A very good chapter, excellent thoughts. The counseller is interesting; he really does still possess the poor intrinsic qualities that probably gave him an unattractive deamon in the first place, and could be going about the whole issue the wrong way, but his heart does seem to be in the right place.

Anyway, Mike is a well drawn toe-rag out of touch with anything resembling human feeling, and some very non-emotional suffering; Nisha's story is interesting as well. The unappealling tone you brought out certaintly works, though I'm not sure whether the 2nd line is Mike speaking, or his deamon that he mistook for the phone, and the significance of the first time he hears Nisha's deamon gets very slightly lost in all the points ending the paragraph. What made you post this as a seperate story to your last piece on this theme?