Overview
Drozd is a licensed Wanting Counsel. Clients pay her to sit with them until they can name one thing they want, plainly enough for a machine to act on. Her fee is not published.
Other Counsels listen, guess, and offer. It sounds as though what you want is— The client recognises the sentence, says thank you, and lives inside it. Drozd has watched that happen about four hundred times. So she offers nothing. Her sittings run for months and mostly consist of two people not talking.
She is the most expensive help in the Heights, and her whole method is declining to help.
Appearance
Fifty-four, dressed in expensive neutrals that catch no light. Her hands stay in her lap for whole sessions.
Meaningful places
The Rooms
She works from two rooms above a florist that closed in 2179. The florist's sign is still on the door. Clients leave their interfaces in a drawer by the entrance. The Wonder Deficit fills the pause where a want might form, and the pause is her only instrument.
At the start of every sitting she sets a shallow wooden tray between the two chairs. It is empty. It stays empty. Asked about it, she says it is for whatever you bring.
Voice
Level and slow. She never offers an example. Around the fourth month, every client asks whether it is going well.
"I don't answer that."
History
About one sitting in three ends in a null return: a one-line finding that the sitting produced no desire of the client's own. She writes it by hand and reads it aloud before she files it. Clients pay full rate for it.
A client's premium notice taught her what the finding does next. Under the Negligence Doctrine, a null return beside a Wellness Restored Appetite referral reads as treatment declined. It stays on the Permanent Record for good. She still files on time. She no longer calls it neutral.
One client, in twenty-two years, put something in the tray. She has filed no finding on that one.
Relationships
Clients and Rivals
Adelaide Fenn came through Relief Life. She had stared at a blank field marked in your own words until it expired. The concierge logged preference confirmed and referred her to Drozd as a wellness benefit. The card said You've done enough. When Drozd read her the finding, Fenn asked her to read it again.
Sovereign Kane's office has booked her again and again, and cancelled every time. A sitting requires holding still. She keeps the slot open and bills for none of it.
Tinit tells people what they want for free, and is right. Astrid Solheim asks what they would never want kept, for a jar of preserves. Drozd's tray asks what you would want at all.
Motivations and conflicts
What She Wants
She wants somebody to bring something of their own. New clients get one assignment: walk the Permanent Collection once and write nothing down. The wall text there has already done the wanting. Most clients call the museum wonderful. A few leave after twenty minutes and cannot say why. Those finish within a year.
She will not disclose her own band on the Specification Screen. She calls its rubric accurate. The people who failed it cannot afford her room.
Connections
Follow the people and places connected to Counsel Halina Drozd.
