|
|
Chapter 181 – Vine StreetFrank West had hoped he’d get to see this someday, just as soon as he had realized what that crazy bastard Jack O’Neill was really offering him.
He had seen the real Alex Mack. She was pretty much what his mother would have thought of as the epitome of the ‘girl next door’ type. She was sweet and wholesome. She was pretty in a cute way, rather than a brassy way. She was a flawed teenager trying hard to be something better. She was nervous and had doubts.
But Alex had just transformed. She straightened up. Her voice deepened into those distinct Terawatt tones. The nervousness and impatience vanished. So did the sweetness. This wasn’t your girl next door any longer. This was someone who knew what needed to be done, and knew she was going to have to do it or die trying. This was someone who was too bad-ass for class.
She swiftly handed him her steadicam, and she dived at her gym bag. It was a real dive like she was on a low board at a swimming pool. Only she kept flying forward, and she went silvery in mid-air. She dived into the gym bag like she was a tub of water.
The gym bag shuddered and wiggled for maybe two seconds, and then the silvery blob flew back out. It changed into Terawatt before it reached the side of the building.
There was no way that was Alex Mack. That was a superheroine who could stop anything, and knew it. She dived over the edge, cut down several stories, and then rocketed toward the crisis so that it looked like she had just flown in from between the buildings.
And she was fast. She had to be going way over a hundred miles an hour. She headed right for the most dangerous thing in sight.
Well, the second most dangerous thing in sight, because he had no doubt that Terawatt was the most dangerous thing he’d ever seen in his life.
He lifted up Alex’s steadicam and concentrated on getting the pics. This time, someone else was doing the world-saving and people-rescuing part, and he was good with that.
* * *
Alex zoomed at the plant-thing as it tried to eat the excavator.
Or whatever it was trying to do. It had mouths on the ends of its vines, and some of those mouths were big enough to eat a whole roast turkey in one bite.
It probably had some sort of disturbing instinct to find the cracks in a shell and invade that way, so a turtle would have been in big trouble. Maybe even a Birkin.
If this thing could kill and eat Birkin, it was going to be a problem.
She didn’t care if it scratched up the excavator, as long as it didn’t hurt the guy inside. That had to be her first priority.
“Finn to Tera. If you can rescue the worker, we can attack the vines.”
“Tera. Roger that.”
She hit two of the closer vines with lightning bolts, and they both writhed frantically for seconds before dropping to the rubble. So she flew to the top of the excavator’s cab and grabbed two more vines. They reacted as soon as she touched them, but she still had time to shock them both before they attacked her.
Only problem? A dozen other vines lunged for her, their hungry mouths trying to rip her apart. She darted into the air, and the vines couldn’t find her. Yet. Each massive vine had a mouth that was like a four-leaved, yellow flower. If flowers were the size of a trashcan lid and snapped closed like something in a horror movie and had rows of teeth inside each petal and had creepy thin tongues instead of stamens.
She flew around the excavator, hitting vine after vine with lightning. But every time she killed — or maybe just stunned — a vine, a couple more ripped their way up through the rubble and came after her or the excavator or just started reaching out toward other parts of the ruined building. The other five excavators were getting the heck out of the immediate area, which she was pretty happy about.
She flew toward the rock crusher and smacked the rubble with as much TK as she could spare. Okay, she had a lot more TK to spare than she used to, because she had been working out. She was up to about three hundred pounds of TK, when she had barely been over two hundred pounds not much more than a year ago. And if this trick worked on giant clam monsters, it could work on something else just as stupid.
The vines snaked up out of the rubble where she was smacking on the debris, and tried to grab whatever was there. So she used her TK to smack the sides of the vines. That wasn’t enough to hurt vines that were maybe three inches thick, but it sure got their attention. More vines erupted out of the rubble, and the vines that were already up just reached out a lot further.
Perfect. That was just what she wanted.
She flew backward, using her TK to smack vines away from her. Well, she was pretending that she was trying to smack the vines away from her. Because first of all, she wasn’t strong enough to smack those vines and do any serious damage, and second, she wanted them to come after her, not go away. She drifted backward past the edge of the rubble, and downward. The vines came after her, only now there were more vines. A lot more vines.
She jetted straight up and let go of herself so she could use all her TK for just a moment. And she used all that TK to shove the tips of two of the vines into the rock crusher.
