2019-11-08 - You Never Know Unless You Ask

Sparrow wanders in on a cool, clear Friday afternoon. Without her neon red hair tucked under a cheap black wig, she might not be all that recognizable from the comic shop costume party, but either way, she doesn't look all that out of place here. With a backpack over her shoulders, she wears a black hoodie with vertical stripes painting a rainbow down the front paired with intentionally torn jeans and comfortable sneakers with sparkly green laces. Though she glances this way and that to take the shop in, it doesn't seem like she's here to browse, instead headed right for the counter.

Abitha leans on her elbow against the back counter, a tablet on, glowing, and lain before her. She lazily swipes through EBay listings, occasionally poking at one, considering, then backing up and browsing again. All that can really be seen of her from behind the display was a v-necked tshirt, a small blue fairy depicted alongside an angrily scrawled 'LISTEN'. Her hair was in a loose bun, little trails framing one side of her face. She glances up briefly as Sparrow enters, offering a, "Hello..." in as sing-songy a tone as Abitha's generally flat voice can manage. She doesn't seem all that observing of the other woman until she notices the approach of the counter, hands sliding to the edges of the case and levering herself up straight, her eyes slowly following after reading the last heading of the broken game systems displayed on her pad. No recognition of Sparrow showed, but she had been mostly a wallflower at the event anyhow. "Need somethin?" She asks in her best disinterested NPC voice.

There's an ease to the wide smile with which Sparrow greets Abitha that suggests it's entirely natural, that she does this cheerful thing so often that she doesn't even need to try anymore. That good humor skews left, following the arch of the same eyebrow up toward her too-red bangs as she ventures, "A job?" like someone who knows damned well there's no Help Wanted sign in the window and just doesn't care. "You're top of my list. Then the comic shop. Then the strip club." Her well-lined eyes go wide enough to look a little haunted as she adds, "Then food service after that." Brows begin to knit together as she contemplates even worse fates. "Or a real internship." Ugh. With a scrunch of her nose, those emotions are dispelled, and she quips off-hand, "But that probably wouldn't pay, and I'm hoping you might. Hi. Sparrow Jones." She waves instead of thrusting her hand out in offering. It seems the less imposing option.

Abitha doesn't blink. For a long moment. She stares at Sparrow, and it was like watching an idea bloom in real time with the growing white of her eyes as they begin to widen. Green irises start to track off aside into a thousand-mile stare, flicking horizontally occasionally as the math begins to play across her psyche. Three painfully awkward seconds later, she snaps her gaze back to Sparrow, eyes still a little wide, but appearing sharper now, glancing over the woman, noting specific things about her, microexpressions tugging her brows and eyelids as she notes the fun but intense hair, the colorful sweatshirt, the cheery personality. Things things -could- work, and... Well bein theforst choice when you werent even AWARE you shoukd hire someone was a good thing... Right? Her words come out a little slowly as the mental calculations are seemingly forced backward into her psyche and she has to activate those horribly rusty social algorithms. "Yyyeah, uhh, I'm, Mac. Hi. I... Suppose yeah I might have a job... You like... games?" She actually winces as she realizes how dumb and silly that sounds, given how much Sparrow had given her already.

Awkward? Where? Sparrow seems oblivious to it. Mostly. Nevermind the sideways ticking of her gaze as she adjusts her own calculations, trying to predict flowchart pathing. When Abitha's attention returns to her, brows go up in unison as her smile widens. "I mean. As much as I like stripping," she bullshits effortlessly, almost certainly joking. Probably. "But I figure the earlier hours and the absence of glitter--" Her eyes narrow, and she corrects, "The probable absence of glitter?" She doesn't know what Mac gets up to in here. She's not gonna judge. "Might suit me better." Eyes blinking with wholly feigned innocence, she turns the question back on the shop owner. "Do you like games?"

The pure cheek of the response gets a snort from Abitha, her expression finally softening, eyes finally falling half-lidded in amusement. "As much as I like drinking." As if demonstrating, and without looking, her hand moves off the counter. The pop-hum sound of a fridge opening can be heard and the clink of bottles as she leans just slightly. She pops one, goes to hand it, but pauses a moment, "You're not buying anything from me." She states flatly before setting it on the counter. It's labeled Whitewood Red hat. She opens her own and takes a sip. "Are you seriously using the 'Ask your interviewer' strategy? Fuck. What's your favorite Smash character?" Clearly, she had different ideas of how she would be someone's boss.

Now might be the right time to clarify that she might not have been entirely sincere about that whole stripping thing, but Sparrow makes no effort to do so as she steps that little bit closer to snag the offered bottle with a nod. "Right. I am asking you for money." Sure, she got the message--no alcohol being sold here, no sir--but no reason she can't restate her pitch. And drink to it, bottle lifted and tilted toward Abitha before she sips. "I mean," comes with a thoughtful tilt of her head. It might be the beginning of an answer to the first potentially rhetorical inquiry, but no, it leads into, "Samus." And then a pause for reconsideration. And, in the end, confirmation. A nod. "Samus. Not just because she's fun as--" Curb your swearing, Sparrow. This might be a job interview. "--heck?" That was awkward. "But because I get this song stuck in my head every time I'm playing her. They ain't got nothing on me. Ridley, Kraid, Mother Brain can't come for my seat." She clears her throat, smiles, takes another sip. "Mario Kart?"

