She grumbles as she precipitates the magical construct from the abstract realm of forms and onto her workbench.
"... stupid way for a multiverse to work ... not like the portal division is getting anywhere ..."
Finally, she finishes double-checking her work, and gives the tightly coiled ball of magic a shove out of the universe and — hopefully — into the hands of someone who can use it well.
"I hope it works," she remarks quietly to the empty room.
And the magic falls in what one could call a "direction", if one were feeling generous. It slips between realms, bounces off of worlds, and plunges through space.
Eventually, it hits:
...Cynthia, enjoying stretching in the sauna room. She loved the way her tired muscles almost felt like they were growing back with the heat and circulation after a particularly demanding workout and long shift at the hospital. She liked getting a massage of her own once in a while, or some music from her phone, but today she could just sit down and feel the pleasantness without total concentration on doing her work right and better, for once.
It latches onto her, in the way it was designed to do.
But whether through oversight, thinness in the dimensional barriers, or simply momentum, that isn't quite enough to halt its motion through the multiversal sea. It falls one universe further, and drags Cynthia with it.
WHAT. She's not supposed to teleport into lakes in the middle of resting in her home sauna! Cynthia looks around in total confusion and shock, struggling to accept what's happening.
A foreign sensation nudges her, offering her the ability to accept what's happening.
She intuitively feels that she could accept or reject the offer, and that there is no downside to either.
No downside to either? Not even rejecting? Cynthia is feeling indecisive for a moment, before choosing to accept the power.
A dim spark settles within her.
It shows her the paths her thoughts can go down, to accept what's happening and regain her composure. It doesn't force, just makes the option available. All she needs to do to calm down is breathe like this, remember that, and so on.
Cynthia closes her eyes. Can she see... a different path? She's just curious to see what paths there are to see.
Does she want the ability to intuit the kinds of thought-shaping abilities that the gift can give her, perhaps?
Now that she has one spark resting inside her, she gets the impression that there are four ... 'slots', maybe, that the foreign sensation can put things in.
Cynthia is incredibly curious! Yes yes yes she wants to intuit the thought-shaping abilities the gift can get her! She just lets the fish bump into her, not really acknowledging it.
Another dim spark blooms to life. The two sparks seem to like one another, slowly orbiting around a common center point.
The gift can give her thought-shaping abilities to help her be happy, or sad, or content, or charismatic, or focused, or intellectually curious, or angry, or peaceful, or disappointed, or enthralled ...
In fact, it can give her an ability to bring her thoughts to the plausible human limits of pretty much any emotion or mental posture. No more than 2 more right now, though.
There's also the sense that she could ... merge the sparks within her, if she wanted to.
That sounds... mysterious and powerful, and Cynthia feels a bit uncomfortable by the idea of merging sparks of super-powerful emotions. She finally steps out of the water ("it's fine to not be fully dressed, it's pointless if she's running out for 5 minutes do some chore") and takes a few careful steps as she makes her way out of the water and up somewhere with a better view.
The shore is rocky and currently fairly damp, on account of the light drizzle that has been menacing the area all morning. But it's easy enough to scramble up the bank and under the shelter of some trees.
From there, it's also easy to spot a cluster of small buildings perhaps a quarter-mile along the shore. Smoke rises from a handful of chimneys.
Oh. Smoke. That's bad. She knows about the "huge value of tiny health improvements", so the fact that they're not doing everything they can to use something that stops them having smoke inside their own houses means that they're primitive or... that they're primitive. She's going to miss a sauna big enough to let her lie sprawled out on her stomach and the mini-pool.
There's a very faint sense of not being sure what she needs, easy to ignore if she doesn't focus on it.
Now that she's looking, she may also be able to spot that the houses are largely made of wood. So "primitive" seems apt. There are also people moving around between the houses. They don't seem to have spotted her yet.
Oh. Cynthia is feeling a bit nervous, but she has to go down there and won't be able to go down there better if she waits. So she just walk down and tries seeing the people more closely and to look friendly and not worth attacking.
The first person to spot her is a young boy playing naked in the mud near the closest house. He looks at her for a moment, cocks his head, and then calls something vaguely question sounding.
Cynthia waves back at the boy. If mud is the thing he thinks of as fun, that's quite a bad sign. And the chance of her knowing the language is zero! She keeps going and tries to think up what she could possibly do in this situation.
Does she want to be better at coming up with relevant ideas? Or good at guessing what people mean?
Relevant ideas are almost certainly less relevant than knowing the words other people are saying! She chooses guessing the things people mean.
A third spark blooms to life inside her. This one doesn't seem to like the others, and stands apart from them. There's also a feeling of approaching-fullness, and she intuits that she can only have one more ability at a time.
Casting her thoughts back over what the boy said ... it feels greeting-ish? And as though he wanted to know something about her that he found puzzling. It wasn't hostile or distrusting.
