A/N: The new word limit is 6,000 words, okay? I haven't gone over that yet, so we'll go with that. Yep.
Chapter Four: Of Bakeries and Junk Shops
Penny certainly seemed fond of her favours. At the end of the 'selling day', as she liked to call it, I helped her pack up with more enthusiasm than I'd been able to show to anything for days. While the chipper woman's stall didn't seem to be the most popular place in town, and didn't get flooded by people like some of the stalls further up the street had done, most of what had been on the fresh fruit shelves that day had been sold. In fact, the little produce that had been left over could all fit into a crate that was even smaller than the rotten fruit crate.
Penny spotted my amazed owlish blinking and cackled. "I only bring enough fruit for the regulars, and a little excess. Leaves room for one or two new customers if they fancy a taste of the good stuff!"
Everything packed up and ready to go, Penny had instructed me to pile the shelves (which had been easy enough to deconstruct), both the rotten-fruit-crate and the leftover-fruit-crate and a small locked box which I assumed was where Penny kept the money on top of the table. It was then the awkward task of carrying the table between us, Penny at the front and me at the back, without tipping everything off of it. Luckily for Penny I was much better at this sort of thing than keeping my diet in order, even when there was food around, so there was only one instance of the near-empty rotten-fruit-crate slipping off due to the lack of weight holding it down.
With Penny in the lead, we had marched down streets and alleyways, with the frizzly-haired woman nattering all the while. At one point I asked where we were going, but realized as she gave the answer that it didn't really matter what she said because I didn't have a clue where we were in the first place.
She continued to give me her entire family history, starting with her grandfather, then her grandmother, then her parents, then a little about herself and skipping right to her eldest son. And, as you'd expect from a doting parent, Penny had one helluvalot to say. Her first son was the eldest of five children, and owned a farm up on the hills behind the town. His farm was the most successful on the island (I took this as exaggeration, but at the same time I didn't let myself completely doubt it), and he had employed his younger brothers (the second and third eldest, twins) as the lead farmers on the fields.
"I buy some of my fruit from them myself," Penny sang as we continued to walk, me carrying the crate of leftover fruit and she carrying the nearly-empty crate with the locked box sat in the bottom. At some point in the family-history lesson we had left the table and the shelves at two separate locations - it appeared that the objects had been loaned to Penny as a repayment of some kind of favour she had done for them years ago.
She eyed the way that I was carelessly carrying the crate. "Careful with those, love, they need to be good for when they're made into a cake!" She smiled warmly at me again when I met her gaze, and I shifted the way I was carrying the crate slightly, so that the fruit wasn't shifting so much with each movement. Now I would feel bad if the fruit bruised… I was feeling bad already, simply because I hadn't thought about the 'correct' way to carry a crate. But at least now my question of whether Penny could bake or not had been answered.
"Oh, yes, and I haven't told you about my fourth child!" the topic was brought back up as we came to the door of a large, round-topped building. The structure itself screamed factory, but the mill that was attached to the far side of the building said otherwise. Penny knocked on the door with a beaming smile on her face. "That child of mine owns this very bakery-"
The door opened inwards with a sudden "whoosh" and the beaming face of the short old lady was met with the tall and compact figure of a very muscled man with a face full of… I tried to name the emotion. Contempt? Perhaps. Either way, whoever the man was, he really didn't seem to appreciate the presence of my saviour. I found this puzzling - even the men who had probably been called out from their family time to help us put the table and shelves away from the stall were happy to see Penny. I stared at the man. This… this couldn't be Penny's fourth son, could it? No, no… I shook my head to myself lightly. He didn't hold any resemblance to her at all…
"What do you want, Penny." it was a question, but it was said like a statement, and even though the man had used her name he somehow made it sound like an insult. When I looked back to his face I saw him looking at me, but as I met his eyes they turned back to the 'problem' at hand.
It was then that I found out that Penny was masterful in the way of controlling her expressions. She continued to beam happily at the bloke, her face shining like the bloody sun. Her voice gave her away, however, as she ground out the words "I wish to see the owner of the bakery, brute." her words sounded strained.