Mario kart? Dare she? Abitha eyes Sparrow appraisingly, eyes flicking to her screen briefly, then out the front door. "I mean, happy-fun-time Mushroom Circuit or you trying to get blasted off Rainbow Road?" Abitha taps the bottle to her jaw thoughtfully. Then, strangely, her hand is lifted to her eye, pushing against it lightly, like trying to clear her vision, but not trying to mess the bare minimum eye makeup she'd applied to look like she wasn't dead. She blinks, then looks at Sparrow again. Something was weirder about this red haired woman than anyone she'd encountered thus far. She wasn't sure why. But she was damn curious. "What did you think of Keanu at e3?"

"I own the Rainbow Road," Sparrow makes plain with a gesture of her bottle toward her... conveniently rainbow-sporting chest. It might be bravado. It might be some irrational sense of ownership of all things colorful. It doesn't matter. She says it with sufficient conviction that it sounds like she might be willing to throw down. Was that the wrong move? The way Abitha's eyeing her, it looks like maybe it wasn't the right one? She squints back a little. "Breathtaking, obviously, but I would've liked to see more gameplay are you alright?" There's no punctuation between those thoughts, one bleeding right on into the other before she takes another pull from her bottle.

"Yeah, fine, eyelash." Mac answers quickly, one last flutter of said lashes made, before she's glancing right to her larger computer on the counter. Quick hands lift and go to the keyboard and mouse, looking to Sparrow to ask, "Do you have a Steam?" Regardless of the answer, the true result wasn't quite just looking up the account to silently judge her gaming picks and most played. No, she was making sure Sparrow Jones wasn't a serial killer, or at least wanted for embezzlement... Or... Well whatever she could find. It was either a real odd name that would be easy to find or an alias that'd turn up nothing. But her Google-fu was strong regardless.

"OriginalRedSparrow," she offers without skipping a beat, distinguishing herself from that Jennifer Lawrence movie which couldn't be as cool is if it tried. It definitely didn't try hard enough. If Abitha does look at her collection of games, it reads like a collection of Humble Bundles where someone's actually given most of the games at least a little bit of screentime. But not much more than that. Even the bigger RPGs and abstract puzzle games which have racked up some hours haven't been played all that much. Or recently. She's sure got a lot of friends, though.

She drinks contentedly while waiting for Abitha to presumably peruse her games, even if what she gets instead is some kitschy new age newsletter in which some local yoga instructor, Robin Jones, is writing about his kids in a blog for the Wingless Pilgrim Wellness Center right here in Gray Harbor. There's a blurb about doing yoga with kids and how he'd started with the twins--including Mena, his little sparrow--as soon as they were able to walk. There's mention of the value of trusting your children, referencing Mena's cross-country adventure a few years back. Some babbling about chemists and cooks and adoring doting dad nonsense. The most recent post referencing Sparrow (not Mena) and Corey moving out on their own, this written in August. Beyond that, there are definitely videos and photos of her, hair red as it is now, wailing on the drums a few years back in a girl-fronted pop-punk band called Helgrind. That's as close as anything gets to murder. She's fucking killing it.

Friend Request sent, Abitha tears her eyes away from the screen finally, a brow faintly raised as she looks at Sparrow browsing. After taking a deep breath, letting it out, eyes glancing off aside once again as she redoes some math. Was this a good decision? The store could actually stay open reliably, this girl was not only knowledgable, but, as Abitha looks at her objectively, cute, which cynically meant Dumb Boy sales. Respect the Hustle. She finally slowly says, "Oo... Kay. That's enough gatekeeping, I guess?" The questioning tone is introduced halfway, as she realizes just what she had been doing. Damn toxic gamer culture. "If you want to work here... You will literally be my first employee, so I guess we're going to have to figure this out as we go?" Her head sinks downward a little as palma raise, a very Donkey Kong taunt sort of shrug. Her eyes flick sideways, a click and a quick type made, "Uh, is like sixteen ok? The internet tells me that's living wage for here?" Abitha Machinae, Business Tycoon. "I guess we gotta work out some sorta schedule. What else do you do?" She sips, leans forward again on her folded elbows, a more comfortable listening position.

"Interview," Sparrow corrects in regards to the gatekeeping. "Totally appropriate work-relevant questions in the context of an interview." Way shittier if outside that context, to be sure, but suitable within that framework. The DK-Shrug gets a snort of laughter and a bob of her head. "That's how I work best." Probably not something to admit to the new boss, that she just wings it most of the time, but they're in this together, right? "Yeah, sixteen sounds great." Only the slight lift of her brows suggests it's more than she was expecting, the height implying not outrageously more. Nice, but not unreasonable. The hand coming up to fuss with her red hair for the first time might be telling, a little worry that her schedule might not be as flexible as it needs to be. "Full-time college student. Chem major. Which means I've got lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays this semester, and I'mma aim to do the same next semester, too. I'd rather have those off. Along with raid nights, though we're only raiding once a week lately. Kinda shit at it, but." Shrug. She has fun. "I can slip in some short midshifts Monday, Wednesday, Friday between classes. And I've got most evenings and weekends fairly free, though I would like to still have time to spend some time with my people on the regular. So don't take all of it please?"

