I wished that I shared his confidence. My tummy felt funny and there was a fluttering feeling in my chest.
“Where are you going?” Reiner asked when I got up from my seat.
“The toilet…” I replied before walking away.
I just need to be alone before I get a panic attack. Unfortunately, there was around an hour before the meeting would start. I had to gather myself before then while not driving myself crazy.
“I’m going to do a last run through,” I announced determinedly when I returned from my trip to the toilet.
“Good luck…” Reiner replied before smiling encouragingly at me.
…
This is exactly why I never agreed to any of Zak’s crazy ideas of putting me on any of his shows or starring me in even the smallest roles in any of his movies. I stood in front of the projector screen with my face turned towards my only audience while I tried my best to keep my legs from shaking visibly. King was the only one who attended the meeting as our honorable audience and that was exactly why I couldn’t understand why the meeting room was so big.
Basically, the secretary who was responsible for scheduling this meeting had selected an auditorium for our presentation. King sat in the chair at the center of the first row as he glanced up at the large projector screen. The expression on his face was as unreadable as ever. If I had to describe it, then I would say that he simply looked disinterested.
How Edward or Lucien managed to pull off presentation in halls packed with people while it was broadcasted on live television, I had no clue. Reiner stood by my side but because we were supposed to be in work-mode, he couldn’t really give my hand a squeeze of encouragement.
“Start,” King said coldly.
Here goes…
Reiner started off by recapping the objectives of our project and giving a brief summary of the problem that we had been working to address. His part of the presentation wasn’t short, but it ended too soon and now it was my turn. Just as we had agreed, I would present the methodology of how we arrived at our proposed solution as well as give some more details about the proposal.
So far, King had not said anything, although I could tell that he was listening attentively to what Reiner had been saying. Now that it was my turn, his cold blue eyes shifted from his son to rest on me. At that moment, I fully understood what it meant to feel so scared that you thought you were going to pee your pants. The greatest blessing was that I didn’t pee myself on the spot.
It’s ok, Natalia. You rehearsed this so many times that you can even recite it in your sleep!
“After going through agent profile data and their past records, we interviewed many agents to get their views on teamwork and team-based training in preparations for team-based missions. We found out that many agents still operate based on a solo-operating mindset and did not go through or appreciate the value of team-based trainings. When we evaluated the training programs that are currently being offered by the company, we found out that very few courses are available for team-based training and none of them focused on building cooperation between team members or how to create synergy between the strength of the different key members…” I said as I tried to calm myself down.
King listened and the more that I said, the more comfortable that I started to feel. I never reached the point where I was fully comfortable but halfway through my part of the presentation, I felt like I could do this. My attention focused more on getting the important messages across to my audience rather than my own nervousness and my shaky nerves.
“We worked alongside various experts to co-develop training curriculum to stress on team-based training as well as counselling for agents to improve their acceptance of working as a team. If you approve of this project, we expect the success rate of missions to improve significantly which will improve the overall survival rate of agents across the company given that a significant portion of missions are now team-based missions unlike the trend before where most missions were solo missions,” I said before my part of the presentation came to a close.
I sucked in a breath and breathed out slowly as I dared look at King again to judge his reaction. Reiner made some wrap up comments and asked his father for his opinion. Honestly, I thought the presentation turned out better than I could have ever dreamt of. Nothing happened during the presentation that could tarnished the quality of our presentation so now it was up to what he thought about the quality of our work.
King didn’t stop us to ask any questions during our presentation and now that the presentation was over, he still didn’t say anything. That alone made me so much more nervous compared to when I was presenting to him. The silence in the auditorium was so unnerving and my nervousness returned in full stream.
“The presentation was not bad. The ideas presented made sense…” King commented passively.
Since I didn’t expect any sort of praise from him, having him say that it was ‘not bad’ was already quite satisfying for me. He could have shouted at us and scrapped our project right away, so compared to that alternative, this was already a great outcome.
“If we have your approval, we will proceed to the next step of more detailed design and then piloting before full-scale implementation,” Reiner said politely.
“How much of this was your work and how much of it was Natalia’s work?” King asked as he turned his attention to Reiner.
His question surprised me. We pretty much worked on the project together although we split our work up here and there but I had not expected King to ask about this. I glanced over at Reiner as I waited to see how he was going to reply to his father.
–To be continued…