Description: Stop callin', stop callin', I don't wanna think anymore / I left my head and my heart on the dance floor.
It's a bustling day at the community center, like it is every day! Even if there's not a lot of people. The YFCC does important work. With so many of the world's role models being beefy men who beat the shit out of each other for their daily paycheck or just because they like it or just because it's how they find peace in life, counseling young people who want to do the same is a vital part of a well-balanced society. Having YFCC work on your resume is very helpful when moving to other positions. A lot of companies specifically hire out fighting-related dispute mediators for when Phil in accounting starts throwing fireballs at his boss.
Yet, the woman on the register to interview for a position today does not need money or experience or really anything. Shermie is a world-famous musician, model, and party girl. The clubs she goes to become hotspots. The clothes she wears influence fashion. The magazines she decides to appear half-dressed in get hardly inexplicable surges of sales for that issue. Yet, she was very sweet on the phone.
The French superstar steps out of an innocuous looking towncar to the curb, quickly crossing into the lobby. She is somewhat conservatively dressed for her usual image: a matte leather half-vest unzipped down way too low but saved by a black bandeau top, a matching leather miniskirt, and black stockings covering not only her legs but also her arms, terminating at the fingerless gloves on her hands and heeled ankle boots on her feet.
She finds the receptionist and sets a manilla folder on the desk while (assumedly, hair covers eyes) looking around.
"Ah, hello? I am here for the interview. My name is Shermie. Do I need to sign a guest book?"
There's a wonderful moment while the girl behind the desk -- who oddly doesn't look like she belongs there; she can't be more than 17 and has the sort of panicked air of a person who expected to hold the line for 10 minutes, see nobody, and go back to what she was doing -- looks up at the new arrival and a sort of internal war begins to rage. One, this is Shermie, damnit! Part of her wants to leap out from behind the desk and mention that she was into Shermie before she got mainstream and she has that one rare print edition of one of her CDs where the weasel on the cover was printed with the wrong ink so it's worth $5k on eBay. The other part knows she's trying to be professional and handle this like an adult.
This is why the poor girl practically thrusts the sign-in clipboard at her with both hands, the string-attached pen rattling across it and off the side with the force of it all. "P-p-please sign here!" she says. The stupid clipboard is shaking, which is probably going to make signing the stupid thing really difficult unless Shermie rips it from the girl's hands.
MEANWHILE:
From downstairs there is the sound of a heavy door opening, followed by the sudden increase in volume of a sound that was mostly ambient to this point: little children laughing and playing. Shortly thereafter, the door seems to shut and the sound is muffled again, followed by the footsteps of someone coming up the stairwell. The footsteps are a bit quiet, as if someone were walking on carpet, and the reason why is made apparent when the person rounds the top of the stairwell.
It is, for lack of a better word, Mario's Tanuki suit from Super Mario Bros. 3, complete with full-body raccoon costume, ears, and a hood with a nice oval opening for the wearer's face. It's difficult to tell, BECAUSE of the suit, but there is a reasonable expectation given the freckles and green eyes that it's Frei in there.
The tanuki even walks over to the desk and waves at Shermie. "Oh, hello. You must be the afternoon interview. I'm Frei Renard, nice to meet you."
That's right, Shermie: the place is run by furries.
Shermie is characteristically inscrutable. She tilts her head down toward the clipboard, then reaches out with both hands, one taking the pen and the other slipping around the receptionist's wrist. "Shhhh. You seem too stressed. Take a nice bath when you get home, yes?"
Frei enters as she is signing, and Shermie comfortably transfers her attention to him. "Ah, stage name? You do not look like a fox."
Clipboard forgotten, and in fact probably everything forgotten, the girl takes it back once Shermie is done signing and proceeds to rocket out of her chair and off into the center somewhere to dig out her laptop, fire it up, and blog that Shermie just touched her. Thus in small ways, the French musician continues to make the world a better place.
Meanwhile, Frei smiles at Shermie, though he does have a brief moment of tracking the receptionist with his gaze as she Speedy Gonzales-es her way out of the room, practically leaving a dust cloud. Turning back to his guest, he hmms. "It's my real last name, actually. My father's side of the family is half French, half British. The rest is Japanese on my mothOH MY GOD." He finishes the sentence by having brought his hand up to make a point and realizing that he was wearing a tanuki suit. "Uh, one sec," Frei offers in a guarded tone, reaching behind him with the paws of the suit and trying in vain to work the zipper with the stupid things, which were built for being cute and fuzzy, not necessarily for fine manipulation. "We had a... ngh!... group of kids from... argh dangit... a local school and I'm the... bloody!... only one who fits in this thing..."