Then she grabbed herself with her TK before she dropped more than a few feet. The rock crusher was mercilessly grinding the vines to pieces, but even better, it was dragging more lengths of vine in. And it was heavy enough and powerful enough that the two vines couldn’t pull loose or drag the rock crusher around. It really worked! She couldn’t help smiling.
And with two of its vines under attack, the plant thing was sending more and more vines to grab the threat. She dropped to the ground beside the rock crusher and grabbed another vine tip with her TK. A hard TK shove, and the third vine went right into the rock crusher.
One vine that was being ground to pulp in the rock crusher was stretched so tight that it finally ripped in half. The lowered stress on the grinder gave it more power to use on the other two vines, and so within seconds the second vine ripped. And then the third one tore, only it tore way back at the rubble end, so a whole lot of vine came whipping through the air like a bullwhip. She went silvery and darted out of the way, as she fed two more vines into the maw of the rock crusher.
The plant-thing really didn’t like that, and it handled the problem by coming at her with more vines. A lot more vines. She was starting to feel like she’d found her very own hydra. She hit another several dozen vines with lightning blasts, and fed another dozen into the rock crusher.
And there was still more junk writhing its way up from beneath the rubble. How much stuff was down there?
She suddenly remembered Jack complaining about something that was like ‘twenty tons of angry vines’. Was this what you got if you let twenty tons of angry vines grow and mutate for five months? Crud.
“Finn to Tera. Can you hold a vine stable for long enough for us to poison it?”
“Tera to Finn. No. But what have you got?”
“Marshall to Tera. I mixed up a homebrew concentrated herbicide with antiviral in it, but if we want to kill the underground part, we need to get it into the mouths, not just on the outsides.”
She looked over, and there were only a few vines still grappling with the cab of the excavator. “Tera. Let me rescue the construction guy first.”
“Finn. Go for it.”
She flew across the rubble to the huge excavator and zapped all four vines still attacking the cab. Then she used her TK to unlock the door to the cab, and she flew in. “Sir, just trust me for a second.”
“Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me? Me not trust Terawa–… AAGH!”
He sort of freaked as she pulled him into her morph and puddled as fast as she could past the rock crusher over to where it was safe. She went normal and stood him up beside her.
He took a deep breath and then gasped, “Holy shit, that was freaky.” He got hold of himself and looked at her. “Jesus, I can’t thank you enough. No one’s gonna believe I got rescued by Terawatt.”
She smiled slightly. “I think that the two dozen news cameras will be all the proof anyone’s going to need.”
He grinned back. “I thought I was a goner. I mean, did you see … Of course you saw. Sorry, that was stupid.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “No, that’s completely normal. You’re a very brave man to even consider doing a job like this. I hope this doesn’t scare you off.”
Then she flew toward Lieutenant Marshall, who was standing there with a rolling cart full of stuff, including a big plastic cooler. He grinned at her as he patted the top of the cooler. “Hi, Tera. I’ve got a bunch of cheap cuts of meat that we spiked with our own herbicide and toxins and antivirals, just in case. I was hoping you could grab a vine with your TK and hold it long enough that I could feed one of these chunks into its mouth-part. Then we’d leave the poisoned vines alone and let the toxins get absorbed by the plant body that’s still down under the rubble. We can’t clear more while that thing’s still a threat.”
She thought for a second and said, “I’ve got a better idea.”
And he just trusted her, like she was Sam Carter or something. He just said, “Okay. Have at it.”
She popped open the cooler with her TK and lifted out what was probably sixty pounds of beef in chunks that were like half a pound or a pound apiece. She also grabbed a can of red spray paint off his cart. Then she flew right at the vines.
Every vine that opened its mouth as she passed over it got a big chunk of meat shoved down its throat and a line of spray paint marking the vine. She flew around for maybe fifteen minutes feeding it and marking the poisoned vines so she wouldn’t waste her time poisoning them a second time. Or ruin her hard work by killing the vine before the poison got all the way down the system. There must have been almost a hundred vines that got fed. She just knew that if Jack was here, he would have been doing ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ jokes.
When she ran out of beef chunks, she went back to zapping the unpoisoned vines until Riley called her in. “Finn to Tera, please come to Valentine’s station.”
“Tera. Roger that.”
