In the enclosed, windowless dry store-room behind Widow Orla’s bakehouse on Fish Street, the immediate matter of the flour-dust fit-check in the dry store-room centered upon a pair of baker’s hand-bellows loaded with finely sifted white barley flour and a dark-blue slate mirror. Before deploying the masks to the eastern drain crews, Jo and Dima run a visible white flour-dust fit-check test inside Widow Orla’s dry store-room so every worker can see the seal hold with their own eyes. While Jo Saye, Dima Fen, and Foreman Eren Tal examined the physical evidence at hand, Widow Orla, Hesta, and Bessa Marr kept the workshop register open so every measurement and spoken condition could be entered without embellishment.
The technical core of the flour-dust fit-check in the dry store-room needed having each masked worker step up and down on a wooden box, turn their head side to side, and read aloud from a chalk slate for three minutes inside a suspended cloud of white baker’s flour before untying the mask in front of a mirror. Throughout this phase of the cross-threshold collaboration between Jo Saye and Master Tailor Dima Fen, the crew held fast to building layered cloth, wet ash, and wool-grease baffles against invisible cellar damp. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