"Oh, France? Beautiful country," Shermie comments. She walks around Frei in a wide circle, inspecting the suit, and then presses up against him to pry his hands out of the way and unzip the back. "Let me, ah, unzip? Tres difficult."
It is probably for the best that high-strung girl from before was not here for this, because now Frei is making more or less full body physical contact with Shermie and who knows where that would have led afterwards. As it is, the guy in the suit seems completely relieved that she's going to give the zipper a whirl and slumps forward a little, letting his arms drop down and breathing out a sigh of relief. "Thanks. The one who helped me put this on just, uh... ran out of here like a bat out of hell."
Thankfully for all involved, two things are true. 1.) It takes no time at all for Shermie to get the zipper undone and 2.) Frei appears to be dressed relatively normally under that getup: jeans, black socks, grey moleskin shirt. Once he can move his elbow back, he starts to sort of... wriggle out of the costume in a truly hilarious manner, speaking to her all the while. "The deal is I'm the most huggable of the staff..." he says up front, as if to explain why he was dressed as a giant raccoon. "So what first interested you about working here, Miss..." He pauses, trying to remember her last name, and drawing a blank -- and struggling to get one leg out of the costume -- Frei simply finishes, a little lamely, "...Shermie?"
Shermie maintains her way-too-close pose but twists her lips in such a way that her mostly obscured face appears thoughtful at best and judgmental at worst. This continues as Frei shimmies his way out of the suit and then steps away, likely overheated and rumpled from the constricting grip of the tanuki.
By the time Frei is ready to look at her, she has returned to being the picture of twenty-something glamour, hips tilted slightly and a demure smile on her glossy lips.
"Ah, the Youth Center? It is so nice in concept." The Frenchwoman clutches her hands to her chest. "My fans, they are many of them young girls and boys, teenagers like myself when I played in malls in France for tips, and they see me on the television... ah, 'breaking arms and taking names?'" Shermie pauses, almost in askance, and then continues: "I feel it is my duty to be a role model in not only fashion and culture but also the breaking of arms. It must be done delicately to ensure no one is hurt."
He does indeed look a little hot and sweaty once Shermie's done with him, and as he finally steps out of the costume Frei brings two hands up and runs them through his sweat-damp hair, slicking back the long bangs that usually hang -- Shermie-style, in fact -- down into his face, though perhaps not quite at the eye-obscuring level of the Frenchwoman's. He listens carefully to her explanation, though there is the slightest, briefest momentary facial tic at 'breaking arms and taking names', as if he can't tell if her version is better for the changes, or worse for the implications. Still, semantics aside, her heart seems to be in the right place, as it were.
A hand comes up and he rubs the back of his neck for a moment, before Frei reaches down and picks up the now-empty suit, folding it somewhat inexpertly just enough so that it can drape over one arm without dragging on the ground, before he turns his expression back to Shermie herself. "Well, that's admirable, I think. Sort of an 'Idol Gives Back' kinda deal?" Bringing up his hand, Frei clears his throat, then continues. "In any event we're always looking for more volunteer instructors in the, you know, delicate breaking of arms, so who am I to say no?"
"Ah! So great!" Shermie squeaks, skipping forward and taking advantage of Frei admitting that he is the most huggable of the staff by hugging him because come on it's like Chekhov's Gun up in here. She is taller than him and her posture makes it almost like he is still a dopey plushie even without the raccoon suit.
"I will do my best to teach the teens to grow up correct! So many are so bad at coordinating the outfits, yes?"
It is the most glorious and massively underappreciated near-asphyxiation that has ever occurred in the YFCC. If Frei had any understanding of just what was going on here, he'd rush out to tell Tran as soon as possible, especially because Frei is only slightly shorter than Shermie, putting his face mostly in line with her neckline, but Tran is about 6 inches shorter, and if he could get Shermie to hug him, would probably explode like a Mega Man boss shortly thereafter. Perhaps fortunately for all involved, Frei is not the type to hug and tell. A sadly 6'2" Alma Towazu would be screwed either way, which Tran would take even greater pleasure in.