She flew over to where Jill was standing next to a Humvee that was chock full of heavy weapons. It looked the SRI team was equipped for fighting pretty much anything, including tanks.
Riley jogged over to the Hummer, and Hank Marshall wheeled his cart over, too. Riley grinned. “Good to see you.”
She grinned back. “I was hoping to stay in my other identity this week, but just in case, I asked Jack to get me a gym bag. Turns out I needed it.”
Jill said, “Turns out we needed it. We would’ve had a hell of a time getting that guy out of that cab safely without you.”
Riley told her, “We have everything up to anti-tank missiles and a flamethrower, but we sure couldn’t use a flamethrower on that thing while we had a civilian trapped in there.”
Alex wondered, “What are you gonna do now?”
Riley looked over at Lieutenant Marshall, who answered, “We’ll stall. The far side of the wreckage seems to be safe, so we’ll excavate over there only. This isn’t really a normal plant any longer, so it won’t take days for the poison to work its way systemically. And you really taxed it, so it ought to be expending a lot of energy in repair and healing. If you can dump a few hundred gallons of our herbicide all over the rubble surface there, that ought to force it to expend more energy and depend even more on the food it just got. Then tonight and early tomorrow morning, we’ll run some little robots across the surface here for a few hours, and we’ll see if anything’s still hungry and mobile. If not, we’ll go back to digging.”
Riley added, “I think every one of our operators will feel better knowing Terawatt can swoop in on a second’s notice and save their bacon.”
Jill muttered, “If they have any sense, they wouldn’t get back in those cabs otherwise.”
Riley grimaced a little. “They spent a couple of weeks excavating the crater that was left when the Spencer Mansion blew, and everyone was on edge the entire time, and there was nothing left. Not even pieces of things.”
Hank Marshall added, “Not even concrete and rebar. It was like they used a hundred Mark 77 mods and fifty tons of C-4. The most they found was where the bedrock got glassed from the heat. Some CDC guys are still checking that ‘glass’ to make sure it doesn’t have any nasty surprises inside.”
Alex said, “If Jack was here, he’d make a ‘box of Crackerjacks’ joke there.”
Jill smiled at that. “Yeah, while we were dealing with plant-jira back there, I was wondering what the general would have gone with.”
“Little Shop of Horrors,” Alex guessed.
Lieutenant Marshall grinned. “The Roger Corman version or the musical?”
Riley volunteered, “The general’s more of a ‘cheesy monster movie’ kind of guy than a ‘retro musical’ kind of guy.”
Then Alex followed Hank’s directions as she poured ten-gallon drums of herbicide all over the plant-infested rubble. Since she was just standing next to Hank and using her TK, she was able to empty a bunch of the drums all at once.
Afterward, Alex walked over to Riley and whispered, “How’s Sam doing?”
Riley grinned. “We’re in room 612. How about A.L. Mack comes up and has dinner with us at seven? And we’ll talk about interviews, too. Sam was really impressed with what you did for Willow.”
Alex almost jumped up and down like a little kid. “Great. I brought one nice outfit just in case I got to interview someone like you or Jill or Hank.”
Riley clicked his earjack and pretended he was talking over it. “All right Terawatt, I think that’s it for the afternoon. And you have all of our thanks.”
She smiled at him. “Roger that, Colonel Finn.” She leapt into the air, and she flew off to the west, away from the journalists’ pavilion, like she was going to fly home.
Once she was half a dozen blocks away, she went silvery and made a careful jaunt across rooftops, so she wouldn’t be visible to anyone on the ground for more than a fraction of a second. She got back to Frank’s spot in maybe a minute. Then she dived into the gym bag and changed back to Alex.
Frank was standing there holding his camera and looking through the telephoto lens at the general area where the SRI team was stationed. He said, “Impressive, kiddo. Damn impressive. I figured that guy was toast, and you made it look easy.”
She groaned. “It wasn’t. It really wasn’t. I was pretty worried there for a bit, even knowing I had Riley and Jill backing me up.”
“You’ve got that much confidence in Finn and Valentine?”
She nodded, even if he wasn’t looking at her. “Totally. They’re both mega-awesome. I’ve seen both of ’em do really amazing stuff.”
