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Way back before Covid, I went to a really good team-building.

We were all volunteer teachers at an orientation event for the Refugee Project, preparing to go to refugee camps around Sofia and teach English, Bulgarian, and homework prep for children. The organizers and speakers were Bulgarian, but most of the volunteers were foreigners. I loved them all, because, like I said, the team-building exercises were so good.

I remember walking around a group holding a card covered with little symbols: dog, car, watering can, etc. We were supposed to use the symbols to help us remember something we had in common with other volunteers. You don't like dogs? Me neither! You take the bus? So do I! Watering can…uh…I took a class on plant physiology and you…are studying human physiology at Sofia Medical University. Bam! We have so much in common.

I had to back to my partner and ignore her while she described a good sandwich. I wasn't allowed say "yes?" or "oh wow!" or in any way acknowledge that sandwich description, and it was almost physically painful to hear how hard she had to push to get the words out while I pretended to ignore her. When the two minutes were up, I whirled around, babbling about what a great sandwich that must have been, and how I was so sorry for not responding. Once we'd all had our turn to ignore and be ignored, we felt as if we'd all been terribly rude to each other. Now we needed to be extra nice to make up for it.

We broke up into randomly-assigned groups and were told to discuss such topics as the rights of religious minorities. You'd think that a bunch of people who'd volunteered to help Syrian refugees would find nothing to disagree about, but no. This one guy in my group was (I think) Indian Muslim, and he said that the only way to guarantee the rights of a religious minority was for them to carve out an independent state. I disagreed with him, citing Balkan history as an example. This was all somewhat disjointed because this guy spoke better Bulgarian than me, but not English, while the other members of our group didn't speak Bulgarian at all. It's the sort of conversation you can imagine starting a family feud over a Thanksgiving table. And yet we all saw each other's points. We continued to disagree, but that didn't matter. We'd been team-built.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

We were doing something important together, yes, but we'd also connected on a more basic level. We had things in common. We owed each other social credit. We ate together. We experienced the right series of cues and our animal instincts flipped from "stranger" to "friend."

So then I think: what if team-building didn't work? What if you knew which human instincts to target, but you weren't dealing with a human? How much could you have in common with a giant rotifer? What would a colony of salps care if you ignored them?1 And how would an intelligent sea-slug respond to a political disagreement? How could you even know if you'd pissed it off? How could you work with these beings?

That was seven years ago, and now you're reading Fellow Tetrapod (I hope). This is my next big experiment. Is it possible to take a rough draft of a novel and polish it up fast enough to post a new one-to-two-thousand-word chunk every weekday? Will reader reactions steer the manuscript in interesting directions? Should my speculative-evolution team-building story resemble a Korean office drama quite this much? So far, the answers are all "yes."

1 They can keep each other company.