The man glared at her. "I am the owner, and it's Bruce, not brute."
Penny hummed triumphantly, as if she had just scored a goal in some kind of sports game. "Brute, Bruce, it's all the same to me- oh, but, I want to see the other owner, honey, so if you please…" She pushed past the taller man with a surprising show of strength. He glared at her again as she waltzed past, and then turned his gaze to me. I shrunk and tried to hide behind my crate.
The man- Bruce- seemed to contemplate closing the door without me, but I think that carrying the fruit had been my trump card because after he had realized that that was what was in the crate he grunted at me and nodded for me to enter the building. I scurried in, not wanting to anger the man by being slow.
I couldn't help but feel like we'd gone underground once I'd scuttled into what seemed to be a kitchen. The room was lit by yellowy-orange light and the walls seemed to be made of white clay. The worktops were light-chocolate-brown coloured wood, and each counter seemed to be moulded into the walls. The floor was fiery, orange tiled stone. I fell in love with the place almost as soon as I entered it.
There were two tables; one large one in the centre of the room opposite the doorway we had entered by, where Penny had put her crate down, and another table to the side where all of the more kitcheny equipment was (a stove and some sort of fridge-like-contraption, as well as some pots and pans), surrounded by chairs. There was some kind of archway into a corridor behind it. I paused near the entrance to the room, unsure of what to do as Penny circled the first table and brought her attention back to me. She pointed to the other table.
"Just pop that over there, lovey, and you might as well take a seat while I have a little chat with dear… Bruce."
I did what I was told quite briskly, placing the crate exactly where I had seen her pointing and sitting in the nearest direct seat.
At first I sat rigidly - this was obviously a place that Penny knew well, so she had probably been here many times before, but at the same time it was quite obvious that the man owned the place and very definitely didn't think that she had the right to waltz in and take over the place. My instant thought was that she was going to get kicked out at any moment, and that I'd have to dash out with her.
The beginning of the conversation definitely tried to confirm my thoughts, as the man walked into the room and took his place opposite Penny. "What right do you think you have to just barge your way in here, old woman?"
She took the question as an insult. "Why, hon, you may think that you own this place, but you seem to forget that the woman who owns more than half of the place - your wife, honey, happens to be my daughter-"
"Don't give me that crap, we own it equally. Don't think that just because my wife bought the place in the beginning means I'm not working just as hard, if not harder than she is to keep it going-"
"If you grasp that she owns just as much of it as you do then you should realize that as her mother I have every right to come in here-"
"Being her mother isn't just a trump card for you to be able to come in here whenever you want!"
The argument continued, and after a while, while listening to ridiculous-sounding insults and each element of the argument getting more and more fickle, I realized that these two didn't actually hate each other. This was their relationship - the arguing duo. Penny and Bruce were like Zoro and Sanji. One of them were here first, alright, but that didn't mean that the other was going to give up trying to be number one.
I blinked at my realization. Yes, they were very much like a family…
"Momma-! Oh, hello there- oh, oh dear, are they fighting again?" A petite woman walked into the room through the archway that I was sitting in front of, first noticing the scene before her and then me beside her. I gave her a quick glance (so this was the fourth child, huh?), and then returned my gaze to the woman who had brought me here and the man who had let us in. Then I contemplated my answer.
Raising my eyebrows at the bickering step mother and step son, I came to the conclusion that this bickering was probably an everyday thing. Generally wanting to know the answer, I replied with my own question, "When do they not fight?
The girl stared at me. The she grinned and slapped me on the back. I cringed from the blow as she laughed full-heartedly. "I like you! You got the gist of the situation right away!" She sighed and put her hands on the back of my chair to lean on it. "I think the only time they don't argue is when we're eating. Everybody in our family enjoys a good meal, it's like taboo to bring bad feelings to a dinner table!" she chuckled again.
I rubbed the part of my back where she had hit me awkwardly. It didn't really hurt, but, heck, she was a bit full-on…
"Has she been calling him honey?"
Realizing that the woman was talking to me again, I nodded. "Uh, yeah. A lot."