He kept looking through his camera. “Oh, another tip. Don’t stand and talk with your pals anywhere you can be scanned by lipreaders or someone with a rifle mike. I could only get a couple of Finn’s words out of that whole chat, but I could tell he’s a lot friendlier with Terawatt than some ordinary colonel would be.” He glanced at her. “And I scanned the surrounding buildings for anyone with a rifle mike or a parabolic mike, and you’re safe. This time.”
“Thanks, Frank.” She totally needed to step up her operational security.
He told her, “Let’s bug out. I want time to download some of these shots to some newspaper editors I know, and you need time to get ‘your’ film footage edited and off to KPVC or whatever it is. I’ll share my still shots if you’ll give me partial credit on your video.”
“Partial credit?” she squawked. “You deserve the whole credit! You’re the one who took all the pictures!”
He grinned. “We’re not admitting that to anyone, remember? On assignments like this, we’re a team. We share pics and we share credit. You’re not writing a front page story and fighting with other newsies for space above the fold. You’re making me look good already.”
She insisted, “You’re making me look good, and you give great advice. I think Jack picked the best person possible for the job.”
He actually blushed a tiny bit. “Kid, if you were twenty years older …”
“Twenty years? I’m not three you know.”
He insisted, “Twenty. Fifteen years at a minimum. I’m not Hugh Hefner. I like my women the same age as me, so we share some life experiences and we like the same kind of music.” He looked out over the rubble and added, “O’Neill said you’ve got a boyfriend who’s been helping you for years. I’m old-fashioned. I don’t know if I could cope with a girlfriend who’s a hundred times more powerful than me. So hang onto that guy.”
“I plan to.”
They folded the two captain’s chairs and folded up the beach umbrella, leaving the base full of water where it was. That left them with a camera bag apiece, one gym bag, and a cooler. They had no trouble retracing their route and getting back to Frank’s truck.
On the way back to the hotel, Frank asked, “Dinner’s on me. There’s a steak place I saw Sunday that looked pretty good. I’ll even let you order some food to go.”
She gave him a small smile. “I got an invitation to dinner. I may get a really good interview out of it.”
He told her, “Good work. Just remember. Journalism you do without me doesn’t have to be shared. This is your connection and your lead. I’m not helping at all on this one. Be fair in giving credit, but don’t let other people walk all over you. You have to learn to stand up for yourself when you’re trying to get a story, and when you’re working with partners, and when you’re selling pics, and when the inevitable someone powerful gets their nose out of joint over the story you uncovered.”
“You really know this business,” she said.
He shrugged. “If I really knew this business, I’d probably be working as a big-name photographer for National Geographic or Time. And I’d have an expense account as big as Joe Frady’s.”
Alex muttered, “He’s an Orphan, and he’s probably got a pipeline feeding him the stuff he’s published, so he’s probably a tool for Maggie Walsh or one of the American Orphans.”
He raised his eyebrows. “You get to call Dr. Margaret K. Walsh ‘Maggie’ now?”
She shrugged. “Jack calls her ‘Wacky Maggie’, but he’s like that. And I had a face-to-face one of the times she tried to kill me, and if she can call me ‘Tera’, I can call her ‘Maggie’.”
“Holy crap.” He gripped the steering wheel harder. “You had a real face-to-face with Code Walsh herself. And you don’t get how astounding that is.”
She shrugged again. “Well, it wasn’t like I could leave. She had me in a deathtrap.”
“Alex!” he snapped. “Listen to yourself! You’ve gone through some of the most terrifying things possible, and you’re just … casual about them. You really don’t see how freaking awesome Terawatt really is.”
She muttered, “That wasn’t even in the top ten scariest things I’ve run into.”
“Holy crap,” he murmured. “Can you tell me about any of ’em?”
“Can you tell me about your thing in Colorado?”
He frowned at her. “You know I can’t. The DHS has that sealed.”
She knew she shouldn’t, but she still pulled out her tPhone and pressed a speed-dial button. “Hey, Burn.” She flipped it to speakerphone.
“Are you okay? I saw the newsfeeds. I thought Jack said you were just gonna be taking pictures!”
Alex admitted, “That’s pretty much what I thought, too. Even if I got a gym bag just in case.”
Willow’s AutoTuned voice said, “Ooh, they’re using cute little robot walkers that are like big spiders, which I totally didn’t think would look cute, and they’re walking the robots over the rubble waiting to see if the plant-thing is gonna attack ’em.”
