The Nagisa network had, in the past two weeks, achieved a level of logistical coordination that Jude found genuinely impressive despite himself.
The mechanics were simple and devastating: as soon as anyone in the group chat spotted the cart, they pinned the location and the surrounding area began filling with people within three minutes. Not a trickle — a wave, and then another wave behind it, and then a third wave composed of people who'd heard about the first two waves and decided they couldn't afford to miss out. Students he'd never seen before had started appearing, apparently travelling in from neighboring areas on the strength of secondhand reports about the nikuman. The situation had the specific energy of a video game spawn event where the density of enemies scales with the player's success.
He'd joined the group chat himself to get control of it.
"I'll have ninety percent of each day's batch allocated to the group in advance," he posted. "Send one person to collect. Pay at pickup, take it and go. Do not crowd the cart, do not stand in the road, do not make a scene. If the cart gets shut down by the police for causing a public disturbance, you all lose your allocation. Questions?"
"Why only ninety percent?"
"Don't ask. Think of it as promoting Japanese food culture internationally. The remaining ten percent is for the general public."
"I want to formally protest this policy."
"Noted. Protest denied. Go eat your buns."
The system worked. It worked partly because he'd invested in Master-Level Culinary Arts, which had dramatically improved both the quality ceiling and the throughput speed of everything he produced — what had taken a full day of preparation now took a morning, which gave him the afternoon for other things. It worked partly because the regulars, having secured guaranteed access, had stopped needing to chase the cart across the city and had returned to something resembling normal behaviour.
The rest of his time he spent on the three-wheeled vehicle, working through Central City's neighborhoods at the unhurried pace of a man with no fixed destination.
He pulled up the system dashboard during a slow mid-morning stretch between neighborhoods.
Three hundred thousand AP, net, after three weeks. After the Master Culinary investment, the skill purchases, and ingredient costs. The 10x smuggling multiplier was doing exactly what it had promised — every dollar of honest work converted at a rate that made Gotham's asset point accumulation look like collecting loose change. By the time Barry Allen woke up, he'd be sitting on something considerably more interesting.
"System. If something goes wrong during a smuggling assignment — if I'm killed, for example — can I re-enter the same world?"
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION If you have not been recognized as part of this world's timeline during your initial transit, a second smuggling attempt into the same world carries significantly elevated detection risk. If caught and deported on a second attempt, re-entry to that specific world is permanently barred.
"So don't get killed. Understood."
He browsed the shop and purchased an Immortal Totem without deliberating — the kind of item he'd been meaning to replace since Sudan, and the kind of item that felt foolish to put off purchasing in a universe where the Reverse Flash was a background variable. After that outlay, fifty thousand AP remained in reserve.
Fifty thousand for emergencies. The rest is forward momentum.
He filed it away and turned his attention back to the street.
The couple arrived at the cart in the middle of a quiet stretch, mid-morning, when most of the student rush had already cleared out. They were mid-forties, clearly married, clearly in the middle of an ongoing argument that both of them were pretending was good-natured.
"Elizabeth," the man was saying, with the patient tone of someone who has deployed that particular tone many times before, "I do have a significant amount of work today. The research timeline doesn't—"
"The research timeline." The woman — Elizabeth — repeated this with affectionate contempt. "Mr. Danton's research timeline. The one that will revolutionize medicine and reshape human history and presumably also explain why he hasn't taken me to lunch in six weeks."
Danton sighed. It was a sigh that had lost the argument before it was finished.
"All right, Elizabeth."
"That's all I wanted to hear." She patted his arm and turned to the cart. "Now. What is all this?"
Jude looked at them. He looked at the steamer basket, the display tray, the carefully arranged rows of wagashi he'd spent the morning producing. He looked back at the couple.
I am here to sell food, he thought, not to be an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of someone else's marriage.
Danton leaned forward to examine the display with the careful interest of a man who approaches everything methodically. "These are — food? Some kind of pastry?"
"Wagashi," Jude said. "Traditional Japanese confectionery. Two savory, two sweet."
He pointed along the tray.
"Gyūtan miso senbei — ox tongue and miso, rice-based, crisp. Kakuni puff pastry — braised pork filling, flaky crust. Those are the savory options." He moved to the other end. "Sakura mochi — cherry blossom rice cake with red bean paste, soft. Momiji manjū — red bean paste in a shortbread casing shaped like a maple leaf. Those are the sweet."
Elizabeth's eyes moved along the tray with an expression Jude recognized immediately — the expression of someone who has no intention of leaving without buying something, and is simply deciding how much.
"I've heard that word before," she said. "Wagashi. It's Japanese, isn't it."
"It is."
"How much?"
"Five dollars each, across all four types. The savory and sweet are priced the same — the ingredient costs differ, but the craftsmanship is equivalent, so I simplified it." Jude shrugged. "If you like savory, start with the first two. If you like sweet, start with the last two. If you're not sure, the momiji manjū is the most approachable."
"That doesn't sound expensive at all for handcrafted work."
"Back home, street wagashi is affordable by design. If the people who actually live and work nearby can't buy it, you've failed at the fundamental point of having a stall."
Danton had picked up a sakura mochi and was looking at it with the expression of a man whose research focus was now entirely unclear to him. "Two of each," he said. "To start."
They were not, as it turned out, to stop at two of each.
The Master-Level Culinary skill justified its price within the first five minutes of the tasting. The gyūtan miso senbei delivered a clean savory punch — the rice cracker providing structure, the miso rounding into something more complex than salt alone, the rendered ox tongue fat giving it a depth that lingered. The kakuni puff pastry flaked at a touch, the braised pork filling releasing steam and the specific warm smell of soy and mirin. The sakura mochi was soft in the way that good mochi always is, the cherry flavoring delicate rather than perfumed, the red bean paste made from scratch that morning with a texture that stopped just short of silky and landed somewhere more interesting.
Elizabeth ate her way through the tasting tray with increasing speed and decreasing concern for decorum.
Danton, who had been holding a sakura mochi with the focused attention he probably usually gave to laboratory samples, looked up. "We'll take ten of each."
"Credit card?"
"Cash only. Small business."
He dug through his wallet, came up slightly short, and looked genuinely put out about it. "I'd like more of these. Can I find you again?"
"You might," Jude said. "I move around. Keep your eyes open."
Elizabeth, already on her third one, did not appear to be listening to any part of this conversation. She had the look of someone who had solved a problem they hadn't known was bothering them.
Danton paid in cash, accepted the bag, and allowed his wife to take his arm as they turned to leave.
"Come back soon," Jude called after them.
Elizabeth waved over her shoulder without turning around, already talking about where they should go for lunch, which Danton was already beginning to object to on the grounds of his research timeline, which Elizabeth was already dismissing on the grounds of the sakura mochi having proven that the afternoon could make room for pleasant things.
Jude watched them go, then turned back to his display tray.
A pleasant couple, he concluded. Mildly insufferable, but pleasant.
He restocked the tray and waited for the next customer.