Work Text:
Ada Vessalius loved her job at Pandora’s Box. She had first started working there part-time as a teenager, after accidentally discovering that her Uncle Oscar was going on dates with the owner, and though those dates had stopped entirely short after that (something Ada only knew because her boss complained to her coworker about it), the job had been offered and had stayed steady through high school and, now, college. Pandora’s Box had three employees: the owner, Xerxes Break, who swore up and down he was over her uncle but still ogled him when he came to pick Ada up from work; the first manager, Gilbert Nightray, who was a neurotic pushover with a cute-but-insane younger brother and a strange relationship with a couple young teens; and the second manager, Ada herself, who had done everything she could to make sure the shop was as legitimate a purveyor of the occult as was physically possible.
This had perhaps contributed to Gilbert’s neuroses, but that was no matter; Ada had been assured by their boss, Gilbert’s brother, and Gilbert’s young friends Oz and Alice that making Gilbert cry out of fear was not only normal and fine, but was also a really good time. Her Uncle Oscar did not share this view, but that was because Gilbert was around fifty times more likely to end up in tears when Uncle Oscar was in the room, a fact that Ada was dead certain was related to the fact that editing Break’s sex tapes was in Gilbert’s job description, and had been from before Break and Uncle Oscar’s fling. She hated the thought that, somewhere in the store’s back rooms, there were sex tapes of her uncle, but as long as she, unlike Gilbert, never had to see them, she was not going to dwell on it overmuch. Besides, it was a good thing that Uncle Oscar was working his way towards dating again. Though he gave off a great impression of womanizing, the fling with Break was the closest thing he’d had to a romantic encounter since the deaths of his wife and child, and as Ada grew older, she worried about her uncle more and more. When she was younger, she had taken it for granted that Uncle Oscar was always okay, always happy, always nice; now that she was growing up, she could see the cracks in that facade, and had resolved to herself that she was going to make things right for him—and for his romantic life, whether that be with Xerxes Break or with anyone else. Ada wasn’t sure if it was his grief or the fact that she’d walked in on him and Break making out in his office that had caused them to break things off two years ago, but both of those factors were lessened in importance by the way she’d seen Uncle Oscar smile at Break when he’d hired her on the spot for her expertise in the occult. She wanted to make sure her uncle was that happy always, and she would do anything to make that happen.
This was why she had recruited Oz and Alice to help her out. About a week ago, the two teenagers had suddenly gotten a whole lot more time on their hands and started spending every afternoon in Pandora’s Box, playing with Gilbert’s nerves or doing their homework or messing with Break. Gilbert had been happy just to have them around, but Ada had noticed that there was something off about the two of them. Oz was just slightly on edge, and refused to use one of his arms; Alice’s temper was on a hair trigger, and she refused to let anyone other than herself and Gilbert near her brother. But Gilbert hadn’t noticed anything was off, and he still had his job to do, so Ada decided that perhaps a distraction was in order—and she and Sharon Rainsworth were of one mind on the best sort of distraction: romance.
The first thing to do was to start her plan of attack. Oz was generally open to being approached, but Alice at the moment was not, and the few times Ada had tried to strike up a conversation with either of them Alice had grown hostile and started literally hissing and growling at her, so that was a no go. Whatever had happened to unsettle Oz and Alice was probably bad—honestly, the fact that Gilbert had yet to notice there was anything off was extremely concerning—and Ada didn’t want to upset them any more than their clearly recently heightened baseline.
So how to bring their attention to messing with Uncle Oscar’s love life? Scheming would do them good, Ada was certain, but at the moment there was not really any way that she could entice them into any scheming, or really anything at all other than homework and hanging off of Gilbert. She ruminated on this for a good few days until, as luck would have it, her uncle came to visit her at work.
Ada was busy when he came in, correcting a customer’s understanding of a few different rituals, and motioned for him to go wait with Gilbert’s guests, who were in the middle of doing their homework in the back of the store. Forty-five minutes later, when the customer had rushed out of the store in tears and shaking with fear, Ada sighed over the lost sale and then went to go say hi to Uncle Oscar.
He was seated at the breakroom table with Oz and Alice, helping Alice with a homework problem. Oz was beside them, totally engrossed in a novel, and looking at the scene, Ada couldn’t help but smile. If Uncle Oscar had somehow managed to gain their trust over the past afternoon in a way that Ada herself had not, then not only was that a relief for their sake, it was also good for Ada’s plan of getting them scheming in Uncle Oscar’s love life. If they cared, they would get themselves involved on their own, which would probably help distract them better and might even do some of the legwork towards making the two feel better after whatever it was that had happened to them.
Satisfied with this, Ada returned to the counter and to work, hoping that the next customer they got wasn’t too squeamish about human sacrifice and other such things.