In any event, once released from the sure-to-be-deathgrip-y sort of hug, Frei coughs a few times and smooths down his shirt, before smiling at Shermie. He wants to disagree with her on the coordinating the outfits thing, but he's seen some of the more... enthusiastic Taiyo kids come in with various lycra/spandex/etc. creations that are more four color superhero than fighting costume, and so he decides not to quibble over the point one way or the other. Instead he adds, in a guarded tone, "I should tell you we have an above average frequency for crime lords in various multinational cartels occasionally dropping by and exploding the lobby and front doors, but you know, after your first five times of that happening or so you kind of get used to it."
"That is okay!" Shermie says, briefly rocking forward on her heels. "I am very good with people. They enjoy me."
She may or may not have heard the part about crime lords and exploding and fighting.
The YFCC's doors admit one Angel (no last name given) at about the same time Shermie is introducing Frei to her feminine particulars. This is pertinent info when you consider the places the Mexican's casually attention-grabbing gait takes her; five and a half feet of broken dress codes ultimately comes to stop at the community center's front desk (or wherever Frei and Shermie are). Angel leans against the thing, elbow-first, and fixes her gaze upon the other two fighters - at first appraising, then obviously more excited than not.
"Shermie! You're applying for a job too?? Christ..." A scratch of the head. "You always act like you've got so much money, too." Absently, Angel's hand locates a pen on the desktop. Her attention flutters towards Frei. "I heard you needed people here? Something about -paying jobs-??" Eyebrows waggle, and somewhere beneath her face, Angel's tapping the hell out of that pen, right against the desk. Tap, tap, tap.
"I swear, I could really use some cash right now. Do anything you need me to. Lots of experience with businessmen. I know my way around a desk!"
Frei greets all of Shermie's response with a smile, but let's be honest, it's a smile that has the teensiest of a nervous edge around it, the kind you get when you're speaking to somebody and you KNOW they're processing what you're saying but there's just that seed of doubt that they haven't 100% followed through with the *implications* of what you're saying, which has its own set of problems. Of course, Frei expects that somehow, even a marauding band of Shadaloo goons wouldn't get terribly far with Shermie around. She seems to be the kind who has established what her day is going to be like and then imposes that state on the people around her.
He's about to say more when Pulchritudinous Job-seeker #2 makes her way into the building, the redhead tracking Angel's approach to the desk carefully. So she knows Shermie? They appear to have similar if perhaps somewhat conflicting notions of fashion, he notes. However, the issue of money wakens some sort of dormant sense of responsibility in Frei, who turns to Angel with a sheepish smile. "We uh, we don't actually have any PAYING jobs right now, sorry..."
Oh right. He's got a furry raccoon costume draped over his arm. This is important.
Shermie suddenly raises her voice: "Angel!" pronouncing it, of course, with the proper accent. "You slut! I have so much money! It is almost all the money! This is volunteer work because I am a good person!"
After a moment of seething, Shermie's mood lightens out of seemingly nowhere. The Frenchwoman leaps into Angel's arms, because they are the best of friends. The bestest of best friends. Almost the bestritudinous of friends.
Shermie already tweeted that. All of her fans are using it. It's a word now.
Frei prompts the slightest of pouts from Angel, and there's the slightest of flinches in her otherwise wide-eyed stare. Those listening for it would catch that the pen's stopped tapping against the countertop, catch the way the Mexican's eyes roll upwards, backwards in the slightest. Thoughtful.
Inspiration strikes at about the same time Shermie's ass does.
"Wau! Shermie!! You whore! Angel is trying to get a job right now, and you're acting like some skank!!" Angel's no slouch, and Shermie's definitely found a home in her bosom friend's slender arms, but it's a short stay. As quickly as Shermie'd jumped in, Angel's tossing her -out-, and rather directly towards Frei. Frei and his silly raccoon costume. She doesn't seem too concerned about things after the fact; truly, Angel's actually just gotten back to leaning against the YFCC countertop, one hand on a hip.
"Angel can work for tips!! She's very good with people. Lots of friends - a smile goes a very long way, right?" Right.
