Chapter Twenty Nine
Working Wonderland
In the morning, Jenna met with all of the candidates in the dining room of the Dahlia Palace.
She stood up, in her finery and began her farewell address. “First, I’d like to thank you all for coming and being a part of this selection process. I truly enjoyed the opportunity to meet you all. Now, I know you’re all very interested in hearing who has been selected to be crowned, and I must begin by informing you that none of you passed the selection process with a high enough score to be crowned today.”
There were several shocked sounds from the seven candidates. A few of them were too hungover to be very polite that early in the morning.
“However, Binarian Whistle has been selected as a second-tier candidate. She will be invited back at a future date for another round of interviews.”
“This whole thing has been massively unfair,” Ian Cimphis declared. He was one of the men Jenna had Vash escort to his room early the night before.
“Has it been?” Jenna asked civilly.
“You didn’t interview us or even speak to us beyond those two dinners. Who was here to decide whether or not we should be crowned?”
“I reviewed your test scores. I spoke to your Octavian tutors from yesterday’s workshops. What more would you have liked?”
“I would have liked,” he said, standing up straighter than Jenna thought possible considering how much he’d had to drink the night before. “To have talked to you personally about the direction the OA Alliance should take.”
Jenna understood immediately. It was well known that her marriage to Armen had ended. His plan was to charm her. He had no idea how difficult it was to compliment her, seduce her, or win her over.
Jenna lowered her eyes. “It’s important to see multiple angles of any situation. You see, all of you were being filmed the entire time you have been here. Transcripts were made of everything you said. Your alcohol tabs were scored. We need diplomats that can keep their heads on straight, moderate in their words, behavior, and overall conduct. We need our representatives to be of the highest quality. You, Mr. Cimphis, complained as soon as you arrived that my dress was too expensive and that the money ought to have been spent on your comfort.”
Sardius played the clip of his words over the loudspeaker.
His face turned red as he dropped back to his seat.
“Mr. Cimphis, you should know that you personally consumed three times the cost of my dress in alcohol in the three days you were here.” Jenna raised her voice. “There will be no talk of the fairness or unfairness of this selection process. If there is a word spoken about it, tapes shall be leaked, audio recordings shared, and test results publicized. You will leave here with a paragraph that has been written for you and no matter what reporter asks you a question, you shall answer with that paragraph or the words no comment. I hope all of you understand that this was never a joke or a vacation. You were each posed a very serious question about your worthiness to represent the Adamis in these talks. If you have an interest in taking part, I recommend improving yourselves. We will surely keep tabs on you as we have six more slots to fill.”
“Don’t you mean seven?” someone asked.
“No. Six. I crowned Dr. Excelyn Factic the day before yesterday. She’s here to bid you farewell.”
Excelyn entered and Jenna thanked her lucky stars that Misha had put a wig on her head before she came in.
Binarian, the little girl candidate Jenna almost approved of, stood up and clapped for Excelyn, giving her a few more points in Jenna’s book. The others followed her lead, but the overall sound of the applause was quite lacking.
These people were so stiff and selfish, they couldn’t be happy for anyone.
Half an hour later, Jenna and Excelyn watched the disappointed candidates board their pods.
“Don’t you feel a little sorry for them?” Excelyn asked.
“No. I’m getting six more candidates from the AAMC in three days. They’re bound to be army meatheads, and I’m not sure how to sift through them.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“It’ll be weird for them,” Excelyn pointed out. “Not many of them have had much to do with Octavians close up.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that Adamis and Octavians don’t share the same living space,” Excelyn went on to explain. “Adamis are on the land and Octavians are under the water, even if they share a planet. It’s the same on space crafts. The Octavians are in the pilot’s cabin and the Adamis are passed out in the pods. Unless the Adamis work in healthcare, they never see them. It’s really hard to breed sympathy between two groups of people who never see each other.”
“Underwater tour?” Jenna suggested.
“Have you had a chance to do that since you got here?” Excelyn asked with one eyebrow up.
“Not exactly. I’ve been too busy,” Jenna admitted.
