Clodia is looking at me with a frown.

"Explain."

"Altamura bread is a special type of bread made where my... ancestors came from. It has a thicker crust, a stronger 'mollica'—that's the soft inside of the bread. It's made from what you people call hard wheat, basically. You just need to refine the grains into finer and finer flour, or semolina—you choose the nomenclature. What matters is that the inner structure of the bread will make it last much longer than your normal bread. And the thick crust itself will act as a better protection against the inside becoming stale. When you use beer yeast, bread goes stale fast. But if you let the bread naturally develop its own yeast, we can create what's called a mother yeast. That's a mass of fermenting bread that we will use to make the bread rise. It takes much longer, and the overall process is more energy-intensive, but the end result is going to not only taste much better than any other bread you tried, but also keep for an entire week while maintaining a good consistency."

"How long until those things are ready, then?" Clodia points at several semi-open glass containers full of starter dough.

"I ground some of the semolina in each of them, and I'll need to add more each day. Anywhere between two and ten days to get a good starter. Once it's good, I'll slowly enlarge it to get the necessary quantity for a baking complex. It's going to take a while to select the right strains to make this kind of bread. Ten days to have the first loaf, give or take, a month before we have enough to mass produce it."

Clodia looks at me and then at Flaminia.

"What about the other thing, the beer one?"

"Oh, that's already rising," I move onto another table where wet cloths are covering the tops of some wooden bowls.

"Look," I say, uncovering one of the doughs.

Clodia's eyebrows snap up, and she raises the bowl closer to her face with her muscular arms. She gives it a sniff and frowns.

"This smells different than normal bread."

"It does. It will give quite a different taste as well. Sometimes people put it on top of stuff as seasoning—that's a terrible idea, though. Please don't do that."

Clodia goes on to check each bowl, seeing that pretty much all the dough has risen; some better than others, obviously.

"In my office," she says, as soon as she's done examining everything. When Flaminia steps forward, Clodia shoots her a scary glance. "You stay here. Keep an eye on everything. Put the barrels behind locked doors. If that slut Camilla gets her hands on this, I'll wring your neck."

...

Sitting across the desk, Clodia joins her hands into a thinking pose and rests her elbows on the wooden surface. Even though this woman could pass for a bodybuilder, she's strikingly beautiful. She has these thick eyelashes that flutter like excited butterflies every time she gets angry.

But what she is, even more than beautiful, is competent. She is taking her time to evaluate the kind of discovery I just dunked in her lap. Again, it's super weird that they never found out about leavening by themselves. I blame skills: without skills, people have to adapt and learn. With skills, you kind of point your hand at something, and boom, done. It's similar to how in Harry Potter movies, mages are fascinated by Human technology.

Also, I don't know how it got this clichéd, but the fact that Clodia is clearly obsessed with pink stuff is so damn funny. The pink rolling-pin logo of Happy Bakery is delightful. But even more so, it makes this scary woman much more approachable.

"I had my mother draft a contract for the kind of special work you are doing. This is it, you sign this and—"

"Oh, no," I shoot to the balls of my feet as soon as she gets the paperwork out. "I don't do paperwork."

"What in the rotting roots of the World's Tree do you mean you don’t do paperwork?"

"I can't handle contracts," I say, my hands raised, palms outstretched.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

"Are you playing with my ears, Luciani?"

"Nopity-nope. If I touch one of those, I might faint."

Clodia has already taken out a truth-stone, and it flashes... green, baby! Yoohoo for mental illnesses!

"This is..." She looks extremely confused.

"Can I just give you my word? With all these truth-stones going around, isn't that as good as a contract?"

"Technically, yes," Clodia sighs. "But you need a motive to bust out a truth-stone. Do you even know their etiquette?"

"Absolutely not," I smile.

The big woman gets up, clearly upset. She gestures to follow her, and that's what I do. We get out of the office and go to a small room where employees can eat during breaks. Happy Bakery is insanely huge, trust me. Perhaps I'm used to the terrible square footage prices of NYC, but this place could house four restaurants and more.

Clodia gets a few meat pies and snaps her fingers. "[Kitchen: Preheat]. [Always Fresh]."

Suddenly, the two small pies are fuming in front of my eyes, and the doughy crust looks much... crustier.

