Welcome to Gaia! ::

The air still held the warmth of late summer, even if people were drinking their pumpkin spice and hanging up wreaths of brightly colored leaves on their doors. It was pretty enough weather that Sadie left her apartment for it, and she was curled up at a picnic table with her laptop and an iPad so she could answer some client emails without being stuck away from the end of the season.

She did, however, have her own pumpkin spice latte. Nobody was going to find her complaining about that.

The impact of a crumpled paper bouncing off of her shook her out of her work haze, and she glanced down to grab it, not noticing that it might have been aimed for the trash can that was right next to her.

Uncrumpling it revealed something about a garage, and a sketch that she couldn't make out the details of.

She gave a sideways glance to the man next to her, mostly just out of her habit to hide the scarred side of her face. Her smile was gentle. "Is this yours?" she asked. Her was the only one she could see around.

His cheeks were going red as red, and Sadie had to wonder why. It was just a piece of paper, it wasn't like it had hurt her at all when it had hit. Was he embarrassed that she'd seen him looking at her face, at her scars? He didn't have to be. He wasn't being rude about it.

She didn't want to be rude, either, and so she turned away, back towards the paper.

She'd gotten sketches on napkins from clients before. This was rough, but she thought that she could see what he was getting at. It would of course need work. A crumpled paper wouldn't do much to draw in customers, no matter how good this man's paint jobs were.

"Have you considered hiring it out?" she asked. That seemed like the obvious choice here, and maybe she should promote herself at least a little. "I could give you a discount."

"I'm a graphic designer," she said with a nod. Artist was close enough, although it was technically a somewhat different skillset. "I do logos, advertisements, sometimes website visuals. It's an investment, but it makes the difference between customers coming to your garage or passing you by."

This was about as much of a sales pitch as Sadie could manage. She looked a little bit tired, just after saying it, although she remembered, at least, to keep up a smile.

This man seemed earnest enough about his cars, and sweet enough that she wanted him to succeed more than she really wanted his money, or for him to fix something in her house when she didn't think that really, she had anything broken.

"A single logo wouldn't be too bad, though," she murmured, and then she quoted him a number that was much lower than what she should have been charging.

She did this too often, the logical part of her said, but the rest didn't care.