Work for what? There is a brief and terrible moment where Shermie's description of her wealth actually makes Frei imagine her swimming in a vat of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck before he comes back to his senses and actually gets the first part of a normal sentence out: "Our patrons are mostly high school st--"
LOOK OUT FLYING SHERMIE.
He literally has enough time to turn from Angel to Shermie before basically he is en route to introducing his nose to Shermie's decolletage. Unlike these women, his reaction time isn't very good, mostly because he is baffled by what is going on in the first place. This means it's up to Shermie to see if this becomes the first scene of a truly bizarre hentai anime, or something even scarier.
Shermie, atop her luxurious bed of Frei, turns her head to pout at Angel. "Do I need to tip you to regain your friendship? Angel, you wound me deeply. I was even going to pay your salary to have you be my assistant."
It's entirely possible that Angel wasn't thinking about what she was doing when she threw her friend at her potential employer. That's definitely the look that's kind of slowly dawning over her face - parted lips, wide, moony eyes.
"Augh! Look what you -did-!" Angel, a creature of action, is moving towards Frei at a sedate rate which does nothing to wreck her outfit or makeup. She drops to her knees such that they're touching Frei's head, and leans over his face, frowning -deeply-.
"Is he dead? Did you kill him? Angel told you a million times that you can't keep jumping into people's arms like that!! Angel could have been carrying a baby or something important!" Shrewdly, the Mexican reaches out to -push- Shermie off of Frei - her other hand is lamely pressed to his chest, where she assumes she is going to figure out his pulse, respiratory rate and quality, and whether or not he requ-
"Does Angel need to give you CPR? Mouth-to-mouth?? She's very talented, like she said!"
He's got little swirly eyes, kind of @_@-like. It's adorable. That poor costume isn't getting the rental deposit back either.
The YFCC doors then slam open, and inside burst a man in rumpled clothes with a notepad, accompanied by a cute gothloli young adult woman with a camera. "Ken Tanaka, Southtown Ledger. I was just wondering if you'd care to comment on allegations that the YFCC has been indoctrinating--"
He and the camerawoman look to where Frei, thoroughly pinned by Shermie, is basically staring dazedly into Angel's crotch while she all but teabags him with her epic jugs. There is the sound of an old-school flashbulb going off a few times, some scribbling of a pencil on paper, and the sound of Ken Tanaka's voice dopplering back as he retreats out the now-closing door: "THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!"
Shermie politely crosses her her legs at the ankle, looking comfortable in her new spot on the floor and not entirely angry that Angel has tried to hit her best defensive stat not once but twice. "Those reporters seemed nice," she comments. They didn't even try to follow me around. Southtown is so polite! It must be, ah, the Japanese culture?"
The Frenchwoman eeriely gets to her feet without visibly pushing herself up with her hands. "Angel, as your friend I recommend to you that the best course of action here is to offer the work and not make out. Tres unprofessional. Instead, you be polite like me."
Shermie suddenly lashes out with her nearest hand, grasping Frei lovingly by the shoulder and almost levitating him to his feet. "Do you know where the man known as Alma is?!"
Flashbulbs alert Angel to the people at the doorway. "...Ken?? You told Angel you were a secret agent!! -HEY!" She'd have been tipped off by the sounds of the news team entering if she hadn't had her head flush to Frei's chest trying SO HARD to listen for his heartbeat - but it doesn't matter now. Angel's up off of her interviewer in an instant, arms crossed beneath her chest, face -chilly-.
"Augh! He lied to Angel! She's not surprised - who wouldn't feel like they needed to be as fully inflated as possible? - but he's definitely not polite. Don't let the manners fool you, Shermie!" Vindicated, Angel turns to offer Frei a quick smile.
"Is this Alma in charge of employee payroll? Angel needs to see him about her paycheck."
Despite his surprising toughness in the ring, Frei weighs like, a stack of dimes in real life, and since Shermie has the superpowered strength of being a pulchritudinous (yeah I said it) girl in this universe she basically flails Frei around like a rattle or maybe one of those 'here are all your bones' skeletons that occasionally happen in doctors' offices. His perception of the past 90 seconds has involved a lot of breasts and now the horizon is spinning and there are lots of questions coming at him that, frankly, the redhead feels it is slightly unfair that he should have to answer all on his own.
