Crumbs of a Plot: Day 2

Friday 2^nd November

Work was on the forefront of her mind on Friday as Tasha entered Crumbs. Three days out of seven she worked in a bar, running the bottles and glasses back to be washed before they were used again. When it was quiet during those shifts the older, more experienced bartender helped her learn the tricks of the trade and memorise the cocktails they sold. Until she actually remembered and could mix every cocktail that they sold, she was unfortunately stuck as a runner or ‘Barback.’

The job itself wasn’t bad, the pay was half decent, the hours allowed her to do pretty much whatever she wanted during the day and she could wear whatever she liked as long as she wasn’t showing her underwear off to the world. Borderlands wasn’t even a huge bar. It got busy on the weekends and edging her way between the customers was a little less than fun when they got drunk enough to play ‘grope the barback.’

Still she should not complain. At least she had a job. With the way the climate was at the moment, putting up with a couple of arse slaps a night was a small price to pay, especially when she could then get the bouncer who hovered on the door, making sure that underage members of the public did not enter the bar after a certain time of night, to kick out the customers in question if they did it too frequently or were too insistent. It was generally a good sign of when they had had too much to drink.

Settling at ‘her’ table once again, she made a note of the fact that she was not the only to be hiding behind a large cup of coffee, a couple of cakes and a computer screen. She could not help but wonder if the other person was a Wrimo like her, then shook her head at her foolishness and settled in to write her story. It was not as easy as they day before. There was shouting coming from the kitchens out back and while most of it was not hard to ignore, there were one or two occasions where it got so loud that it caught the attention of everyone in the ‘public’ part of the bakery and Morgan had to step into the back.

The third time it happened, Tasha had been stuck over how to  get a pair of characters to interact without resorting to locking the pair of them in a room together. She had not quite realised how difficult it would be considering their different backgrounds, skill sets and timetables until she had had to write it realistically and understood properly that really, given everything, the pair of them should never meet.

Poking at the part of the story she was trying to write until it did what she wanted it to, she happened to be looking up when one of the bakers came storming out of the kitchens and proceeded to start shouting at one of the ladies behind the counter. The lady in question, Morgan’s younger sister, Dee, started shouting back, and though it took a moment for her to decipher what was being said, Tasha managed to grasp what the argument was about.

“You gave us the wrong details!” The baker was yelling, furious beyond reason, “The client came in and pitched a fit!”

“I took them exactly as I was given.” Dee screeched back, “They wanted a red velvet sponge with strawberries and cream filling,”

“The customer was getting the cake for her son” The baker snarled, “She told you he’s allergic to strawberries!”

“That’s not what I was told, Steffan!” Dee snapped, “She specifically asked for...”

“She asked for raspberry and specifically asked for no strawberries to be prepared anywhere near the cake!” Steffan raged back, “We could have killed him! Get! Out!”

“Wha...what?” Dee yelped, shocked.

“Get out of my bakery! Now!” Steffan ordered.

“You can’t fire me!” Dee’s piercing tones caused everyone who had been trying to ignore the ongoing ‘conversation’ to look in their direction.

“I can and I have. Get. Out!” Dee fled at the look of pure, unadulterated rage on the baker’s face and Steffan stalked into the kitchens but not before yelling something about free drinks for anyone served by the stupid bint.

This included Tasha who got a free cup of coffee out of the mess. She watched the customer in question get led to the booth where the consultations for the unique, speciality cakes were held and between word sprints Tasha watched them ply the angry woman with food and drink as the bakery worked fast to provide a replacement for the cake that had been tainted.

She wasn’t sure who she felt more sorry for, the woman, the baker, Steffan, or Dee. The poor customer was frantic. The party was this afternoon and there was very little time for a new cake to be completed. Steffan was probably frantic too, his worker had provided the wrong information and now he was scrambling to provide what would probably be a much lower quality version of the cake he had already prepared, using sponge had prepared for a different cake, and she could hear the sounds of complaints coming out of the kitchen now. This was all Dee’s fault of course. If the woman had just taken the order correctly none of this would have happened. However Tasha could not help but feel sorry for her. After all she had seemed genuinely surprised when Steffan had told her the order was wrong and it was hard to find another job, especially when your previous place of employment would not give you a reference.

