Chương 76: Chapter 75: Choosing the right fit

A team assembled from people who share a strength also shares a blind spot. Pick for the gap. It's always better to have diverse skill sets when doing complicated tasks - Hans Loriett, Fifty First Principal of the Progenitor's faction Waggy got as far as the bed and gave up on the day. He went down on his side across Kara's blanket, one back leg still folded under him, and did not bother to fix it. Pip came over to investigate, prodded his ribs twice, got nothing, and lost interest.

"What did you do to him?" Glasses asked from his desk.

"Hey, it's not my fault. It's the first time he's trained in front of so many people and animals. They had to do a sort of course while ignoring all distractions."

"Sounds exhausting for everyone." Glasses did not look up from whatever he was building. Pip had climbed onto his shoulder and was holding a small component that Kara chose to assume she had been given rather than taken.

"Where are you going?"

"Phinx. Duty calls."

"Right, preparing for the new intake. Well, all the best." Glasses turned the thing over. Kara left Waggy where he was and went out. D block was four minutes walk from L along the main path, and the waterway that ran across its entrance had dolphins in it at that hour, two of them moving along the length of it. Kara stopped for a moment on the bridge to watch.

It occurred to him that this was the first time all day he had walked anywhere without Waggy, and that the quiet was less pleasant than he would have thought. He kept expecting to look down and find Waggy. Phinx's room was denser than he remembered it, and it had been dense to begin with. She had what was probably third-year project work distributed across every surface that would hold it. The posters were still there under the layers.

The compact fridge had a stack of documentation on top of it and a plate balanced on the stack. She moved the plate, indicated a chair, and took the other one.

"So... How was your internship?"

"It was... Interesting I guess," Kara said. She raised an eyebrow.

"Interesting, huh." She sat back.

"Coming back with two exotic partners and a masterfully crafted war umbrella sure counts as interesting. We both know the crafted version out in public isn't true, and I'm not gonna grill you about it. It was well done, to be fair. Even if some don't believe it, they will be reluctant to test you on it. It's not exactly a secret that you interned with PfP." Kara smiled.

"Just to be clear, I am in regular touch with Moghli, but he hasn't told me anything about it. I don't want you to assume otherwise and then be careful around him for no reason." She let that settle.

"But I've known him for the better part of two years. And I knew Monk too for almost a year, even if briefly. And I know what they were upto during their time here. That's all I'm going to say." It was Kara's turn to raise both eyebrows.

"Don't worry, my lips are sealed." She mimed sealing her lips.

"Anyway, onto the main agenda now. With my current performance, I'm highly likely to be in the dungeon selection tournament." Kara sat forward.

"There's a tournament?"

"Sure is." She leaned back.

"It runs across universities. I guess it's not exactly a secret that the top few from the Universities get selected for the dungeon, but the exact numbers and how the selection happens is not in the public domain. I'm not allowed to tell you more than that, so don't ask me the follow-up you're about to ask." He closed his mouth.

"The point I'm trying to make here is not that your senior is extraordinary, which she probably is, if she says so herself, but that this means the prep is going to eat me alive," she went on.

"And it stacks on top of the third-year project load... You've already seen what this leads to from Moghli last year. So yeah, I'm going to be unavailable a lot, and I'd rather tell you that now than have you wondering why I'm not responding."

"How unavailable do you mean?"

"I mean I will still be reachable. But any extended presence from my end will need some pre-planning." She shrugged.

"Look, you can run it without me. I've watched you do most of it already last year. The only thing I actually do that you don't is talk to people who annoy me, such as Adam Mink, and the Disciplinary Committee, and you're going to have to learn that." Kara turned that over. He was not looking forward to that part.

"Which brings me to the thing I want settled before I disappear." She pushed a document across to his interface.

"First years land in seven days. You'll be running the orientation about a day after that." Kara opened it. Arrival schedule, when the notice about orientation would be going up, the slot the committee had been given for its pitch.

"Eight days," he said.

"Eight days, and the trial after it, and I want the design finished before any of them arrive. I don't want you assembling it in the week you're also standing in front of a hundred first years telling them what we do."

"You want me to build it." Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

"Yes. I'll review it, maybe add a couple of suggestions here and there, but it's mostly going to be you." She stretched her legs out.

"The rounds and what goes in them is all yours. How many people you cut in each round is again yours. I'll tell you what I want tested and then I'll get mostly out of the way until the final round."

"Fair enough. So what do you want tested?"

"Two things. First, they have to be good at handling unexpected situations." She looked at him.

"You know by now that some of these demonstrations produce situations we can't always anticipate. If someone locks up when that happens, we'll be royally screwed. So that's a non-negotiable."

"Yep, completely agreed on that." She held up a second finger.

"The other one is that I want somebody who complements you."

"Huh?"

"You've had a year of running these," Phinx said.

"You know how they go, you know where they go wrong, and you know which parts of that you handle well. So you're better placed than I am to work out which parts you need help with. Whatever that turns out to be, that's the second thing you test for."

"That's not going to be easy... And if I get it wrong?"

"Then you'll be working with the consequences for two years and I'll be gone by then." She stated matter-of-factly.

"They also have to be competent, obviously. I've told you about our history, and looks like you're well on the way to continuing that. Don't let the streak end with you."

"Alright... I'll need about two-three days," Kara said.

"I'll come back with the profile and the tests."

"Three days it is." She was already reaching for something else on the desk.

"And I want tests you could actually run in the stadium with the equipment we have, not tests that would work beautifully in a building we don't own."

