She walked right past him as he spoke and couldn’t help but roll her eyes when he collapsed to the floor. She washed her hands and stared down at him as she dried them. She couldn’t honestly say that she knew how<span style="font-style: italic">any</span>of that felt. What she was - what being her father’s child had made her - had always been a closely guarded secret. Her father had eventually been discovered, hunted like the monster so many saw him to be, and shot several times before being brutally beaten to death. Her mother, at least, had managed to protect her with the Craft and had passed much of what she knew on before she disowned her daughter for being transgendered.<br/><br/>The ironic thing was that she wasn’t actually transgendered. Well, she<span style="font-style: italic">kind of</span>was. But she considered herself ambigendered; she fully accepted that she was male, and yet she liked dressing and acting and being addressed as a girl. It was perhaps this unique identity that had drawn her husband to her. He had taken her in and accepted her even when she began being plagued by her mother’s Craft. She had spent several years developing powerful protections against her mother, and those protections were still going strong; they would be for many years to come, although the minor ones she restored to their full strength anywhere from once a month (around the time of her period) to seasonally to annually. Her husband had learned a little from observing her but had never really been involved in the Craft. No…he had<span style="font-style: italic">other</span>things to worry about…<br/><br/>But back to the matter at hand, she had been helped to understand her mediumship and the power potentially available to her by those around and by whom she’d been raised. So to her, this boy was little more than a child beset by a despair that was wholly unrealistic. He was rather pathetic and a solid portion of her mind saw him as little more than a weakling bullied by nothing that couldn’t be handled. What was it people called that? Oh, yeah - people called it “emo”. Still, if he<span style="font-style: italic">could</span>see spirits, he still might be useful to her. She threw the paper towel away.<br/><br/>“What I know,” she told him, “is that whining solves nothing. My Craft, however, can trap the spirits of those who have passed on. How I use them is my affair but for a fee or some kind of exchange, I might be willing to help you out. Of course, you’ll have to get up and stop moping first.”<br/><br/>Yeah, she wasn’t the most tactful of people. Oh, well.