Welcome to Gaia! ::

It was a little serendipitous that he'd managed to snag a time when Taym was in his room at all--he was rarely here save for sleeping or trying to sleep, and his days of late had been especially busy, packed to the gills with distractions.

But he was here, and when his face (bearded, tired, tanned, sun-freckled) manifested it was with an expression of expectation. Whoever he'd been expecting, it clearly hadn't been Ever. One of the things he didn't both to censor was the dirty look the newbie got for not being an accommodating tiny blonde or an infuriating redhead or even a dry-voiced Russian.

"You need something?" he asked, cracking the door a little wider. In a remarkable feat of poor interior planning, the dorm had a sort of separate entryway, the general gloom of it broken up by sunlight drifting in from the rest of the room. Hilariously, his scowl was matched perfectly by the sole personal decoration visible at all: an embroidered patch of a frowning face thumbtacked next to the lightswitch and glaring over Taym's shoulder.

It was true enough that he was unimpressed by optimism, but still more by Ever's aggressively suggestive mode of speech. Impatience gave way to the expressionlessness of sincere irritation.

"Cee prefers skipping straight to the lap dance," he said flatly. "I am going to assume that you didn't come by to assess my furniture. What," he repeated, "do you need?"

He would have been all too satisfied to know it, and so possibly it was best that he didn't: Taym had a capacity to look, in fleeting moments of real, sincere rage (the kind that came of hurt feelings), a little bit terrifying. For a second or two the constant aura of wild dog that clung to him sharpened, offset by a tension in his jaw and a silent deep breath of barely-restrained violence. It was exactly the sort of thing, as Ever said, you did not want to see in your welcome party, and he demonstrated it here.

He mastered himself before he answered, his voice too calm. "You know, I was just telling someone the other day how poorly ********' suited I am to this job. But I've been here a year and no one else has done it. Not one ******** person has tried to do more than snag a couple of people out of the pod room and focus on them individually, or if they have they've given up and I haven't. So maybe, unfortunately for you, I'm the only person who cares." Except he wasn't, and he knew it--he had help and lots of it--but it wounded him deeply to be bad at anything, and especially to be bad at the thing he'd set aside all his personal goals for because it was the one thing he felt was important; the one thing he didn't want to wait for someone else to accomplish.

If he was still in Death division, ideals sacrificed for personal needs, maybe he'd have his hands around a replica's throat right now. Instead he was gritting his teeth and letting Cami do cheery s**t, helping her, because it was more important that people not be scared, more important that they stick around and listen long enough to not die, than it was that he hated every second of this.

"So did you decide to come bother me so you could tell me how shitty I am at the job that no one else thought was important enough to do? Or was it just to suggest that I can't maybe identify and backburner my cynicism long enough to do something professional? How ******** decent of you."

"Good," he said immediately, half-closing the door, but only to grab his coat and scarf off a hook on the back of it. "You can. Hope you have a couple hours spare, because I need an extra pair of hands and several pairs of eyes."

He left the door open while he shrugged into his uniform, disappearing into the room while he talked, returning seconds later with a plain folder in his hands, which he thrust into Ever's. This was followed, ominously, by a pair of work gloves, which he dropped on top of the folder as though he were depositing a napkin onto a polished-off plate of food.

Locking the door behind him, he continued: "I asked for intermediates and up because what I desperately needed was people to present information and act as mentors, not because I don't fully ******** trust that there's plenty of competent new people here. It's about the specific work that needs doing. Look over that s**t for me. Camille Ryland made it, so spare me any aesthetic critique and focus on the content."

The folder contained a neatly-arranged, stapled booklet of basic information--bullet lists of need-to-know items, the DIANA Welcome packet shrunk down and modified and made somewhat more friendly--alongside a simple map of the Island and a list of contacts with notes on their areas of expertise, phone numbers, and Twitter handles, although this last was largely filled in with placeholder text. At the back was what looked like the outline for a meeting or lecture, and a feedback form with generous space for notes. All of it had a carefully friendly, accessible, non-intimidating tone. This was almost entirely Cami's doing.

Apparently fully expecting to be followed, Taym set off down the hallway, reaching for his cigarettes, too.

"As far as I know, Deus only recruits the English speaking, if you're generous," he added flatly, "with the definition of English. But if you think there's some poor Parisian or Quebecois floating around who'd feel better having the ******** thing in French, be my guest. I'll even let you borrow the computer. And yes. I will be interacting with people." A pause while he lit his cigarette, exhaled without breaking pace. Taym moved briskly, unhindered by his considerably shorter stride, and when he was focused on something else, as right now, with an easy lupine grace that might have been his only attractive quality.

"Once a month is what we're aiming for: in-person, group orientations, with a time set aside for questions and answers and a ten or fifteen minute block for going over news and s**t. Get people as updated as we can, get people working quickly. The paperwork's for new depods but it'll be at the orientations too, because I'll be ******** if we're going to let 'slipping through the cracks' be an excuse any more. You some kinda polyglot?" he added skeptically, and completely irrelevantly.

"What does oportet vivere mean?" he asked. "Or oportet, anyway. Vivere is obvious."

"About what I figured. And moriendum est means we all must die, or something close. Bibamus moriendum est." It was half a statement, half a question, and he ignored Ever's inquiry and was sufficiently distracted by the conversation to forget to forget to be rude, and out of old instinctive habit got the door for him as they stepped out into the unseasonably-pleasant day, under a cover of scudding clouds.

"It's not--grammatically symmetrical," he added vaguely, sounding irritated, and this was almost certainly to himself given that he supplied no context. "Or maybe it is. I don't know Latin. Was interested in taking it but I didn't even make it to my first semester before my plug got pulled, as you put it." It was not delivered in a tone that invited questions although, to be fair, it wasn't one that asked any of Ever, either. "You know we've got a mission detail in Paris?"