Chương 81: Chapter 80: Welcome to the team

"Two good candidates is a better, but harder problem than none. With none you go looking again. With two you have to admit which of your own gaps you are trying to cover." - Ilvet Marrow, seventy first Principal of the Progenitor's Faction The interviews ran five to seven minutes each and told him more than he had expected, most of it from the last question. The first two questions were on scheduling, both practical scenarios.

A demonstrator confirms for the evening of the eleventh, and a Professor wants the room at the last moment, how do you handle that? What do you move, and who do you tell first? Then a demonstrator wants two hours, the slot is ninety minutes, what do you say to them and when do you say it? Four of the six answered both well enough. Then the third question - why they wanted to join the SDC. One girl straight up admitted she wanted the chance to make connections with some of the most powerful people on the planet.

A boy near the middle told Kara that his family knew people worth bringing in and that he could open doors the committee currently could not, and he spent half of the seven-minute interview bragging about it. Sunny said he liked being where things were happening, and that he had spent his whole life so far being the person in front of the room and wanted to find out what it was like to be one of the people making the room work. It was a good answer.

It subtly pointed out that he already knew what the front looked like and could handle that, while also showing a desire to learn and grow. Tinder mentioned she wanted to learn from the best. She also talked about the fact that she worked well under pressure and was good at coordinating, and gave two real life examples of it that Kara couldn't refute. What Kara also noticed though it wasn't part of the scoring, was that all six of them had come in formals.

He was hoping he would feel vindicated if even one of them had not. Sigh. Sorry past Kara, but that one's on you. After each interview concluded, Kara gave a brief to the candidates that they would have to coordinate a live demonstration now. He gave them two minutes before Phinx came in through one of the backrooms playing the demonstrator. The agreed routine was balancing acts - Kara had mentioned this to the candidates. She turned up with a knife-throwing set instead.

She was cheerful about it, she was not going to change her mind, and every objection came back as something for the candidate to solve. There were three things she could be moved on, and she gave every candidate the same three. She would agree to a barrier going up for safety if the candidates brought it up. She would agree to open with the balancing acts and close on the knives. She would agree to walk the whole thing through once, in the room, before doors opened.

Two of the six simply told her what would be happening and refused to budge, which brought them to a stalemate. One tried, folded when she pushed back, and ended up scheduling knife throwing into a room with a hundred and forty seats and no barrier. One came out and found Kara, which at least meant nothing dangerous got booked. Sunny got two of the three. He did not fight her on the knives at all.

He asked about them instead, and inside ninety seconds she was telling him what a good one weighed and he was on the edge of the platform listening properly. Then he asked whether she had ever done the balancing acts in front of a full room. She said she had. He said that half the audience would come specifically for that, and would she think about opening with it and finishing on the knives, since finishing was the part people talked about on the way out. She gave him that one.

She held the barrier for a long time and he came back at it twice, warmly, and she moved the conversation elsewhere both times and he let her. He got it in the end by asking what she needed from him. She said space. He said he could give her the entire floor with the barrier up, because without it the front three rows had to be cleared and she would lose forty people out of her audience. He never asked for the walkthrough. He ran two minutes over and shook her hand on the way out. Tinder got all three.

She did not ask about the knives. She asked whether she was comfortable doing the balancing acts. Phinx said she was, but that she had performed it six times already and was tired of it.

"Then we're not doing it," Tinder agreed.

"So what do we tell the hundred and forty people who signed up for it?" Phinx said that was not her problem.

"It isn't," Tinder said, smiling.

"It's mine. I'll be at the door explaining it while they come in. So I'd rather you told me what to say, because whatever I say is what this University thinks about you by dinner, and you should be the one choosing it." There was a pause on the platform that had not happened with the other five. They agreed on starting with the balance work and ending with the knives. She then asked whether the knives were sharpened. Phinx said of course they were.

Tinder said good, because she would have to write that down and put her name under it. She had the barrier in under two minutes after that. She got the walkthrough by saying she would arrange the right set of Council members and professors to attend who would truly appreciate her work, and she could only do that if she knew what was being demonstrated first hand since no one had seen the knife work before. At the end, Kara and Phinx locked their marks separately and opened them together at around half past seven.

The top two were the same two and the four below sat in nearly the same order.

"You have him first," Kara noted.

"I do." Phinx put her sheet down.

"He is easy to get on with in, which many demonstrators will appreciate. He asked me about my own equipment before he asked me for anything and I did not notice he had done it until afterwards. He really knows how to hold a conversation and make people comfortable around him." Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Any cons?"

"Well, being friendly and informal certainly worked on me and it could work on a lot of people. But some of the people this committee bring in have spent thirty years being addressed a certain way. If he gets all chummy with one of them faster than they want, there could be consequences." Kara nodded along.

"Ok, now for Tinder," Phinx prompted.

"I think she meets the whole profile. She's perfectly comfortable starting a conversation with a stranger, she can say hard things to a person's face without raising her voice, and she acts on what she notices." Kara looked at his notes.

"She's also done really well in all the rounds and even in this one, she got all three concessions out of you, which nobody else did."

"That she did." Phinx admitted.

"Here is my worry though, and it's a minor one. She decided in the first two minutes what the right outcome was, and every move after that was aimed at it. She was right, and I gave her everything. If she had concluded on the wrong outcome, she would have got exactly what she wanted out of me and we would have run the wrong demonstration very efficiently."

