“You have to prepare the various types of flour for the other employees,” Raissa explains to me.

“Make the work easier for the others,” I nod. I’ve had high schoolers in the past come work for me to make a few bucks and they did pretty much the same kind of things.

Maybe another person in my position would be offended by the humble job they just gave me, but I really don’t care.

“We have put tags to make this easier for people trying out the job. And don’t worry, everyone started out doing this,” she adds with a sweet tone in her voice, probably thinking I’d be bummed out by the work.

Girl, I have Italian American parents. I know a degree of exploitation that you have no idea of. I slaved away countless times in the family restaurant.

Moving a few ingredients around and arranging them between tables? Tsk, it’s nothing for this big boy.

Sure, it’s nothing until I see that the flour bags that she wants me to haul probably weight around 120 pounds each.

“Wait a second, how much bread do you even ship out every day?”

She shrugs.

“No idea. But we go through ten to fifteen of those bags each day, just for the bread. We always make a bit more for the Watch too, just in case.”

Goddamn medieval times and their carb-rich diets.

I can already feel my arms turning to jelly, but I just keep smiling while I slowly die inside.

Wait.

My ears turn off while I watch the shorter and thinner girl.

How does she take those huge bags?

“What level are you in cooking-related classes?” I hear Raissa ask.

“No classes yet,” I smile.

“Oh,” she looks at me with a slight frown.

Once again, I’m ‘one of those people’. At least, that’s what her stare tells me.

But it doesn’t really matter. I can change people’s mind. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again, baby!

“Then, you have to put all the necessary bowls on the tables. You will find them in the cupboard. I’ll show you, don’t worry.”

Raissa goes on and explains to me a very neat system.

It’s a good thing that I have a memory of steel for everything related to baking. I still cannot remember my parents’ birthdays, but I could recall a thousand and one recipes in an instant

She asks me for a demonstration, and I start hauling one of those giant sacks of flour. We have some big bags in my own bakery too, but I started ordering the smaller ones to make it more convenient for me and my employees to move them around.

My mother used a not-very-nice adjective that I shall not repeat to describe my laziness.

I put the right bowls, some wooden spoons, salt and so on, on the table.

As soon as I’m done with the first twelve tables, I notice something.

“Where’s the yeast?” I ask confused. The sugar is missing too, but if the yeast is not there, it does make sense that there’s no sugar.

“The what?” Raissa looks at me curiously.

Holy.

They don’t use yeast.

WE ARE BECOMING RICH, BABY!

“Nothing, it doesn’t matter,” I say while an idea creeps in, “can you point out a place where I can buy beer wholesale, perhaps?”

“Sure, there are a few breweries I can show you on the city map later.”

I’m so going to blow Clodia’s mind!

I’m so exhilarated that I almost don’t feel the pain in my arms while I carry the last bags of flour.

Even if it looks easy, it takes almost two hours to arrange everything, clean the tables from residues of the previous night, and double check the tools to make sure they are both clean and still perfectly functioning.

By the end of it, I realize that I’m quite dead. I don’t take the night shift in my bakery anymore, thankfully. But I was transported to this new dimension in the evening and now it’s morning. Even if I joked about it before, I am jet-lagged.

Wait, dimension-lagged?

There is a joke there. It’s better if I start thinking about it. I’m sure I’ll be abducted or something at some point, and I might need some humor to entertain my captors and make sure they don’t skin me alive too soon.

My mom always tells me I’m way too paranoid. I like to think I’m very prepared. I always tell her that if I ever end up in prison because of some clerical stuff I didn’t do – which she says is impossible, but that’s because she trusts them – I already have a plan sketched out.

I’m a baker, right? I will probably go to a minimum-security prison, or even get house arrest.

So, if I got min-security, I’d simply ask the prison ward to have me lead a baking program. Then, I’ll pay off my dues to some gangs in the form of sweets.

I can imagine the conversations.

‘Yo, Joey Luciani is a good piece of ass.’

‘You better not touch him, pal.’

‘Oh, and why is that?’

‘He’s under the protection of the cake-act. He makes cakes for all the gangs, and no one touches his ass.’

That’s my plan in case I go to prison.

If they get me a house arrest, I’ll just open a baking account on social media. I think we might have one, but I’m not sure. My mother records around a hundred videos of me doing stuff every day. It may be that she either forgets my face when she goes back home and doesn’t see me for barely ten hours, or we do have a social media account and she opened it without my permission.

Knowing the woman, I’d say we have a 50-50 chance of it being one or another. Or even both.