"Can you tell me about where we are?" she says as Satenag pokes her head in.

Satenag blinks.

She explains about being near a lake, says a direction word, and then talks about what is ... probably a region? "Marnesi".

Cynthia gives Satenag a thumbs up. (...how the hell is she supposed to get the boatloads of uranium she'd want to start escaping the misery of being kept warm by poisonous coal and wood! Agh)

Satenag waits a moment longer to see if Cynthia will say anything more.

Cynthia remains quiet after getting Satenag's answer.

She returns to the porch.

A moment later, a set of footsteps depart, and then things are truly quiet.

The fire crackles a little.

Hmm... she knows, barely, how a generator works. And how important hydropower keeps being today! But ahh, of course you need a magnet in a generator... and she doesn't know where they are either!

Today is a grey and drizzly day in a week of grey and drizzly days. Around her, the villagers go about their business. Penþa sits on the porch in case she needs anything, spinning with a drop-spindle.

The fire burns lower, and the wind creeps through the cracks in the walls.

Eventually, the dinner bell chimes over the village.

...plastic insulation isn't very hard when you have any plastic to begin with. But for that you need oil which only a few places have. And steelworking is the real magic behind everything else.

That's it. Screw knowing about uranium, Cynthia was being impatient. Steel pipes and steel plates, how to make many of them, that's the thing to know. Copper is easy, magnets lie on the ground, steel must be made. Power?

It can show her how to make steel! Does she want to stop having an intuition for nuclear chemistry, for what thought-shaping abilities it can give her, for what people are saying, or for how to phrase things?

Her knowledge of nuclear chemistry is rather very irrelevant to her current and foreseeable situation, so steel knowledge should take its place!

It can do that!

Steel is iron and carbon, of course, although one can also alloy in some of these other things. She gets some intuition about when you would want to use different varieties of steel, and which ones are easiest to produce. Here's the difference between high-carbon and low-carbon steel, here's how it feels to work it, and so on.

...she has to get some clothes at a soon-ish point, she thinks. And a waterwheel to work steel without destroying everyone's muscles. How will she explain... "Is there a smith in the village?" Cynthia asks Penþa .

What a strange visitor.

Yes, Penþa replies. There is a smith in the village. Something about making nails, and maybe horses?

"I should wear more than this I think. Certainly with the smith."

Penþa is obviously a bit baffled about why she would want to wear clothes specifically with the smith. But it was predictable that she would want to wear clothes generally. They fish around in their bag and come up with a spare skirt, which they offer to her.

The skirt is a faded brown, clearly patched, but it wraps around and then cinches with a drawstring, so it should fit her fine.

Cynthia nods, before trying to make her way over to the smith, seeing what the tools and materials are like, seeing what her knowledge lets her put together and do.

... well, Penþa will follow her, and point her in the direction of one of the buildings.

The forge is half-open, the better to tolerate the high heat, and currently occupied by a tall, broad-shouldered man wearing a skirt and leather apron. He's currently drawing cherry-red iron through a draw plate to make rods.

Cynthia's steelmaking knowledge gives her the wordless intuition that this isn't very pure iron.

There was a cool technique that made super-pure iron that was mixed with ultra-high carbon steel to make the perfect steel mix! Is anything like that much better way possible? What has to be built first to do that?

Well, the most pure form of iron requires a complicated refinery process with lots of additional steps. But she could make the iron better by burning off some of the impurities. If she made a reinforced crucible for it, and heated the iron samples in just the right way, she could make the impurities react and come bubbling out as toxic gasses, leaving the iron pure.

It would be physically demanding, though, because the molten iron needs to be stirred. And she'd need some way to protect the crucible from it, so that it didn't melt through.

Or, of course, if she had any aluminum she could make high-purity steel via the thermite reaction.

Native aluminum exists! But it won't be found by her, in all likelihood. She really wants plastic more than iron, but iron would likely be a necessary step to it... and electricity, maybe. Is there something Cynthia could do better than the smith, or teach him, before she starts on any projects?

Hmm. It's hard to say, since right now the smith is just drawing iron rods, which is a fairly simple activity.

She could probably teach him to make Wootz steel or Damascus steel, though, since those don't rely on having high-purity iron. In fact, it looks like the tools she would need to make Wootz steel are already available in the forge — there's a supply of clay in the corner away from the forge, and what looks like a kiln around the back.

Cynthia shrugs. They were close to as good steels as could be for hand tools, right? "I have an idea for how to make very good steel for very sharp knives and tough tools. Can I do that with your materials?" Cynthia should be plenty strong enough to lift things to the right places...

The blacksmith looks at Penþa and asks a question about who she is.