"So he's a little warmer than the job needs and she's a little more stubborn than the job needs."

"Both are easily correctable." Phinx sat straighter.

"That is the honest answer even if it does not exactly help you."

"So which one?"

"That's for you to decide... I'm ok with either." Phinx stood, getting ready to leave.

"You will be working alongside this person for two years. I'll probably have just a couple of interactions. Pick the one you want next to you when a demonstrator walks in." He went to file his choice at the committee registery at two minutes past nine and the entry came back flagged. A first year can only be part of one committee at a time. Both his names were already sitting against the Alumni Committee. In such cases, the first recourse was for the committee reps to sort out out.

If not, it would go upward and take eleven days to sort. Sally, one of the second year alumni committee reps, answered inside four minutes and met him at the cafeteria a half hour later. They spent the first few minutes exchanging pleasantries. She asked how the trial had gone and whether ninety-nine was up or down, and told him Alumni had taken forty-one applications and been happy about it. Then they got to the point at hand.

"So it looks like both the candidates I had in mind are the two you chose this year as well. Can't really blame you there, they're both a cut above the rest. Do you have anyone else in mind?" Kara asked. They both knew who the candidate would go to if it went upwards. Sally already had her list out. They read across it together and found a name in both their final groups, a girl who had come fourth on Kara's sheet and third on hers.

"She'd be good for us too," she said.

"She's careful and she writes well and she will answer every message she gets."

"Yeah, not a bad choice. Do you have a preference of which of the two you want to keep?" Sally shifted the bag on her shoulder.

"Hmm... I'll be straight with you on this. It's Sunny. It's not exactly a secret that we've been in a bit of a rut the past year or so, especially after the dungeon incident. Two events last year with under thirty people in the room." She let that sit.

"Since it got out that he was applying to us, eleven of our alumni have written in asking about him. Eleven. We did not get eleven replies to anything we sent last year."

"That isn't a reason to select somebody."

"No, and I would be embarrassed saying it to almost anyone else." She shrugged.

"But it's the truth, and he's our best bet on getting some engagement back with our alumni base." Kara thought about it. Two events under thirty. It wasn't a stretch to think that in the next two years, the Alumni Committee could quietly become obsolete and nobody noticed until the day somebody needed it.

"He'd be good at it anyway," he said.

"That part's true regardless of the intentions. He'd be very good at it."

"He would."

"Then take him." Kara stood.

"I'll file for her tonight." Sally looked up at him with something close to relief.

"Thanks for understanding."

"Don't worry about it. I'm happy enough with my choice." The selections went public the next morning. Kara sent a message to Tinder, asking whether she had twenty minutes and whether he could come to her room. She came back inside two minutes and said yes, and gave him a floor and a number in D block. He had specifically asked to meet at her place because there were two to three exotic animals in his own room at any given point in time and he was not ready to introduce a first year to any of them.

The door opened to empty air. Kara was confused for a moment.

"Ahem." He looked down. Tinder would have made five feet in heels on a good day. Her mask was a bright orange turtle shell like structure across the whole face. Kara looked away for a second, embarrassed.

"Everyone does that," she said, stepping back.

"Come in." The room was what Kara thought Glasses room would look like if he had had it completely to himself. Her desk held four things, each of them arranged neatly. On the low shelf under the window sat a shallow tank with a ramp built up one side, and on the ramp, entirely motionless, was a turtle about the size of a dinner plate.

"That's Rocket." Kara looked at the turtle. The turtle looked at the wall.

"Uh... he's fast?"

"In water, yes. On land, he is spectacularly slow. It was funny four years ago and now it's just his name." She pulled the desk chair out for him and sat on the end of the bed.

"Anyway, thanks for the opportunity, I really appreciate it. I was almost surprised I got it over Sunny if I'm being honest. He got Alumni right?"

"He did."

"Was that you or was that him?"

"It was both committees agreeing," Kara said.

"That's all you're going to get. Anyway, welcome to the team!" She smiled.

"Thanks! So... what do I actually do?"

"Well, first things first, you can read through some of the documents we have." He shared them across as he said it, demonstrator files, schedules, booking access, the whole correspondence.

"We'll have our first demonstration in about three weeks, so you can be better prepared for that. It'll be mostly the two of us handling things. Phinx will join in during the actual demonstration itself. She's super busy, so you won't be seeing her around much. She'll meet you in a few days, whenever she finds some time." Tinder walked him to the door.

"Was she the one on the platform with the knives?" Kara paused.

"Ask her when you meet her," he replied with a smirk.

"So that's a yes." She held the door open.

"She was very good." He could hear them from the corridor before he even entered his room. He opened the door to find Vitaly had Pip by one ankle and Pip was making a noise like a kettle and clearly enjoying her life, and Waggy lay stretched flat on his side by the bed with his legs out, tracking the pair of them and declining to involve himself. Vixen sat against the wall on Kara's bed. Glasses was at his desk, both of them clearly looking at something on their interfaces.

"You're wrong about the Veil," Vixen said, without looking up.

"I am just quoting the rules."

"That's literally what the Veil does... The rules don't explicitly forbid it." She swung her legs off the bed.

"Both of you are coming to the pitch tomorrow evening. I'll walk you through it on the ground with the lines marked, because neither of you knows what you're looking at." Kara looked at Glasses, who looked back at him.

"Well, sure... why not."