Welcome to the second round

At this point, they were called for the second round. Again the four of them followed the crowd through a new corridor and into a new room. This room was different from the last one. It was bigger and was Yu Chen's paradise.

Yu Chen stopped suddenly as she entered the room. Half of it was filled with chairs put in rows, and the other half...It was set up with top notch computers. So many computers. The computers were separated by glass partitions and were set in clean rows. Each one had two chairs behind it. Yu Chen stood at the door and started mumbling, "Oh hell no. So many Huawei MateBook 13s. With an 8th generation processor, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB Storage, Windows 10 OS and...."

Yu Chen's voice trailed off as people started pushing past her. She looked around and realised that she and Zenghai were standing in the doorway staring at the computers. Xi Hua suddenly appeared before and started pulling both of them by their hands. "Oh come on, you two. Don't just stop suddenly."

Saying this she led them to where Kio was standing in a corner.

After all the people were in the hall, Mr. Zhen stood up from. somewhere behind the computers. Mo Kio, being the tallest of them all, peeped and told that all the judges were sitting there.

Mr. Zhen cleared his throat, "The second round will now commence. Each computer has the name of a team on it. Find your particular computers and sit down. The other team members may sit down on the chairs on this side of the room. Yu Chen and Mo Kio went to a notice board and found their team's name at the very top of the list, very much unlike the last time. And their computer was, No.1.

Yu Chen: "Oh, I would have liked better to have a computer in the back."

Mo Kio: "Let's go. It's probably in the first row."

They both went past rows of computers towards the first row. In the first row, after they found their computer, Yu Chen felt like slapping her forehead. It was the corner most computer towards the middle of the hall. On their left, all the other members who were not participating in this round were sitting cheering their teams. On the right, they had the team, 'The first everywhere'. As they sat down, the tall boy looked at them and nodded his head in greeting. The other boy, whose name was Zach, maybe, Chen thought, smiled at them and stood up to shake their hands.

And that was not the worst. In front of them, all the judges sat. There were five of them. Mr. Zhen, Lu Jim, a lady with a bob haircut, and old man and another young man who looked foreign and had short blond hair. Yu Chen looked at him and thought, "That's wierd. I've never seen him before, but I feel like his face matches someone I have seen recently."

But her chain of thoughts was broken as Lu Jim stood up, "Hey everyone. Welcome to the second round of the '99 open software competition'."