Excelyn smiled. “You must have been raised from birth for this job. I’d like to help you with the meatheads, but I’ll be too busy myself. I have to interview nurses and get a personal assistant. Sardius has given me a list of recently fired nurses.”
“Yeah, he can’t find people with good reputations.”
“And neither will you.”
“Can I just find someone who isn’t a cheap drunk?”
Excelyn slapped Jenna on the back. “Get Sardius to make up a job posting advertising for exactly that. The most expensive drunk in the universe.”
“Done,” Sardius said.
“What? You’ve already done it?”
“Well, yeah. It was a good idea. We could get an interesting wild card that way.”
Jenna rolled her eyes and decided to let it slide. “Can you keep your palace docked to mine for the next three days, Excelyn? I’d like to have a meeting with you each day to discuss your progress.”
“We’ll do yoga together in the morning,” Excelyn suggested. “I have the best courtyard for it. But wait. You want me elsewhere when your meatheads get here?”
“I have to choose someone from the AAMC ranks, but you’re unlikely to get along with them. You represent one faction and they represent another. We need both of you to vote.”
“I see. It would be easier if you selected people who all had a similar view on how things ought to be handled. Bringing in a person with fundamentally opposing views will…”
“Make all of us more credible,” Jenna finished for her. "Not to mention that it will open up the army’s resources for us and win us support from powerful sectors. I may even decide to crown two.”
Excelyn’s face fell. “Yeah, exactly like you were raised to do this.”
Jenna knew Excelyn was disappointed because she wanted to push her own ideas all the way down the pipe, but the Octavians had their own council and group of diplomats to represent them. Jenna didn’t even want to guess how Excelyn would react when she crowned a doctor from one of the conventional hospitals. She had already got Sardius to start screening them.
***
That night when Jenna was getting ready for bed, Sardius asked her in a smooth dreamy tone, “Would you like to try sleeping somewhere different tonight?”
“Hmm? Like where?” Jenna wondered, confused. “Underwater?”
“I’m sure at some point you’ll have to do that, both in and out of a wetsuit, but for now, I want you to try this therapy bed I’ve been programming for you.”
A side of the wall clicked open.
Jenna gasped. “What’s that? I have a secret door in my room?”
Sardius cleared his throat. “There are three secret passages in the Dahlia Palace. This is the first one.”
“Where are the other two?”
“They’re not overly exciting. One is meant as an escape route from the great hall to the servants’ quarters and the other one is meant as a bomb shelter.”
Jenna approached the hidden door in the wall and saw that it was a pocket door and slid into the wall. Inside was a thing that looked very much like a canopy bed except that you weren’t raised up on a mattress, but dropped down onto a mattress.
“Why is this a therapy bed?” Jenna questioned.
“Get inside and I’ll show you,” Sardius instructed, his voice low like they were in a spa or a library.
Jenna obeyed.
The mattress was so soft, Jenna got sucked into it. Once she was lying down, the mattress firmed up and seemed to hug her body. She tried to move around, but the bed defied her movements, keeping her somewhat still.
“It’s a therapy bed because it is completely soundproof,” Sardius explained as he raised glass walls from inside the bed that attached themselves to the top of the canopy. “The bed is meant to hug you, but you can ask it to let you move around if that’s more comfortable for you, but after you haven’t moved for a few minutes, it will revert back to hug mode and continue to hug you.”
“I like this,” she said, snuggling in deeper.
“I’m seeing if I can program it to make a version of me to lie next to you. I’ll try sending the mattress my measurements. That way I can give you a hug.”
“Really? How would that work?”
Sardius explained. “It would be a back hug with my hands around your waist, or I could program it so you’re lying between my legs. Anything more complicated than those two commands would be more challenging to the physical interface.”
Jenna waited, but nothing happened.
“Sorry. Why don’t you try to go to sleep while I keep working on it?”
“I need a blanket. I can’t sleep with nothing covering me.”
Sardius lowered the glass for her and she scooped up a throw blanket from the back of a chair.
“You should leave that blanket in here all the time,” Sardius advised. “There are stacks of blankets in the closet down the hall.”
She got back in and snuggled in with the fur-lined blanket. Surprisingly comfortable, she fell asleep before he’d worked out how to give her a hug.