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 Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2016 6:22 am
 Hmph. Bread. For all it was light and fluffy, it was a heck of a lot of work.
Being the lowest on the totem pole, Juno persistently got stuck with whatever jobs were left after all the experienced employees had taken their assignments. This was good, in some sense, as he was always covering for someone who was sick or injured or away on vacation… and so he got to try his hand at a lot of different things. Sometimes he’d be selling out in the marketplace, or delivering baskets to households and restaurants. Other times he he’d be cutting dough for loaves on the bakery floor, or counting inventory in the back room.
Today he was assisting Jaya at the bakery’s main store, where people could come directly to buy individual baked goods or make big orders to be delivered later. Jaya, a hefty Oban woman, got to do all the easy work of talking to people and making orders, and Juno had to take care of the hard stuff… in this case, bringing in the load of flour that had been delivered to the front door. The delivery-man had conveniently disappeared, leaving Juno alone to shoulder each heavy bag and carry it into the bakery. Clouds of yellow-white flour rose up as he picked up each bag, and he knew his clothes and hair would be full of dust for days after this.
Well. There were worse fates -- like being broke and unemployed. So he picked up yet another bag, and kept his eyes on his feet as he carried it towards the doors.
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Posted: Sun Apr 03, 2016 1:26 pm
Ichil was still in the process of training Imari to fare better in crowds, but it didn't seem right to take a janarim to market. Besides, she'd be sure to draw some unwanted attention mounted on some enormous beast while going about simple errands. The noblewoman was dressed in commoners' clothing and wore her braids low on her head, not that her father particularly loathed these sorts of trips any more.
...well, he may still loathe them, but he now allowed them.
She arrived at the bakery to find a young man of rather contrasting hues unloading a cart of flour. She was intrigued by the way he looked, and the way he carried himself, and she stood nearby his final pile. Really if she had just gone around she could go straight into the bakery.
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Posted: Sat Apr 09, 2016 4:10 pm
He was almost through the pile now, and had fallen into a sort of meditative reverie, finding this the best way to deal with such a tedious task.
Pick up a bag. Throw it over his shoulder. Walk to the door. Do a funny twist to fit through the door. Walk to the storeroom. Stack it with the others. Walk back to the cart. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. He’d taken to humming as well, to make the time go faster -- a swinging, hopping sort of melody his mother might have danced to, some windy night by a campfire, in a land far away from the parched sands of Oba.
Engrossed thus in his task, he didn’t notice the woman who had come up behind him, standing now by the cart. He picked up the last back, turned away and --
Pooof!
With an ominous ripping sound, the end of the bag split open. Almost half the flour spilled out down Juno’s back and shoulders, landing at his feet in a billowing cloud -- covering both him and the Oban woman, whom he had still failed to notice, and who was even harder to notice now that she was hidden in a maelstrom of drifting white.
“For Chi’s sake!” He laughed, batting away the flour and hopping a few steps back to get a gulp of fresh air. “And I almost made it!”
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Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2016 12:05 pm
Ichil was amused by the young man's work song, even if it differed from what one might expect in the logging camps of Tivrod or out on the sea. It might have been that that kept her so unusually close to the work being done with a soft smile on her face.
It all happened so fast.
One moment she was watching the boy unload another bag, and the next she was covered from head to toe in white flour. She had tried to turn her face away but was not quite fast enough. She simply stood there with her eyes and lips tightly shut for a moment, in some sort of shock, and then blew the flour from her lips and started to brush her face clean. The coughing started up then as she accidentally inhaled a bit of the floating dust. This was what she got for curiosity, she supposed! It couldn't always end well.
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Posted: Tue Apr 26, 2016 5:15 pm
Despite his attempts to get out of the flour-cloud, it soon spread all around and had him coughing all over again, with nothing to do really until it all began to settle in a big white smear on the ground. A couple of bemused passers-by laughed at the sight, but most seemed to stay of the way -- except, he finally noticed, one.
The woman was almost as flour-covered as he was, which meant that she had been standing fairly close. Well, if she was standing exactly where she was standing now, she certainly had been close! Why, she wouldn’t have been more than an arm’s reach away. Juno realised that he had completely failed to notice her while he was working, and now she had gotten caught up in his mess. Well, damn it all! He wasn’t exactly looking forward to getting in trouble with the barkery owner, not when he was still relatively new on the job.
“Sorry ‘bout that, dear!” He called out, gesturing at the split-open bag. “Hadn’t a clue it was going to do that! And on the very last one, too. Well, I suppose that’s how it always is. Can I get you a cup of water, maybe? I think I just breathed in a whole loaf’s worth of flour.”
He hoped she wasn’t going to get angry. He really, really did.
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Posted: Mon May 02, 2016 4:29 pm
"Dear?" Hah! Ichil's nose was wrinkled and one brow was raised. It was certainly not the face of a woman who was alright with what had just transpired. Her clothes, though common, held fancy embroidery and were of high quality, suggesting that she was perhaps not the lowest class either.
