16:05 <VoxPVoxD> When strikes Aaron Aster's fancy as a time to come up to Crime Lake? Willie'd leave it to him, though she'd indicate that after work hours would be most convenient for her. That'd almost certainly mean after dark, however, given sunset in early November. 16:06 <Crion> After work means yes, after dark, so he'd prefer a working Saturday noon or afternoon so he can examine the grounds. 16:07 <VoxPVoxD> That's fine! Brings it awfully close to their next appointment with the Dragons. Maybe they'll go straight from one to the other, even. 16:07 <Crion> Possibly so. Or he'll return to his own bolthole for an afternoon nap, first. But sunset is drawing closer and closer to five in the evening. 16:07 <Crion> If it's not already there. Anyway. 16:08 <Crion> What does Aster see driving up to, ah, what's the name here? 16:11 <Crion> Crime Lake. 16:11 <Crion> Hmmm. 16:13 <VoxPVoxD> Crime Lake is east-northeast of the main metro area, in a green area between the breadth of Greater Manchester and the subsidiary town of Ashton-under-Lyne. Winding around Crime Lake is Crime Lane, and on Crime Lane is Crime Farm; this is where Aster sees Willie's car, Willie's person, and an quaint old two-story farmhouse in clear need of renovation. 16:14 <Crion> How's the property? The lawn? Are there trees, good sightlines, hedgerows doubling as walls? Does Crime House have boat access to Crime Lake? 16:19 <VoxPVoxD> The property is pretty open; there are trees hugging the property near the wide road that Crime Lane breaks off of, but not the Lane itself, as well as along part but not all of the lake. It takes him a moment to identify the boat slip (with no boat at present) nestled between two bare willow trees. 16:19 <Crion> Hmmm. And is Crime House in the center of the lot? 16:20 <VoxPVoxD> No, it's to one side, not quite adjacent to the road but nearer to it. Instead of a proper drive there's a little ersatz carpark with room for three or four cars. 16:21 <Crion> Well, you can have everything, from a home defense standpoint. Or even most things. Quite the name though. He'll park in the carpark, step out, and light a cigarette, wearing jeans, hiking boots and a heavy outdoors button-up shirt. 16:25 <VoxPVoxD> Willie's in a dark peacoat with a brown scarf and slacks. Are those Uggs? She's holding two thermal mugs and drinking from one. She waves, slowly, with the other. 16:26 <Crion> As he walks up: "Do you mind if I smoke? Thank you," he'll say when he's handed the thermal mug. 16:28 <VoxPVoxD> "Not at all. Indoors I would, ordinarily, but we're well short of me living here and the smell'll be long gone by the time I am. Thank you for coming!" The mug contains some of that fantastic, presumably-fancy coffee Willie makes or buys somewhere and then hides in her own mugs and carafes. 16:28 <VoxPVoxD> "I didn't name it. For the record." 16:30 <Crion> "Is it actually pronounced 'Crime?' As the word is?" 16:32 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Yeah. It was formed when they dug the canals in the late 18th century. I'm not clear on the etymology. It could be a coincidence, or it could not." 16:33 <Crion> Aster sips the coffee. It is quite good. "Did you purchase it because of the name? It certainly wasn't because of..." 16:35 <VoxPVoxD> "You get sightseers on the far side of the lake from time to time. Past the property line a lot of this area is protected parkland." Willie's gesturing by way of explanation. "I wanted something with some water that I could fit a downpayment on from our first job, and ideally pay off entirely with another two or three. This fit the bill admirably." 16:36 <Crion> Aster: "How much are you looking to spend on the renovation?" It was the farmhouse he was gesturing to when he trailed off. 16:38 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "As much as it takes, really. I'm not going to be able to get contractors in here until spring. By then, we'll have a better idea of our workflow and what my budget will be." 16:38 <VoxPVoxD> "But I don't want to constrain myself at this stage." 16:40 <VoxPVoxD> "Not a suitable fortress. I wouldn't survive the Northern Revolution Part 2 here. But I think, given the amount of work that already needs to be done, there's a lot of scope to do some interesting things. I just need to know what those might be." 16:40 <Crion> Aster: "Well, that's my first piece of advice: it's easiest to do the work you need to do before the renovators come in, but you'll want to choose them carefully. Less so that they don't talk afterwards about what they've seen, though that's a concern. More so they don't screw up anything you've already installed." 