Well, small point of order, if he may, ma'am? You see, and he hates to bring it up but, well, he's [i]not[/i] an Engineer. His mind hasn't been touched by a train, raw and uncensored and intolerably full of that barrage of input. He may wear the gloves and swing the wrench, but if he were to go into a roundhouse and call himself an Engineer, at best he'd be laughed out of the building.

And more's the pity, really. Mister Conagher hadn't had the words to fully explain what it's like to fully connect to an engine, though the word "overwhelming" had been involved. And at the first connection, it's almost painful? It's... Look, your brain is trying to interpret senses you didn't have thirty seconds ago, and the train is getting used to what it's like to be able to [i]see.[/i] You have two foreign minds that are temporarily fused together and every nerve is firing at the same time and you're not sure whether you're dying or if you've ever been alive before this or whether you're seeing the moment the universe began.

It's not sight, you see. To feel the tracks under you, to shriek down the tunnel and hear the earth moan in response? You're experiencing echolocation, feeling the future of the track through your wheels, and your primitive lizard brain isn't ready for it. And that's before the train decides to reach out, to touch at the other minds in the area, incorporate their senses?

Really, donating his sight almost feels like it must be superfluous.

Sasha isn't fully formed. It's clumsy, pushy, the way the tendril of will nudges at his brain, a child's first clumsy grasps at an object. She can't just reach out and direct his eyes, show him what to look at, and she's not subtle enough to skim across the surface of a mind without it noticing--already he can see some booth barkers turning to stare at the train.

This is gonna be trouble.