[ tsuruno, kaveh thinks, loves alhaitham so. she does. she does so - the way she leans is like an inquisitive bird in hand, absorbing the story with the voracity found only in the young and the vast-of-heart. kaveh smiles. it ends beneath his mask, it comes in the corner of his eyes and the way the line of his body changes with it. ]

Perhaps not you, given that you're older than he had been when I met him. [ kaveh says with a laugh, ] Though you are right about Alhaitham. In fact, when I met him, he had long since decided that interpersonal relationships weren't something he wanted at all. Ah, the arguments we had over it. I had to pull out papers from Vahumana that date back to the two hundredth century because he wouldn't let go of the precise definition of solitude, and he wasn't going to listen to anything I say until I proved him wrong.

I still don't know to this day what made him accept me as a friend, especially after knowing the ins and outs of his temperament. But we did become friends, Tsuruno. We were as well-known for our arguments against each other and the arguments we had together against others. The two of us could talk any conference into a standstill so long as we agreed with one another. We could talk the world into a standstill, or so I believed.

[ kaveh plucks up the cloth. he considers its colour, and then, deciding that it's soaked enough, makes to pull it out of the vat and spread it on a wooden rack. chemicals drip into the pan beneath. ] It didn't last, however. It rarely does. I merely thought it would. Have you ever had to work on an academic project, Tsuruno? In a group?

What would you do, if someone in your group was less talented than the others?