The blue-pen-lab-coat guy was Ethan, he was a theorist who was being paired with a researcher by the end of the week. He felt that he worked best alone but knew that he wasn’t good enough to join the theorist-only company. Ethan didn’t want to be alone as he was fairly social outside of theorist work, but inside he was a different person that couldn’t stand people making dumb mistakes. Theorists were known to be like that especially with each other, but with researchers sometimes they decided it’s better to accept mistakes as long as they didn’t reoccur. Ethan was unable to do that. Back in school researchers were forced to work with him, until there was no one left. After being in the T&R building for a year figuring out what he wanted to research, he was hopeful that the paring system would find him a good match. But he was afraid for various reasons that he might be paired poorly because they stick the people left over together. 

Ethan thought his fears were coming true after seeing how the researchers were doing after they left Monday and Tuesday. It seemed like no one was working on his experiment, if anything these researchers seemed particularly dumb by working on the experiments in order, sprinkling in some experiments that they thought were more up their alley. There was one researcher’s notebook he noticed that was doing things differently. He thought that the owner was a girl because her handwriting was girly. He looked at her notebook closely after noticing that experiments were out of order from the original’s notebook. When he realized she was doing the experiments that required bacteria or fungal cells he was hopeful she was working on his experiment. But he noticed it was still untouched and behind six other experiments, this made him upset. Not only were many of the researchers mediocre, the only one that was interesting was a girl (who he knew wouldn’t like how uptight he is) and she wasn’t even working on his experiment. The researchers didn’t know, but the theorists knew that the researchers had to complete or attempt to complete their experiments for their pairing to occur. 

On Wednesday when the theorists were going to be meeting the researchers for the first time, Ethan wanted to meet the interesting female researcher and hopefully get her to work on his experiment. Ethan had it in his mind that this was his only chance to get the best-suited researcher, even if they were a girl. When the theorists were finally able to put a face to the researchers’ binders, he was surprised to find a small girl working at the lab bench that he was looking to visit. He gave her time to get settled and when he found a good time to approach her, he did. Ethan wanted to ask about his experiment but couldn’t tell her which one was his. He tried getting her to talk about how she organized her notebook, but everything that came out of his mouth sounded rude and condescending, which had forced the female researcher to be defensive with her responses. Eventually, when he mentioned his experiment, he had lost all hope about getting her to work on it. But then he heard those beautiful hope-inducing words, “I’m working on it right now.” He left her to keep working on his experiment and instead returned to a seat at the front of the room to stay out of the researchers’ ways.