The hungry birds in the sky pecked away at the bread. The presence of the birds was an independent event unrelated to the travails of the children: it could not be foreseen and would have not made getting loss more or less probable if Hansel had used stones. But with bread, alas, that was not the case.
"Don't the leaves of the trees look strange?" said Gretel. The conifers of the evergreen trees around the children were organized in perfect Pascal's triangles. The strangeness of the land of probability was confirmed when they came upon a gingerbread house covered with chocolate shingles and lollypops in every permutation of the colors of the rainbow (Hansel and Gretel calculated the possible combinations). Had the children been less hungry and weary they would have further calculated a subset of probabilities that the individual who owned such an abode was likely to be a witch, and that the outcome of events was likely to be ugly, but they were too hungry and simply dug in to the bounty before their eyes.
Even the theoretical probability that the house was owned by a witch was high, given...
And sure enough, witch popped out her head, and demanded the children pay for the shingles of peppermint and the windowpanes of spun sugar they had ripped from the structure of her home.
To extract payment, the witch, a clever baker and sorceress who had some problems with probability put the children to work. She gave them some marketing data and demanded that they conduct trials, based upon past sales forecasts, as to which products were likely to succeed in different markets of the country. The children toiled day and night, hunched over the computer as the perused spreadsheets, attempting to determine if gingerbread would sell well in the south, or mint chocolate chip cookies would be popular in New York City. The children's natural mathematical prowess ensured that the witch's confectionary business became a shining success, and eventually Hansel and Gretel branched out to sell their own line of gingerbread men and houses.
THE END