16:41 <Crion> "This is where perhaps your contacts on the other side of the river might help." 16:41 <Crion> "Though, again, I can't advise that." 16:41 <Crion> "No one ghouled, that is." 16:41 <Crion> He shrugs. "Though if they want to know the ins and outs, well, they've got your lover in a blood bind." 16:42 <Crion> "This is all a series of tradeoffs." 16:42 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "You think I'm wasting my time?" 16:43 <Crion> Aster: "Absolutely not. You've just made decisions that on the balance make it impossible to protect you from vampires specifically using wards, traps, and planning principles. Or at least one faction of them." 16:44 <Crion> "In that case, it might be best to throw specifically anti-vampire planning out the window, and focus elsewhere." 16:44 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Yeah, that makes sense. If I want to protect myself from vampires I need to... leave the country, probably." 16:47 <Crion> Aster: "Geography isn't the problem. You need a house that a vampire can easily enter, sleep in, feed in, and enjoy the other fruits of living comfort in without sanction because you're going to be inviting one over for a holiday weekend as soon as the place is fixed up. You're relying purely on social protections from him and his. Which means we're focusing on changelings and their hunters, 16:47 <Crion> starchildren, mages, and assorted slashers." 16:48 <Crion> Aster: "Also, I would be remiss not to note that you have the best last-ditch anti-vampire ward possible, which is that this is an old wood-construction house and you can turn into into a fiery tomb at will." 16:49 <VoxPVoxD> Willie's grin bubbles over into a quiet, quaking laugh as she takes Aaron towards the house. 16:50 <Crion> Aster: "Bob, were he here, would find it very amusing then that one of my top-line judgments is that suddenly guns are very much a thing of use to you, national firearms laws not withstanding." 16:50 <Crion> "They don't do much to vampires, yes, but everything else I just listed?" 16:52 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Then I'll get some use out of Robert's gift, and perhaps Robert's obstacle course." 16:52 <Crion> Aster makes a face. "You're joking." 16:52 <Crion> "His what?" 16:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Did he not tell you? He's doing up a CQC - that's Close-Quarters Combat, I learned - training exercise on his property." 16:53 <VoxPVoxD> "I'm sure he'd be delighted if you came out to criticise it." 16:54 <VoxPVoxD> "He really craves that from you." 16:54 <Crion> Aster: "I remember the conversation about CQC and his Krav Maga blackbelt, but not its obvious, unholy fruit." 16:54 <Crion> With irritation: "We'll make an afternoon of it, then. How many doors does the first floor have?" 16:55 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Two. The front door here and a back door in the kitchen. There used to be a side entrance but at some point previous owners built an addition off of it, and now it's a sunroom with no exit." 16:56 <Crion> Aster: "Excellent. Do you plan to add a garage and a third entrance, or keep the carpark?" 16:57 <VoxPVoxD> Inside it's cold, and the only furniture is camping stuff that Willie clearly brought herself. Aaron observes a couple of folding chairs, a folding table, and one of those insulated bags food delivery people carry orders in. "I might have the landscapers replace the carpark with a proper drive that touches the lane further down the property, but I don't anticipate enclosing it." 16:58 <VoxPVoxD> "I don't have the kind of car that needs a garage." 16:58 <Crion> Aster nods. Did the front door have a storm door on it? 16:59 <VoxPVoxD> It did, at one point - he can see where it was attached. But it's been removed, likely a couple of years ago at least judging by the weathering pattern. 17:01 <Crion> Aster: "You'll want to replace the storm door on the front and add one to the back if there's not one there already -- regardless of any other homeownership benefits, two doors means two sets of wards. You never want to combine or overlap wards on a single entrance, but the shell of the storm door generally counts as a separate threshold for all but the most finicky ritual magic. As one 17:01 <Crion> of our SWAT teams found out the hard way." 17:02 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Interesting! So it's like a two-centimetre foyer." 