, twice the length his arms had been, folded now at the place where less than half of each hand remains usable, thin black membranes reminicient of a giant bat. He has to make an effort to keep them out of the way while he works. His eyes glint a jarringly bright yellow in the darkness. His teeth are sharp. His face defies description.

He looks up when they enter, then returns to the crate.

"Hello, Mr. Wayne," Inaaya says in a very NORMAL way to her extremely NORMAL bat housemate/surrogate father. 

"Inaaya. Kai Li." His voice is deep and raspy. They don't know yet how much of his vocal range he'll get back -- he can get above a whisper now, which might be promising.

Delicate apparatus goes from the crate onto the table, where he can fiddle with the settings for a bit. He is doing his best to make this enterprise look both effortless and fully engrossing.

(Kai Li watches the awkward grip of his remaining fingers and the tension in his shoulders and sees where he should've put everything down to re-adjust and tries to map memories onto him until she can guess why he's acting like this, if it's practice or distraction or stubbornness or pride, if he's being stupid or she is.)

"We're looking for Kirk Langstrom's final confession," she says in a calm and businesslike way, because she is going to be talking to a batman every day for the rest of her life and so there's no sense getting upset about it, is there, she can just skip ahead to the part where it is normal. 

"The Gotham file's in the center drawer," he says without looking up. (There's a specific desk where most of their documents have been gathering.)

"Right. I... could have guessed that." 

She goes over to pick it up and then sits in a corner of the batcave. 

The final statement of Kirk Langstrom.

Kirk Langstrom

"You know," Inaaya says to the universe at large, "why is it that everyone wants to write down a final statement and no one wants to write down a useful final statement? When I write a final statement about my findings it will include fewer Sodom and Gomorrah references and more detailed explanations of how reality could possibly have a doorstop."