You were not invited to something. You:

Turn up anyway, magnificently, and make it about that.Find out who wrote the guest list, and become useful to them.Say you did not want to go. At length. To several people.Are hurt, in a way you will express as concern for them.

Somebody is better than you at your thing. You:

Study them obsessively until you find the one flaw.Position yourself above them, structurally, where it counts.Get the room onside. That is the actual contest.Keep them close, and gently undermine their confidence.

Pick your grievance:

A specific slight, from years ago, perfectly preserved.That you do all the work and somebody else holds the title.That it was supposed to be you, and everybody knows it.That somebody said no to you, and meant it.

What you would actually offer somebody:

Exactly what they want, on terms they will not read properly.Nothing. You would simply take the thing.Competence, in return for being close to the decision.Total devotion, as long as they stay where you put them.

How do you get your way?

Spectacle. By the time anybody objects, it is done.Money, and an absolute refusal to hear the word no.Comparison. You make them feel small enough to agree.Love, weaponised, and delivered as worry.

Your relationship with rules:

Excellent. You have read them, and they favour you.You enforce them. Somebody has to, in this place.You would like to be the one who writes them.They have never applied to you, and nobody has minded.

The misunderstanding you have stopped correcting:

They think you overreacted. They were not there.They think you cheated them. You told them the terms.They think it is vanity. It is terror.They think you wanted power. You wanted to be taken seriously.

Your worst habit at work:

Sarcasm about people who outrank you, in corridors, at volume.Deciding that you want it, which is then the end of the matter.Turning a disagreement into a popularity contest.Making yourself indispensable to somebody who wanted to leave.

Pick a thing you would genuinely enjoy:

An entrance nobody in the room will forget.Owning the one that nobody else can have.Being the person the powerful one cannot manage without.A crowd agreeing with you, loudly, about something.

How would you eventually be defeated?

By somebody reading the contract properly.By caring, fractionally, about one of them.By being told, truthfully, that it stopped being about you.By the person you kept safe leaving through the door anyway.

Pick an aesthetic:

Black, green, and absolutely enormous.Somewhere warm and low-lit, where deals get made.Whatever you had on. It has been a long week.Extremely expensive, faintly cruel, unmistakably yours.

The line you would want in the story:

"Nobody ever once told them that they were enough.""They were the most competent person in the building.""Everybody loved them, right up until they didn't.""They called it love, and they may even have meant it."