A/N:
This chapter is shorter than the others (mainly because I am busy planning the war and the ending; since they say 'start with the end in mind').
Special thanks to my Beta, Your Fellow Conspirator.
Enjoy! :D
"For the second and last stage of your initiation, you are required to assemble in this room for both sessions," Jeanine said as she gestured to the room. She and the initiates were in. A chair sat in the middle of the white-painted room, which was spacious and broad, like all the other rooms of the Erudite compound. "Today, you will be injected with this serum," she nodded at the vial of clear liquid in her hand, "Which will cause you to enter a simulation where each you will be required are to solve a mystery. Your scores will be based on the time used for the mystery to be solved. The difficulty level is set to easy for today, so you will all experience the same level of difficulty without having to solve the same mystery."
She walked to where Alfred was busily tapping on a screen and spoke a few words to him, he nodded, and they both went to stand before the initiates, who were lined up in rows of two.
"Please, take your seats and we shall begin," a smile was painted on her lips as she tilted her head slightly to one side, glancing at Caleb, she said, "Mr Prior?"
Caleb stood from his chair and made his way to the middle of the room where the lone chair was. Shakily, he sat, while giving a tight smile to the other initiates. Alfred walked to Caleb, serum needle in hand, and asked the 16-year-old to adjust the position of his neck. Injecting the serum into his veins, he left him half-conscious on the chair and went back to the computer to resume his typing.
Sitting on the first row of chairs and between her friends, Tris observed that Jeanine and Alfred both had injected serums into themselves as well. If only those two were able to watch the simulation, did that mean that the initiates had to sit and wait until they were all done? It's time consuming, thought Tris. A look at the other initiates proved that they all reached the same conclusion as Tris.
Jeanine and Alfred sat side by side before the computer, studying Caleb's simulation landscape as the boy in turn scrunched up his nose and furrowed his eyebrows.
A quarter of an hour passed, and Caleb still hadn't solved his mystery.
Tris remained in her seat, fiddling with her fingers as she peered at Jeanine who was at the other side of the room. Her eyelids were closed, so Tris couldn't see those charming gray eyes. Instead, she observed her posture, which Tris almost believed was a peaceful one. Jeanine looked as though she was slumbering… except her body looked a bit too rigid and straight…
Another ten minutes went by, and Caleb finally woke from the simulation. All around Tris, her fellow initiates all looked at him with wide eyes, silently asking him how the simulation worked.
Caleb returned to his seat with the other initiates, while Jeanine and Alfred exchanged a few words before asking for the next initiate to step up.
Tris watched as Ray sat in the chair where her brother had been sitting on for the past half an hour, she continued playing with her fingers when he entered his simulation. Beside Tris, Caleb quietly described his mystery to those who would listen. Roughly another half an hour passed found Ray awake from his simulation, and another initiate sitting in his place.
A few more came and went, and lunch time eventually arrived. The initiates left to head to the canteen block, leaving Jeanine and Alfred being the only ones in the room.
"I have been considering about having another assistant to relieve your work burden. Is there anyone you would recommend?" Jeanine asked as she analyzed the words on the computer screen, not meeting his curious eyes.
"Ms Prior is a good option, considering her IQ score…" he replied.
"Yes, she is, isn't she?" Jeanine smiled slowly.
"The quickest so far is that guy. He solved his mystery in fifteen minutes," said Ray as he nodded at one of the Erudite-born boys. The transfers had just finished their lunch and were making their way back to the room.
In the room, while everybody was taking their seats, Alfred approached Tris to inform her that she will be experiencing the simulation next. So instead of taking her seat with her brother and friends, she sat in the middle of the room and waited for Alfred to inject the serum into her veins.
Which never happened because the moment she settled down, Jeanine came walking towards her with a serum needle in hand. Expressionless, she gently forced Tris's head to another angle, brushing her hair to one side, she inserted the needle and injected the serum into Tris's neck.
Before she could be properly shocked, before her mind processed the fact that her faction leader had just done something very tender to her, the serum clouded her thoughts and she entered the simulation.
A glance around her told her that she was in a hotel lobby. She took in her surroundings – a fat lady was weeping, a man, whom Tris presumed was the fat lady's husband, patted her shoulder while comforting her, a few hotel staff were seen, and last but not least, a screen was floating in mid air, with the following words on it:
"FIND THE MISSING RING."
Those four words was all that was written on the screen. Those four words were also the trigger that clicked in Tris's head, sending her running straight for the crying fat lady.