17:04 <VoxPVoxD> The kitchen is big relative to the size of the house, which is somewhat explained by the apparent lack of any pantry, which Willie complains about. "Real gas hookups, so I can have a proper range in here. But everything in here will need to be ripped out and replaced." 17:05 <Crion> Aster: "Indeed. You don't really get the same ability to double dip with windows, so you just ward those against the smarter or sneakier monsters. I advise contracting a blacksmith, one of the traditional sorts who is used to upcharging rich aristocrats who want authenticity or whatnot -- you are in fact looking for fidelity of technique. Get him to replace your doorknobs, window latches, 17:05 <Crion> and hinges. The locks themselves don't need this treatment; changelings and their ilk can bypass locks quite easily. Better to sting them when they go to use whatever they've opened." 17:06 <Crion> Looking about the kitchen: "Sticking with gas will help with the last ditch funeral pyre scenario, certainly." 17:06 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I'll have to warn any seelie guests not to touch the knobs, then." 17:06 <Crion> Aster sighs. "Right. Bob and his business. Well, this is a game of compromises." 17:07 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I imagine you're the sort of man who cultivates a small number of highly valued friends." 17:07 <Crion> "The big issue you're going to run into here is that unlike an alarm system, ritual warding and magical protections don't have on or off switches." 17:07 <VoxPVoxD> "Right. An 'off' ward is a broken ward." 17:09 <Crion> To the bit about friends: "I don't make it a habit." 17:09 <Crion> "It's possible what you really want here, then, is a panic room." 17:09 <Crion> "I don't like panic rooms in general; I prefer off-site boltholes." 17:10 <Crion> "A panic room simply ensures they know where you are, and where you can't run to." 17:10 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "A panic room necessitates a home defense strategy that makes use of the finite amount of time such a room will buy you from a dedicated assailant." 17:11 <VoxPVoxD> Dryly: "Perhaps I can just call the police." 17:12 <Crion> Aster: "One assumes your actual external security force here is one or more friendly vampires and/or the cell, since we've already run a line through vampire-proofing the place." 17:13 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "If I'm putting Sergio in danger, or having him commit to defending me physically, that makes me directly liable to the emollient Lord Weaste." 17:13 <VoxPVoxD> "Perhaps unavoidable. Perhaps I already am." 17:14 <Crion> Aster: "So it goes. But if you're going to have vampires and changelings on campus regularly it necessarily means we can't proof the farmhouse against vampires and changelings." 17:16 <Crion> "Starchildren are mortals with psychic powers, and many are easily overwhelmed since they are untrained and unused to psychic pushback. Which means most of my solutions there are either unhelpful to you, or are the very obvious 'shoot them in the head.'" 17:16 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Maybe the Illuminus has a module for me." 17:17 <Crion> Aster: "Possibly so. Not particularly something in the jurisdiction of a security system, however." 17:18 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Numinous beings can be blocked by proper wards, salt circles, locks of Solomon... do you have experience with those?" 17:20 <Crion> Aster: "Yes; those are simple. They result in your house looking like an insane person's, of course, so I advise putting as much of that in the walls or behind false cladding as possible. Possibly put it on the outside before siding goes on. You can fairly easily muck up a sort of salt-paste that's useless for any purpose but being an adhesive-to-surface version of a line of salt that 17:20 <Crion> isn't constantly getting kicked over by shitty teenagers, or other horror tropes." 17:23 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I had a friend in London who pulled up all the floorboards in his flat and chalked the wards on the underside. Then they raised the rent 600 quid a month. I hope whichever corporate solicitor lives there now appreciates the protection." 