"Oh, hoho, oh dear." She chuckled. "You know momma doesn't like someone when she starts calling 'em honey. She doesn't like honey at all, see. Gives her a headache." She looked at the arguing pair pityingly. "I was hoping that she'd start to stop calling him that, now, but no. My husband passed the test, after a while, but now they're so used to arguing they can't stop. Hmmm." her baby-blue eyes darted back to me and all of a sudden I felt like I was under a spotlight.
"Who're you then, huh?"
Caught off guard by the feeling of interrogation, my intellectual-mastermind-like answer was a simple "Uhhhh…"
The woman blinked at me blankly, and then went into a flurry of motion. "Oh, oh! I'm sorry! It's polite to introduce yourself before asking someone else's name, right? I'm Calista Bazyl! Call me Callie, though, everyone else does…"
My chest panged.
Calley… Calley was the name of my second fictional child.
Which was a ridiculous thing to get upset about, I told myself, even despite the pain in my chest. They were… well, not… real… per se… but… just because I had travelled to a different world… that didn't mean that I was cut off from my fictional family…
But suddenly this Callie looked so much like I thought my little Calley could look like when she grew up…
"Hey, girlie? Are you okay?" Calista furrowed her eyebrows at me. I realized that I'd zoned out for a few seconds. How rude of me. "You had a really painful look on your face just then, you know." the woman looked really worried. I shook my head at her, my eyes darting to the ground. I really disliked it when people gave me looks like that.
"Ah, sorry. I'm Elmo. Sorry… can I… is it alright if I stick with calling you Calista?"
The woman was really quick when it came to topic changes. "Mmhm! That's just fine! What's your family name, huh?"
It felt a little bittersweet to stick with the surname in my head, but at the same time it felt like the right thing to do. "Carol. Elmo Carol."
"Why do you have to stick your nose in everywhere, you old bag?"
Brute- oh god, I was doing it now too- Bruce's latest yell was quite a bit louder than the previous snipings, and it cut through our little conversation like a cleaver cuts through flesh. I saw a flicker of an emotion flash across Calista's face, telling me that she had had far more than enough of her mother and her husband's bickering.
She took a deep breath, her whole body seeming to grow taller in both height and presence as she straightened her stance and put a stern face on her features. "It's so nice to see you two getting along!"
Her voice was shrill and unpleasant, completely different to what one may expect in the usual use of such a phrase.
The mother and husband closed their mouths abruptly, paused, and then stuttered in apology, turning to the new centre of their attention dutifully.
"C-Calista!"
"Callie-"
She didn't give either of them time to come up with some kind of explanation, excuse or apology as she briskly walked towards her mother and forcibly took her hands in her own. "Momma, it's wonderful to see you, I love how great you and Bruce get on nowadays, it makes me so happy-" she cut off her own sentence and turned to her husband, putting her hands on his shoulders. "And Bruce, Bruce, it's so kind of you to let momma in and welcome our guest, making such a friendly show in front of somebody we don't even know."
The atmosphere now considerably more awkward, with the two eldest and proudest people in the room practically hanging their heads in shame from the obscure telling off and myself twitching at the table, I began to wonder if this really was a usual occurrence. I couldn't imagine that Calista liked playing the bad guy who had to tell the children off…
…but then, ask me an hour ago and I would never have thought that Penny could act like such a child. To her child's husband, and all - the awkwardness of this particular situation was stifling. If this happened every time Penny came to visit, I wouldn't… well, if I was Calista, I wouldn't want to have to deal with it. Sheesh.
Face still shining like the sun through a magnifying glass, Calista practically dragged her two family members over to the table I sat at, pushed them down into the two seats next to me, and then sat down next to me herself. "Well, thank you very much for bringing me some fruit to bake with, momma, I appreciate that…" the crate was slid to one side of the table and then put on the floor below it by the leading lady.
The other two were still sulking, giving each other darting looks that clearly read "This is all your fault.". I continued to study them as Calista moved the crate, and before I realized what I was saying I told the pair off as if they were ten-to-twelve-year-olds in scouts. "You guys are terrible, jeez, take a break from all the glaring."
