He wakes up as a minor villain in a hunter novel he barely remembers — the disposable kind, written to be humiliated in an early chapter and never mentioned again. His inheritance is one skill, and it is not the one everybody wants. Suggestion is not hypnosis. It cannot make anyone do what they would never do. All it does is lean on what is already there: a doubt, a resentment, a want somebody has been careful never to name. He decides that is enough to work with.