Drat! And she doesn't know what to say! She wouldn't even know it if she could talk the language!
A fourth spark blooms to life and pairs off with the third spark. These two feel like they could merge as well.
Having four sparks brings with it a sense of fullness. The gentle alien something that has been touching her mind fades away into dormancy. It feels like she could waken it if she wanted to, but having four abilities is ... stable, and it sleeps.
It suddenly seems intuitive that the first part of the boy's words, specifically, was the greeting, and that she could echo it.
Cynthia repeats the words. (This is probably gonna some obtuse super-relationshippy culture, she just knows it)
The boy says something in reply — it feels a bit like he's asking her to wait — and then runs inside.
A moment later, a woman wearing a skirt (and a shawl, pulled around her shoulders against the cold) comes out and leans in the doorway of the small house.
She says something in a different language, probably wanting to know if Cynthia speaks it.
Cynthia trusts in her ability to say a sentence that makes sense for this situation and begins speaking.
... huh.
The woman says something to the boy, who rushes off into the village.
The woman looks back up at Cynthia and says something vaguely invitational, accompanied by a gesture of eating.
She is almost certainly safe! Cynthia walks up to the woman. Presumably she gets to come inside and eat something?
The woman does indeed gesture for her to come in.
The inside of the house is not all that warm — the wooden planks that form the walls are not sealed terribly well — but it's warmer than outside, on account of the merrily burning fire. There is some water heating on the fire.
The furniture consists of some wooden chairs, a wooden table, and a low bed. A cured deer-skin hangs on the back of one of the chairs.
The woman grabs a loaf of bread from where it was warming near the fire and holds it out to Cynthia.
Cynthia is quite furious at the fact that she doesn't know much more than "uranium makes electricity via fission!" She's quite mad at the woman's primitive situation, but manages to keep it to herself as she very slowly reaches for the bread that's held out in her direction.
The woman, ignorant of exactly how far her people have to go, takes another roll of bread and sits in one of the chairs, gesturing for Cynthia to sit in the other.
She holds a hand to her chest. "Satenag", she says, and it's fairly obvious that she means it to be her name.
Satenag nods. "Sinþiah."
She asks a question, and from the accompanying shiver-gestures Cynthia might guess that Satenag is asking whether she's cold.
Well, she has a bit of training in that, and a tiny bit of lingering heat from the sauna... she makes the right gesture with her head to say "no"!
Huh. Alright, maybe her guest just runs hot.
Let's see ... food, shelter ...
Satenag pours them both mugs of nearly-boiling water, into which she places a pinch of ground pine resin, and sets one on the table near Cynthia. Then she sits back and tries to figure out what to ask next, while munching on her lunch.
The bread is dense, hearty, and secretly full of chopped vegetables and cheese. It's something like the midway point between a garden salad wrap and a calzone — and clearly made without the benefit of artificial sweeteners.
The bread is truly exceptional for something randomly give to feed a stranger, Cynthia presumes. But it doesn't take long before her thoughts go to asking what she could do to give herself and these people the life of comfort she had gotten so used to...
Satenag cautions him off before he tracks mud inside; Cynthia gets the impression that the boy's name is "Daskal".
Daskal jumps in the lake to clean off and then comes inside and quickly settles down by the fire with a blanket wrapped around him and a mug of hot pine-water.
Satenag sits back down, and asks Cynthia a question that seems very where-ish while pointing back the way that Cynthia came to their house.
Oh. Cynthia hopes that the words out of her mouth make sense; she would say "different dimension", but she's not even sure if that's true.
A moment later, there's a knock on the outside of the doorframe, and a person wearing a skirt and breastband says a greeting.
The person exchanges a few words with Satenag, and then holds a hand to their chest and turns to address Cynthia.
"Penþa," they introduce themself.
Then they say a sentence in yet a third language that is probably questioning whether she can speak it.
Penþa and Satenag exchange looks.
Penþa sits down on the bed, for lack of other furniture, and asks Cynthia a question in two parts. She gets the sense that they're offering her an alternative between something to do with language, and something to do with resting.
...she has an answer. (Could she please know the things they're actually saying? she thinks to herself.)
The gift stirs in its sleep. She's full; it can't help her unless she lets go of an ability or otherwise opens up space.
Penþa and Satenag stand, and go to talk on the porch in low voices.
Things are quiet, except for the crackle of the fire and the gentle patter of rain on the lake.
What do you mean you're full, Cynthia asks in annoyance? Help me get some way to get tons of nuclear energy! she thinks at the thing that is "full".
The gift wakes up properly.
Does she want to stop being able to easily accept the current situation, stop being able to intuit the thought-shaping powers that the gift can provide her, stop being able to guess what people mean, or stop being able to guess how to phrase things? Or to merge one of the two pairs of abilities, to clear up space?
