In the grounds of Sunnyside orphanage in Corvin village, Dal-Rhiatah, is a separate building normally cordoned off to the general public — that is, apart from the adults that work there and eleven-year-olds.
The building, colloquially known as “The Doctor’s Office”, is a laboratory where the children of Dal-Rhiatah take the Test around their eleventh birthdays. The Test determines whether they are ghostbait (afflicted with the ability to summon Ghosts) or witchward (able to repel Ghosts).
The Test is a horrific ordeal involving exposure to the gateway to Hell, albeit in a controlled environment, for a certain length of time.
The lab is owned and maintained by Doctor Fosby, the Head Technician. Under him, there are a group of Psyche Technicians — like scientists, but scientists who deal with the supernatural and the paranormal and their psychological and physiological effects on humans, which can be empirically studied in this world. The Psyche Technicians don’t appear very much in the second book of The Nighthunter series, but they are lurking there, in their daunting workplace conducting an unethical test on children to try to keep the rest of society safe.
One of the junior Psyche Technicians is a young man called Burs. He is one of the kinder members of staff.
Another Psyche Technician, who also newly qualified as a Psyche Physician, is Hellen, a small, blonde woman who travels from house to house in Corvin providing a service similar to psychotherapy to people who have been Grimeaten (fed upon by Ghosts) and survived.
Not wanting to stay working in the lab witnessing the horrors occurring inside it, she moved onto a different and more modern profession. People in Corvin who had been Grimeaten previously and survived were not given any mental support, despite its causing them PTSD and “melancholy” (depression and anxiety). Hellen wants to change that, one patient at a time.
Nightwalks 