Who: Katou Yue & Alex Danvers Where: Al's Dive Bar When: Early December, before Serendipity and the holidays What: Katou gets a job Status: Complete
Katou had always liked to run on his own time. When he’d been alive, he’d gone to school only when he wanted to, and generally only because he had sales to make to his fellow classmates, and he made his money on his own time, when and where he liked. So long as he made his sales and got his cash to his employers on time, they didn’t care how or when he worked. It hadn’t been a good life, not by a long shot, but he’d thought it had worked for him then.
He’d been better here in Vallo. Dying four or five times tended to give someone a different perspective on life. He’d gone to almost all his classes, though he still skipped now and then, mostly when he slept in. He’d still been enjoying not needing to work that much though. He’d taken contracts in the forest when he needed some extra cash, and that had worked out pretty well for him.
Right up until he’d taken a contract to clear out a nest of a certain rare subspecies of fairies. Fairies, he thought, would be easy to take care of, and he’d thought that right up until they’d thrown sleeping powder in his face and he’d woken up tied to a tree. They’d only left him alone after they’d taken a couple of bites and realized he was made out of plants instead of meat, and even then it had taken him a couple hours of shifting to loosen the ropes enough that he could escape.
So no more contracts. Even if they seemed easy.
That left him with needing to find an actual paying gig though. Something easy, with low expectations. Something surrounded by a whole bunch of booze. A dive bar was perfect.
At least, Katou assumed it would be.
He took a seat at the bar, ordered a rum, and took a moment to look around the bar, which was nearly empty. “So, you happen to know whether you guys are looking to hire?” he asked the bartender.
Alex had been doing her best to curb her workaholic tendencies lately. Like a true addict, after dropping her alcohol intake down to nothing, she’d replaced it with an overwhelming work schedule that kept her busy more often than not. She’d switched from active Defense to Reserves and started splitting her time to accommodate her schedule. Mornings into the mid-afternoon were spent in the lab, and evenings were spent at Al’s, keeping track of the books and inventory and all those fun tasks that came with taking ownership of a business.
But she had been making more of an effort to pull back in both areas and enjoy her life, now that she finally felt fully settled here. She had a fairly solid staff at Al’s these days, mostly reliable locals who’d stuck around. It gave her the breathing room she needed, especially now that her relationship with Lena had shifted and she needed time to spend with her girlfriend, too.
And business was good. There were no shortage of bars in Vallo, but there was never a shortage of customers either. The alien liquor this place had was a big draw for some of the different species around here that human alcohol didn’t affect. She had no fear that Al’s would keep on sustaining itself and bring in enough money to keep her employees comfortable and allow her to build a little nest egg of her own.
One of her regular bartenders had just gone down to part-time for the holidays, however, so when she heard a voice inquiring while she was checking the tap levels behind the bar, she turned around to field that question herself. She hadn’t expected someone that looked so clearly like a kid, but she didn’t mind talking to him and feeling him out. Some kinds were insanely responsible; she’d been one of them before she’d gone through her heavy drinking period in college.
“Hey, I’m Alex, I run this place,” she introduced herself. “I’ve got a part-time position open right now. Are you…legal?” The drinking age here wasn’t what it was in America, but she wasn’t going to hire anyone underage to serve liquor.
“I’m eighteen,” Katou said, grinning. The age of adulthood in Japan was twenty, and that included the drinking age, so it was still something of a novelty that Katou could just proudly proclaim to be the legal drinking age now instead of just finding bars that wouldn’t bother checking. “I’m Katou. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” Alex replied, setting the clipboard in her hands down on the counter so she could offer a hand to Katou to shake. “So, would this be your first job?”
Katou took her hand and shook it, feeling a little like an idiot. He wasn’t really used to the whole shaking hands thing, generally he just sneered or smirked at people when he first met them. “Naw, I’ve been working since I was fourteen,” he answered.
“Early start, good for you,” she complimented him. She was the same, working in some sort of fashion for years. At that age, it was usually just in Eliza’s lab. Unless babysitting a brand-new-to-Earth Kryptonian counted as a job (which, unfortunately, it couldn’t). “Anything working with the public?”
Katou wasn’t sure if he should be amused or not, and so he took a sip of his rum to hide his smile. “Yeah, you could say that,” Katou said. “You might say I worked in sales, I guess.”
Alex raised an eyebrow at that. She had no idea what that meant, but the kid seemed capable of holding his own. She figured he could manage to hand out drinks at a bar. “Alright, sounds good to me. Want to do a test run later in the week? One of my staffers can teach you how to make mixed drinks and work with alien liquor.”
Katou grinned. First legit job interview of his life and he’d obviously nailed it. “I can do a test run whenever. Ain’t like I’ve got nothing else going on, ‘cept for school.” And school was usually done before noon most days, except for the days when he had art or music classes.
“Tomorrow, then,” Alex decided, giving him a quick, small smile. “We’ll see how it goes, and if you don’t crack under the pressure, we’ll get all the official paperwork out of the way.”
Katou grinned. “Listen, if I can fight the armies of both Heaven and Hell, I think I can manage to serve a bit of booze.”
Whether or not he’d made it through the war without cracking was a different story - he’d wound up ending the world, after all - but that probably wasn’t as important. He wasn’t going to start Armageddon because of one-too-many beer orders.