xp_logs | Hope and Doug: Further learning (backdated) (Reply)

Hope frowned for a moment, tapping her pen against her chin for a moment, before she furiously started typing on her laptop. A few minutes later the printer sprang to life and started spitting out a number of papers. Retrieving them, she pulled over a file and carefully started to put them inside.

That done, she started to page through the various materials in front of her. "Where oh where are good spots to find that... preferably without having to hire Ms. Frost..." Again she tapped the pen against her chin, thinking.

"What are you working on?" Doug asked curiously from just over her shoulder. He'd noticed her deep in thought, and had snuck up on her while she was obliviously working away.

She slammed her file closed, before lifting a document full of tiny letters from her desk. "Just a bid from a possible new decorator. There is a ladies luncheon in a few months I am assisting with. It's a fairly small event, so I figured giving someone new the job might be interesting and refreshing." Hope quickly explained in a hurried tone.

"Mm-hm," Doug murmured, a skeptical look on his face. Hope's body language looked awfully flustered, defensive, and secretive. Which didn't match her story. "I think we need to work on your lying skills," he told the younger woman, his skeptical look shifting into an amused half-grin.

"You startled me! That is not fair!" Hope protested. "Besides, I have my guard down here." Unobtrusively she pushed the file under some other documents and books she has lying around.

"Lesson to be learned, padawan - people won't always be fair, and they won't always wait until you have your guard up." Doug shrugged. "As a matter of fact, they'll usually -try- to find you at a time when your guard is down."

"It's the mansion. It's probably one of the safer places to at least let my guard down somewhat." Hope suggested glumly. "You don't usually come to this part of the mansion, do you?" There, let's see if could keep his attention away from the file.

"That's true. But you never know." The mansion had been a battleground before, more than once. But Doug's point had been made, no sense in continuing to belabor it. "So what are you -actually- working on?" he asked, nudging a book off of the file.

"More things for the ladies lunch." Hope explained with a casual shrug. "Caterer, invites, everything. I didn't have enough time enough to go in the city today, so I settled down here for a bit.

Doug shook his head. "Doubling down? Points for trying, at least." None of the books or documents looked to have anything to do with the sort of social event Hope was claiming to be working on. "Must be something embarrassing or the like, if you won't let me see it."

"What do you think it might be?" Hope titled her head, a slightly sassy smile playing around her lips.

"Something you pretty clearly desperately don't want me to see?" Doug volleyed back, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

"A lady does need a few secrets of her own." Hope tilted her head, then simply pulled out the file. "But perhaps... perhaps it's better to learn how to do certain things first before she starts keeping lots of those." She handed over the file, then popped her head on her hands to await his reaction.

Doug's eyebrows shot up briefly when he opened the file to find a candid picture of himself on the top. "Interesting," he said, flipping through the subsequent pages. "Trying your hand at profiling?" he asked, somewhat rhetorically. He closed the file with a snap, turning his attention backt o Hope. "So. Tell me about...me."

"Not even that." Hope shook her head. "His Grace... No, I mean... the archduke would give me these assignments... and he would have me work from a background file his people had created. Fairly extensive background files, I might say." Her voice trailed of for a bit.

"My mother taught me to keep notes on the people in my network... So I would be able to send the right gifts and flowers at the right times, invite right people for a certain event and be able to converse with them about things that interested them... I wanted to see how far I could get with information I can gather myself..."

"Gathering background information is a very valuable skill - learning what is important, what's not..." Doug nodded. Hope directing her own learning from him was a good thing, a sign of engagement and initiative. "So how much information did you gather on me?"

"Not that much yet. I only just started. I was mostly gathering basic facts and what your online presence is. Not only social media, but also newspapers and all those things. Plus the notes I already had." Hope gestured at the file.

Doug made a thoughtful noise in reply. His social media presence these days was minimal and carefully cultivated. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised that he'd been in the newspapers, given his ties to Emma Frost and other glitterati and influential people in New York through the Hellfire Club. "Summarize your notes? I'm curious as to what sort of conclusions you've drawn."

"Too early to draw any conclusive notes, I'd say." Hope tilted her head mischievously. "Though I do have to say... your gained your degrees awfully fast. You graduated from Xavier's in 2005. And finishing a double major in less then four years, while working for the Snow Valley Research Center..."

