[DRAFT. CURRENTLY UNEDITED]
“Mr. Torres, Ms. Wang, right this way.” The nurse says as she leads the pair of extrospectors from the lobby into the sterile bowels of the hospital. Carlos is grateful to have Grace with him for this extraction. She heads his unit and has developed quite the reputation with both the higher-ups and her underlings. No one else comes close to her numbers. She typically reserves her talents for only particularly dire hunts, but any extraction work in the unit immediately falls under her purview. Extractions can get dicey.
He let her do most of the talking with the staff. For the time being they were two social workers visiting a troubled young man on their caseload who had been discovered this morning prone and non-responsive in the middle of a public park. The paperwork was easy enough for the organization to draw up, and Carlos played the part well. He’d been a social worker once, in a not so distant past life.
Grace fell back a few paces from the leading nurse and he followed suit. “With all the incidents in this city lately, I don’t want to take any chances with this one, I hope you know.” “I’m good at extraction. We won’t have to.” “Hunting is more important, Carlos. Successful hunts mean we can avoid messes like this altogether.” She chided him, he knew, for letting the godworm slip through his fingers at the station. It was a rookie mistake, letting it get the chance to overwhelm him. “Just prepare yourself. I won’t hesitate to pull the plug on him.” He nods. Where other extrospectors favored hunting, he favored extraction. But he’d never conducted one with Grace before. He already knew she wouldn’t be lenient.
The nurse turns into an intensive care unit crowded with four beds, each flocked by its own armada of medical equipment. “He’s comatose, but stable. We’re unsure exactly what could be the cause.” “Maybe he fell and hit his head?” Grace suggests even though she knows exactly why he is in this state. She’s only asking questions as part of the role. It probably isn't necessary, but Grace is thorough. “No head trauma at all that we can tell. Again, we really don’t know with this one.”
While Grace plays concerned social worker with the Nurse, Carlos gets a better look at their victim. A young man, couldn’t be over thirty, boyish, underfed, cute in a pathetic kind of way. Carlos cleared that assessment away as soon as it appeared. Not relevant to the job. The guy’s eyes are open, pointing at the far wall but looking at nothing. Pretty lashes on them, the thought sneaks in. As he’s inspecting his eyes the nurse takes an eye drop dispenser and drips a splash of fluid into each lens. “It’s odd. We’ve tried to close them, but he just opens them right back up. He’s not blinking so we need to keep them from drying out.”
“Do you think we could have a minute alone with him, ma’am?” Carlos asks. Their time is limited. “It’s hospital policy that a nurse be present, I’m sorry.” Carlos nods. He prefers privacy for this part, but it isn’t necessary. Grace swoops in to distract the nurse with a barrage of questions about perfectly improved bureaucratic minutiae. Carlo crouches by the bedside and searches those seemingly vacant eyes. Their pinprick focus is difficult to locate, the Godworm always does its best to conceal its entry, but it can never fully close it off. Carlos handles this part because he’s the best at extraction, even better than Grace. He finds the miniscule point of psychic entry before Grace finishes her second question. Then he holds his ocular focus on it, pinprick to pinprick, which is a task that requires extremely developed skill. The difficulty of the ability is due not only to the precise laser muscle control it requires, but also because after a few seconds of this level of intimate contact with another person the reflex to pull away becomes quite overwhelming. Even with his natural talent for it, he wouldn’t be able to maintain the connection for more than a millisecond without the training of the organization. Likewise, the organization would never have developed the training if not for the life work of the Estrusan alchemists, Himalayan monks, Delta shamans, and all the others who pioneered this practice over the long arc of human history.
The hospital begins to fade as he sinks deeper into Ben’s pupils. The inky blackness swallows him and in it he detects the strange unbearable-irresistible push-pull of another consciousness. This takes training to withstand too. Quickly he feels out the contours of this other mind and finds that it is in a moment of sheer panic and terror. The represents itself to him as Ben running through the void, tripping over himself to get away from the invading force. He’s finished if he keeps that up. That’s why Carlos is here to intervene. He reaches out.