Starting a Bakery on Sorq

 Quotha comrade T—

Let's say I'm a fairly typical citizen in the second-largest city in the world. I find myself from a young age just enthralled with the baking process. How do I get to make my living baking?

Sorqite cities are pretty diverse in terms of lifestyles, markets, and ways of going about the fundamentals of life. The polis with a hinterland around it is the most common regional unit* ; within each city there is a tendency toward lots of neighborhoods that are colonies or developments of other city-states and their cultures, so each polis is like a bunch of modules connected together in a big arcology or coral reef of structures.

Almost any craft or profession is going to have a plethora of venerable guilds, unions, schools, and fraternities practicing it, doing a trade well and making an art and a performance out of it being widely valued and seen as a good use of one's life; a respectable way of life.

The traditional guilds and such are cultural institutions, but in the biggest cities, and plenty of small ones too that want to be hip or stand out or attract travellers and pilgrims, there is room for independent operators to set up shop and do what they want. It is easy to build or extrude a new structure from existing living buildings by making an arrangment with whoever controls that building and any oversight bodies, be they living officials or automata in service of the city or temple.

Sorqites have many uses for the magical energies bleeding out through other dimensions, augmented and shaped by vast ancient machines within the planet, most of them practical, and keeping water pure and crops plentiful is of only slightly less concern than shielding the land from the sullen outbursts and fits of pique that Bale, the old red sun, throws at his orbitting child.

So basic necessities, in the civilized equatorial belt, are widely available, nobody goes hungry without ascetic intention, and there is social credit for amateurs and punk kids to try things like baking or couture.

*The main alternative to the autonomous city-state is the great temples, the independent temples and sacral networks; the description of which must wait for another time.