Office Hours with the Seminar Prof

The actual office is a bit of a cramped space. As you’ve come to expect from rooms like these, books fill every possible bit of open space, leaving only the barest space for the professor’s own chair and desk, as well as three rickety wooden ones. Just as you predicted, the chairs are occupied by Lisa, Lucille, and Charmaine, who seemed to be avidly engaged in a debate already.

“Look, the ideal of romantic love isn’t even a well defined concept! It is necessarily full of contradictions. How could anything, much less sex, be compatible with it?” Lucille seems to be fired up by this.

“That’s kind of persuasive,” Charmaine says, thinking to herself. “Maybe I will have to switch sides.”

“Hey, Lucille makes a good point, but doesn’t the existence of these contradictions guarantee a degree of compatibility? Obviously, there are going to be elements of this ideal that fit with sex and others that don’t, that’s why this is even a prompt, but the relevant question is then which side is the larger.” Your short speech draws the attention of everyone in the room, and Lisa gives you a curious look. That’s right sis, I can be smart too, you want to say, but you restrain yourself.

“Huh, I do like that way of looking at the question,” the professor says. “I would have asked you to wait outside for our current crew to finish, but how could I kick you out with your fantastic contribution just now? Alas, there are no free seats left in the room. Are you alright standing?”

You look at the books clustered around your feet, and start to shrug, when somebody jumps in.

“Standing doesn’t look very comfortable to me. You could share a seat with one of us,” Lucille offers. Now this is an opening you can work with.

“That’s not a bad idea,” you say, and you walk up to the girls, squeezing in on a chair with…

Lisa +5
Charmaine +5
Lucille +5