The team assembled, Victor and Dr. Case walked to the front of the room carrying a small stack of papers. The team looked at them with an almost annoyed sense of waiting. Following close behind, the beautiful people also walked to the front of the room and the team seemed truly interested, almost eager to see what happened next. The beautiful people spread smiles around like clowns throwing candy at a big parade. Each member of the team blindly imagined that the smiles were solely theirs to see, as if the beautiful people were sending reassurance that the surprise was soon to come. Even Max seemed to be entranced by the beautiful men who spent only five minutes alone in the room with her but asked her questions, smiled, flirted and showered her with individual attention. In her heart she knew that she shouldn't be feeling anything for them but she couldn't keep her eyes off of them while her mind told her that it was all okay because Victor brought them there in the first place. Surely he was aware of what they were doing, what they were saying, how they were making her feel. Suddenly she felt guilty, as if she had betrayed a trust. She quickly asked Farb to forgive her, to make sure that Victor never found out what she had been feeling.
Farb must have been busy. The whole time she had been thinking about it, she had been staring at the beautiful men. During that time, Victor had left the front of the room and maneuvered himself into the seat directly next to Max. "They are truly beautiful, aren't they Max" Victor's voice spoke softly into her ear. She gasped and looked at him with a mixture of guilt and anger. He simply smiled saying,"Stan is about to go over the lesson, we should all listen to what he has to tell us." Somehow, his relaxed tone and his willingness to include himself as one who was about to learn something, made everything alright. He placed his hand upon her thigh and she reached down to hold it.
"Thank you all very much for your time today," Dr. Case began,"we have a lot of information here to evaluate but I'm not going to bore you all with that right now. What I will tell you is that we were testing you." The team began to look around at one another. Most of them were looking to see how the others were reacting. Were they just as mystified by what was happening or did they know something. A few of them thought they knew something and sat smugly. In fact, the only one who knew anything about what was really going on was Leer, and he was sitting with his eyes glued to Dr. Case. Following his example, the team turned their attention to Stan Case. When he sees that they have stopped looking around, that he now has their full attention he tells them,"You ALL failed!
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