the wraith at the bedside: the boy who could master and move on from a plateau

Even the wraith's account of making the Entertainment runs on the anthology's developmental vocabulary. His problem was to build a converse-medium "the gifted boy couldn't simply master and move on from to a new plateau" — the same plateau-language E.T.A. uses for a player's ascent, here describing a son so gifted he devours and outgrows everything put in front of him. The father needed something that couldn't be climbed past, because the boy's very talent — the capacity to master and advance, plateau to plateau — is what keeps carrying him away into silence. The developmental gift the academy prizes is recast as the thing that isolates the prodigy. (The wraith-reality, the converse-medium's identity as the Entertainment, and the whole visitation are ghosts-wraiths'; landed here is only the "plateau" usage, cross-ref, no duplicate blockquote.)