A woman who calls herself a youth mental-health counselor. She hands Lan Yingchen a name card and arranges an 'accident'—her true identity is an arts censor.
Background / motivation / observation stance
A woman in her thirties, with thin gold-rimmed glasses and brown hair loosely tied back, her Chinese carrying a very faint, unplaceable accent. On the surface she is a counselor at a city adolescent mental-health support center; in truth, she is an Arts Censor of Myriad Academy—tasked with finding those who 'can see.'
Beneath her collar she wears a badge: its design is a circle that does not close.
She staged an accident at the street corner: a bus braking hard, a man knocking Lan Yingchen over, the bronze mirror sliding out. She brought Lan Yingchen to a 'center' and ran 5 sensing tests on him.
He passed every one of them—when she collected the test strips, her hand paused for a second. As she left, she told him: before 9 in the morning tomorrow, go check the mailbox at your home.
The municipal youth wellbeing support centre occupies the sixth floor of an office building, with a properly registered plaque at the door and other tenants coming and going along the corridor. The identity stands up to checking.
She holds 3 half-days a week there, seeing genuinely referred young people, keeping records to regulation and filing closing reports to regulation. That part is not an act.
On her desk: a box of tissues, a timer, and two chairs set slightly off from facing each other—standard counselling arrangement, and also exactly what lets the person opposite loosen and hand over an unguarded reaction.
The pin beneath her collar is small and its colour kept dark. During a session she never touches it.
A censor's work is not catching people. It is telling them apart. Of those who can see, most spend a lifetime believing they are merely under strain; a few begin to ask, and it is those few she is looking for.
She does not use questionnaires. Whatever a questionnaire can draw out, the subject has long since learned how to answer.
She works by arrangement instead: an accident, a collision, something dropped on the pavement—and then she watches where the first reaction lands. The 5 sensing tests are the final gate; the staging beforehand is the real sieve.
She has done this work for many years. Her hand rarely pauses when she collects the test sheets. That day it paused for a second.
Discussion about this character
0 records
