Reports & Repertoire

10 Growth and Change

Falling asleep and waking up in another person's arms will make you have to face a lot of hard questions. Thanks to Venom, Eddie wasn't finding it as hard to decipher how he felt about Candy. Having a constant influx of questions about every thought you had had that effect on speeding up realizations.

Candy slept so soundly that night. Coffee and kisses were shared the in the late morning light with Eddie before he left. This time she didn't have any feelings of, 'Oh I shouldn't have done that', after kissing him goodbye. She didn't regret pressing her lips gently to his forehead as he slept on her with his arm wrapped around her, half in and out of sleep with her fingers in his hair. She found herself not regretting any of her decisions thus far when it came to Eddie. The smile on her face that wouldn't go away as she looked in the mirror that morning told her a lot about how she felt. She just needed to figure out how to tell him about it.
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Everything begins to move fast, and not in a totally pleasurable way for Candy. Everything was coming up Milhouse for her but it was all a whirl happening around her and she fought to keep from feeling overwhelmed at times.

She has a meeting with the network and Eddie. With light praise and concerns shared, she signs a contract to begin working with them. They start pre-production and she tells the paper she's leaving that same day. Deciding to keep with the same investigative journalism approach, they decide to simply rebrand that show as The Miller Report. She and Eddie would work together to find out where to mesh the old and new, using the pre-existing popularity of his show to launch hers, a sort of Brock report 2.0 of sorts, but with much better boobs, as Eddie teased in private.

At first, she got to see Eddie at work a few times a week, while the show was getting off the ground. Old leads, reforming a crew and figuring out how to improve on what he'd done lead to lots of brainstorming sessions between the two of them. But as it moved into shooting and interviews and on location production, Candace herself having to put in footwork on stories, they saw each other less and less. They did work for the same company, so sometimes they got to have lunch together, leaving their phones face down and trying to help the other decompress from being in the same fast-moving world of news, functioning as a small respite for each other. They mostly saw one another in passing, coming or going, walking around the same floor of the building with apologetic glances as she was surrounded by people demanding things of her and he would wave his notepad full of scribbles in her direction as he worked on questions and research for his interviews.

He traveled a lot for his work now, the more he released, the wider his net became for individuals to learn about. He spends most of his time hunched over a computer screen and rubbing his temples, trying to find the right angle, the right wording to get the information he wanted to set himself apart. It felt good to be back at work again but it also felt exactly like that. Work. And Venom wasn't very fond of it.

Being back in the loop with stories, especially having Candy to hear them from, helps their need for human brains. Or rather, whole humans. The nonexistence of a body was a lot easier to hide than a headless one, so he found himself in shady parts of town where he knew bad things had been going down and letting Venom get his fill of the murderers, malicious thieves and rapists that crawled in the underbelly of the city. Due to his experience with Carlton Drake, Eddie still had that fire alive for getting back at the 1%. He tried to focus on interviewing these types and exposing them for the greedy, privileged monsters they were. Writing stories of abused laborers and blackmail attempts. He found it a lot harder to get around to eating a rich person though, lots of security and questions if they disappeared, but that didn't keep Venom from always suggesting it and Eddie from always thinking it.

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He finds himself in Colorado the night Candy's show premiers and he feels like a real asshole for missing her party. But if there was anything Candy understood, it was work and he hoped she meant it when she said he didn't hold it against him. He was out researching and interviewing the top manufacturers and dispensers in Denver and trying to bring light to the hypocrisy of white men running corporations and getting rich off what had oppressed the community of color for so long. The recreational laws in his home state made the story relatable to the local market but kept a distance while he could reach out to people in the green triangle upstate to get the real information on the conditions harvesters were forced to work in for a follow-up story.