"Hmph."

Penþa rubs the bridge of their nose.

"Please forgive Bardamma; she's Lhatis's resident pessimist."

They turn to Bardamma.

"Well, when Oskeli is available, I'm sure he'd enjoy meeting her."

"Will I wait long?"

Bardamma silently shrugs.

"I don't think so," Penþa answers her. "He's usually here every day, I think. But you don't have to wait idle; I want to talk to you about what you would like to do now, in any case."

"What can I do now?"

Penþa gestures for the two of them to walk along the beach and leave Bardamma to her knitting.

"Well, you could walk away into the woods again," they begin, because it's always best to start with basics. "You could stay as our guest, and then leave with the caravan when it comes. You could build or buy a boat and sail across the lake to the settlement on the other side. You could join the village for longer than a season and live here. You could use some wisdom from the other place to do something I can't think of, like fly through the air to the library or raise an island from the waters."

"I'd go somewhere where my wisdom can help more people. Make metal, and light, and oil, and waterwheels. My wisdom is... in many things."

"You could write a book," Penþa suggests. "And send it to the library. That way your wisdom wouldn't be lost when you die."

"Writing books..." She has actually learned a fast writing system! If she writes this language in it she can write down so much of what she knows. Beginning with metalworking and mechanical machines! She fiddles with her hands. "I'll do a lot of that, yes."

Penþa nods.

"It's worthy work. We don't have much paper on hand, but I have rope if you want to get started on that."

"Encoding" Cynthia says. "And I can teach when I can't write."

"I'll need to check the law-books to be sure," they caution, "but I think, if you're the first to bring this knowledge from the other place, you're due the inventor's-right. So teaching will likely cover your food share and a bit more, depending on what you have to teach."

"I'm certain that teaching covers my food share!" Cynthia says.

"If your wisdom is in many things — do you know what you want to teach first? It's nearly summer, so we're mostly done with planting, which makes it a reasonable time."

Well, the thing to teach that matters here... would be weaving. Much better, much more fabric is possible. And she could weave rope. What might a rope-making machine do, she thinks to herself. "Machine weaving!"

Penþa strokes their chin.

"Weaving mostly takes time in winter, when we must stay indoors, or from those who can no longer work the fields or waters," Penþa observes. "But I admit we do go through a lot of nets."

...insulation. Cynthia is used to having really, really good insulation anywhere she lived, that's sort of the ideal. If there was a way of weaving natural materials into insulation... that means less wood heating, wood chopping, drafts, or smoke. Until more steel makes sense, what else could possibly be more useful to spend winter doing? "I could make the houses stay warmer, too."

"Now that would be welcome! It's always too cold, in winter. We've tried to source some clay for brick walls, which would be tighter, but we need clay for vessels, and the local stream doesn't actually have that much so we've been shepherding it."

(Power, we're a vast distance from the plastic foams I know of, but is there anything we have usable for weaving into insulation? Grass, wood, anything?)

She's full again; does she want to stop having an intuition for steelworking, for what thought-shaping powers the gift can grant her, for what people mean, or for how to phrase things?

No need to know about steel for the foreseeable future!

The steelworking light drifts away, fading into the distance. Does she want the ability to identify materials that can be used for insulation? Or maybe an intuitive knowledge of insulation techniques?

Why is she so forced to choose? Well. She certainly has to start with materials, write down everything she knows, and know insulation techniques when she needs to know them.

There's a faint, confused jumble of concepts like "time" and "specificity" and "energy".

And then a bunch of materials light up in her senses. It's not exactly a new sense, more a different layer of interpretation. But everything within sight is either obviously usable as insulation, or not.

Lake water: No. Sand: No. Pond reeds: Yes, when dry and packed. Wood: Yes, when treated correctly. Penþa: No. Clouds: No. Grass: Yes, when dry and packed. Her skirt: Yes.

... and so on, over everything that she sees.