Talent

**Talent** is the psychic ability to detect ghosts through seeing, hearing, or other means.

## Types

### Sight

*Main article: Sight*
Sight is the ability to see apparitions, ghost-fog, death-glows, and other visual manifestations. Anthony Lockwood possesses this trait.

### Listening

*Main article: Listener*
Listening refers to the detection of any sound emitting from the ghost or area near it. This includes, in rare cases, live conversations with a ghost, but the only recorded events of this have been Marissa Fittes with a Type Three ghost and Lucy Carlyle.

### Touch

*Main article:* Touch

Touch is the ability to feel the echoes radiating from ghosts or their Source. It is often intertwined with the other two, such as the case of Lucy Carlyle. This leads to an echo being linked to sounds or other visual cues, sometimes giving sensitives the ability to thoroughly understand a ghost.

## Presence of Talent

Talent is generally prevalent in young children, then slowly fades away as they mature into adults. The vast majority lose their abilities by the age of 20. However, as in the cases of Anthony Lockwood and Lucy Carlyle, their Talents show no pretense of fading, perhaps because they are so potent. Some children are unusually Talented, the general rule being the more Talent, the better paying the job. Children with moderate Talent are often only accepted into the Night Watch, but those with especially talented or Sensitives, with extraordinarily well developed talents, apply for agencies, especially the well-known Fittes or Rotwell Agency.

### Coexistence of Talents

Talent was generally not considered an all-or-nothing deal. Especially sensitives often possessed multiple talents, though often only one was especially well developed. For example, Lucy Carlyle was a talented Listener that also had a strong sense of Touch, though this oftentimes blended with her Listening. She could generally see ghosts, but lacked the ability possessed by her co-worker Anthony Lockwood to see the more obscure phenomena associated with the Talent of sight, such as death glows left behind at places where individuals had died. Meanwhile, George Cubbins was not especially strong in any of the Talents, but had a modest ability in all three.

It was likely that almost all agents possessed at least some degree of Sight, as training with a rapier was standard for most agents and it is difficult to fight something one cannot see, as shown when Quill Kipps tried fighting a Ghost he could not see, which was quickly eliminated as soon as an Agent that hadn't lost their talent fought the Ghost.

### Losing Talent

The loss of talent was an inevitable reality for all Agents that survived their active time. Most often before the age of 20, talent started to fade, completely disappearing not long after that. This lost Agents their livelihood, though most found employment as Supervisors or in other jobs at Agency's.

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 *The Screaming Staircase*, Glossary
2. ↑ *The Whispering Skull*, **II: The Unexpected Grave**, Ch. 3
3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 *The Whispering Skull*, **I: The Wimbledon Wraiths**, Ch. 2
4. ↑ *[citation needed]*
5. ↑ *Not The Eternal*: 10:50