When a supercilious Municipal Council aide named Sub-Clerk Perewick arrives to supply order masks for Thursday’s check and sneers at sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye as a ‘costume maker,’ Jo calmly refuses to approve his mask until he completes the physical fit-check. Standing inside the bakehouse courtyard in front of Widow Orla’s flour-test door, Sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye and Sub-Clerk Perewick set Perewick’s gold-laced town supply order clipboard and a three-legged pine milking stool set squarely in the middle of the flour-test room where the lantern light fell cleanest across the work surface. Meanwhile, Master Tailor Dima Fen and Senior Engineer Korr Var checked the entry under the heading of The Council Aide Who Called Jo a Costume Maker.
The technical core of the council aide who called jo a costume maker needed insisting that an official’s velvet collar doesn’t alter the anatomy of his nasal bridge or exempt him from the three-minute dynamic seal test. 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.