Alex made a mental note to look into that. “Okay, but I need to know what Frank West did in Colorado that was so need-to-know. You already cracked the DHS safeguards on his files, right?” Frank totally winced when she said that.
Willow cheerfully said, “Oh, sure. Jack told me not to, but it’s totally good I did. It was more zombies, but no creepy monsters. Probably some sort of Umbrella Corporation trial release, but we’re still contacting people who know people who might know people, and Jack’ll get really crabby at some guys who totally should’ve told Big Cheese and Top Banana about this stuff as soon as the Umbrella mess spilled over.”
“Just infected-live-people zombies?”
Willow replied, “Yep! Transmitted by zombie bite or insect infection vector. Sound familiar?”
“Oh, yeah.”
Willow added, “And the DHS really likes Frank, because he saved their agents, and then he saved the day when their agents got killed, and then he actually adhered to the NDA he signed. No wonder Jack likes him.”
Frank muttered, “Who the hell is she? Even the major cracker threats shouldn’t be able to get into those records, and a DHS computer whiz wouldn’t go rummaging around in files like that without a ton of permissions first.”
Alex smiled a little and said into the phone, “Thanks.”
“Acid Burn out.”
Frank rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on. Acid Burn? As in Angelina Jolie in ‘Hackers’? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Alex admitted, “She just uses it as a handle when she’s Terawatt’s personal Penelope Garcia.”
Frank snorted in amusement. “So Terawatt has her own personal hacker, her own costume designer and master of disguise, her own support group, her own official contacts with the U.S. military and also in Europe and Asia and maybe Africa, and God only knows what else. And you’re a high school senior.”
She explained, “I’ve been doing this a while. I got my powers the first day of seventh grade.”
“Crap.”
She added, “And they went haywire a lot for the first year or two. Like the next time I got a cold, my powers went totally berserk. My … biochemistry expert thinks it was the fever, and also I wasn’t taking in enough calories or my electrolytes were totally imbalanced, so I got a little delirious and lost what little control I had over them.”
“Your … expert? You have your own personal superpowers expert?”
She confessed, “Well, yeah. You know who I am. You probably looked up my family.”
He concentrated on remembering stuff he had looked up. “Your dad. He’s the head of research at PVC. Or your sister, who’s eating up the competition at MIT and already has several universities offering her big bucks to come and develop things for them while she earns a Ph.D.”
She admitted, “Both. Annie was my expert for the first four years. We were afraid to tell Dad, because Danielle Atron was his boss and we didn’t know what she’d do. And we were pretty sure she was trying to capture me and experiment on me and cut me up to see what made me tick.”
“Crap!” he yelped. “I think you just won the ‘worst teen years story’ contest.”
She told him, “Thanks to my powers, I now know at least five people off the top of my head with worse ‘early years’ stories, and that’s just in this dimension.”
He slammed on the brakes. “YOU KNOW PEOPLE IN OTHER DIMENSIONS?!?!”
* * *
Alex knocked on the door to room 612 a few minutes before seven. She had checked with Riley twice more already, and he had been pretty specific. If she didn’t want Sam to know her secret identity, he would keep the secret. But if she wanted to eat four full dinners, Sam was going to twig that there was something biochemically abnormal about her.
And Alex was still hungry. She had ordered and eaten a room service dinner — along with five energy bars and another brownie and two cans of Diet Coke while she waited for the dinner — when she was editing and prepping the film footage Frank had shot for her. Frank thought her dad’s fake steadicam was an amazing invention and she ought to be selling them for three times what they cost to make.
Laura had been pretty surprised and really excited to get the footage, and Alex had made sure that Frank got credit, too. Okay, the footage was really crisp and smooth, and it was really well filmed. Frank was totally awesome with a camera, and their post on top of the building had been a great vantage point that was plenty close to the action. Nobody else was going to have film as good as theirs.
Then, once Alex had emailed everything off, she had walked outside and gotten some burgers and fries at a little fast food place that wasn’t part of one of the big chains but looked like it did a lot of local business. She didn’t bother keeping that receipt, because she just couldn’t explain why she needed so much food right after Terawatt had been doing her stuff.
So she was still ready for dinner at seven. But she was sure she could keep it down to one normal-sized meal. She had even told Riley what to order for her.