17:25 <VoxPVoxD> "What about human assailants? Or mostly-human assailants. I might not be able to credibly block a vampire, but a couple of ghouls with, what did Bob call them, MP-5s? I can prepare for that, right?" 17:25 <Crion> Aster frowns. "I hope that he chose ones that still work while facing Hell instead of Heaven." 17:25 <VoxPVoxD> "Some of them only do." 17:29 <Crion> "Men with tactical weaponry -- you want to engage them at distance, before they reach the house. If they get in here, you're going to be reaching for whatever handy shotgun or other home defense weapon you have and hoping the coin flips favor you. In America, this is where rifle training comes in. In this country...rather than install an alarm system in the house itself, you may wish to install 17:29 <Crion> rollover wires on the drive up to let you know when a car pulls into the lot and wire the property for CCTV, then have that feed to, say, dim the lights in the house twice in a row if someone's coming up the walk rather than ping a command console somewhere." 17:29 <Crion> "If you get them in the open, outside, near a body of water in a generally damp clime, you can bring the fullness of your, ah, firepower to bear on them without torching your house." 17:30 <VoxPVoxD> Willie's pretty sure the ghoul Bob was talking to was a woman, or at least she's pretty sure Bob thought she was, judging by the amount of attention he was paying. But that's going to sound like a actually, the doctor was a woman bit if she says so here. 17:31 <Crion> Aster: "You may wish to look into getting a guard dog for the property, if you can take the responsibility to properly train and -- ah. Right." 17:31 <VoxPVoxD> Willie smiles. 17:33 <VoxPVoxD> "Do you want me to let you know when I'm performing the ritual?" 17:33 <Crion> Aster: "Yes; I think it would be rather instructive." 17:35 <VoxPVoxD> "Do you have much experience with demons?" 17:35 <Crion> "Either way, you want to move all confrontations you can out to the lawn and property, where you have natural advantages." 17:35 <Crion> Aster: "No. Only their aftermaths." 17:35 <Crion> "One of the jobs VASCU junior technicians work to learn the ropes is failed summonings." 17:37 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I've only seen pictures. I imagine the smell is something else." 17:39 <Crion> Aster: "There are almost always parts missing. Imagine someone detonated a jigsaw puzzle with a small bomb." 17:39 <Crion> "Anyhow." 17:39 <Crion> "I'm surely you have a better handle on it." 17:41 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I have a System. Last I heard, I still hold the records for fastest summoning by a novice in Milan." 17:42 <Crion> Aster: "There's a large catalogue of sayings about pride and hubris, and they have an extensive peer-reviewed body of work to back them up." 17:42 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "So saith the Lucifuge." 17:42 <VoxPVoxD> "You and her'd really get on, I think." 17:43 <Crion> Aster: "The good news is that a large number of the minor demon summonings that went wrong were survivable if immediate treatment had been available from trained medical personnel. Obviously not when summoning e.g. Chaggwyeath, The Sum Of All Lies, but that doesn't seem to be the remit." 17:46 <VoxPVoxD> "Not quite what I'm looking for in a sentry, no." Upstairs is cold, bright, and airy; big windows throw the gray midday light into the corridor from every room. Willie shows him a crawlspace/secret door connecting the study and the master bedroom. "In my mind this is the Mistress's Exit from the master bedroom." 17:48 <Crion> Is there room here or in the rest of the architecture to connect this to some kind of escape tunnel? Slide down the Batpole and run down a thin, bricked tunnel to an exit that pops open near the boathouse. Well, where the boathouse will be. 17:50 <VoxPVoxD> That could definitely be built out, assuming the ground is amenable to tunneling. Need surveys to be sure of that, especially on water like this. 17:52 <Crion> Aster will mention the idea, then. "Not much use in a secret passage otherwise, other than the generic English aesthetic of it. I advise the boathouse instead of the carpark because intruders are less likely to go poking around there for a concealed exit hatch, though obviously on this particular set of thresholds you can bring the fullness of cold iron and such to bare." 17:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Right. I won't need to be taking any seelie people *through* the escape tunnel. I can just have a full-length mirror somewhere." 