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Yarver Bakema had spent enough time pacing. No amount of introspection was going to leave him better prepared for the interview, no amount of note-taking about what he absolutely had to ask. Nothing, he reminded himself, was strictly irreversible until it passed Psynateh's muster, and she had an instinct for what humans needed to painstakingly coax out of each other.
And yet, his role was important. If he made a mistake, it would almost surely spell doom for the applicant. The integrity of the Council was sacrosanct; if she disagreed with it, there was no letting her go. The risk of damage was too great. They would almost surely treat her cordially unless she turned violent, but rob her of her freedom regardless.
And so he had paced for a few hours, coming to terms with his role - until he had shed his anxieties like dead skin in a single dismissive gesture, found his centre, and let a casual air permeate through him, carrying both a friendly exterior and peace of mind.
He sat the reception desk of the Vale gym, one foot touching the ground, the other leg angled, slotting him into a loose sit. He had left the wrist watch he used to stop competitions at home, deliberately, knowing that he would otherwise constantly be checking the time until he drove himself mad with it.
He expected her to be extremely punctual, as the resume had promised, and he had no reason to doubt.
Adelaide Mawne, meanwhile, had seen the Vale gym from the outside before, so its appearance was not strictly a surprise.
Yet there was some absurdity in the idea that an interview for a position as a maid-cum-secretary (a butler, really, even if didn't say so on the tin) ultimately for a household not yet expressly named, that was palpably going to great lengths to weed out untrustworthy individuals, would go through such a proper establishment.
On the other hand, no one had ruled out that the Vale gym was where she would be working if she passed muster in the interview. She had already spoken to Yarver Bakema on the phone once, where he explained some of the subtext of the advertisement.
'Formally, I will be the one that would be writing your paychecks, Mrs. Mawne,' he had explained. 'However, your de-facto employer is in an ultimately very vulnerable position and thus prefers not to conduct the first-level interviews himself. Please don't hold that against him. Should you make it part the first-level interview, he will explain his concerns to you directly.'
It was to pay well. If she was being recruited into some kind of mafia, this secrecy then almost made sense, except that Yarver Bakema's flawless reputation, exemplary conduct and moral judgement utterly ruled out any criminal organisation.
In either case, she was here now, and perhaps he might volunteer some more information in the interview itself.
She'd spent some time entertaining herself with thoughts of who her mysterious potential employer could be. The Vale gym was, of course an option; she wasn't sure why the high level of secrecy, but according to the rumour mill Yarver Bakema was the de-facto leader of Sehto's gym leaders. Perhaps it was something related to that? Surely there was some degree of coordination between the regions, and with it some form of sensitive information.
What he'd offered in the phone interview didn't quite fit with that, however. Yarver had indicated she'd be working primarily for another, and her previous experiences were primarily acting as personal assistant to a recently retired businessman, so it seemed likely she was being hired for something of that ilk. Plausibly a friend of Yarver, who did not trust themselves to vet a new employee, and had chosen to ask the local most familiar with identifying shady characters.
She'd certainly met her fair share in her brief dalliance with circuiting, before deciding that most of the “professional trainers” she'd met were various flavours of crazy and she needed to leave before it became infectous.
Still, Yarver had indicated that familiarity with both travel and pokemon was a benefit for this position. Presumably there would be some travel between cities - another reason the mystery employer could have recruited a gym leader as middle man - and that made pokemon of your own a necessity. Hungry wild pokemon were dangerous. Criminals were irritating to extremely dangerous. Mountains were mostly inconvenient. All could be circumvented by pokemon.
It wasn't polite though to bring pokemon to an interview, even one with a gym leader, so hers were neatly tucked away in her bag when she stepped in the door.
It took the opened door for Yarver to realise he should cut this short. He had seen this one before. There weren't so many circuiters in Sehto that he couldn't memorise their faces. Names, on the other hand, had gone right out of habit - they were always exchanged, but not necessarily real, and so he had rarely bothered to commit them to memory.
It was no big deal. If anything, it was a relief to have such a simple reason to send her away again. He would have a polite, friendly conversation with her, ultimately dismiss her with a comment on how they would think about it, as was entirely customary in interviews of any kind, and then send her a polite letter of rejection.
It took all the tension out of their meeting. It was a blessing.
And yet, a different part of him insisted he assess her purely on her merits, and it came from a mental module that knew how to fight its way to dominance.
He considered the option, tried to grasp at what he knew about her - had she gone up to Taqnateh? If she had, she'd declined Jagdish's deal. Did he not perhaps have a moral obligation to deliver her to Jagdish anyway? Declining the deal was a cheap way to skirt accountability, after all, even if those that did knew nothing of what it was they were opting out of.
And yet, he was not Arbiter. Jagdish was, for good reason. A lifelong incarceration was not for him to decide, especially under some shady guise of employment. No, his obligation was in determining whether she was a good candidate as Jagdish's assistant. It was his sworn duty to take the question seriously.
Then the instant of competing thoughts was over and he slipped down the table, smiling cordially toward his guest, thrusting out a hand toward her as he approached at a casual pace. “Mrs. Mawne, I presume? Welcome,” he said, his tone warm. “I'm Yarver Bakema, we spoke on the phone - and I do believe we've met before, if only briefly. You've been on the circuit?”
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