The neon lights of the Susukino District were intermittently flashing against the glossy doors that lined the streets as Tetsu approached a small, nondescript building that seemed squished into the alley like an afterthought. He knocked, but no one answered, and so he checked the handle and made his way inside. It felt like a break in, but what he walked in on was a small office. No hallway, no pomp or ceremony, just a few dim desk lights, an imposing, if run-down, oak desk, and a few ugly metal filing cabinets and other office staples. Behind the desk sat a man, staring down at the contents of some file intently, and beside him, off to the corner of the room, what appeared to be a secretary not really doing her job very quickly, tapping away in brief intervals along her typewriter.
"Have a seat, please." The man offered, not peeling his eyes away from the series of documents until Tetsu had lowered himself to eye level, before finally making eye contact. The man was old and trim, looked like he had made his way around the block more than once or twice, and was not looking very impressed when he gave the boy a sharp, almost scathing glance. "So why should we hire you?" He asked, leaning back in his seat while dismissing Tetsu with a gaze that returned to the clearly much more engaging material in front of him. "Let's start from there, why don't we?" Tetsu stared back for a moment, his expression slowly sinking from bored to annoyed.
"Don't you make new hires file paperwork? Do you want to know if I can read?" One of the phenomenons of growing old was that your lips tended to shrink slightly, so that they were only delicately pronounced pink strips that separated your skin tone from the dark redness inside your mouth. The old man's lips seemed, somehow, to get even thinner as he now gave the boy a slight and begrudging increased degree of his attention. He, of course, scolded Tetsu with it. "Do you suppose we want to pull in any unemployed bum from the street capable of doing the entry level work? Would such a person not be better off trying their luck at a cafe in two months time? Quitting with our documents then stored in their head?" He paused for a moment, not to add dramatic effect, but to try and find the exact pointed conclusion he wanted to add to the end of that thought, "Is that who you are? A barista hopeful with no other prospects?"
Tetsu was not really used to being chided effectively. Most of the people he met either didn't, let's say, invest a lot of their stats into useless witticisms, or couldn't, or correctly saw arguing with a vagrant as a situation that only the vagrant could possibly emerge from victoriously. He sank back in his chair for a moment and was shocked to find that he actually had to think of a good response. "I don't get uncomfortable when other people around me are; I revel in it, to be perfectly honest." The old man across from him didn't exactly jump at the response, merely raising an eyebrow that seemed to indicate that the boy had a rapidly narrowing window to elaborate. "Meaning if I'm caught robbing someone blind," he continued, "I don't mind dressing them down for how awful their security is. You won't find a candidate more brazen than I am."
It was a poor sell, no question, and the boy didn't even seem to have any final word to make his point more compelling. The fact that he couldn't completely win over the interviewer here was no small matter either, since selling yourself was the very business that the spy was engaging himself in. It would comfort Tetsu to know, however, that the KSIS was tragically short-staffed, and his piddling excuse for interview answers would just have to suffice. "Aiano" He called to his secretary, "Bring out the box of locks and picks for this young man to work on." There was a chance he could simply keep this tragic excuse for a ninja on courier service or something, maybe re-think their incentivization structure for attracting and retaining more than this horrible medley of miscreants that seemed endlessly rushing through their doors to apply. Until that pipe dream was realized though, Tetsu would have to do.
