Welcome to Gaia! ::

The Taym that answered the door, to the contrary, looked more or less his best. It had not yet occurred to him to feel guilty over the fact that America's misery and resulting need for comfort had served to buoy his spirits. He was clearly expecting someone that wasn't Ever, a cheerful greeting dying in his mouth, and he took in Ever's new coat.

"Congratulations," he said. A pause, and then: "Peyton told me everything went smoothly."

There was a question there, unvoiced.

He took the jackets and disappeared into the apartment to hang them up, but he left the door open and also raised his voice, a pair of invitations: come in or stay out there, your call.

"I did a similar mission and I just told everyone I'd pretend not to notice their cellphones if they returned the favor," he said, "so couldn't possibly be worse than me." A pause. "I picked up that one they call Canary on mine. I take it you didn't have anything worse than a weaponization prospect?"

There wasn't much to see--boring was right. Even the frowny face that had previously been tacked up across the doorway was gone. Everything was white and spartan and impeccably scrubbed, the floorboards shining and the entire place reeking vaguely of Pine-Sol and bleach. The door to the bathroom was hanging open slightly and it looked like this particular room's original budget had all been invested there. There was, at least, a separate bathtub and shower, and both of those as sterile and gleaming as the rest of the place.

There were not much in the way of personal touches: a few bookshelves full mainly of well-worn used volumes arranged in some system that possibly only Taym understood, a pair of plastic toy deer on the top of one and a cage covered in glowing runes resting next to another, four faintly-gleaming golden eyes peering out at Ever with distinct suspicion. The windows were open, as was the laptop sitting on the bed, open to a text file of some sort, the desktop wallpaper visible around the perimeter of the window apparently consisting mostly of ginger hair and a lot of skin.

"Good work persuading her to come back here. I was telling Peyton I figure if they get weaponized they're actively helping us, best case scenario, or they're harmlessly stuck in a tablet down in the cove, worst case." He closed the closet door, and when he turned he was holding two cans of beer which were by necessity lukewarm but which were free, anyway. He tossed one towards Ever without much warning. "So you didn't run into any of the candy nonsense?"

It apparently was an invitation to stay: Taym flopped back onto the bed (with all the grace that Ever lacked and, given his body, a strange sense of bonelessness) and pulled the laptop onto his stomach before opening his can as well and gesturing with an elbow at one of the empty chairs.

"There's someone out there selling FEAR candy to kids. And using the clones to do it. Or at least they were in Mississippi. I figured that's what they'd sent you out there to look into, but I guess not, unless Luna Lovegood had a sideline. And if she did," he observed drily, "there's a bunch of pissed-off kids with more money than they'd expected to have after this weekend."

"I guess it's preferable for them to be over-eager to look into things as opposed to the alternative," he observed, remembering a long-ago gleam in his eye, a distant goal for specialization squashed by his time in Death. Someone else's job now, and maybe they'd be better at it. "Given that you found what you did there I'd guess they had plenty of reason to decide to check it out just in case." Suddenly and completely without segue, without even a change in tone, he said: "Not that I'm questioning your discretion, or I wouldn't have asked you in the ********' first place, but I'd rather no one hear about what happened at the last testing session."

At the tone--obviously unexpected--he glanced over and raised his eyebrows (having never quite mastered the art of raising just one).

"Did I storm out?"

And if Taym noticed it, glancing in his direction at the movement, he neither spoke nor reacted.

"Some people have expressed the opinion that it wasn't about testing the clones; they were interested in seeing me make poor choices. Proving something. Trying to break me, maybe, because they're curious to see along what faultlines people shatter. But they were sorely mistaken," he said, absently typing as he spoke, "if they think a single hit after a two year dry spell is going to make me into some sort of slavering opiate zombie. If that was someone's goal, that person doesn't understand heroin and he doesn't understand me. But that's why I bring this up."

He took a sip, then leaned over to put the beer on the nightstand, and he was still typing. "I was too ******** up to notice or care, obviously. What did H do, while Sunny shot me up? And right after."