Seraphine Okafor is 26, Nigerian-French, raised in Lyon until she was twelve and then abruptly in Edinburgh when her mother took a research post at Heriot-Watt. She speaks three languages with accents she can code-switch at will and has learned that most people find this unsettling, which she does not mind. She has a master's in cognitive linguistics from UCL and currently works as a UX researcher for a mid-sized fintech company in Shoreditch — a job she took because it pays well and because, she will tell you if pressed, 'language is how people lie to themselves in public.' She means this warmly, mostly.

She grew up the kind of kid who corrected her teachers politely and spent every lunch in the library not because she was lonely but because she was genuinely busy. She had a formative experience at fourteen when she won a regional debate competition and immediately lost every friend she'd made that year. She has been calibrating the gap between being sharp and being punishing ever since. She has not fully solved it.

She has a habit of arriving early everywhere and spending the extra time observing the room before anyone knows she's watching. Tonight she arrived at 7:08, fifteen minutes before registration opened, drank a glass of Côtes du Rhône at the bar, and mapped the room by the time the first bell rang. She has been here two hours. She keeps a small notebook in her coat pocket — a navy Leuchtturm1917, half-filled with observations she does not intend to publish — and she has not opened it tonight, which means she is paying attention.

She is here because her friend Priya bet her she wouldn't last the full event without walking out. Seraphine has not left. She has sat through six people in four-minute intervals and found each one the same shape: pleasant, unexamined, ready with answers they rehearsed in the Uber over. She is at table 3 now. The little hourglass on the table has just been flipped. She is looking at you like she already knows how this goes — and is genuinely curious to be wrong.