Still it all worked out fine. Tasha happened to be at the counter when Steffan called the woman over, offered her a partial refund and showed her the cake. It was gorgeous, a round cake covered in green fondant icing with cars made out of icing adorning the sides and a road on the top with a car made out of modelling chocolate ‘driving’ down it. The grass had been piped on in green royal icing and there were even little street lights.

To say Tasha was impressed was an understatement. After years of store bought cakes she had forgotten how good one of these cakes could be. A lot of work probably went into them and Steffan looked tired but as the customer practically danced out of the store with her cake his face lit up and a calm seemed to settle. It was intriguing to watch and as she settled back at her table, it got her thinking about how things going wrong could help things go much better afterwards.

With that in mind she rewrote the events she was planning, editing them so that things went wrong and it was a comedy of errors that brought the two lead characters together in time for the ‘real’ plot to kick off. It was not quite what she had had in mind when she had first thought about this scene, but it worked much better than any contrived reason she had thought of before.

This was one of the reasons she preferred writing in public as opposed to curling up at home and ignoring the outside world. There was inspiration that could be missed if you shied away from what went on around you. Answers to problems that could cause the dreaded writer’s block could be surpassed with a little observation and occasionally a random conversation with a stranger.

At least Tasha always found that it helped. She supposed that it was different for different people but her muses never worked as well as they did as when she was sat in some corner of some tiny cafe and letting the noise wash over her.

Making a note in the pad of paper containing her entire collection of notes about the change in the meeting, she swiftly worked her way through the conversation of the two lead characters. They were stand offish at first, the not-so noble Prince and the golden hearted but hot-tempered servant girl, and while it read awkwardly to start with it kind of felt natural for it to be. After al it wasn’t like a commoner would be friendly towards someone of the upper caste, especially with the reputation that Tasha was writing for him.

Still as the story progressed, as the Prince realised that the cushy lifestyle he had lived his whole life was nothing but a shield to prevent him from realising what life was actually like for the people and was forced to actually realise that in the ‘real world’ things were not just handed to you on a silver platter, and the servant girl lost some of her dislike of the Prince and taught him to understand the people, something he would need to do to be a good King, the pair would warm up to each other.

At least that was what Tasha hoped.

It was an overdone plot, she knew it, but it was something she had been planning for a rather long time now, ever since she had blown last year’s attempt by getting distracted midway through with the latest in a game series she had been following since her early teenage years. That and having a huge amount of reading material had made it easy to work out how to run the story and how to avoid being too much like every other rendition of the tale. It was not going to be easy to stand apart but she was going to try at least.  

With the problem of how to get the pair to meet worked out and the story flowing swiftly again, Tasha’s hands flew across the keyboard as fast as she could manage, the ideas flowing much faster than the words could appear on the page. It was always fun when that happened, when the writing became a whirling dervish of literary madness. Reaching the goal at the end of one of those crazed writing sessions always left Tasha with a buzz that would generally carry over to the next day and help boost the creative process when she picked up from where she left.

With her earlier distraction, it had been a good thing that she had suddenly gone into speed typing mode. She barely managed to write the lower limit of what she was supposed to do a day, though she had created more than enough of a buffer for herself before she had left the previous day, before the alarm on her phone went off.

Tasha glowered at the tiny noise making machine and she was not the only one. The obnoxious beeping sound caught the attention of the few patrons that were still here this close to closing, including the other girl who was still tapping away at her keyboard even as her eyes flickered over to Tasha who was scrambling to hit the off button and make the annoying beeping noise stop.

“Just five more minutes.” Tasha muttered to herself as she tossed the mobile phone, which was now on silent, into her backpack, deciding that since she did not start work until after nine at night she did not need to leave the bakery before she was ready to do so or the bakery closed, whichever came first. She was there, in fact, until Morgan had, very apologetically reminded her that she could come back the following day if she desired but the cafe had to close as they needed to count up the money in the till and someone needed to go home and check that Dee was okay after the earlier row.

Still unsure whether she felt sorry for Dee, who had, after all, been the one at fault for the earlier explosion behind the counter, Tasha managed to get everything into her backpack and switch her shoes, trading her nice sensible trainers for her sturdy but fashionable boots that went much better with the outfit she was wearing and were suitable for work. Then she exited the bakery to the sounds of a new argument starting up in the kitchens, looking for somewhere a little closer to Borderlands in order to hunker down and get a proper meal before her shift started.