When the shaking stops and he gets unsteadily to his feet, Frei looks at Shermie, then at Angel, and then squints his eyes shut before grasping for a rock to hold on to during high tide. He says two things. "China," and then, after a narratively-proscribed beat, "Why is everyone talking in the third person."
Shermie narrows her eyes.
Okay actually she doesn't. Her lips pressing together imply that she is narrowing her eyes. There is determination there. Lip determination.
"Then we know what we have to do." Shermie spins on her heel, stopping to reach out to Angel. "Angel! Join me in a very special TEAM UP! Together, we will find jobs with this mysterious man named Alma! It will involve terror! Heartbreak! Adventure! Drama! Learning about other cultures! Sexual tension!"
Shermie goes quiet and removes a cell from her purse. She dials a number and waits.
Angel's jacket abrupty vibrates. She's as shocked as you are.
"One second!" She turns on her heel, rustles around in the garment, and has her head tilted with one hand raised in no time flat.
"Angel~"
Shermie hisses into her phone. "And I will pay the bill."
At this point, Frei has retreated to the safety of the reception desk, where he is now sitting in the chair and watching these goings on. Eventually, he reaches into the bottom drawer and produces... well, in anybody else's case, this would be a flask with emergency brandy, but since none of the YFCC types are really drinkers except for Maxima that one time, Frei in fact produces a bottle of Pocari Sweat.
Opening it, he tips the bottle toward the two women in salute. "Enjoy your road movie," is the most he can manage to say.
He then drains the bottle in one go.
Angel sounds shocked. "Oh! Good idea! We aren't going anywhere coach, though. Those bathrooms are too small." Her phone is clicked shut, and post more rustling and an ominous zip, the Mexican's turning back around, bringing her attention back to Frei. "O-kay! Angel and Shermie figured it out - We will go and find Alma! He knows much more than you, Angel's guessing. As for your second question..." A quick, understanding grin.
"There are three people here. Why would Angel not speak in the third person..?"
"I will go book the plane tickets and buy a few luxury cars for our road trip portions!" Shermie says, skipping out the door. "Ah! So excited! Also I call dibs on Alma!" she shouts right before the door slams.
"Bye, Shermie!" Angel waves to her friend, and really just can't seem to help herself from grinning at the prospect of an actual adventure. It's been so long! Still basking in the aftermath of the declaration, the Mexican turns to rest against the desk - her desk - and regards Frei with some degree of interest. "What're you drinking? Can Angel have some? She'll let you have some of her tequila. Great year, no worm!"
The fact that it was basically fruit soda makes the slamming of the now-empty bottle on the desk as Frei leans forward and breathes out a little less dramatic than it could have been. That said, as Shermie flounces (sorta) out the door and Angel offers to show Frei how they do it south of the border, the redhead gives Angel a very even look, and then says slowly, "Tell you what. How about when you find Alma, you make him drink the whole bottle and we'll call it even."
There's a beat, then another, and Frei's expression seems to have frozen in place for a moment, but then he suddenly adds, in a suprisingly low and macho voice, "...*record it on your phone*."
Angel meets Frei's gaze with her own (only moderately) caught-in-the-headlights look, and briefly, intensely considers all of the -other- things she's recorded on her phone. Summarily: "Angel is not positive she has enough space for that! Why do you need it recorded, anyway? Did you make a bet with somebody?" Angel determines that nobody is going to be drinking anything at this rate - bummer, but c'est la vie. The Mexican saunters around the YFCC's reception desk, drops into its chair, and lazily kicks either of her booted feet up on the countertop.
"Do you want to make a bet with Angel? It could be fun! --Angel does not know your name."
Let's review the happenings of the afternoon to this point.
Shermie walked in the door. Frei came upstairs, dressed like a raccoon. They chatted! Angel came in, then hurled Shermie's breasts at him before basically pressing her own into his collarbone. Now Shermie is gone after all but demanding that she and Angel recreate 'Wet Hot American Summer' only in China since that's where Alma is, and now Angel is basically reclining in his lap after having offered him tequila. Now she wants to make a bet with him and also she can't record Alma getting drunk on her phone because it is probably full of videos of her having sex with [redacted] and [censored] and then maybe [redacted]'s cousin [classified].
Frei pinches the bridge of his nose.