"Understood."

"Great. Off you go then." She rubbed the bridge of her mask where it sat against her nose.

"I've been up since four."

"Damn, have you been eating well?" Kara looked pointedly at the plate balanced on the top of the fridge.

"That's what the fridge is for." She waved him toward the door.

"Go on. I'm sure you've got a lot on your plate." Kara hesitated for a second, then got up and left. He noticed on the way out a poster on the back of the door. It said, "This too shall pass." Kara took the bridge back the other way. The dolphins were no longer in sight. He was thinking about the tests the whole way - particularly about someone complementing him, which was a problem, because building a test for what he wasn't required a clear understanding of what he was.

He decided he wanted Glasses' read on it, maybe Vixen's too before he wrote anything down. He also decided that could wait until after food. Vixen was in the room when he got back, sitting on Glasses' desk with her boots on the chair, mid-sentence and clearly enjoying herself.

"... and the reason it's hard is that you're not giving an order," she said.

"You're asking them to trust that you know something they don't, that your words are worth more than the distraction. Which they'll only do if you've proven it."

"That sounds like a long-term investment."

"It is a long-term investment. Ask him." She tipped her head at Kara without looking round.

"How'd it go with Phinx?"

"Well, there's a lot. She's gonna be in the dungeon tournament, which means she won't be very available." Vixen got off the desk.

"Wow, she's in the dungeon team. Wait, there's a tournament?"

"Don't look at me, I don't know the details. I just know it's cross-university. She's not allowed to say more than that." Kara collected Waggy, who had reached the stage of sleep where being picked up was a personal affront.

"Anyway, I've got a selection to design in three days."

"You always get the fun jobs," Glasses commented.

"Lunch first." They ate late enough that the cafeteria had mostly emptied out. Vixen walked to the table nearest theirs on the way out entirely unprompted, and came back saying that everything was fine and that a second year called Beko wanted to know if Pip bit.

"Does she bite?" Vixen asked Kara and Glasses.

"Not me." Kara answered.

"Me neither." Glasses considered.

"Unless you count her biting my devices." There was a strip of open ground past the Lifesciences farm that the practicals used and nobody else bothered with. They went there because Glasses asked to. He framed it as scientific interest.

"Show me the setup," he said. Kara laid it out the way Peaches had. A dish, a scrap of something with an unfamiliar smell on it, a good distance to walk. No geese. Kara considered that a mercy for everyone. Glasses set Pip down. Pip went four feet, found the dish, ignored it entirely, and continued past it toward a length of irrigation pipe that had been half buried at the field's edge.

"Pip." She got a hand into the pipe up to the shoulder.

"Pip. Come here." She extracted a bolt from inside the pipe, examined it, and put it in her mouth.

"That's not - Pip, that isn't food."

"She knows it isn't food," Vixen said.

"That's why she's keeping it." Glasses walked over and negotiated for eleven seconds and came back with Pip on his arm and without the bolt.

"The exercise is flawed."

"No it isn't."

"The exercise assumes the distraction is the dish. The dish is not the distraction. Everything within a hundred feet is the distraction." He set Pip down again.

"Watch. Pip." Pip looked at him, more than she had managed the first time, and then went back to the pipe. Kara went next and did marginally better, in that Waggy at least came three steps toward him before deciding the scrap of fur was more urgent. On the fourth attempt Waggy sat down halfway, looked at Kara, looked at the fur, and appeared to weigh it seriously. Kara counted that as progress. Vixen did not.

"That's not progress. That's negotiation."

"He came back."

"He came back eventually." She stepped past them onto the strip.

"Watch this properly, both of you. Vitaly." She walked the whole course. Vitaly went with her, down past the dish, past the fur scrap, out to the far end and back, and Vixen talked her through all of it in short flat words that never once got louder. Stop. Left. Wait. Come. The tiger cub sat at the dish for four seconds on a single word and did not touch it.

At the far marker Vixen sent her out alone, walked back without turning round, and called her in from thirty feet, and Vitaly came at a trot and sat down at her heel.

"Do that again," Glasses said. She did it again. She did the last part a third time with her arms folded and her back turned, purely, as far as Kara could tell, for the effect.

"You're enjoying this," he said.

"You bet I am. Come on, where's the applause? Don't be spoilt sports." Kara and Glasses looked at her with deadpan expressions. Glasses had gone quiet in the way that meant he was constructing something.

"There has to be a mechanism. She isn't obeying you, she's - ""She's decided I'm usually right." Vixen crouched and scratched Vitaly under the jaw.

"That's how it works. She stops when I say stop because every other time she's stopped when I said stop, something good happened afterwards. And she's just got used to it at this point."

"How do we build that?"

"Hmmm, start with small treats when they get it right, every single time, and tell them they've done well while you're giving it. They understand the tone even when they don't understand the words." She straightened up.

"When they get it wrong, no treat, and you tell them off. Not shouting, just make it clear you're not pleased. They'll get the hang of it soon enough."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Just rinse and repeat until you've got it down." Pip chose that moment to come back on her own, unprompted, carrying a second bolt from somewhere.

"Right," Glasses said, looking at Kara.

"Every evening. Half an hour. You and me."

"Agreed," Kara said.

"I'll coach you," Vixen offered, in a voice that made Kara immediately suspicious.

"Free of charge. Conditions apply."

"What conditions?"

"I'll tell you later. You want it or nah?" Glasses looked at Kara. Kara looked at Glasses.

"We'll get back to you," they said, almost together.