The thing was that A.L. Mack hadn’t met Samantha Finn. Terawatt had. And Alex wanted to have a warm, friendly dinner with the Finns, not something stiff and awkward. And she had called Jack to ask his advice, and he said he trusted her judgment. Okay, he also had gotten Riley’s report and seen some camera footage from the dig, so he did a couple ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ jokes and a ‘Day of the Triffids’ joke and even a Dr. Who joke that she didn’t get but Jack said she’d be ‘rushing off to get some jelly babies afterward’ so that probably meant it was a Fourth Doctor episode. She wasn’t a Whovian like Willow, but she knew that much.
So she was carrying her gym bag.
Riley opened the door and spotted the bag at once. And she could tell from his eyes that he knew what that meant. He waved her in.
Riley and Sam had a nice hotel room. There was a little kitchenette and dining table on one side of the front door, and a little living room area on the other side, and straight ahead was a closed door that had to lead to the bathroom and bedroom. The area she was seeing was all cleaned up, but she knew what her room looked like a lot of the time, so she wasn’t assuming the bedroom or bathroom looked that neat.
Okay, Riley was career military, and Sam was living in a Doctors Without Borders compound most of the time, so they probably kept everything clean and neat and perfect even when they didn’t have guests.
Sam was sitting on the nice couch, and she got up with the help of a cane. Alex hurriedly said, “Oh, please don’t get up on my account.”
Riley smiled a little as Sam walked over anyway and shook Alex’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you. I saw your interview with Willow Rosenberg, and I was very impressed.”
Riley had a Jack-like smirk on his face as he said, “Sweetie, you’ve met Alex before.”
Alex grinned. “It’s good to see you again. The last time I saw you, you weren’t in very good shape.”
Sam looked back and forth between them. “Okay, I’m not getting something. Riley’s not fibbing, but …”
Alex held up a finger to stop her. “This is why I brought the gym bag.” Just to show off, she tossed it into the air and held it there, unzipping it with her TK as she did so. Then she went silvery, flew into the bag, changed, flew back out, and went normal in her Terawatt uniform. In her best Terawatt tones, she said, “Good evening, Dr. Finn. The last time I saw you, you weren’t in very good shape.”
Sam opened her mouth, and nothing came out for a couple of seconds. Then she cursed for several seconds in a language Alex had never heard before. Maybe it was Swahili or Hausa or one of the other African languages that Riley said Sam spoke.
Alex used her TK to lift off her mask and plastic ‘makeup’ and wig. “Yeah, I’m Terawatt. So we really have met before.”
Sam looked over at Riley for support. “So she’s really A.L. Mack also? So how did she get those pictures of Terawa–… Oh, right, telekinesis.” She turned back to Alex. “And you look like you’re about seventeen!”
“I am about seventeen. I had my eighteenth birthday just before school started.”
Riley added, “She just graduated from high school. She starts college in the fall.”
Sam really glared at Riley. “She’s a teenager! It’s bad enough you’ve got Action Girl out there, it’s not right to drag teenagers into things like this!”
So Alex changed back to her regular clothes and sat Sam down and explained all about the secret world of Alex Mack. It took a while. They were most of the way through dinner before she was done.
Sam finally looked at Riley. “So you’ve met her parents and boyfriend … because you had to rescue them from Danielle Atron.”
Riley nodded. “Right. And Jo gets to have dinner with them most Sundays because she flies up and gives them martial arts lessons.”
Sam looked back at Alex. “I don’t know what to say … except thank you very, very much for keeping the world safe and saving Riley.”
“It’s been my pleasure.” Alex didn’t realize until after she spoke that she’d slipped back into her Terawatt voice.
Sam giggled slightly. Then she asked, “And you really can do an interview with us?”
Alex nodded. “Sure. And since you know my secret, I can do the whole thing even easier, because I can use my TK to manage the camera and the lights and the reflector and everything.”
Riley smiled. “That’s great.”
Alex added, “So first, let’s talk about what you want to say in the interview, and what you don’t, and what you don’t want me to ask. Then we’ll put together an order for the questions, and then I’ll take the gym bag back to my room, and I’ll put on my nice interviewing outfit while you two dress up a little nicer, and I’ll bring my camera bag up and we’ll do it right here with you two on that couch and me in that armchair …”