He almost let me get to the door this time.
     "Hi. Come on in."
     "I'm going to beat you one of these days. You let me knock once."
     "Depends on how much I feel you need it. What's up?"
    The day I'd knocked I'd been in pretty pathetic shape; I couldn't tell if that meant I was doing better or worse and decided not to ask. "You stood up our police liaison. Just wanted to make sure you were OK."
     "I was supposed to have the meeting with the police liaison so that we could deal with the problem of Lucky's addiction. Lucky has her gloves back, if I'm reading the paper properly, therefore there was no reason to meet her."
     I blinked a little at his somewhat curt tone. "Just because she has them back doesn't mean that the addiction question has been answered."
     "No, but there's no point in my going to great effort to remove myself from the records of the police just to go meet with one."
     "That's what I thought you might say. I just wanted to make sure you were OK." If he's not worried about Lucky, I'm not. He seemed to have his mind on something else, so I was ready to head out when he said, "She hasn't been around in a couple of days, is everything OK?"
     "She's acting a little weird, but..." I shrugged; weird was pretty much de rigeur for her. For all of us, to be honest. As he mentioned on my last visit, normal people don't go into this line of work.
     "Our last conversation was... strange," he said with care.
     I arched an eyebrow. "Just for reference, do you have any conversations with people that are not strange?"
     He actually looked uncomfortable. "I was being affected by some sort of... outside agent, damned if I know what."
     "Oh, the pheromone guy." He looked at me as if he'd like a fuller explanation. "We were thoroughly humiliated by a septuagenarian supervillain...." No doubt he'd read the paper.
     "The butterfly guy, yeah?" he prompted.
     I shrugged. "He has pheromone powers. It was probably some sort of residual effect." He'd certainly had an effect on us while we were there, and doesn't that sort of thing cling? Like perfume does?
     "She drank something while she was there?"
    "Yes."
     He snapped his fingers. "It was in her breath. Oh, thank God!" A relieved sigh.
     "I don't want to know, do I?" I looked at him sideways.
     "No, you don't. Try and imagine me in the most embarrassing situation you can."
     An embarrassing situation which would lead Lucky to avoid him. Didn't leave much to the imagination. "Oh," I said carefully.
     "There we are."
     "Well, I'm glad to see you talked about something besides me," I couldn't resist digging.
     "I'm sorry." He had the grace to look a little shamefaced about that; I relented.
     "Thanks for worrying, but it's OK." As OK as anything ever is, at least.
     "Did you go see him?"
     "Oh, yeah. We had an interesting chat." My tone must have conveyed my unwillingness to discuss it, but he paid no attention, and somehow I can't tell him to get lost the way I might Lucky.
     "So is it him?"
    I hesitated. "Yes and no. Unless of course he was lying."
     "Did you think he was lying?"
     I sighed. "As much as any of this makes sense, it fits."
     "What is it?" He seemed intent on dragging it out of me.
     "Let me see if I can explain this in any coherent fashion... what it looks like they did is used him and another of us to record the memory sequences." Us. I try not to think about them.
     "OK. So that they could put them in you?"
     "Yeah."
     "But who is he?"
     "An actor."
     He nodded thoughtfully. "You going to see him again?"
     "If I can think of any more questions. It was not a very comfortable conversation." No more so than this one, actually.
     "Did you tell him what was going on?"
     "God, no!"
     "Well...."
     "Not that I could tell anyone what was going on, since I don't have the faintest fucking clue what's going on. I told him he's best off not knowing and we're trying to get to the bottom of this." It was quiet for a moment. "Don't give me that look," I muttered, half angry, though not at him.
     "I just don't know what to say."

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