17:54 <Crion> He sighs. "Yes, it is rather easy for them to come and go as they please. This is why I prefer operationalized safe houses." 17:54 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "What does it mean to operationalise a safe house?" 17:55 <Crion> Aster: "Remember when I made reference to various anti-ghost measures making it look like an insane person lived in the house?" 17:55 <Crion> "You go full-on in that direction." 17:55 <Crion> "No mirrors, for one." 17:56 <VoxPVoxD> "So this is what you meant when you said it was easier, rather than harder, to make a truly safe safehouse. You just have to give up the idea that you will live as opposed to survive in it." 17:57 <Crion> Aster: "Correct." 17:58 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I don't think I have the mental fortitude for that. I've spent too much of my life in bunkers and cells already." 17:59 <Crion> "My safe house is for myself and perhaps one other person, and bunkering down there is a very boring experience unless you haven't seen the entries in its very slight DVD collection." 17:59 <Crion> Aster: "Understandable." 17:59 <VoxPVoxD> "Is a media server a security liability?" 17:59 <Crion> Aster: "As long as it's not on a network, it's fine." 18:00 <Crion> "But setting up a pristine white roomed media server is not something I've gotten around to." 18:01 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Suppose I get this place set up to spec. I have the defences we've discussed, the escape tunnel, et cetera. Abandoning the pretence of vampire and seelie safety." 18:01 <VoxPVoxD> "What are my greatest vulnerabilities?" 18:04 <Crion> Aster will the skip the obvious two: Sergio and complications from Bob. "A sufficiently-motivated, close-in killer. Jason or Michael Myers from the movies. You'll want some version of a home security system for him, but that will alert you, not ensure your safety. He likely won't arrive in a vehicle or in numbers so you might not even clock him until he slips in a window or a door. And in 18:04 <Crion> here, it's just you and whatever you have on you against him. In that instance, you'll want to create a...let's call it a Final Girl zone." 18:05 <Crion> "You flee out of the house by whatever means necessary. Take a chopper to the arm if you have to. Get him out on the estate. Then lead him to a pre-arranged, pre-designed kill zone." 18:05 <Crion> "Wards, pit traps, any other sort of thing Bob can cook up -- all of that is in play here." 18:06 <Crion> "The important thing is not to have it near the house, and have it firmly inert when you're not fleeing for your life such that a local child doesn't die in it." 18:06 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Near the water, then." 18:06 <VoxPVoxD> "Accessible from either end of the tunnel." 18:07 <Crion> Aster: "Likely so. Chaining this person and/or monster up and depositing it in the lake until it can be safely dealt with is a good end-game here." 18:08 <Crion> Aster: "Past that? A mage." 18:09 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Like our friend the handmaiden, or one of his." 18:10 <Crion> "Not much you can do against a mage. Make sure your gas lines aren't on a public grid so he can't blast you from far away, maybe, but you've got that fire immunity. The thing with mages is that without their magic, they're just people. They die just as easily. But you have to make them exhaust those resources. So in a sense the 'make them work for it' advice from with the slasher is still in 18:10 <Crion> effect...but the work here is going to be phenomena that pique their interest." 18:13 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "What sort of phenomena pique their interest?" 18:15 <Crion> Aster sighs. "Well that's the problem, isn't it? What sort of mage do you have on your hands? They all like different stuff. And within their field of interest, they can be distracted by said stuff. But creating things that interest mages enough to use their active magic instead of their passive magic...that's a tall order." 18:16 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Demons might do it. One of the ones we met in Liverpool was into that." 18:16 <VoxPVoxD> "He heard 'the bells of Pandemonium' in my voice." 18:17 <Crion> With annoyance: "Yes, they're always saying shit like that." 18:17 <VoxPVoxD> Willie laughs. "Not a fan of lyricism?" 