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Job hunting is awful in the best of times. Tack on an economy where nobody was hiring, in a rust belt shithole, and I was seriously thinking of taking Hemmy’s advice and jumping off a bridge.
Now, my resumé was doing the best it could, but there’s only so much you can spin with “former supervillainess”. I’d even tried leaving it off, but… better to own it. Except owning it didn’t work. I guess people couldn’t get the image out of their heads of the crazed woman adorned in bones and furs, as if it wasn’t an act. Whatever. Fuck 'em. So instead, I had to make my own way.
After I entered the café, it had become quiet. Rooms tended to do that when I entered, especially nowadays.
“…you want to open a studio,” Parian said, incredulous.
“Yeah.” I shifted uncomfortably. You think they’d have nicer chairs. It wasn’t a cheap place, really. Fancy bullshit on the walls, art stuff and shit.
“And you’re looking for my advice?”
“I can’t exactly ask anyone else, can I? And you, like, know clothes and shit, right?”
“With all due respect, ignoring the fact that you just stroll in here while I’m having lunch, what do you even know about fashion? Reaver, with all due respect, the Teeth aren’t exactly known for their chic downtown boutiques.”
“But we are known for badass costumes!” I said with a grin. “You know who made all those? You’re lookin’ at her. The one and only.”
“Okay,” Parian said, resting her face in her hands. “But nobody is going to buy that! You can’t transition from necklaces made of teeth to high fashion. That would be like… like making a car company because you changed your own oil!”
“First off, fuck you, secondly, I’ve thought this out. I’m not going after your stupid hoity-toity steampunk bullshit. Will you at least look at my business plan?” There was a bit of satisfaction at her cringe from the word steampunk.
“Will you leave me alone if I do?” she asked, gesturing in a let’s get this over with sorta way. I took the binder out of my bag and slid it across the table. The wannabe Victorian frill-bomb had the cojones to put on a pair of lace gloves before opening the cover. Like I had a disease, or some shit. Outside, the sound of sirens was getting on my nerves. That was Brockton Bay for you, though.
“Costumes,” she said, looking up. I nodded. “You want to make… costumes.”
“Yeah, think about it. Like, most people just either make their own, or patch something together. There’s no theme, no continuity, they just want to look cool. Now, I looked it up, there’s nobody in New England currently making a business selling costumes, and even outside that, most are low quality for the price. We’re both capes, we know what capes want, and there’s a secondary market in cosplay as—”
“Cosplay???” Her voice was incredulous, like I’d suggested eating babies or whatever. Which, by the way, was total propaganda fake news, the Teeth never ate babies, that New York Post article was horseshit. Come on people, really? Would it be too modest a proposal to ask you horsefuckers to check sources before starting rumors like that?
“Yeah, cosplay. People like dressing up as capes, we can give them the Authentic Cape Costume Experience™. I did some research, and cosplay cape porn is, like, one of the fastest growing online sectors. The internet wants to see Armsmaster’s titties, and we can give them that.”
“That’s illegal,” Parian crowed. “Copyright infringement. The PRT would aggressively pursue the titties and purge them from the internet.”
“Hey, that’s not our problem, we just sell the costumes, and it’s not like we can control what our customers do with them.”
“Can we talk about the elephant in the room? I feel like you’re trying to sweep the whole former supervillain thing under the bloodstained, corpse-laden rug, so to speak.”
I rolled my eyes. Of course she’d bring that up. “Look. It is what it is. I’m trying to get out of the game here, okay? It won’t be easy, but turning a new leaf and all that shit.”
Parian sighed, looking down at the binder once again. She was opened to the page with the bitchin’ graphs I’d made in Excel. Forecasts and cash flow estimates and shit, yo. “Fine. Fiiiiiiiine. We can try this out but nothing long-term. Can I go back to my tea now?”
I put my sword back in its sheath, grinning. “Yeah. Thanks for giving me a chance, Parian. I won’t let you down, pinky-promise.” I pulled my chair back and stood, my boots splashing on the ground. “Careful on the way out, the floor’s a bit slippery,” I said, stepping over one of the corpses. “Have a great day.”
I looked out the tea shop window, at the flashing police lights, the sound of more sirens approaching. Fucking Brockton.