Everyone paused and looked at me. My face dropped and my mind went into a frenzy of "Oh my god Elmo you did not just talk to a respectful old woman and a big beefy I-can-knock-you-flat-with-one-punch man as if they were school kids, oh my god oh my god".
Calista broke the silence with another full-blown laugh. Hitting me on the back again, she claimed, "I really like this girl!" She let out another laugh and then turned to me, asking, "Have you ever worked with kids, Carol-san?"
Bright red from the embarrassment of telling two people I didn't even really know off, I answered, "Uh, y-yeah, I used to work with a bunch of kids…"
"Haha! They're terrible, aren't they! The arguing is so petty-"
"Okay, okay, enough, we know when you're trying to make a fool of us as punishment." Penny huffed at us from across the table, leaning back in her seat with her arms crossed. I glanced at Bruce, but his face was unreadable. I was a little surprised that Penny was sort of defending him, even if it was only to save herself.
Calista gave her an unimpressed look. "I wouldn't have to treat you like a kid if you didn't act like one, momma, really." She was not impressed at all. "Okay, love, I get what you mean. But now we should really get onto why I brought this dear along with me to visit," she nodded towards me, a mischievous twinkle in her eye, "Though after what I just heard I'm not sure I should be so nice to her anymore~!"
I looked at her with an apologetic sheepish smile. "Sorry, it just came out-"
"No, no, lovey, if there's one thing you learn in this life it's that you can't regret what you say. If you hadn't meant it, you wouldn't have said it."
Bruce grunted in agreement, and Calista rolled her eyes. "Momma, stop trying to teach life lessons, I'm dying from curiosity here!"
I squirmed in my seat uncomfortably. I didn't have a clue what was going on here, only knowing that for some reason I was at the centre of attention, and that made me feel very awkward indeed. Penny just grinned at my discomfort.
"I'd like to put forward your new employee and lodger."
Everyone at the table gawked at her, including myself. Then Calista clapped her hands with a smile, at the same time that Bruce put his hands on the table and said a firm "No."
Calista and Penny turned to him with socked, disbelieving and confused eyes.
"Why the hell not?"
"What's wrong with the idea?"
Bruce's initial determination faltered slightly at the look his wife was giving him, but he kept his resolve strong anyway. "She's just a kid! And a weak-looking one at that! She wouldn't be able to work in the bakery, let alone pay rent to stay here. I don't think it's a good idea-"
"Not to mention that I can't cook to save my life." I stared at Penny with my eyebrows furrowed. This had been her plan? Her favour? Well, I didn't know what she thought she had up her sleeve, but she could have at least found out if I was fit for her majestic plan first. I couldn't help but be slightly annoyed, even if she had been doing it for my sake.
The woman didn't look at me. Instead, she turned to her daughter expectantly. Calista didn't let her down. "The job that needs doing doesn't need cooking skills, Elmo, and Bruce, I bet you anything that this girl is stronger than she looks." She sent me another beaming smile. I was starting to think that I didn't deserve all of this kindness that these women were deciding to show me. My mind then went on to the thought of karma. Was I just being prepared for a whole load of bad stuff?
Not a comforting thought.
"And anyway," Penny spoke up again, "The wages you pay your employees could cover living and eating costs, and still leave a little extra for Elmo to save up with. She's a travelling girl," the old lady winked at me, "Even if she's no good at the job, I'm sure it won't be too long before she's out of your hair."
Oi.
Bruce narrowed his eyes at me and for a moment alarm bells went flashing off around my head, "Big scary muscled man glaring at me, ohgodohgodohgod", and then his eyes relaxed and he looked at Penny, stating, "If she's not any good, I won't keep her."
Calista's face lit up and she pushed herself out of her chair to her feet. "You mean you're alright with employing her? Bruce! You won't regret this, I swear on it!" choosing to ignore her husband's suddenly unsure oh-dear-I-walked-right-into-that-one expression, Calista practically jumped over to hug him and kiss his cheek, giving a bewildered me a wink as well as giving one to her mother as well. I stared at the pair; mother and daughter, two women who seemed to be able to get things done.