"I lost my ring," the lady choked between sobs, her three chins wobbled, "My husband gave it to me on our wedding… And now it has been stolen…"
Quickly, Tris recognized the situation from all the fiction she had been privately reading back in Abnegation, she asked the fat lady for some information – most of them which were answered by the husband.
After collecting all the facts that she required, she took the elevator to the floor where the lady and her husband were staying and paced around the corridor, stepping harder on certain steps when all of a sudden, she stopped and turned to glance at a small door she had almost missed.
Opening the door, she found a small broom closet with musty-looking boxes stacked in the corners and several brooms slumped untidily against the walls. Unlike the hotel corridors, the closet wasn't carpeted, which briefly caused Tris's eyes to light up.
Moving all the boxes and brooms to one side, she squatted and started knocking and tapping on the floorboard, testing its hollowness until finally, she paused and bent down closer to examine one of the floorboards. Upon a closer look, she found that the floorboard had a tiny dent near the edges.
After a swift rummage of the boxes, she found a chisel laying in one of them. Using the tool, Tris removed the slightly dented floorboard from its place and, as she had expected, a diamond-studded ring was lying in the hollow space below the floorboards. She picked up the ring and the scene before her gradually dissolved and the simulation ended.
The first thing she saw as her eyes swept opened was Jeanine smirking down at her with a knowing expression. A turn of a head found her other instructor gaping at her with a surprised expression on his face, and, glancing at the other initiates, she saw that they were all staring at her as well, looking utterly shocked and curious.
"Um," she started rather shyly, "Did something happen?"
Alfred, who was standing beside her, gave a quick glance at Jeanine and seeing that their faction leader didn't look as though she was about to explain anything, he spoke. "Do you know what's the average time for this simulation in easy mode?"
She shook her head, but somehow she got a sense of what he was getting at.
"It's twenty minutes. The last time somebody achieved a time less than a quarter of that was years ago," Alfred said, peeking at the 'somebody' he just mentioned, which only gained him a steely, gray glare. "Your time is three minutes and thirty two seconds," he stated.
Tris blinked.
She admitted that she knew this was coming, but what she had not foreseen was that her time would be three and a half minutes, which was almost six times lesser than the average time.
"Okay," she murmured quietly before rejoining her fellow initiates.
Another initiate, looking obviously nervous, went up to the chair in the middle as Caleb whispered to his sister: "Was your mystery easy?"
Tris gave him a look. This was easy mode, wasn't it? "It was alright," she whispered back, ignoring the glances from some of the Erudite-borns.
"Details. We want details," he said, nodding at their friends, "What was your mystery like?"
So that was what Tris did. She spent the next quarter of an hour describing her mystery; the screen, apparently all the mysteries had that to give out instructions, the fat lady and her husband, how she got the information that she needed out of them, the chisel and floorboard... Caleb and the others nodded continuously. Questions such as 'How did you even know?' popped up occasionally, but Tris explained them so that her friends understood, which made her feel like a teacher.
By the time the last of the initiates were done with their simulation, it was evening and close to dinner time. As they left the room, Tris silently hoped that Jeanine would ask her to stay behind, even if it was just for a second. It would feel like eternity to her nonetheless.
She had been awfully fine with her crush on her faction leader that day. Awfully and dangerously fine. She was sure she shouldn't feel that way, but crushes tend to end quickly. It was like that for everybody, and no matter how high her IQ score was, no matter how intelligent people thought she was, she was still human and crushes always go away.
So why not enjoy a bit of a fall?
Tris never had a boyfriend before; and in this case, she has never had a girlfriend either. The last time she had a crush was years and years ago, when she was in school and a boy in class was cute and charming. And also Erudite.
Was she sapiosexual? Would she forever be falling for people with great minds? She doubted that. Forever was an interesting concept, butnothing, absolutely nothing was forever, so that concept was never accepted by Tris. It was illogical, simple as that.
Tris never liked illogical things. Love was illogical, but Jeanine wasn't.
The fool has to wake up one day
The fool woke up today
A/N:
Here are some questions I would like you to answer (if you are going to review, anyway):
#1 Any songs that fit your Trinine headcanon?
#2 Are the characters OOC?
#3 Which OC initiate do you favor the most?
#4 Any type of cute moments that you want to see in this fic?
#5 Do you want a detailed war? (I am very, very bad at action stuff; I'm sure I would only ruin the fic if I wrote the war with all the details.)
The last two italic lines weren't from song lyrics (unlike the other chapters). I quoted it from a friend, so credits to him.
As always, thank you for reading! :D