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Jean knew what it meant to work. Labor, toil, endurance - all those concepts were familiar.
After Jean finished her education, she was given the opportunity to study in Rome. According to the assignment, she would spend her days thinking of how to discover new objects, new ways of creating objects, new ways of distributing objects,173Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3qKXJAmBEZ
new ways of convincing people to start using these objects. New, everything had to be new.
Assuming she would spend her days mostly confined to a room, Jean agreed to the move. Once she arrived in Rome, Jean was horrified. She would have to interact with others a great deal.
For the most part, Jean had always worked by herself. She preferred that. Her superiors had noticed her performance was better when she worked alone. It made sense to keep it that way.
Yet, Jean - and everyone else in her work group - generated idea after idea. They strategized how these ideas could be put into practice universally, and also how specifically to various countries.
When she and her teammates walked around Rome for inspiration, at times the world broke in. On one occasion, they were examining the colors of fruit in a marketplace, an unusually tall woman slapped a young man so hard he fell to the ground. None of them said or did anything. After a while, one of the team members mentioned colors again, and then they all began to talk once more.
The team members ate their meals together. After supper, they typically all went home to read. Outside of work none of them talked to each other. Jean barely even talked to her one friend, while he could talk until her eyelids became heavy. Her friend Stone liked to talk.
One day Jean and all her fellow team members were assigned assistants. Jean had even been given an extra woman. Soon everyone realized these assistants were in fact their slaves. Though they might have initially been conflicted, nearly all of them started having relations with their slaves.
A month later, the team munched on tobacco leaves while strolling through the marketplace of Rome. Then a blonde woman came near them, flailing about, with a leash tightening around her neck. The person holding the leash was the unusually tall woman they had all seen before. A teammate nudged Jean's shoulder as if to say "look," but it didn't seem out of the ordinary.
Then Jean's eyes opened. Starting from a Chinese concept, Jean had designed that leash. The leash trained an animal to not struggle, because the more it did, the tighter the noose became.
Jean meant to scream, but instead started to choke. As she gasped, and collapsed to the ground, she welcomed death. People formed a circle around her. A guard came over and punched her in the stomach. The blockage was freed, and Jean vomited all over the tall woman's feet and gold-emblazoned sandals. Jean would have to pay a high price for what she did.
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