Tessa put the shortest interval first.
The delegate who had asked for emergency authority looked relieved, as if she were finally offering a timetable without qualifications. Then she explained that the interval was a maximum under the proposed conditions, not a target everyone had to reach. A stop might come earlier. An unclear acknowledgment might end the attempt before the captive produced anything the team could interpret.
“Operator fatigue. Sensory confusion. Unstable energy,” she said. “Those are risks we can monitor imperfectly. We cannot diagnose a captive’s condition from a trace. We also need to account for what an ambiguous response can do to a family observer.”
Eli sat where he could see the protected contact record without having to look at the private room. The relatives there had chosen not to attend this portion publicly. Their observer had asked for the medical briefing and the power to challenge its plain-language version before agreeing to the next preparation.
Tessa described what the team had learned from recent confusion and from previous energy overdraw. She did not turn Eli’s whole ledger into a teaching aid. She used the operational conditions: limited exposure, independent monitoring, physical backup, and an immediate stop for symptoms or failed response. A clinician’s narrow permission for one kind of inherited work did not certify native contact or the surrounding structure. Each task required its own conditions.
