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Taym had been about to suggest that they meet outside the dorms when she'd done the work for him. The dark and still rooms were unsettling and making him stir-crazy, and the buildings important enough for emergency power had a certain "stay the hell out of our hair, trainee" quality to them at the moment. And Taym, still unrecovered from a year and a half of sleeping in doorways and parks, felt more comfortable and less nerve-jangled under the fogless Island sun than he did nearly anywhere else.

That said, even less jangled Taym was still Taym, and none of this would be obvious to anyone who hadn't met him yet: he was sitting cross-legged in the grass and tapping his bandaged knuckles on the pages of the notebook on his knee with an incessant nervous energy, his entire skeletal body taut with visible unease. He had the look of a stretched rubber band, or a deer tensely waiting to see if it needed to run. He had also apparently relinquished shaving for the duration of the power outage. He was treading a fine line between really thick stubble and patchy beard. It wasn't a good look, but then again, on Taym, nothing was.

Instinctively, he glanced down at the screen of his phone to check the time before remembering that it was off.

He startled, but only a little, and he recovered almost instantly. He was either more tolerant of the heat than she was or had no options (truth: both), because he was in jeans and long sleeves, both of which looked positively ancient. He was the sort of person who looked like he smelled bad, but surprisingly smelled like nothing worse than cigarette smoke and bleach and the same stale-sweat clothes everyone smelled like at the moment.

"Candace," he acknowledged, hesitating over the name, and he didn't stand up but instead made a jerky gesture for her to sit. "Before the--" another hesitation "--s**t hit the fan, Gale suggested I talk to you. Sorry," he added, deadpan with a sweep of his arm to take in the muggy air, the grass, "about the condition of my office." He offered a hand to shake.

This part was hard. He wasn't sure how to approach the topic, so he'd mentally rehearsed this, and it showed in the way he ran over the words. Clearly his grasp of exactly how he felt about his own projects was less firm than his handshake, which had been, surprisingly, professional. Despite the fact that a tremor shot visibly through his fingers as he ran them through his hair.

"I'm--bad at explaining this," he started. "It'd be easier if we had power, but since we don't, I'll give you the verbal rundown. Death's got an intelligence network; Life's got a library. There's information everywhere. The problem's not collection, it's collation and presentation. There are layers of classification and a lot of proprietary information. It's a ******** mess," he said bluntly. "I mean, the upper echelons have their s**t together, but someone like me falls out of the pod and we're relying on a lot of pieced-together hearsay for the bare necessities. And it's worse when new information comes in that ought to be readily available to everyone, immediately, but isn't actually so vital it's an emergency--who broadcasts it, and how?"

He paused to cough into his elbow, unaccustomed to so much talking; probably the smoking didn't help, and he reeked of it. "Before The Tear I got some network space from Gale and I set up a framework. It's open-access--theoretically anyone can contribute to it. It's essentially--" he hesitated. "It's an open filing cabinet. But the problem is circular. I made the filing cabinet because I got pissed off at how little I knew, and I can't fill it up because I still know jack s**t. And my biggest problem--" another cough "--isn't knowing jack s**t, because I can go troll the library, if I need to. It's that I don't know what's important and what isn't. And I'd like to preload it with some information before it gets rolled out, if in fact it's deemed worthy of rolling out. That's on--that's on Gale, I guess. Or whoever."

Having thus spoken more than he had in as long as he could remember, Taym ran down, coughed into his elbow again, and avoided Candace's eye by dog-earing a page of his notebook, over and over.

"I'm fine," he said tersely, and that was about all the information he volunteered on that front.

"I figured you being in Mist you'd know better than most what everyone could benefit from having open access to." He flicked his pencil absently against one of the many lists of tiny, cramped handwriting scattered over the page, avoiding her eye again. He looked as miserably uncomfortable as he felt. "You've been here a while. If you want to fire off a list of times you've thought 'I wish we'd sent a memo about that,' I'm here to write it down. I can harass you for details once we've got the broad strokes." He hesitated, voice rough again, like even these short spiels were a strain. "I'm not trying to sound like a shameless ******** upstart, but I do hope that even though the idea is a database for newbies now that it's going to prove itself useful for everyone, eventually. Information means jack s**t if it's not readily available."

Clearly Taym was not yet inducted into the Caelius School of Intelligence Theory. Or maybe he never would be.

Apropos of nothing and perhaps because he was desperately trying to seem human, Taym added: "I met your roommate. I saw her on Twitter talking about cutting her hair. Tell her it'd be a crime against nature, because I don't know her well enough."

He seized on the last, having remained stonily silent on the topic of sex and procreation--although his pencil was moving obediently.

"I think one of the advantages of the open-access format--and one of the reasons it's going to give me an enormous ******** headache--is that everyone's going to potentially be able to give a first-person view of things. Maybe a place for established Hunters to give a brief run-down of their day-to-day divisional work would be a good idea. Could separate out a file for each division, let people contribute their experiences working there." He grinned, suddenly. "I'm fine with putting information on the leads on there too, but are they likely to do the Deus equivalent of Googling themselves? And more to the point, does anyone care?"

RateMyDivisionLead.com. Ha.

Diplomacy did not come naturally to Taym, but he tried it anyway: "Maybe," he proposed, "we can have a list of available established Hunters to direct questions at. And mention that it's to avoid... putting undue workload on the Leads." Tactful.

The more he heard about Caelius the less he liked him. He supposed meeting him was inevitable, but he'd gladly stave off that day as long as possible.

At the second part of her statement he had switched to a blank page. Another tiny underlined heading, a new train of thought started. "Some sort of really succinct, broadly-outlined manual would be a ******** godsend for some of the s**t we do," he agreed. Abruptly, apparently still dwelling on thoughts of Caelius, he added: "What the ******** kinda Intel division snubs you for asking a ******** question? Isn't that our job?"

A long pause while Taym's eyes absently roamed the middle distance, before he snapped back to more mundane topics. "I'll need to set up a new category for the duty rosters. Didn't even occur to me. That's why I'm talking to you." His hand jerked distractedly back up to his hair, restless. "And I'll set up some s**t for the leads, too, just don't expect me to contribute any first-person perspectives with my name attached." He barked a laugh.

"Christ, I have a lot of typing to do," he said, fanning the pages demonstratively at her, distracted again. "This would be a lot easier if power was up. Does this s**t happen a lot or do I just have spectacularly bad timing? I'd kill for a real shower."

He actually said "ugh" at the idea of bunkers. He enunciated it. The idea of being stuck in a bunker at all was too much like being stuck in tiny, stinking concrete rooms in the middle of the city in the dead of winter. The thought of sleeping in bunkers with all these crazy people was worse.

"What?" he said, in answer to her last. "And lose the excuse to spend a day chained to a desk as soon as there's time? What a tragedy it would be, to sit in the air conditioning with a cup of tea quietly inputting things into a computer instead of, you know. Risking my neck fighting fog-monsters and poking around in werewolf dens." Another sharp, sudden grin that was quite wolfish itself. "I think I'll shoulder that burden for a single day rather than foisting it off on some poor a*****e who somehow manages to under-rank me. Which is technically impossible, by the way." Not for long, if he had his way. Private bathroom.