"I get paid the same as anyone else," she replied, then paused. Evie hadn't put much thought into whether there was some sort of pay grade scale for agents. She assumed there was for the different levels of handlers, but until the moment, she had presumed that everyone on her level got the same amount of pay. "At least, I think I do. It hasn't gone up any since I joined, so they aren't paying me extra. This is just what I do since I'm not that great on mi--" Evie stopped mid-word, her most recent mission failure slamming her mind like a load of bricks. She swallowed. The hologym flickered around them, showing the barest glance of the room she had been interrogated in, briefly, before the room quieted back down to its normal state. "Not that great on missions," she finished, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly.
"Mmm yep. Surprisingly," she confirmed. "I mean, it took you how long to even notice the music was off? You picked up on how that happened faster than you realized it even happened. So yeah, surprising." That, and he didn't strike her as the brightest bulb in the bunch; an assessment she clearly needed to reconsider. Street smarts could often make up for lacking book smarts. "Well, yeah, I can see your point, but why drain them when you don't need to? That would just be wasting battery power on music you weren't paying attention to when you could save it for later."
By the time he recovered enough to lend her a hand, Evie had done her own recovering and was already on her knees. She looked at his hand with a pout. Her face was reddened with embarrassment. Sure she couldn't help that she'd slipped, but falling on her butt, and especially in front of someone else? Mortifying. Reluctantly, she accepted his offer of help to get the rest of the way onto her feet. "Yeah, yeah," she mumbled, glancing off to the side.
Maybe he would help if she asked nicely? She scoffed. Was there any point in saying pretty please if he might not even do it? She wouldn't put that past him, either. He had a knack for getting on her nerves, she decided. But since her power set didn't lend itself to breaking the ice, what with no robots around that she could control, she didn't have a lot of options. Or...did she? Evie glanced around at the hologym, and then grinned. "Hang on." Trying not to rub her sore butt, because that was the last thing she needed to do in front of him, Evie jogged over to where she had left the panel from earlier. It was still dented more than she liked, but still workable. She pushed it into place where it belonged on the floor, then turned back around to face Buck.
"Maybe I've got this, after all." Interfacing with the hologym's computer system, she brought the room online wordlessly. What came up was a group of robots, not much bigger than Buck, about a dozen total. Evelyn stood completely still with a faraway look in her eyes, her mind in the machine as she commanded one of the robots over to the hammer to hit at the ice with its metal fist. "This should do the trick," Evie said, but her voice didn't come from her; instead, it was projected over the hologym's speakers, with a tinny quality to it.