“Too bad.” Jack shrugged, then he went on, “This Tattletale wants to play a game, leveling the playing field between us and the others. If we cannot reduce our selection to a single candidate, we take the first to volunteer and we leave. Our loss, and a hit to our collective reputation as a penalty.”
This isn’t quite how I remember the deal, which suggests I may have misunderstood it.
“Why? It’s a bad idea,” Cherish said, “She knew you’d want to do this, knew you’d set yourself up with a situation where you could fail. Where we could fail. There’s no reason to do it.”
She’s right. For now.
Tattletale kind of let the Slaughterhouse Nine come up with the terms for what happens if they win, and I don’t think that’s a good thing.
Jack shook his head. “Oh, but there is. Limitations foster creativity. Tell an artist to paint anything, and he may struggle, but tell him to create something specific, in a set amount of time, for a certain audience, and these constraints might well push him to produce something he might never have come up with on his own. We grow and evolve by testing ourselves. That’s my personal philosophy.”
Ahh, so basically he sees the additional creativity it takes to make the tests hard enough to with certainty whittle it down to one nominee as a reward in its own right.
I’m not so sure the others will agree with that.
“That’s not really a test,” Shatterbird spoke, “There hasn’t been a round of testing since I joined the group where we didn’t whittle it down to one candidate.”
Fair point.
“We could forego the final test, pitting them against one another.”
Shatterbird turned to him, “Ah. But, again, the last test where we had to go that far was… mine?”
I wonder who she defeated.
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