"Very perceptive." Doug's eyes went a bit distant, lost in memory. "Emma bought the degrees so we'd look better on paper, and then she made us backfill the work to actually earn them."

"I thought something had been going on there..." Hope smiled satisfied, though it had been an easy thing to find. "Must have been quite a bit of work though, both the college work and the work for Snow Valley."

"It's still a lot of work." Being a more or less one-man IT department for the mansion as well as X-Force and their cover company led to long and unpredictable hours. "Pete told me at the beginning - he was always going to want the moon on a stick, and he wanted it yesterday."

"He sounds like a challenging man to work for." Hope looked back down at the file and blinked innocently: "I was wondering if you had a suggestion or two on how I could fill some gaps... how to find the information..."

--

Doug didn't quite buy Hope's innocent face, but he had certainly seen the value in teaching her a bit more about information gathering and profiling a person. So they had adjourned back to the small office he kept in the mansion, and he printed out a few files for her to take a look at.

"Now this is an interesting little tidbit." Hope noted after she had scanned a file for a bit. "I mean, he seems to have a perfectly normal job as a VP in a factory, normal family etc. And then he suddenly had skydiving as a hobby. Makes me wonder if he likes adrenaline kicks..."

"It's more common than you think. Person gets locked into this life that they think they're supposed to have, sometimes they need to find an outlet. And when you're stuck in a suit every day, you start to not really feel alive. So you go find something that reminds you that you are, usually by dancing along that knife-edge." Doug had gotten fairly good at reading people since he started working with X-Force. He still didn't necessarily have the facility at it that someone trained in it did, but his power certainly helped in that regard.

"You would think it would be some nice stress release... But look at this. He is a VP of Purchase." Hope scanned through a list of decisions made and frowned. "Many of them are noted to be quite risky... I wonder if it somehow connected..." With a small shrug she closed the file. "It's only a guess though."

Doug shrugged. "Sometimes a guess is all you have to go on. At the very least, it gives you someplace to start. If that avenue doesn't pan out, you try something else." He pushed the file across his desk from one hand to the other as he spoke, an unconscious fidget. "You can't count on getting something perfectly right the first time. That's quite rare. Persistence counts for quite a bit."

"Practice makes perfect?" Hope tilted her head, then looked down at the file. "Too bad we don't always have that chance though. What would jump out to you about this man then?"

"Financials. When in doubt, follow the money." That particular aphorism was often repeated because it was true. "Money, ideology, coercion, ego. You can almost always find an inroad with a person through one of those." He flipped through the file to a bank statement, and tapped a particular set of rows. "Unexplained purchases. Start there."

She took back the folder and scanned the various entries. "Wow, those are no small amounts. Makes me wonder where he spent it. That could explain quite a bit.... though... I do think you forget to put matters of the heart on the list... that would be one where you can often learn interesting things."

"That generally falls under 'coercion'. But also..." Doug pointed out several more rows and then flipped to the next page. "Look where the money leads." In this case, it was a grainy photograph of the file's subject walking out of an apartment building, a woman who was definitely not his wife leaning out behind him with a hand on his arm.

Biting her lip, she took the picture from him. "Would be not that hard to attack his virtues with his vices in this case." Hope noted as she examined the photo.
Doug made a thoughtful noise. "Attacking his virtues with his vices. That's an interesting turn of phrase. I like it," he said. "And yes, it's always about knowing how to apply leverage. Find the right spot, and pry." Not the nicest thing, but then the line of business he was in wasn't the nicest.

"It's something my mother used to say... only with the goal of dislodging someone from her social position then with other purposes..." Hope fell silent, remembering for a moment the assignments she had done. "Though that can be damaging enough on it's own."

"There's a reason some people will try and justify Voldemort, but nobody tries to justify Umbridge," Doug said with a serious look. "Nobody really has experience with that over-the-top megalomaniac type of evil, but -everyone- has experienced that sort of everyday, petty, within the letter of the rules sort of evil." He drummed his fingers on his desk. "Don't underestimate the banal sort - it's much more pervasive."

"And there for so much scarier, because people can visualize it, while Voldemort style evil stays abstract." Hope mused for a moment, then sat up. "Got another one for me?"