There was one good thing about the Lair: it made for a nice getaway when he wanted to break out of Amity for a bit and wasn't on the job. Graveyard shifts at the junkyard, while pleasant, were not the times his mind was most mentally stimulated; though mind you, the monotonous work did help him clear out his thoughts if he sifted through them and ignored the whispers. But even that was growing more and more troublesome to do, enough that even as the zomboil slipped into the portal he felt wary, as if something or someone could follow him and call out his condition.

There was no gray, was there? He was beginning to check about as regularly as the clock struck the hour. Poke, prod, stretch, view, sigh. As mechanical motions as they came.

The library the horsemen owned - to use the term loosely - was a place he often haunted, but he didn't go there at first. No, this time Mort chose to slink into the alchemical labs for the first time in ages, gazing in wonder at the Famine horsemen as they worked on this potion or that. He leaned against the wall and watched quietly for the moment, the entry just by him; he could hear the swish of cloaks and the murmur of hushed conversations as they passed by.

And repeatedly he had to tell himself it was not because he was a student, not because he was a probably untrusted Initiate, not because he had Insanity. After the debacle with the hunters in the snow a month before, tension between some horsemen and students was rising to a boiling point he did not want to see explode.

Ephebe
this isn't super late or anything no sirree OTL