She coughed again and fluttered her eyelashes, trying to to clear the flour. Her mouth opened in a rather unflattering way as she worked at the corners of her eyes. Okay, she definitely looked ridiculous. When the second round of coughing came, she just smiled and nodded.
"Water, yes, please!" She could make bread in her lungs at this point, she was sure of it. She tried to brush her hands clean to better wipe her clothes and face and shuffled toward the dark-skinned entity. Oh my, his hair. A hybrid, eh? How neat!
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 6:18 pm
The ornamentation on her clothing, although not itself unnoticed, was not exactly understood by Juno as being what it was supposed to be -- a marker of at least reasonable social standing in Oba. This was something the hybrid was having a seriously hard time getting accustomed to. Back home, in Sauti, everyone was about equal; roving nomads as they were, there was no such thing as ample mansions to live in, or multitudes of servants to clean and decorate your clothes. Decoration to him was a personal choice, and he was constantly being berated by the bakery managers for treating certain ‘high-bred’ individuals with ‘inappropriate’ familiarity.
He couldn’t quite understand the big deal. He was polite, wasn’t he? Whoever heard of something like being too friendly?
“Come inside, then. It’s cool, and we’ll find some wet towels you can use to wipe off some of this mess.”
He lead the woman into the shade of the stockroom, and disappeared behind a curtain for a few moments -- returning with a battered-looking wooden lunch tray bearing two tin cups of cool water and the promised towel.
“Here, use this. Wash your face and hands off, at least… you’re just smearing it around the way you’re going at it now!”
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Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2016 10:44 am
"Thank you," Ichil said with a soft bow. She was only slightly worried about blindness by flour at this point, but was happy nevertheless for a chance to clean off. Those who recognized her might question her appearance. She didn't fancy herself vain, no, but that didn't mean she wanted to wander around covered in flour. How embarrassing!
She followed the young man into the stockroom and smiled when he came back with water and a towel. She sighed. "Thank you," she said, ignoring the boldness with which he implied she had been doing things wrong. She began with her face and moved on to her hands.
"So. What's your name?" she asked, "I feel that we've interacted enough to make introductions necessary, don't you?" She offered a little smirk and then handed out the towel in case the young man should want it.
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Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 9:03 am
While the Oban woman towelled off, Juno found himself a rather more questionable-looking rag. It had that musty… rag-smell, but it was good enough to briskly wipe the flour-dust off his hands and face. At least with his shifter-blue skin, the white of the flour didn’t stand out quite as much, and as for his clothes… well, he couldn’t be bothered right now. He had a spare shirt tucked somewhere in the back maybe, but he could just as well wait to get home and wash off.
“Hm?” He looked up (from under his rag, which he’d been wiping over his forehead) as she spoke. She had a rather formal way of speaking, and for the first time Juno started to suspect that this was one of those ‘Noble’ folks he was supposed to treat with some special sort of attitude. Unfortunately, this was not something he had yet mastered. “Oh, sure. I’m Juno, from Sauti. I work here. You know, in case you were under the impression that I carry bags of flour around for fun. And you? If you came here to buy bread, I’ll gladly help you pick out some fresh-baked loaves for your… uh, trouble. But go, take a drink first. Water’s clean. Mostly.”
He laughed and picked up one of the tin cups. The water did indeed look clean, freshly poured from the big clay jugs where the bakery stored it.
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Posted: Sat Jun 25, 2016 10:33 am
Ichil laughed delightedly. Well! Not only was this young man an interesting sort of hybrid, he was a genuinely funny guy. She shook her head and put the rag down to pick up a different tin cup. She didn't imagine Juno was holding his for her to take.
"I'm Ichil, born and raised here in Oba." She took the jug and filled her cup before downing it in a few hearty gulps. Ah, much better. She smiled and bowed slightly. "Thank you. As for the bread, I did come here to get some. I have a friend in Tivrod whom I visit quite often. We bond over food." Nevermind that this friend was a man and a romantic sort of companion. "If you're implying I need something for free, don't worry about that. It's just a little flour. I'm sorry for interrupting your day, as a matter of fact."
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Posted: Mon Jul 18, 2016 3:35 pm
“Well, no, no -- “ He held up his hands -- he had no particular authority to offer up things for free (and he would probably get in tons of trouble for it). “But I can make sure you get the freshest of the lot, y’know. Right out the oven. Bread’s best that way, anyhow, but most times we shove it into delivery carts and back storerooms and the like, and by the time anyone touches it it’s not quite as good as it once was. And I mean, you shouldn’t think it’s stale, or anything like that, just… well, there’s nothing quite like fresh-baked bread.”
“I guess I’m spoiled,” he shrugged, waiting for Ichil to finish her cup of water, the gesturing for her to follow him through a back door. “I get to eat this stuff all the time.”
