Chapter 70: Performance Captains

Joan, Michael, and Tamara stuck close as they made their way through the buffet line and selected a table in the banquet hall. Only volunteers and other tournament officials ate here; contestants ate in the university's student dining facilities. Joan recognized some people she'd worked with in previous years and decided to risk joining them. Tamara and Michael flanked her as they pulled up an extra chair, squeezing nine people around a table designed for eight.

Joan's eyes locked briefly with the devilishly handsome Timeless Treasures Performance Captain Scott, but she quickly turned her smile to his petite, almost frail wife. Scott wore a black polo shirt embroidered with IPC, setting him apart from the volunteers in colorful T-shirts surrounding them. "Hey Michael, hey Joan. Looking forward to having you on the team again."

"Actually, she got a last-minute reassignment, but I'll still be working with you," Michael said.

Scott's wife sighed with relief.

"What?" Scott's hazel eyes caught Joan's again. "Why am I just now hearing of this, and why'd they reassign you instead of Michael? I thought you were a regional performance captain. You should know the performance requirements inside and out."

"I am, but it's a long story." Joan couldn't believe it had only been two months since the regional tournaments and one month since the state tournaments. At the rate things were going, she'd be in labor when the time came to train next year's regional volunteers. Perhaps she should put someone else in charge, assuming Walt would continue to back her up in the first place. If Walt learned more about her situation, he might change his mind. Having learned her lesson at her internship, she'd kept all her relationships except her marriage secret from her fellow volunteers. Two years ago, Sacramento Valley Region needed a new performance captain for Timeless Treasures, and Joan had been in the right place at the right time with the right amount of charisma to take on the responsibility.

Scott smiled. "I like stories."

"How do you not know," Scott's wife hissed, "it's been all over the internet!"

"In case you haven't noticed, I've been busy prepping for the tournament," Scott chided his wife. "Anyway, fill me in!"

For years, she'd been terrified that someone in Imagination of the Mind would find out she was polyamorous, but getting involved with the Kaibas had changed everything. Joan knew that Scott would find out sooner or later, and since Walt Mickley himself had already cleared her for duty, she had little left to fear. In fact, she had to take control of her story now to prevent misunderstandings. Starting from when she married Michael, Joan gave Scott a simplified version of her story, leaving out the most recent developments with supernatural forces.

"So what you're saying is that you're one of those Ethical Slut people?" Scott clarified.

"Pretty much, yeah," Joan agreed. "How did you know about that phrase?"

"Some of my friends have the book sitting around their house, and we got to chatting about it. They said their relationships were 'outside the box' and talked about how they came up with imaginative solutions to their problems kind of like what we do here in Imagination of the Mind."

Some of their tablemates leaned forward with interest, but Scott's wife cleared her throat. "Just because some people are doing something doesn't mean everyone should try it. It rarely works out and just wastes everyone's time."

Joan nodded enthusiastically. "I know what you mean. My parents are doing monogamy, and that works great for them, so I tried it back when I was eighteen because I thought it was my only option, but it didn't work out so well for me. I wish I'd known my options sooner so I didn't waste so much of my former partner's time as well as my own."

Scott's wife stared with her mouth half-open until Scott changed the topic. "Well, enough of that. I heard there's a Chinese team that got penalized for using a giant smoke cloud during their performance. They had no fog machine, no apparent fires or chemical reactions, and they couldn't explain to the judges how they did it. I think it's really sad that happened because the penalty lowered their overall score so much they couldn't come here. Still, if that smoke was caused by something truly dangerous, it's a good thing the officials caught that."

"What if they were using magic?" Joan asked.

Scott laughed, and everyone else echoed his sentiment. The nervous undertones of Michael and Tamara's laughter went unnoticed. As the laughter died down, Scott said, "We're Imagination of the Mind, not Hogwarts. If magic did exist, we would have to penalize teams for using it anyway. It would give the wizards an unfair advantage over the muggles."

Joan nodded. Allowing magic would hinder the program's fundamental goal of encouraging creativity and developing problem-solving skills. However, entertaining kids in the waiting room held no such restrictions. Besides, if anyone questioned her about it, she could blame her abilities on her duel disk implant rather than the ring.

Joan remembered that she needed practice and levitated forks and spoons every so often throughout the meal for her own practice as well as entertainment. Not knowing that Joan caused the levitation, her tablemates took it as a joke or an illusion brought on by a hidden piece of technology. Joan held her silence on the matter, but after several rounds of searching for a mechanism, Scott brought up the possibility of magic again. They all had a good laugh and laid the matter to rest.