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The hunter he was meeting, on the other hand, approached the issue of restless hands from another direction entirely: give them something to fidget with, in this case a cigarette.

America had been trying to arrange work shifts that kept them together, her watchful eye on him lest he fall into another silent funk, but circumstances intervened, as they nearly always did, and he was alone save for the cloud of smoke following him around, a slick of sweat on his forehead, his coat slung over his shoulder, his hands wracked with a visible tremor.

"Wood?" he asked bluntly, recognition flitting across his face from Twitter.

He shot the gloves a skeptical glance but gave the man a handshake that was far firmer than the trembling, bony hands would have suggested.

"Let's ********' sit down a minute," he said. He didn't want to. He'd far rather have made Melvin trot along at his heels as he stomped off to his room, like a politican dodging a weasely reporter's mic, but he was exhausted. The physical symptoms should long since have passed, but he still found himself worn out easily, wanting to crawl into a bed and stay there unmoving, and so he only managed the Mr. President Has No Comment shtick for the time it took to get to a table and fall, bone-weary, onto a seat. He gave Melvin a bleary look. "Make it quick anyway, I need a ********' shower."

Maybe Taym had said make it quick, but he answered this with a long, slow silence.

"I was there. I was captive in the Sahara and woke up in a Famine hive and there they were." He said this slowly, as if Melvin was very stupid, although why exactly he thought this was a stupid question was impossible to fathom, reasonable as it was. "They only sorta looked like me at the time, and didn't act like me at all. They got better at it."

He shifted, uncomfortable, and made an agitated movement with his hand that meant nothing. "I don't know where they are. They were sort of... bald and..." He thought back, to the skeletal shapes, their skin stretched taut over the jut of hipbones and ribs, the alien shapes of their skull protruding through the fleshless faces. "... I think they were pretty close other than that, just... dead-eyed. And no scars, no tattoos, nothing like that. Blank slates. I don't know how much they can learn. The ones I've talked to didn't have much interest in imitating me specifically. They latch on to sort of... aspects. The last one I ran into could probably pass himself off as me if they... didn't know me too well." He felt sick, it was obvious. "I don't know how good or bad they are other than that."

"You're making a ******** of a lot of assumptions and doing a hell of a lot of speculation for someone who's supposed to be making a dispassionate scientific inquiry," Taym pointed out, heat rising up slowly behind the agitation.

Another withering look.

He presented his right hand: a dead bird, a waxwing, on a pool of red blood. His left: a line of tiny script running along the outside of his hand, hard to catch in the split-second it was presented, moriendum est. Sleeve pushed back, a plain black band around his left forearm, a series of tiny squares underneath it, all of them filled in but one.

He yanked down the scarf to show the rest of the half-seen tattoo encircling his neck, antlers framing a circle-sun and the word haecceity, disrupted by the clearly-visible line of an ugly scar slicing from one ear to the other, as though he'd been garrotted, or caught in some monstrous human-sized rabbit snare. Collar of his shirt shoved aside for the hollow under his alarmingly-clear collarbone (neck and hands suggested a very thin man under all the layers; the clavicle itself suggested a nearly-starved one), and this was the only one he clarified: "bullet wound." Head turned, to demonstrate the ragged chunk missing out of his right ear.

He smoothed the scarf back into his collar, disgruntled. "And a couple more. America," he added in a cryptic deadpan, "at least had the decency to bring me a ********' pie."

He made a noise of outright disgust at that.

"There is no other tattoo. There's a couple scars. My kneecaps look like they got run over by a ******** bus. I think you've got enough to go on in terms of personal inventory. I might reiterate," he added acidly, "that in addition to their other shortcomings they can't summon. Granted there's situations where we can't either, but I can't help but feel like you'll get further with that on the whole than attempting to make an exhaustive attempt to catalog the identifying marks of everyone on Deus who might have crossed paths with Famine or Merlin at some point not that I don't," he finished flatly, "appreciate your desire to be forearmed."