A short and narrow passage quickly opened into a much larger space. It was warm here, for despite the ample ventilation through tall windows, the room was full of clay ovens. Beside each oven (tended to by an Oban baker) there was a rack of fresh bread, cooling from the ovens.
Perhaps it was because Ichil was still somewhat flour-dusted (and hence looked like she belonged in the bakery), none of the bakers paid any attention to her -- certainly not in the same way they normally would, had they noticed a well-bred young lady in their vicinity. It wasn’t much of a loss. Juno and Ichil were able to approach one of the racks without any fuss, from which the hybrid lifted a loaf just cool enough to pick up comfortably.
“How much of an appetite does this Tivrod have?”
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Posted: Tue Jul 19, 2016 12:23 pm
Ichil just laughed and nodded. She listened to the poor boy ramble and just politely kept quiet. Sure, she knew what he was saying. She had spent a lot of time in the kitchen as a young one before she had been old enough to scold about the time she spent with the servants. Everything was better fresh-made.
"I know exactly what you mean," she agreed finally and followed Juno into the back room without question. She'd taken part in more risky endeavors. She highly doubted that this boy intended to toss her in an oven.
It was not unusual to Ichil to be ignored. She went about in common clothes so often it didn't strike her as strange at all, and never would. Instead she appraised the loaf in Juno's hand and smiled.
"Oh, no. He lives in Tivrod. His name is Kiyelt," she said, "Tivrod is a little logging town. He lives on the outskirts with a tent full of animals. He's... a man of fair size and muscle." She laughed. "Market is further to go for him than it is to me."
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Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 4:17 pm
“Hm. Tent full of animals? Sounds like an interesting fellow. I guess you’d have to have some bulk to you, if you’re gonna manage all those critters.”
Having seen many little towns on his trek here, he could almost picture it. Seemed to him that all the interesting people lived out of the way… although maybe that was just the novelty speaking. Certainly, he’d met more than his share of interesting people in this big city, and this was the furthest thing from ‘out of the way’ that one could possibly come up with, he was certain.
“Well, we’ll get him stocked up, then.” He grinned, and picked up a few other loaves, all fresh and fluffy. There was another brick-shaped one ike the one he had handed her before, but also a circular one with a crispy crust and some cuts along the top, a shiny braided-up one and a few smaller, sticky-sweet buns. He figured on a very (very) fair price for the lot of them, if only because her company was pleasant enough to warrant the favour, and lead her around to the little front counter where customers generally paid for their merchandise.
They left flour-white footprints on the floor here, having dragged this in from the bakery floor (and likely some of their initial dusting).
“How long is the trek, to get to Tivrod?”
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Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 5:18 pm
"He has janarim as well," Ichil said with a soft shake of her head. "You should have seen him when he wrestled mine! It's incredible... and a little scary." She, after all, had only really seen janarim on the battlefield, and now she had mastered one. Hopefully there would be no further battling needed, at least not for a long time.
Her eyes brightened when she saw the fresh bread being pulled out. She might have to partake before her visit with Kiyelt, if just a little. I wouldn't be so fresh come Tivrod, and she never got such fresh stock! Money wasn't an issue and never had been for the girl, so she happily followed Juno to the front.
She noticed their footprints and tried to scuff one out with her sandal. It didn't work. Darn. She didn't like causing messes for others, unless that other was Juno, in which case it was his mess too.
"If I leave early in the morning, I can get there before sundown, around suppertime," Ichil said, "Where in Sauti are you from? I admit that I haven't seen much of it."
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Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2016 6:20 am
“Those are impressive critters.” Juno nodded on the subject of janarim. He was no expert, but he had a good inkling that one needed a fair bit of skill in order to handle them. After all, one didn’t see janarim wandering the streets as often as you saw quhar or perzi or even those big shelled beasts from matori. The most he’d ever seen of them was out on the battlefield, and what wasn’t the sort of sight one wanted to encounter on your way to the market square.
“And you’ve got one too?” He clicked his tongue, realizing she had mentioned her friend wrestling it down. “That sure is something. I’ve got a quhar, but his idea of being mean is just standing right in his place when you want him to move.”
He rolled his eyes fondly, then put the bread in a light reed basket for Ichil to take with her. He added up the total cost on an abacus that sat on the front counter, leaving dusty fingerprints on the little amber beads.
“In Sauti? Well… most folks from Sauti are just from Sauti, and that’s about it. There’s a few towns and things, but the rest of us just wander, with tents and little wagons and the like. I guess that’s why I don’t find it all that hard to up and move around. Gimme a few more months and I’ll be out of here too. I just took this job to save up for a wagon and a second quhar -- then I’m going to work for the brewery, doing deliveries and such. I figure that way I can weasel in a job inside the brewery proper, you know? Eventually.”
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