Chapter 20: Poverty As Weapon
"H-hi! Please t-take a seat..." the girl said as soon as she finished flinching from the door shutting right behind her.
Trying to lighten the mood, Kir introduced himself. "I'm Kir. I'm going to guess you'll be my artist for the day?" He tried to sound reassuring, but for some reason the girl blushed in a way that almost turned the white fluff of her ears pink.
"I-I'm Kordia! Kordia van Mora!" She announced stiffly. Her very-human face trembled with nervousness. This close he could see she had beautiful green-gold eyes.
"Nice to meet you Kordia," Kir said as he sat, careful of his tail on the uncomfortably small object. He crossed his legs right over left, a bit away from the table, and connected his hands on his higher knee. "How do you want me?"
She made a strange noise before, like a popped balloon, she suddenly seemed to deflate. Kir recognized the symptoms of a person reaching maximum shyness. He grimaced to himself as he thought of how to diffuse the tension.
Then he remembered why he was here. Essentially he was submitting himself to racial profiling. Shyness aside, Kir didn't know if the girl in front of him was doing this because she hated his kind...
"So, um... you're going to be a student too?" Kordia asked in a quiet voice.
The look he gave her when he looked up was dark. "Yes. Why are you doing this?" he asked.
"D-drawing? W-well, I'm going to be a second year, b-but I don't have money so I've been working in the city... I used to draw in the park but then one day they said I have to do this and it's a whole silver a day and..."
Kir felt his disposition soften. It was one thing if she'd been doing this willingly, but learning she was being pushed to do it and barely compensated for hours and hours of work... It was the poor being used against the oppressed.
He came out of his thoughts around the time she was complaining about how difficult it was for her to have to walk all the way down here from the Academy.