Ashe Wyre
Where Brock Stump screens by category, Ashe Wyre screens by knowledge. The distinction matters. Brock's function is classification: does this thing belong to a permitted category or not? Wyre's function is something older. Fifteen years of close contact with non-human entities in the tunnels below the Loxley, and she has been keeping notes. The notes are physical - waterproofed paper, filed in a chamber off the main approach. What the notes contain is a careful taxonomy of what hurts things like you, built from observation and from the damage she has sustained during the building of it. The first entry, she told me, was a Syncarid. Not a large one. It still took her six weeks to walk correctly afterward. She does not appear to consider this relevant to the question of whether the taxonomy was worth beginning.
She does not produce a weapon. What she uses instead is the taxonomy, applied. A human who has spent fifteen years learning exactly what hurts the things that come through the Hole, and who has converted that learning into something fast enough to be useful in a corridor at murkneet. This is a harder fight than Brock in a different way: Brock fights the tunnel geometry. Wyre fights the thing in front of her with knowledge she may have had before you arrived. She has been read before. The Cognivise defence she developed is not quite a defence - it is a habit of thought so organised that the attempt slips off it, and when the attempt slips, she notes what the attempt looked like, and the note goes to Ming Shalom by the end of the night. There is something behind the organised thoughts that I have not been able to identify. I have tried twice. The second time, she noted that too.
Ming says she is thorough. He means it as a compliment to himself - her thoroughness operates in his interest, not yours. Whatever she learns from an encounter with you, whatever she extracts from a partial or failed Cognivise, she transmits. The gap between what she knows and what Ming knows is approximately the time it takes a message to travel from her chamber to his. She has not worked for anyone else in fifteen years. I do not think she is loyal to Ming in any emotional sense. I think she finds the work satisfying and Ming provides the work.
Field note: she knew you were coming before you arrived. She was already looking up. Plan accordingly.
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