"You're right. It would not only eat me alive not knowing, not telling what happened would only eat you up, too. You'd carry it in until you fell apart crying in the cafeteria," he chided. That next statement - 'this is where you don't laugh' - made him interrupt for just a moment.

"Wright? This place gave me the..." He had to pause to think of how to phrase it, and the only thing that came to mind wasn't as witty as he would have liked - a phrase from a movie he'd seen as a child, and the comics he'd briefly devoured after that. "...the Spidey-sense from hell. Besides that? I gave you quite a turn the day you reappeared here, if I recall correctly. I have absolutely no room to laugh at anything that you have to say right now," he finished, then intently listened to Phoenix's story, making mental notes here and there.

Maya's cousin...that would be Pearl? The girl Gumshoe had recognized, the night the mimicking monster had attacked them. So that ability ran in the family, he mused, and she had somehow passed...some type of power onto Phoenix. A portable lie detector, small enough to fit into your pocket... He nodded, then, beginning to piece together what had happened. "If only they issued those types of items in my office," he idly quipped, when Phoenix had finished explaining that.

The pit of his stomach twisted and dropped at the end of the conversation. He could see part of where this was going, and he braced himself as best he could, both physically, by sitting ramrod-straight in the chair, and mentally, by taking a long, deep breath, before answering that last question. "Tell me everything," he said, in a serious, quiet voice. "You don't want to hold this in. And..."

Miles looked up, meeting Phoenix's eyes. "I can probably understand better than most people here."