18:18 <Crion> "Not a fan of mages. The good news, such as it is, is that those who have decided to kill are sadly quite effective at it. They don't need to find you at home alone at night." 18:18 <Crion> "So in terms of this specific scenario, it's quite unlikely." 18:19 <VoxPVoxD> "Unless they're particularly theatrical or sadistic." 18:20 <VoxPVoxD> "That always seems to be the corollary to an excess of supernatural power." 18:20 <VoxPVoxD> "One, the other, or both." 18:20 <Crion> Aster: "Thankfully, for all their other faults -- and they're innumerable, even if you don't listen to the other mages -- the 'Seers of the Throne' faction looks very dimly upon theatrical or sadistic, if it involves magic." 18:20 <Crion> "Normal sadism, of course, is full speed ahead." 18:21 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "God, imagine having the kind of brain that wants to set up a permanent namesearch funneled directly into your mind." 18:21 <VoxPVoxD> "Imagine going that much farther beyond being the kind of person who namesearches." 18:22 <Crion> Aster: "They're not good people. But they are predictable ones. And they're more likely to give you acute brain cancer and blame it on Putin or send in a GMP SWAT team on false pretenses than come up the front walk slinging fireballs." 18:23 <VoxPVoxD> "Is that what Havana Syndrome was? Was that wizards?" 18:25 <Crion> Aster shrugs. "It was a psychosomatic mass hysteria perpetrated on members of the United States intelligence community. The 'true answers' there run from it being a moment of exigence generated by a particularly powerful arcane duel or outright 'war in heaven' between mage factions, or it could be a paradox expression caused by backlash after a failed Seer spell, or it could be a massive 18:25 <Crion> prank pulled by some idiot rebel mage whose pride exceeded his sense. Or it could just be good old fashioned mass hysteria and the mages at State have been biting back irritation answering questions about it for months, trying to find some propaganda use to put it towards." 18:26 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I always find it weirdly comforting now when something like that is just ordinary people being odd." 18:27 <VoxPVoxD> "I used to find dreary rational answers so disappointing." 18:27 <Crion> Aster: "It happens less than you would have thought before being initiated into life's most tedious mysteries, but much more than you think now that you know and can justify seeing every event as the designed output of some shadowy cabal." 18:28 <VoxPVoxD> "Bob says that word with a capital C." 18:28 <Crion> "VASCU is run by vampires, yes, but our budget problems probably really were due to the utter fecklessness of Barack Obama at the negotiating table." 18:28 <VoxPVoxD> "Is that an American government thing? A capital-C cabal?" 18:29 <Crion> Aster: "Not particularly. Not to my knowledge." 18:30 <Crion> "But I don't know the context. I rarely know the context, of Bob." 18:30 <VoxPVoxD> "I'll have to ask him what it means then. I was avoiding it because he doesn't like to talk about his past work." 18:31 <VoxPVoxD> "I understand why people find him so... frustrating, but I find him very enjoyable company. He's become a dear friend." 18:33 <Crion> Aster: "If I had a significant problem with him, or any member of the cell, I would no longer be part of it. Or I'd be a charging consultant. Instead of doing home security appraisals gratis." 18:33 <Crion> "But still." 18:34 <Crion> "Difficult sometimes to fathom how the man has been suffered to live." 18:34 <Crion> He pauses. "I'd probably charge Hughes." 18:37 <VoxPVoxD> "I suppose consulting detectives are a proper industry now, with your Vanguard Unit. I should've gotten Dr. Blackfin's card. I wonder if that's on it." 18:37 <Crion> Aster: "Dr. Blackfin is not in private practice; she is officially contracted to Scotland Yard. ...Nevertheless, I can see if I have one lying around, if she's amenable." 18:38 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "She's very enjoyable company. Did you meet her through work?" 18:42 <Crion> Aster: "Yes. She began some six years after I did, in Operations. Different branch, of course. Psychiatrics." 18:45 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "Ah. Huh, interesting. A profiler, then? The obverse of your skillset?" 18:46 <Crion> Aster: "I prefer the complement to my skillset. Bob is the obverse of my skillset." 