Benjamin Almondine was, by any reasonable measure, the most gifted practitioner the clinic had ever employed. His specialty — psychic surgery, the direct excision of trauma and memory from the living mind — required a precision that most psychics never approach. He had it naturally. He refined it over years of practice at Halcyon into something that bordered on the extraordinary.

He was also, for the record, a doctor — trained, licensed, practicing — who came to psychic work through medicine rather than the other way around. This gave his approach a rigor that the self-taught members of the staff sometimes found uncomfortable and usually found invaluable.

He trained alongside Jeremiah Tarquin. He married Claire Redbud. He was, in the language of the clinic's internal assessments, an anchor — the kind of person whose steadiness makes a system more stable simply by being present in it. The clinic has been measurably less stable since his absence.

He left for Eastern Europe on a mission the nature of which remains classified at his own request. Something old. Something dangerous. Something that had been terrorizing a village in ways that resisted conventional intervention. He filed a contact schedule. He stopped keeping it.

Claire Redbud filed a formal missing persons report on ██/██/20██. She has not stopped working. The clinic notes this with concern and respect in equal measure.