Then, as Calista released her confounded husband and encouraged her mother to get up and help her make a fruit pie of some sort, we stared at each other blankly across the table. I blinked at Bruce.
"Everyday stuff, huh?" my voice high-pitched and disbelieving. I suddenly had a job and lodgings, man.
"No, not really." He seemed just as disbelieving as I did.
The two women giggled behind me.
A conspiracy, I tell you.
The next few weeks of my life proved to be, while very consistent, altogether interesting. I thanked whatever god that may be watching over me (with a side note of 'you're-still-getting-hell-to-pay') that the job I had to do - the one that Calista kept trying to convince me was easy, simple, but worth the pay - was actually as simple as she had insisted.
However. If you did it once, it was an easy job. If you did it twice, three times, maybe five times, it could still be considered as an easy job.
But if you had done it a bazillion times for the past five weeks you would agree with me that it wasn't an easy job, not at all, and that it was horribly repetitive. Without some form of chatting every half an hour or so or some sort of music playing in the background, it was incredibly boring. And it made my arms ache.
In a bakery, I'd guess that you have the people who mix the ingredients together and make the initial dough, those who put the dough in some kind of giant fridge to set, those who take out the set dough and give it to the people with the important job of shaping the dough, and then the shaped dough was put onto a just-under-two-metre-wide metal tray and put into the furnace-oven-thing. There were people looking after the oven-furnace, and then people who were taking out the finished, fresh and ready-to-eat bread out somewhere else.
My job - my interesting, wonderful job - was to carry a tray of bread from a gigantic rack that was next to the bread-shapers and take it to the oven, put it in the correct place, and then repeat.
And repeat.
And repeat.
So much fun.
Like I'd mentioned earlier, if perhaps there had been some music playing, it would have been more bearable. Perhaps if there were people close by to chat with, even if only for short wisps of conversation, it would be more bearable. All I could think was that no wonder this job had had a vacancy, people must go crazy out of their minds doing this bloody profession. Anyone who could stick it would either have to be incredibly optimistic or terribly dull. Did I mention that carrying metal trays full of dough was murder for your arms? (I was gonna end up like macho man at this rate.)
Mind you, from what I had seen, the other bread-to-furnace people, and even the furnace-to-elsewhere people didn't seem horribly bright. Muscly, but not cheerful. Dull and grey stained clothes, slouched stance, blank or pissed off expressions…
…they all fit the bill, but none of them seemed to be able to give any good conversation. Pity, really.
But that didn't matter anyway because for some reason my furnace was completely out of the way to the rest of them. I practically had my own private oven.
This would've been great if it was winter, but it wasn't, it was spring or summer and very warm and the heat was very uncomfortable, thankyouverymuch.
…Moving away from boring topics such as jobs, as much time as my work schedule took away from me, towards the end of every week I'd have the Friday afternoon off and then the Saturday completely free. It was probably a good thing that my days off stopped at the Sunday, because I think that if I knew that I was off work on a Sunday then I'd probably go into a comatose state of sleeeeeeeeeppppp. Sunday was sleep day, and it always had been for me. Well, until I travelled to a different world. And got a job.
Being just as slow at noticing the state of my clothes as Penny had been at realizing how thin I had been (perhaps a family trait), Calista had practically dragged me to my new room, thrown me in, dashed off, and then come back and chucked some cloth at me, throwing my flat-cap off my head.
After wrangling the fabric off my face and from around my neck, I realized that the spontaneous cloth-throwing had actually been a throwing of clothes. Calista had smiled at me and told me to use the bath in the bathroom to clean up. Then something about the trousers, but I didn't catch it.
After washing all of the dirt out of my hair, I felt a hundred times better. However, it was only after I'd put my glasses, my watch, my new clothes and the flat-cap back on that I can say that I honestly felt right. The trousers were the right size to fit me, but the leg length was way too short, so I rolled them up into knee-length shorts. My purple vans shoes were tattered and more brown than purple, but I couldn't bring myself to not wear them. My new shirt was a white woman's blouse, which I rolled the sleeves of up to past my elbows. Somehow, the flat-cap just… fitted.
