Through the degrees lining the stairwell, a tenuous thread united the eclectic elements of Doctor Noire's education.<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Corinne's History</div><div class="spoiler_body">On the frontier of mental health there were as many disparate schools of thought as there were sects of Ezra. Out of the dark ages of ill humors and mystical warding arose an awareness of the mind as a complex mechanism, and maturing methods of engaging the puzzle of mental illness through reason rather than superstition.<br/><br/>There had been the Deconstructionists, who theorized the mind as a maze of interconnected chambers self-referencing, whose ills could be measured and solved like a mathematical equation. There were the Selfists, and Animists, who filtered sentience through the lenses of individual perception and emotion, and sought to reduce intelligent behavior to its basest, most unflattering components.<br/><br/>These disciplines had not borne out in the field of severe mental illness by the time of Doctor Noire's education. Rather, there were fringe visionaries who coupled such methods with more direct approaches. Doctor Heinfroth's explanation of the brain's chemical ether suggested such a theory of the mind, freed from the ineffective high concepts of a wrongly constructed mind, conceived instead as something which could, and ought, be chemically altered.<br/><br/>There had been attempts to restart the minds of lunatics, the way an electric current might restart the heart. In the beginning it functioned the same way, with a current through the living brain, to revive the catatonic and incurably melancholy. From there, doctors in Lamordia had experimented with bringing the psychotic mind <em>to </em>catatonia first, through deprivation, punishment, and sometimes surgical means. In a few rare cases the mind indeed seemed to empty, broken open, only to be refilled and rehabilitated by patient teachers. Far more were the failures which left a psyche wounded and in need of care for the rest of the patient's days.</div></div><br/><br/>At the pinnacle, the blank-faced mask stared impassively over bleak, colorless, characterless stairwell, perpetually dusty with disuse, stained by fundamental darkness unknown.<br/><br/>The door at Danae's fingertips proved unlocked, and met with no resistance.