What’s the purpose of grilling someone over a messenger client when you’re going to meet up anyway? That’s the sort of courtesy that you extend to a friend, not to someone you’re meeting for business. Different registers, different modes and different codes. Besides, showing up without having done any reading into Ferris’s e-footprint would have been rude. Slapdash. “Explain to me everything that I should have figured out on my own time, so I can waste at least half of the time we have together.” Ych. No, thank you. (The comma there might not be grammatically correct, but it’s a comfort to place.)

[Rolling for Investigation, barely scratching an [b]8[/b]. Fortunately, you have to match rather than beat target numbers in HWI.]

You know, the hardest part of the investigation was figuring out how to talk to her without sounding like an overenthusiastic activist on her first social media account. Either that, or someone who’s given up hope already. How does the saying go? Take it easy, but take it? That’s got to be the trick. Someone who understands but isn’t here to chat her ear off. A messenger, not a vizier; a support, not a carry.

When she feels like she’s reached some sort of tipping point, some sort of watershed where she’s running downhill in the opposite direction, 3V lets herself in with the casualness of a cat that knows it is allowed to come and go as it pleases. ([i]And all places are alike to me. / Now I will go out again and listen to the dark voices.[/i]) The sliding door catches a bit, squeaks.

“Well! You’ve got a bit of a view from up here,” Vesna says. (Not the first acknowledgment she’s made of Ferris. There was an inclination of the head, a gesture of the fingers— I’ll be there in a moment. Ferris has got to understand the importance, right? How does she stay here and not have the weight of it crush her?) “Thank you so much for the invitation to come out here! It really is something, isn’t it? The whole of it, the view and the climb and the poetry.”

She still has terrible posture when she’s trying to get comfortable, socially. She leans forward on the seat opposite Ferris, sunglasses perched precariously on her forehead, elbows on her knees. “So! Mind if I record? I can switch over to long scratch, but you’ll have to slow down for me. I really should have questions, but I don’t want to tell you where you’re going with this, especially since you sent the first email! I’m all ears, then! Virtual [i]or[/i] otherwise.”

The long scratch (she knows already that Ferris absolutely is going to ask her for it) is going to be bad. She’ll be lucky if she can decipher it later. But she’s done the research already, knows well enough to ask and well enough to have a pulp-paper spiral ring in one pocket with a chewed-cap blue sitting neatly down the spine. Like a real reporter, even. Look at me now!