Chương 78: Chapter 77: Trick for treat

There are two ways to make a creature do what you want. One takes a year. The other takes a piece of meat. - Orin Vandeth, Foundations of the Anima Bond Kara sent the message to Phinx on the walk over to Symbiotics class the next morning. I've got the profile and a format down. Are you free after a couple of hours? Just heading to class, I can come right after. The reply came back just before he reached the field. That was fast. Yes, come over after class. I'll clear an hour off my schedule.

The second session was the same course on the same strip of ground, and Peaches spent most of it walking around to the different practising pairs, giving a few words of advise to each before moving on. Kara got told he was being too passive. He needed to proactively direct Waggy rather than wait for him to start in a direction and then ask him to come back. Kara took a moment to think about that. He got a strange sense of deja vu.

Vixen took Vitaly through the whole course twice without a single wasted step, and the second time Peaches stopped the group to watch. Afterwards she told them all that this was what they were working toward and that most of the room might not get there this semester and that was alright. Vixen accepted this with her hands behind her back and her head slightly down, looking shy and modest. Then she passed by Kara giving him a smug look. Kara's eye twitched. He tried again immediately.

Waggy came off the dish successfully, then ignored him entirely at the fur scrap, and then discovered that one of the geese had wandered onto the course from somewhere and abandoned the exercise as a concept. Kara collected him and walked back to the start and crouched down.

"Did you see that look on her face?" he whispered fiercely.

"She's mocking us. We can't let that stand. We are going to wipe that off her face by the end of this semester, got it?" Waggy stared at him blankly. Kara sighed.

"All right. How about this... If you get the course right, I'll get you a munieru." Waggy's ears came up. Then he was on his feet, leaning forward slightly with a thin line of drool starting to form. He had eaten munieru in Area 10 first, and then meunière in Area 5 and he absolutely loved it.

"Now you're listening." Kara got the pouch out of his jacket. He had brought along a few pieces of crumbled fish jerky. A correct recall got one piece, handed over immediately, along with warm and obvious praise. A failure got nothing and got the flat, disappointed tone that Vixen had demonstrated on Pip once when she was getting naughty. Pip's reaction to that had left Kara with little room for doubt about its effectiveness. It was now his turn to try it on Waggy. And it was a success.

Waggy hated the tone considerably more than he wanted the fur scrap. By the fourth run he was coming off the dish on the first call. By the sixth he was coming off the fur scrap half the time. He made sure to change up the dish and the fur on each attempt... There were multiple options around the field. The goose remained beyond negotiation, but that was the case for everybody except Vixen and two others, and Kara had privately reclassified it as a problem for week two.

"You're using my system," Vixen said from behind him.

"I'm using a system," Kara corrected.

"Sure, a system that I taught you... You could've at least tried to change the words." Kara glared at her.

"You... You must've misheard me." Kara ran the course again with Waggy, making sure he used different words. Waggy refused to come off the fur scrap.

"Attaboy." She patted his shoulder on the way past. Kara watched her walk off and vowed to himself then and there that by the end of the semester, he'd be the one wearing that smug look, and he was going to enjoy seeing her face then. After class, Kara left Waggy in the room and headed straight to Phinx's room. She had cleared the desk. There was a bare surface with nothing on it, which in that room looked like a public highway running through a jungle. Phinx's expression dared him to comment on it.

He wisely chose not to. He took a position on one of the chairs.

"Thanks for clearing your schedule on short notice, I know you must've been busy."

"No worries... Lord knows I could use a break. Besides, I am kinda looking forward to hearing what you've prepared. Let's go with the profile first, then the format." This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Alright then, talking about the profile... I'll be looking for four things primarily," Kara started.

"First, they have to be outgoing. I mean like someone who'd walk over to somebody they've never met and just start talking."

"Second, they don't avoid confrontation. When something needs saying to a person's face, they just say it. Without being rude or escalating matters. The measure is whether the other person still works with them afterwards."

"Third, they notice things and know how to respond. Basically, they should be good at reading a room and knowing what the room wants." He paused.

"Of course, all of these rely on having a high EQ. Which is definitely not my strength. Not that Strength is my strength either... Nevermind." Kara looked away, embarrassed. Phinx sat back. When Kara looked up, she had a genuine smile on her face, one that had been growing steadily as he listed his wishlist one by one.

"There's no way you came up with that on your own. You've got some good friends," she said. Kara smiled at that.

"All right," she said.

"Let's hear the format."

"Right, so I'm thinking three rounds. Round one reduces the initial list of applicants to about twenty."

"How?"

"It's kinda similar to the first round I went through in that they won't be given any explicit instructions." He continued, "They're told the trial begins in half an hour, they're put in the indoor stadium, and they're left there. Nobody tells them it's started." Phinx listened attentively.

