Welcome to Gaia! ::

The past several nights had begun just as any others at the bar. They were weekdays. Weekdays were traditionally slow, lighthearted. The crowds came to relax and enjoy a few drinks with friends before heading home for the night and the promise of work the next morning. It was a completely different feel from the weekends, where nights were pumped with music and adrenaline and the majority of visitors seemed like they were there only to rub up against as many people as possible before settling on someone who they had never met before to spend the night with.

Weekdays were not like that. Lyrus always liked working the weekdays. Tips were higher, for one, because less chaos meant more people paying attention to his games. Weekdays at the bar, for him, were more an act of socialization than a job. On a normal week, anyway. This one, we have already specified, was anything but.

A new group had taken to hanging around the bar during the week. Three men, nothing particularly unique or eye-catching about any of them save that they acted like they owned the place. They had taken a liking to the building and the quite-literally-perfect drinks served and made a habit of arriving every night, promptly at ten, and proceeding to get drunker and rowdier by the hour and by the night. Thus far they had remained well enough behaved, leaving before anything could get out of hand, but the impact they were having on the normal crowd was very obvious; tonight, when normally the bar would be filled with regulars chatting away, only a few handfuls of people scattered the room.

Lyrus's tip jar was practically empty.

He wasn't pleased.

More people. New people. And better yet, scantily dressed girls. Sure, they didn't look like there was a full brain between the lot of them, but Lyrus wasn't looking for a brain tonight. Lyrus was looking for a cheer-me-up. And this group of girls, if he played his cards right, could very easily be that cheer-me-up.

Lyrus offered a casual grin in greeting and reached for the nearest bottle of alcoholic liquid. He didn't pay much attention to the actual titles anymore, not since he realized his new ability let him change the flavor of the beverage. Now he could make the perfect drink with whatever amount of alcohol he wanted, for whoever wanted it and would pay three times the normal price for it. It was starting to get dull. "Ladies, what can I get for you tonight?"

Another grin. And then he noticed their less-than-thrilled escort, and his good mood sank through the floor. This group was useless to him. Oh well, maybe he could still get some tips out of it. His expression didn't falter.

"Something interesting, hmm?" Lyrus watched the girl out of the corner of his eye as he drew up a glass, then, coming to a decision, nodded and reached for several bottles. "Something exotic, maybe. I've got the perfect thing for you ladies... And I'll fix something non-alcoholic for you," he added with a half-nod towards Maelon. It wouldn't taste alcoholic, anyway. Lyrus didn't have much to work with that wasn't.

Maelong. Why did that sound so familiar? Glancing up, Lyrus passed the first of the drinks (some fruity, girly concoction of his own) off to the girl latched on to the unfortunate dark chocolate sin, frowning faintly and automatically beginning to mix up the next. "Do I know you? Sin'aeis?"

"Glass, yeah," he affirmed, laughing and passing off another drink before picking up a third glass. He held the glass towards the girls in the same manner a magician would before beginning his trick, then, balancing it on the palm of one hand, etched an elaborate design around the top few inches of the glass with a fingertip, drawing swirls and loops and whatnot. It was a lovely design, and one he had done several times before. But they wouldn't know that.

"You had the spider, right?" He continued as he finished the trick, setting down the glass without much further display and pouring liquids from several bottles into it. "And poison, or something? Maelon? I think we met a couple times as kids. I'm Lyrus," he added, not at all concerned with the fact that Maelon had forgotten his name. He only new the other Sin's thanks to the girl, but he was fairly certain there was no 'g' on it. That didn't sound right. "You must be having a nice night. All these ladies to yourself? I'm jealous."

"Not many people do," Lyrus replied with a shrug and fixed Maelon a soda from the tap while the girls were distracted by the glass. Alcohol could wait until later. If Maelon really didn't drink, he probably couldn't handle alcohol well, and Lyrus was more interested in a conversation than watching the other Sin unintentionally get trashed. "Not many Sins, anyway. The bar itself has gotten pretty popular since I've started working here."

He grinned, a clear indication that he completely attributed the bar's success to himself. Which, really, it was. However, his grinned faded rapidly as he glanced around the sparsely-inhabited room. "Had. Few new regulars are ******** up my tip jar. Pardon," he added half-heartedly with a nod towards the girls. He wasn't really sure whether they were paying attention or not, but he didn't particularly care. "I'll take 'em off your hands later," Lyrus assured Maelon, again not bothering to see whether the girls were actually paying attention. He seemed quite confident that he could lure them away from Maelon either way. "We can get some music going and maybe they'll go dance and leave you al--"

The sound of shattering glass interrupted his words, and Lyrus's jaw clenched as he craned his neck to peer past the Beckys towards the sound. As expected, it was one of the new group; he was standing near another table, leaning over the chair of a woman who seemed to be leaning as far from him as possible. There were three others at the table, two women and a man, and one of the women seemed to be fussing at the standing stranger. The woman's drink was dripping across the floor. The glass, one of Lyrus's, had shattered. At another table, the stranger's two friends were laughing up a storm, and clearly had been watching the scene for some time now.