"...Rufus T. Firefly." This is a bald-faced lie but, being a Marx Brothers reference, it seems a baldfaced lie that Angel will, hopefully, buy.
In the back of her mind, Angel is vaguely disappointed at Frei's answer. At the front of her face, she is obviously disappointed. "...Firefly?? American last names suck." Even so, Angel has no problems getting comfortable where she is - she crosses her legs, stretches, and regards 'Rufus' curiously: "So, that bet?? And you're sure you don't want to give Angel a job? She's very talented! Veeeeery talented. The only reason she cannot get you that video of your friend drinking her tequila," 'Drinking her tequila' means absolutely awful things in Guadalajara. "Is because Angel would have to record over her brother's birthday party. He just turned five!!"
Cut to the snippet of K9999 at his NESTS birthday party, face purpling over the trick candle Krizalid had set in the center of his cake's display of 4 otherwise blown-out candles. Nobody had cake that day.
On autopilot: "I'm Japanese. It used to be 'hotaru' but I changed it after some comedic mixups." This is what happens when you force someone through massive physical and emotional trauma in a place like Taizhou, then send them back to work in a tanuki costume to be assaulted by large-breasted women. The life you save may be your own. Still, even under all that duress, Frei has a natural tendency to answer questions in a simple, straightforward manner, since it's usually the quickest path to what people want. He turns his head to look up to Angel's face, considering where she's sitting.
There's a moment while he adjusts his view up to her actual face.
"It's not that I don't think you'd be a hard worker, we just don't have any money for paid positions right now." He pauses, then squints his eyes shut for a second, then opens them again. "I guess I should see if K' and Maxima are still on the payroll. That might be money we can free up."
Understandably what Frei is saying would, should, and -does- provoke a strong reaction in Angel. Strong to the point that Frei would be able to feel it right against his gut - her stomach rumbles that forcefully. Immediately the Mexican's hopping to her feet, and claps a hand to her stomach, frowning. "Auhh... it's been six -hours- since Angel ate last. We may need to finish talking later!!" She steps back around that desktop, but leans overtop it once she's past, eyes widened again, focused on Frei. She's seen the way he's looking at her. She knows what that means!
He'll tell her anything!
"You said you are paying people? How much were they making?? Can Angel make both of their salaries? She's -very- talented."
He knows you're talented, Angel. You've been pressing your talent into his face for a non-trivial portion of the evening.
Idiot that he is -- or, perhaps more charitably, being that he has much greater things on his mind and it's been some time since NESTS last blew the doors off in some horrific chi-based explosion -- Frei doesn't process that K' and Maxima were hiding out here as much as they were actual employees of the Center, never mind that it was basically Alma who railroaded them into doing that in the first place. Thus her perfectly reasonable sounding questions actually do get answered, though hilariously, not for the reasons she thinks.
"Not much?" Frei responds, scratching his cheek with an index finger in the international sign for 'trying to remember shit'. "Honestly, none of us salaried people make much, since we're almost all professional fighters and that's enough to get by."
Now the pause, the blink, the eyenarrow as he fixes his green-eyed gaze on Angel.
"Come to think of it, you look kinda familiar."
If Angel's got any kind of internal monologue going on right now, it's definitely hidden behind the dramatic back-and-forth playing across her face. Interest battles stomach pains as Frei goes on, and Angel even gets to the point of nodding once, twice -- three times! Very emphatic! Delicately, she bites her lip before speaking; the bit about salaries and professional fighters gets Angel's ire up.
"Mmm.." She taps fingers against the countertop. "Angel has... needs, you know? She needs money. Badly!" A frown cements her change in attitude, and she's really already pushing off of that desk by the time Frei finishes up. Her laugh is curt; the sort of thing that suggests some exhaustion. Nonetheless, he gets a dazzling, good-natured smile, and an inquisitive flash of the Mexican's uncharacteristic greys. "Angel hears that all the time," she states. "You've seen her running through your dreams? Having your children?" Annnnd now she's walking away. "For a boy carrying a cute raccoon outfit on his arm and such a subtle fashion sense, you're pretty uncreative!! Try harder next time! Angel will be back for her paycheck!"
With that, she's out the door, presumably following Shermie to Southtown's library, so they can figure out where China is.
Log created on 15:02:29 10/11/2010 by Frei, and last modified on 18:48:11 10/11/2010.