18:46 <Crion> "But yes, together we can dismantle a case quite easily, and leave it fully skinned, butchered and dressed for the field agents to take full credit." 18:47 <VoxPVoxD> "We don't really have anyone with that skillset on our team, do we?" 18:48 <Crion> Aster: "We do not. I think Badawi dreams herself into filling that role, but, we recently had to pay the fine for Badawi screaming at Haldane on a train." 18:49 <Crion> "Once I'm more established here I'll formally make an open invitation for her to come up and start an upstairs/downstairs consultancy in the space above Aster Biologics, but she enjoys London too much to ever take me up on it, I suspect." 18:49 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I honestly cannot imagine Agostina raising her voice. I bet it was just insistently threatening." 18:49 <VoxPVoxD> "Do you think it would be possible for me to learn those skills?" 18:50 <Crion> Aster: "Do you mean, do I think it's possible for you to get a medical degree with a clinical training focus in psychiatry? Or do I think it's possible for you to ape her psychic gifts with your own?" 18:50 <Crion> "The first is a clear and obvious yes, and we'll see you again in three to five years. The second...I suspect it's possible." 18:51 <Crion> Aster transfers the dead butt of the fully-smoked cigarette back into his pack as he withdraws another. He'll offer her one. 18:51 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I'm more interested in the capability than the capacity, if that makes sense. The capacity, we've got that meeting with the Illuminus coming up. But it's not just plug-and-play, is it? You have to be taught how to use it. You have to internalise the capacity. You have to adjust to this new sense. You must have some experience with this." 18:52 <VoxPVoxD> "As well as being helpful to us, it seems like a great career development opportunity, to learn from such brilliant people whose expertise costs top dollar on the open market." 18:52 <Crion> Aster: "Correct in all regards." 18:52 <Crion> "But to cut to clean honesty: Someone on this team needs to be the social person." 18:53 <Crion> "You've already basically got the job." 18:53 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I think... everyone has their merits in different interpersonal situations." 18:54 <Crion> "The actual 'science' of profiling, divorced from psychic powers? Mostly worthless. But when you have good and true inputs, it is a suitable framework for useful outputs. The inputs are what's important, however." 18:54 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "But if the capacity is there, it is something you can help me train on?" 18:55 <Crion> Aster: "I can make the effort." 18:55 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I feel like I've been asking rather a lot of you recently." 18:56 <Crion> Aster: "An interesting impulse, coming from a middle manager. I assure you that you have not." 18:58 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I'm not your manager. Despite Robert's protestations that I'm somehow in charge." 19:01 <Crion> "Yes, well, that's Bob." Aster could have some further choice words on that, but he'll reserve them. Instead he'll leave that assumption hanging, with: "So. We've done the survey, inside and out. What sort of time table are you on?" 19:04 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I'd like to get the place ready for contractors by mid-March or the first of April. If I'm paying well enough and don't need to live on the property while they're working, I think all the work can be done by the time that mummy lord is prophesied to return." 19:04 <Crion> Aster sighs. "Right. Mummies. Don't know much about them. Are you planning to make this one an enemy?" 19:04 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "I have never planned to make an enemy in my life." 19:05 <VoxPVoxD> "Accidents all." 19:05 <Crion> Aster: "Less reassuring than it should be." 19:05 <Crion> "I'll see what case files I have access to. They work in cycles, if I recall. Wasn't much mummy activity in 2000s Philadelphia." 19:06 <VoxPVoxD> Willie: "It petered out some time in the 60s, I think. Around when the werewolves started disappearing." 19:06 <VoxPVoxD> "At least here in Britain." 19:09 <VoxPVoxD> "But yes, I think this has been very helpful. Now, may I feed you before you go? I have scouse and a fresh sourdough loaf." 19:09 <Crion> Aster: "Certainly. Let's take it in the sunroom, or the porch. There's more furniture out there."