The arguing woman pushed back her chair and rose to her feet as her voice rose to a yell at a remark from the man still looming over her friend. At the bar, Lyrus cursed under his breath and swept up a few glasses, adding a few drops of something to the first three before filling them with beer from the tap. With the fourth, he quickly recreated the pattern from the glass that had shattered--he hadn't sold many that night, it was easy to remember--, then filled it with the appropriate drink. "They don't pay me enough for this," he hissed through his teeth as all four glasses went on a tray.

"Back in a minute," he muttered Maelon's way as he scooped up the tray and escaped from behind the bar, approaching the group. The woman seemed about ready to throw a punch by this point, and the man had stepped away from the other woman's chair and was standing with arms spread, as if daring her to do just that. A sharp 'HEY' from the lamb Sin caught their attention, but Lyrus's demeanor completely changed as they looked over. He fixed a grin on his face and, stepping between the two, placed the elaborately decorated glass on the table in front of the cowering woman. "No harm done, right?"

He sent a look towards the still-standing woman that clearly indicated that he would take care of the situation. The woman didn't seem entirely confident, but her stance did relax somewhat. Lyrus turned back to the man and gestured him towards his own table with a nod of his head. "You guys seem to be our new regulars, eh? We just wanted to welcome you to the place. Drinks tonight are on me. It's tradition," he assured them as he set the tray with the remaining three glasses on the table. If any of the three mean were sober enough to find this odd, they didn't say so, and the drinks seemed to be enough of a distraction from the group at the other table--for now, at least.

Satisfied, Lyrus abandoned the three men and stopped briefly at the other table on his way back to the bar, murmuring an apology to those seated and assuring them the trio would be dealt with. This done, he returned to the bar, muttering under his breath about killing the bouncer after close for not paying attention. He took a deep breath and leaned against the bartop, resuming his conversation with Maelon while watching the three men out of the corner of his eye.

"Yeah, my Sin abilities, or whatever they are, seem to be perfect for this sort of thing. Glass aside, I can mix drinks perfectly, first try. Any drink. I've made a lot of money betting people over it. I can just tell what suits someone's tastes." He shrugged.

"The drinks are drugged," Lyrus muttered under his breath, just as the first of the three men slumped down in his chair with his face planted against the table-top. "I don't like fights in here. Our bouncer's a lazy-a** and I'm not big enough to take most of the people who start the fights. Those three've been coming in for a few days now, pissing people off. This was bound to happen sooner or later." He shrugged, watching as a second man slid otu of his chair to the floor, snoring. "We'll dump 'em in the alley out back to sleep it off, and they'll be banned from the place."

"Though, I don't resort to that for all fights. Only repeat offenders. Drinks usually shut up the rest, yeah." The third man slipped out of his chair with a thud, and Lyrus glanced down the bar to the other tender on duty, who was already leaving his post to alert the bouncer at the door.

"You can detox stuff?" Lyrus asked, returning his attention to Maelon. "Must be handy with your spider and stuff. Dunno, maybe you could work for Poison Control or something. People call up saying their baby's swallowed a load of bleach, they send you over to pat the kid on the back a couple of times, and voila." He chuckled.

"Giant African millipede?" Lyrus raised a brow. He had absolutely no idea what that was, except that it sounded like some badass bloodsucking bug. He was going to assume that was the truth. If Maelon had given up spiders in favor of it, it must be pretty awesome. Lyrus was slightly jealous, even if he did have Dominic around. "Very nice." And he meant it, which was a rarity in itself.

"That's a good point," he agreed, on the subject of the panicking parents. Maybe Maelon could sic his Giant African Millipede on the bitching parents. "Anything sciencey is pretty broad. With detox and immunity, you could probably pick up something pretty easily. Can't say I have any suggestions for you, though. Science isn't my strength. What're you doing right now?" He asked, but paused as a gesture from a short way down the bar caught his attention.

He excused himself from the group long enough to fix a few drinks at the request of the person, then wandered back and picked up where he'd left off. "Working somewhere right now?"