I almost looked like a new person, with my hair all wavy without the use of straighteners. I definitely felt like something was different, but in a good way.
I was thrilled to think that I almost looked like a pirate.
As I'd said before, I got Friday afternoons and Saturdays off. You'd think that I might take this time to immediately dash off into the town and explore.
However. I was no Luffy. I couldn't let myself just run off into god-knows-where - I'd get lost, and not have a clue how to get back.
That's why for the first half-a-day-off I had I just wandered around the house part of the bakery, basically making a nuisance of myself. But that was okay, because Bruce worked in the Bakery overseeing everything all the time, and it was actually quite rare to see Calista in the house before the sun had started to set.
If anything, I was only being a nuisance to myself.
However, by the morning of the second day off, Calista had spotted me lounging in one of the dining chairs and had figured out my dilemma.
"You wanna come around the town with me?"
Calista's 'going around the town' basically consisted of stopping to chat with friends, bargaining with stall owners, and discussing deliveries with shopkeepers. Even still, I learnt the basic layout of the town through her pointings and labellings. By the end of the day I could connect one street to another and could direct us by myself back to the bakery. I knew at least a little more about the town, and felt a little bit more comfortable around the buildings that I was now less lost amongst.
After that, my days off were spent exploring, widening my knowledge of what was where in the town little by little. I became familiar with some shops; books shops, art shops (I bought myself a sketchbook and pencil almost straight away - going for so long without drawing had been almost painful), I had even ventured into one or two more approachable-looking clothes shops. But, as you would expect, there were a few shops that I purposely avoided, too, such as more extravagant and intimidating clothes shops, as well as all of the gambling and betting buildings. Not that there were really many of those.
But one shop, in particular, bothered me. Because I wanted to go in there. But somehow it was intimidating. Whenever I went near it I didn't see anyone going in or coming out, and because of all of the objects piled up against the window - chairs, old toy sets, a rocking horse, some more chairs, a couple of boxes - it was impossible to see if anyone was inside.
And as much as I didn't want to, because the stuff inside the shop looked cool and anything but junk, I had no choice but to call it a junk shop because that was what the shop was labelled as. "The Junk Shop". Pretty. Enticing. I was at a loss as to how such a name couldn't attract hundreds, if not millions of customers.
Really.
…But all the same. There really was something about this little, tucked-in-out-of-the-way junk shop. Ever since I had first spotted it, I had thought about entering every time I'd passed it. But the thought of nobody going in or out freaked me out a little. What if the place was actually closed? What if it was a drug-sellers or something? What if people were lured in there only to get killed by an axe murderer?
Maybe I was just being stupid.
From across the street I stared at the shop. It was an epic stare-down between an animate, needing-to-blink-soon object and an inanimate, I-don't-even-have-eyes building.
The atmosphere was electric.
It was now, or it was never.
…or next week, but- no, no, shush - now, or never.
I walked across the street and entered the shop.
*Sigh* Yeah, this is a bit of an odd chapter, and I'm definitely going to have to do a catch-up chapter when I come back from camp, because now I'm DEFINITELY behind and that is no good, nosiree.
So, uh, yeah, camp. I'm going camping from this Saturday to next Saturday now, and so don't expect a chapter next Tuesday and don't be too hopeful for one the Tuesday after that, either, because all I'll probably want to do after coming home from a scout camp full of a bunch of kids who don't listen to me very well is sleep. Unless, of course, I break my leg or something like that and come home from camp early, by which case, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
As for concept art, I'm going to stop telling you that it's the next chapter, oh wait, the chapter after that, or maybe the next one because I'm terrible with this sort of thing. I'll tell you what, I'll tell you when it's actually up. Is that okay with you guys? Cool. XD
Hm. So. I'm leaving you with some sort of cliffhanger and Elmo telling herself to shush while having an epic stare down with a building. Sounds, uh, good to me. Have a good few weeks without me, guys. Until the next chapter!