"Do you actually need to snap your fingers?" I ask as I put the fork through the pie. It's getting dark, and I have effectively skipped lunch— well, I slept through it, to be precise.

"No. You don't need to speak your skills, nor do you need to... wait, haven't you gotten your own skills?"

"Nope," I say with my mouth absolutely full of the delightful pie. "I've got nothing."

Clodia frowns so deeply that I'm afraid her face might actually fall on the table at any moment now.

"Have you refused the class?"

"Nope. Haven't gotten any notifications... why?"

"You... that is..."

Big bad Clodia seems at a loss for words.

"I should ask my mother. She knows more about skills than me; damn [Merchants]."

"Your mother is a [Merchant]?"

"Retired now. But she's still pretty famous around Amorium."

"Cool, cool, cool," I respond.

"Anyway, Joey. Truth-stones are banned from most personal relationships and a good chunk of transactions. People still use them in their day-by-day, especially store-owners and [Merchants], but if you catch them, you could report them to the Watch. You can only use a truth-stone in public and as long as the other party consents."

"How come you're telling me this?"

"It's better that you know your rights. You can refuse truth-stones on you in almost any case, apart from the Watch questioning you. But the Watch routinely undergoes questioning for unsolicited use of truth-stones too. The military is straight-out banned from using them outside their barracks. That's the Watch for you. They don't want non-Watch personnel abusing the power of truth-stones. They are almost foolproof. And there are higher rarity ones, attuned by great [Enchanters], that are essentially impossible to lie to..."

Clodia leaves the conversation hanging for a second before she actually takes out her truth-stone. "Sorry about not telling you before. I didn't know if you could be trusted."

"No trouble," I say, still busy eating.

"Can I ask you some other questions under truth-stone?"

"Go ahead."

"How come you are afraid of paperwork?"

"Do you know what anxiety is?"

Clodia shakes her head.

"Ok, if you are in a forest infested by whatever monsters you have around here, you wouldn't just jump into any clearing or run around willy-nilly, right?"

Clodia nods.

"Well, that's because you know there might be danger around you. Foreseeing danger is anxiety. It's completely normal in most cases. Sometimes," I say, pointing a thumb at my chest, "your brain works weirdly, and you might think that there's a monster behind every door in your house. That paralyzes you."

Green, green.

"My father was a veteran of war," Clodia suddenly says. "He used to wake up screaming, clutching his mace. Once, he almost brained my mother. He died from it."

I nod carefully. "I'm sorry about that. What you are describing is not exactly the same. Let's say it's similar."

"Would you mind explaining?"

"Sure. There's not much more to it than what I’ve said, honestly. Sometimes, your fears get bigger than they should, and instead of slowly improving, they might get worse. I have done some... work," I don't think she knows what therapy is, "on this issue."

"With a [Healer]?"

"You could say so. A [Healer] without the class. Anyway, there are some things that cause this reaction in me. They make me feel... doom?"

"I know what doom is," Clodia says with a scoff.

"Yo, I didn't mean to be demeaning," I say, raising my arms.

Clodia just stares at me.

I get from the posture, the slight aggressiveness, and everything that telling her about how my brain works might have reminded her of her father too much. On top of that, people who don't know anything about mental issues have delusional thoughts that now that they know something about it, stuff could have gone differently. If I have learned anything from my years on Earth is that that's not the average outcome.

"So, yeah. Big feeling of doom and stuff like that. If I touch a contract, I start thinking that something is going to happen to me without me being able to do anything about it. I can be read some stuff out loud, but even that triggers me a lot. There are certain processes in your head that just go boom, and you find yourself staring at the ceiling after passing out. Oh, right. I can't drive... carriages? Yeah. Carriages. We have other types of carriages where I come from. But yeah. Driving stuff is another no-no."

By the time we are done eating, Clodia has mostly kept to herself after I explained to her how my anxiety works. She didn't really take it well. Meh, I don't blame her. Being aware of all this stuff is probably much worse than ignorance.

"So, what are we going to do?" I ask, giving her a smile.

"Your stupidity means we can't make contracts," Clodia says with a shake of her head. "I'll take your word for now. We'll have to draft some papers if we want to keep collaborating, though. Perhaps, we'll hire someone to deal with that on your behalf. Someone you trust."

"Sure, why not."