Her rejection sets one of the sparks loose and drifting, until it vanishes in some direction that isn't quite 'under' and isn't quite 'out'.
Does she want to have an intuition for working with nuclear physics?
There's a sense that 'asking' and 'giving' are the same thing.
Nonetheless, she gains a kind of wordless intuition for how the energy levels of a nucleus relate to its structure and contents. Before, she knew that Uranium made electricity, somehow. Now, it seems obvious that it must do so by decaying into a more stable form and releasing heat and alpha particles in the process. And she could probably extract it from a mixture of similar atoms with a centrifuge, actually, since it has a different weight ...
There's a sense of confusion. The gift wants to help her, and it doesn't know how. Does she want to be good at holding complicated flowcharts in her head? Does she want to emit neutrons? Because she's full again and it can't give her either of those without space.
Emit neutrons! Cynthia is utterly shocked. She needs to know the situation more, ask these people who they are, where they are, how things are. She's not in a position to use any nuclear-related power.
There's a sense that the gift is thinking hard, and struggling to come up with anything. Does she want ... the ability to tell how far it is to the north pole?
It isn't as clever as she is; it needs her to need something specific.
Cynthia just ignores the power and waits for the two people to come back, so she can ask them questions and learn where she is and how things are.
The boy, however, eventually gives up on being quiet. He sets aside his mug and asks her a question about her hair.
Cynthia runs her hands through it. "I found a barber I like and she taught me to have my hair be pretty like this! She's so nice."
Daskal cocks his head to the side.
He gets up and collects a few small items — a carven bear, a blanket, a jug — and arranges them in rough hue order.
He asks a question about the color of her hair.
Daskal thinks about this for a moment, and then runs out onto the porch and asks Satenag something about dying his hair.
Satenag's reply is too quiet to hear, but she pokes her head back in and says something about keeping Daskal busy and Cynthia resting.
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)
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?
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.
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...
Penþa says something about a visitor from through the woods. It feels like they're referencing something.
The blacksmith separates his latest rod, and lays it next to the others to cool. He wipes his forehead with the back of his hand.
He says something about inventory, and amounts. A question about knives, or maybe plows.
"I know to make those much better." Cynthia begins miming the motions to making the best steel she knows to make using the materials that she's seen. She gauges the response of the smith, to see if her method is new to him.
He scratches his head. He certainly doesn't seem to understand what she's trying to convey, although that may just be because it's hard to mime "and then let the crucible sit for 6-12 hours".
He has another brief conversation with Penþa — something about payment and fortune and maybe fairies? — and then goes into his stores and comes out with two rough bars of iron, which he sets down on the end of the forge nearest her.
He says something about kitchen knives and gestures at the iron.
...is she allowed to start making a knife. Can she start making a knife. Power?
A steel knife, sure. It can't really help with, like, the design of the handle or tang. But turning this iron into steel and then flattening and sharpening it is definitely within the auspices of an intuition for steelworking.
She's going to need finely powdered carbon, preferably pure, although a little bit of sulfur is expected. That, wet clay, and a sufficiently hot kiln will get her some steel to work with.
She trusts that it'll be made obvious if something she does isn't something she's supposed to do and starts. And what happens when these people find out what she's capable of, she thinks to herself.
Lhemur crosses his arms and leans against the wall to watch her work. But nobody stops her as she grinds some charcoal, carefully prepares the iron, gives it a makeshift clay crucible, and sets it to heat in the kiln.
Well, Lhemur does stop her before she lights the kiln, but only to put in some unfinished pottery around the edges, in order to not waste the heat.
And then it's time to carefully monitor the temperature of a kiln for 6-12 hours.
Penþa comes back a bit after she gets the kiln started with salads and baked fish for all three of them.
They hand her a bowl and then ask something about learning language again.
Cynthia laughs for a moment. She tries saying a few simple sentences in the languages she knows Penþa understands, before nodding. "I should learn!"
Well, that sounds more like an invitation to provide her with vocabulary than earlier!
While they eat and watch the kiln, Penþa and Lhemur will point out various things around the forge, and act out basic grammar with each other. With her miraculous ability to guess what they're trying to demonstrate, it's not too hard to get basic grammar and vocabulary straightened out.
"So are you from where?" Penþa asks.
She tries getting as close to saying "different planet", or "different dimension", as possible.
Penþa perks up, and gives Lhemur an 'I told you so' look.
"Ah! Knew I you were an other people," they declare. "You lived in that body for how long?"
"Oskeli might have a say," Lhemur remarks.
"Sinþiah, you put the coal in why? Inside the clay, it burns not."
Cynthia nods, concentrating on her thoughts. "Coal is ingredient in better iron. Recipe is strange and unexpected."
