The New Job [Morning | Work]

Life was becoming hectic lately. Not only did she have school and Cecil... (That didn't really count did it?), And working at the Inn, and working at the Ranch every Tuesday and Thursday, now she was shooting for a more permanent position. Something she could call stable. But in order to do that, she had to deal with the transition period where she'd be doing all of it at once.

The fact that she had been able to get a job here was one in a million. Not only were the hours flexible, but Shopkeeper was nice. He mainly wanted to get someone else to cover him so he could do something else with his time, it sounded like...In any case, Nadia entered the door to Ars Moriendi. The instant she did so, a familiar musty smell greeted her. The air always seemed a little stale in here. As she walked around the shop, Nadia took notice of the fact that there was no one inside.The small shop's shelves were lined with oddities of all sizes. Small animal skulls, sets of bones in jars, fossilized insects, and other assorted morbid oddities and objects made from them. Much of these items were created by the owner of the shop. A stern, dead-eyed looking man in his mid-thirties. He had a scar under one eye, and Nadia hoped to one day figure out how he got it.

As she rounded the last isle and approached the counter at the back, Nadia stopped for a moment and admired the six stuffed birds that lined the shelf on the wall behind the counter. Beneath them was a black wood cu-cu clock, pendulum ticking out the seconds. But where was Mr. Kaska? He should be out here by now if he heard the bell ring. Stepping up to the counter, Nadia rapped on it twice, loud enough that it could be heard back through the door to the small office. Such a nice hollow sound.

"Mr. Kaska?" She asked.

"...Yeah? What is it?" The man arrived through the office door a few second later. Upon seeing Nadia, he blinked, squinted at her, as if trying to figure out why she was there. "Oh, right, it's you. What's in the bag?" He asked curiously hand on his hip. He was wearing a grey t shirt with splotches of something on it, sleeves rolled up to the shoulders to expose his lean, well-muscled arms. His thin pants were jet black, and belted around his waist with a thick leather belt.

"Oh...Well, I wasn't sure how long I'd be here today, or what you had planned, so I brought my sketchbook, in case I saw something interesting on the walk home." She replied.

"You're an artist then?" He asked. There was something like irritation coloring his near-perfect nonchalance. His narrow eyes were piercing. Nadia liked that gaze, though. She didn't flinch under that look like he probably wanted, but met it with a measured, flat look over her own.

"I draw. I wouldn't call myself an artist though. It's just a way to capture the things I experience in a tangible way." There was a moment of silence as she shared a look with the man. He held her gaze, thinking Something. Though, what that something was, Nadia couldn't say.

"Well, if there's nothing else to do, I don't mind it. Probably nothing in here you'd want to draw anyway."

Nadia shook her head. "Actually...That makes me really excited." She gave him a small smile.

The smile seemed to sharpen the edges of the man's form as he shrugged. "Well, whatever. I don't care what you do, as long as you man the counter while you're here."

After their short exchange, Kaska took Nadia around the small shop and showed her what each section was for, and how things were marked. "This old shop gets dusty, so I'll have you dust around this stuff pretty often." He said at length. The cash register was an old style one, simple to operate and didn't get used much. It turned out most of his customers either paid for small stuff with card, which he really didn't seem to like, or they payed check for Kaska's other service...Taxidermy. Since the Divide, his taxidermy business had dwindled, now only being taken up by people who wanted their pets preserved after death. It was a morbid subject that excited Nadia, and she hoped one day to see that process with her own eyes. For now though, she'd settle for doing whatever it was he wanted her to do, and absorbing his words like a sponge.

For her first morning of work, she spent most of her day dusting. It looked like it hadn't been done in a while, and Kaska spent most of his time back in the office somewhere. Nadia didn't see or hear much from him all day. But then...she supposed that was why she was here. What was he doing back there, anyway, she wondered.

The girl had one customer while she was dusting. A middle-aged man who bought an amulet made from some kind of bone. They were rare, as he said, something he collected. It sounded a little outlandish to Nadia, but she simply checked him out as she had been shown, and sent him on his way. Closer to noon, she had dusted much of the shelves on one half of the store, and decided she had done quite enough of that. Still not seeing her overseer, she snagged her bag from the shelf beneath the counter and settled down to sketch an array of bird skulls that had caught her interest earlier.

It was several minutes - maybe even an hour, before she noticed that the shop's owner was leaned on the counter above her, watching her draw with a half-interested expression. He didn't seem to mind that she had noticed him watching, or care if that bothered her. After seeing that he wasn't going to reprimand her for drawing, she went back to her sketch.

"You've got a good eye for composition. You don't waste time on meaningless lines and exaggerate the things that interest you. In this case, the beaks and the eye holes. Nadia looked up as the man spoke to her. He'd moved from the counter to lean against the shelf above her. She hadn't noticed. "You say you're not an artist, but you've got more talent than most of the people who come in here and tell me they are."

Nadia sharpened her pencil with her little red and blue plastic pencil sharpener. "Thank you. Are You an artist, Mr. Kaska?" She asked, seeing an opening to chip away at that wall between her and this man's history.

"I'm just a man who makes things out of the remains of dead animals." Kaska replied with just the smallest hint of sarcasm. "Anyone who says differently is just fishing for a discount." His tone sharpened into a more managerial one, "I don't give Discounts."

He looked at the clock on the wall then, rocking back on his heels with his arms folded. "What I do do, is shut this place down early on occasion. You can run along and hang out with your boyfriend or your girl friends or whatever it is you kids do these days."

Nadia nodded, standing. "I don't really have either of those things. But I'm sure I'll find something interesting to do in this city. Thank you, Mr. Kaska." She said with a slight bow.

The man waved her away. "What are you, some kind of japanese school girl? Go live your life. I'll see you tomorrow."

Nadia left the shop with a strange feeling of progress. Like maybe she'd glimpsed a new path her life might take and had started down it.