Eyes starting to go glassy by about the fourth detail, Abitha finally holds up a hand, then opens her tablet up again. She taps a simple note taking app and flips it around, pushing it across the counter, "Just gimme like... Your number, details, anything you think I'll need in a legal sense to get this hiring thing done, and I'll make some sort of spreadsheet to figure it out. I'll be real, I'm... We're?... Not that busy, so like, homework would probably be possible? Maybe I go off the deep end and find us a third to really round out some sort of regularity? I dunno." The last bit has her eyes flicking to the ceiling, her face surprisingly calm as she announces, "Actually that sounds terrifying, maybe I'll hold off on that." Her eyes flit back to Sparrow, the sort of deer-in-the-headlights look with just a dash of don't-let-them-smell-your-fear intensity. "Also, you've got a friend request. MacTheKnife. What MMO?" Great subject change deflection, Mac. Whenever Sparrow would look, she would find Abitha actually didn't have that many friends, but at least four or five were legitimate Twitch personalities, and her account was a literal treasure trove of a games list.

"WoW." Sparrow flicks a quick look up at Abitha before answering the unasked questions. "Void elf demo warlock deeps. Usually." How much of the horror had she caught? Who knows. Her head's mostly bowed to the tablet as she adds full name, phone number, a rough outline of her free time, emergency contact information--Corey Jones--and a note to Mac telling her 'don't forget to ask me for my W-2.' This clearly isn't her first time through a hiring process, even if it's a bit looser than she's used to. "If you don't mind me studying on the clock, yeah, that'd be perfect. Way too much work and not enough time." Unless she wants to give up her social life, and who the fuck does that? When she hands the tablet back and looks up again, she wonders, "How long has it been just you?"

Abitha's features pinch and her tongue appears in faux gagging at the mention of the Blizzard virtual addiction, but it's brief, meant more for comedy than actual degradation. "I feel like I need to show people a sober chip when they talk about WoW." She taps the inside of her elbow like displaying veins, then shakes her head again, the ghost of a smirk on her face. "Uh, since I opened?" She ventures aloud in answer, which honestly had only been a few months. A hermit like she was, it probably hadn't occured to her. Another gentle lift and fall of her shoulders, her eyes falling to the pad, "W2? Taxes? Oh fuuuh.." Her posture slumps, almost depressed at how quickly she felt like she was going corporate. With a dejected sigh, she's adding her own notes, self-questions, logical extrapolations. Sure, not the most mature first reaction, but at least she seemed pretty organized when it came down to it.

Sparrow snorts a laugh for the talk of WoW-related sobriety and explains, "Guild's all grown-ups, ya know? We've got lives. Ultracasual." And almost certainly terrible as a result, but she doesn't seem to mind one little bit. Except to mention in a dry aside, "Which is usually met with way too much disdain, so." The actual 'thanks' is left off, but it's not difficult to hear all the same. "Not my area of expertise," comes with a note of apology for the actual business-end of things while she watches. "I'll make sure to bring everything first shift, though. Make sure you've got whatever you need to make this all legit. Figured this would be one of those hand in an application and come back later sorta things, so." Yep, not sufficiently prepared for on-the-spot hiring.

"Filthy casuals." Abitha mocks flatly, with a faux accent of some sort, then breaks into another smirk, really just trying to let on to Sparrow she knew the struggle. Another noncommittal shrug answers the last bit, "I dunno, stuff just seems to fall into place. Maybe it's too good to be true and you'll drink all my beer. Maybe we'll be friends and I can leave the building sometimes... If I wanted to..." She looks right, then left, then back at Sparrow, maybe wondering why she just blurted out awkward shit so often.

"Dangerous prospect," Sparrow confirms of all that out there out there. "I'm not very good at letting people keep to their comfort zones." But at least she's offering fair warning? Who knows how much she might be joking. Still, she picks up the bottle she'd set down to fuss about with the tablet and lifts it to Mac, an unspoken promise to enjoy at least some of the beer left on offer as she takes a long swig of this one. "But I am good at telling people what they need. Which should be good for business. If not for your never-go-outside lifestyle." No apologies. "So... should I leave you to it or...?"

Abitha gives Sparrow a long squint at the remark, but still breaks into that wry curl of the lip that makes it seem like it was an alright joke to make. "MacTheKnife." She reminds the redhead adding a slightly upward stabbing motion with her bottle. Nevermind she had literally zero experience using one in real life. "If you've got places to be, go be those places. I've got some research and stuff ahead of me. If not..." she shrugs, "Finish your drink, I can show you around some stuff, but I'm gonna guess its not gonna be too hard for you, since you're telling -me- how to hire -you-." She peers ar her over another long sip of her cider, matching.