"But, they wouldn't simply be left to their own devices. Multiple things will happen throughout the half an hour in and around the hall, none of them strictly needing their involvement. Some of them are noise, while some of those things are important."

"And at the end?"

"They will receive a prompt on the interface. Written answer, no discussion allowed. What did you see." Kara shrugged.

"I'm not going to tell them what I'm after."

"What are you scoring?"

"Whether they can separate the things that mattered from the ones that didn't. And whether any of them did something while it was happening instead of just looking or even worse - ignoring and caught up in their own world."

"Hmmm... Interesting," Phinx commented.

"Go on."

"Round two. We'll go from twenty down to six. At the start of the round, we'll make teams of five." He leaned forward.

"Each team gets a checklist and a timer. Setting up a demonstration, roughly what the committee actually does. Enough separate jobs on the list that they have to split up and trust each other to do their jobs."

"Ok, and?"

"One person on each team is actually a plant and has been told privately to slow it down without getting caught."

"A saboteur."

"That's right." Kara had spent most of an evening on the next part.

"But I'm not scoring who catches them. Catching them is not the hard part. I'm scoring what happens once somebody suspects. Whether they stand up and accuse the person in front of everybody, leading to an argument. Or whether they deal with it in a way that keeps the team working and still solves the problem." Phinx thought about that for a moment.

"Question," she said.

"Go ahead."

"Let's say team three finishes the build. On time, clean, no friction. Not one of them ever suspects anything." She turned a hand over.

"What have you learned about those four candidates?" Kara opened his mouth, and closed it. He sat with it.

"Nothing," he admitted.

"I've just learned about the saboteur. If that one was nervous, or too subtle, or just bad at it, then the team scores as though there was nothing to find, because there wasn't."

"Yep, that's the flaw... You're leaving it in the hands of the specific saboteur in each team." She nodded once.

"So?"

"So the sabotage can't be improvised." He was already rebuilding it.

"The plants get a script. Fixed beats at fixed times, identical for every team." He looked up.

"And I score the reaction to each beat. Not whether the demonstration set up gets finished."

"Good." She flexed her fingers.

"Now for round three."

"Round three will be similar to the final round of last year. Two parts. An interview, because we've always done one and it works." He paused.

"Then, instead of just receiving the demonstrator, a live mini-demonstration. All the way from receiving to the end of the demonstration. So a quick five to seven minutes of interview with a couple of questions and then about fifteen minutes for the mini demonstration."

"Anything in particular you have in mind for the demonstrator?"

"Well, maybe a demonstrator who won't cooperate." Phinx raised an eyebrow.

"That's what I'm looking for, someone who can manage a situation like that," Kara said.

"Getting a workable demonstration out of somebody who's turned up with a different routine than the one you agreed, or who's decided at the last minute they want to try something else, or who's frozen. And doing it without publicly overriding them."

"So the demonstrator plays difficult." She was already nodding.

"Do you have someone in mind?"

"I think we both know who'd be perfect for this," Kara smirked.

"Oh... Pray, tell." She had a small smile on her face. It was Kara's turn to raise his eyebrows.

"Fine, fine... I'll do it. Was hoping to sit this one out, maybe just take the interview, but alright."

"Maybe just go a little easy, eh... Don't wanna end up with no candidates at the end," Kara laughed.

"Heh... No promises on that, but I will be consistent." She twirled a stray hair absent-mindedly.

"Ok, now that's settled. Well thought out and very practical, I must say. Tests pretty much everything we do... From arranging the demonstration, to observing their needs while waiting in a hall, to actually conducting a mini-demonstration. Well done - to be honest, when you completed it so quickly I was half expecting a shoddy plan."

"Thank you."

"One last thing. Let's score separately."

"As in?"

"You don't see my scores and I don't see yours until everyone is done. If we come up with two different candidates, we can sit down and go through their respective strengths and weaknesses." She raised a hand before he could respond.

"It isn't about trusting your judgement. If we score together, then we might drift toward each other without noticing, and it'll practically be just one opinion. The places where we disagree when we score independently could have some interesting information."

"Fair enough."

"And of course, let's have a detailed discussion before the final round on your six chosen candidates, so that I'm not going in blind." She checked her interface.

"I'll make time for it."

"What about the logistics?"

"All yours. Stadium booking, plants, scripts, scoring sheets, the notice, the orientation pitch, all of it." Phinx stood, which meant the hour was up.

"If you need me for anything, feel free to ping. I'll try to respond as soon as I can. Now, back I go to my den." On the way out, he noticed at the back of the door, a poster. It had the image of a praying monk and it read - This too shall pass.