Carabas

I'm in a hospital, speaking to a doctor. There was some information I'd wanted to get from him, but he's assumed I'm here about something else, a person who's been checked into the hospital with a specific condition. I hide my surprise and go with his assumption, only expressing my surprise that he'd known about this patient, since the ward they're in isn't his responsibility - has he kept an eye out for this condition since the last time we met? I'm privately thinking that if that person's developed that condition, then this both simplifies my job and complicates it; I no longer need the information I'd come here for originally.

I'm discussing this development with three other people in an empty hospital room - a man with a shaved head, a teenage girl, and a person whose gender I'm not completely sure of but I'm going to go with 'she'. Black hair, ragged like she cut it herself, short in the back and long in the front; pale with bad skin; and a grey hoodie zipped up, making her look heavier than she is.

Talking about that patient's condition, the guy with the shaved head had just been saying something about how dreamers have it rough. Talks about how badly things can go wrong just from being interrupted at the wrong moment; talks about people traveling through a dream being dumped back into reality wherever they happen to be at the moment, and hoping you're lucky enough not to be overlapping some physical object at the time; and that's just the passengers, the dreamers themselves get it worse.

The person in the hoodie shrugs this off, says at least if you can heal people, no one cares what nastiness you've got going on; they're content to leave you be in your swamp.

The guy with the shaved head is disgusted by this, says yeah, you enjoy making yourself the worst person you can be.

She says to him that she learned in prison, "There's no such thing as letting go of vanity, Wade."