Inka, aware of the Minders for several years now and long past cycling through self-doubt (am I dreaming? high? crazy?), had simply accepted their presence, and the fact that no one else seemed to be able to see them, as a novel fact of her life. For the most part, they just floated around, though it was clear from the get-go that they gravitated toward populated areas. Occasionally, she'd see one of their tentacles suddenly shoot down and attach itself to someone's head ("enter, with a frightening amount of impact force" was perhaps more accurate than "attach"), then retract a moment or two later, leaving the affected person seemingly (and surprisingly) none the worse for wear. But lately, the Minders seemed to hover more closely to her in particular than they had before, and the targets of their tentacles seemed to be located closer and closer to wherever she happened to be at the time, as if they could somehow sense (yet not directly see) her, and had decided to seek her out, perhaps aware that someone down here was aware of them… Assuming it was only a matter of time before one of these "outreaches" pinpointed her own head, she had begun her own hunt, for some kind of protection, a difficult proposition when she had no idea of the true nature of the threat, or if the prospect of being thusly probed, however shocking and invasive, was truly a threat at all. More importantly, she would need help, and that would mean finding someone not only willing to believe that she could see something no one else could (and that this something was indeed real), but someone who wasn't full of shit, who actually possessed some kind of clue how to deal with the sorts of things most would dismiss as insanity. She knew of only one person who could possibly fit this bill, and she did not expect Hodja would be in any way happy to hear from her.
