Warrior Princess; Her Quest to the throne

The multiple-choice question paper was scheduled to be held this morning and Mriga went inside the big auditorium along with the other participants half hour before the scheduled time. It was a one-hour long exam and would contain forty questions and each question would have three choices to select from.     

Abhirath was pacing inside the small reception area of the Admin building. Neither Prithvi nor Saraswati were at their designated places and as a result, the interns had a free run to the place.     

"Can you stop pacing the floor. Your movement is making me dizzy," Vandit complained.     

"Looking at him, it feels as if he is the one appearing for the QIT competition," teased Nirbhay and bumped his fist with Vandit.     

Vandit guffawed and replied, "Well, you are not completely off the mark. His pain or gain is linked to that of his 'almost girlfriend', right."     

Yash hadn't accompanied these boys to the Admin building. He had mentioned that he was going for some urgent work.     

"I have a way to relieve all of you from your boredom and nervousness," Chiranjeev suddenly spoke up.     

Abhirath paused in his steps and looked at him. All this while, Chiranjeev had been in Prithvi's room and stepped out just now. In his hand, he held few large parchments and Abhirath realized his intention.     

But Vandit was slow to grasp it and asked Chiranjev to share his idea.     

"As your maps' training has suffered recently due to your helping Mriga in her tasks, I want to use this idle time to check your current knowledge. Please take a parchment each and start detailing your respective portions which you have been learning," he said with a poker face.     

Nirbhay stood up in protest and said, "Uh… actually, we are too nervous right now on Mriga's behalf and won't be able to do justice to the task."     

Chiranjeev shook his head and replied with an innocent expression, "I am aware of your 'concern' for Mriga and hence this is the perfect antidote for your anxiousness. Take a sheet and start. You have forty-five minutes. That is more than enough time to finish this and reach the auditorium to wait for Mriga before she finishes her test and comes out."     

Inside the examination hall     

Mriga had been extremely nervous since the time that she woke up and till she didn't receive the question paper. Once she saw the thick sheaf of parchment though, a slow smile lit up her face. Her fear of lack preparation vanished.     

Unlike questions lifted straight from the text books, the question format on the scroll in front of her were all in passage forms. A situation had been presented and the participants were asked to choose a solution from the options as to what would be the correct measure to be taken under the circumstances. There were questions linked to famine, war, change in policies etc. but the good part was that the data was given and all they had to do was make sense of it rather than rely on their rote learning skills.     

Mriga soon realised that the question paper was not as simple as it had seemed at the first glance. After surveying a few questions back and forth, she went back to the instruction sheet to read the fine print again.     

Ah! There it was. Below the main set of instructions regarding their names, badge numbers and other directions, a line was written in small font which said –     

Contestant should tick the right answers, however many they may be.     

"So, a question could have multiple right answers but not all questions had multiple answers. Ahhh, I knew it. How could a paper set by Prithvi guruji be so simple?" Mriga muttered under her breath and went back to re-examine her already attempted questions.     

Thankfully, she had encountered such a question early on where she could see more than one answer, making her go back to the beginning of the paper. With an eye on the clock, she chewed one end of her quill to dispel her nervous energy, while pondering over the options given.     

In many questions, it felt as if all the given options were the right ones at the first glance. The paper was making the contestants do critical thinking instead of simply matching what they knew in their head to what was in front of them.     

Stage two was a tricky phase because the number of girls qualifying for the next round would straight reduce to ten from forty-five, making the elimination percentage much higher than before.     

Few places away from Mriga, Vindhya was fuming silently as she attempted her twentieth question. She had been taken aback when she first saw the paper format. These MCQs weren't like their predecessors. She would know, since her parents had spent a lot of money in finding the person who had designed this test twenty two years ago. Vindhya had taken training under that woman who had been the part of the previous queen's rule and was retired now.     

Rani Samyukta had tried to play smart yet again. What was her problem? Why could she not stick to the format which had been successfully prevalent in the past? She herself was a product of such a selection process. By changing it so much, was she trying to prove that the previous system had been flawed and she was a wrong choice?     

Vindhya ended up wasting a lot of energy early on during the exam, fuming over this thought.     

Post that, she became so busy trying to adapt to the changed format that she missed reading the fine print till a small crumpled leaf landed next to her foot. Vindhya didn't dare look up to see who had thrown it was but pulled it closer to her after noticing that the invigilator had gone past her.