The others watch as she decants the steel, checks its grain, and then starts hammering it into shape. She may have skill with steelworking, but it still requires a certain amount of muscular exertion that she may not be accustomed to.

She's not done any bodybuilding for a while, but she still has much of her muscle and her strength from those days.

Then presently she will have a hard, sharp blade made of grey steel covered in tiny black patterns to hand to Lhemur.

He runs a finger over it to feel the texture, and then tests it on a bit of scrap leather.

"That's sharp," he says cuttingly.

He glances away from the still-cooling forge and out into the dimming evening.

"I will look through the <something about planning>," he promises. "In the morning."

Cynthia nods at him, before making her way to Penþa's house for the evening.

The guest bed is low and somewhat lumpy, but clean. There are several blankets available, and a deer-skin.

The night is not quiet. With no cars, no airplanes, no industry, one might expect the night to be quiet, but the truth is that the fields and forest are loud. So the night is filled with the croak of frogs, the buzz of insects, and the occasional call of a nocturnal creature skirting around the edge of the village. It is, despite that, peaceful.

Cynthia is used to a bed very carefully tailored to how she sleeps best! She misses it quite a bit, but has a strong enough circadian rhythm that she still sleeps well through the night. Water is probably a much better source of energy for as long as it lasts than anything else she's going to manage to get, so she should do something to make water-powered machines. A water wheel could be wood, but anything it connects to should probably have a lot of steel. So she tries thinking up useful machines for waterwheels to spin, perhaps ones to hammer metal for more machines?

In the morning, Penþa will leave quietly, and then come back to place a mug of herbal tea and a breakfast bun on a tray by her bed.

Wow, she has breakfast brought to her, just like how it was at home! She thanks Penþa before enjoying the breakfast and stretching.

Since she's awake, Penþa sits on their own bed to eat, and asks whether she slept well.

"Fantastically", Cynthia says excitedly.

"Well, that's good."

Penþa pauses to take a long sip from their mug. It's been some time since they've felt that energetic in the mornings.

"Know you how long you will stay? Or guess."

"I stay to help people, I go to help people. I stay if this is the best place to help."

Penþa nods like this is the expected answer, for some reason.

"We don't have much iron," they warn her. "Not until the caravan, at least. Know you of medicines? Or fish-calling?"

Cynthia dramatically snaps her fingers before giving a thumbs up. "When I have to", she replies. (Synthetic opioids are a pure miracle... but maybe too far off. Quinones? Antibiotics? Killed-virus vaccines? No, sanitation, which is another way of saying piping, earthworks, and machinery. Meaning, large-scale steel and mechanical machinery driven by waterwheels. The end of waterwheels is extremely far away still. Fishing... probably not the ideal food source. Steel remains the plan.)

Well that's cryptic.

"I would like to introduce you to Oskeli. He would like to hear about your home," Penþa decides.

Something about that second sentence niggles at her language-intuition.

Cynthia nods. "Introduce me now?" Cynthia asks.

Penþa furrows their brow.

"By ... walking to their house; if he is in it, saying 'Oskeli, this is a visitor from the other place'. If he's not in it, telling that to his —" and then they say an unfamiliar word that does not seem to have a good reference point in her language.

"That's good to do! I'm happy to go now."

Penþa clicks in what feels like an acknowledging sort of way, and finishes their tea.

"In your place, how do you introduce people?" they ask, leading her down toward the shore.

"We... say our name and why we introduce ourselves."

Penþa feels like some kind of miscommunication has occurred, but frankly Sinþiah is picking up the language remarkably quickly and there should really have been more of those by this point, so they just shrug and carry on.

They lead her down to a house on the beach, where there is an old woman sitting on a bench and knitting.

"Hello!" Penþa calls. "Is Oskeli in?"

"Not at the moment," the old woman answers. "Right now it's just me, Bardamma. I heard we have a visitor."

Her voice is a bit wary.

(Preindustrial fabric production... even having read about it made her sad, seeing it is taking those feelings and making them feel 10 times worse!)

"I'm the visitor" Cynthia says to the woman on the bench.

Bardamma looks at her intently.

"What's your earliest memory?" she says gruffly.

"Being surrounded by trees and hugged by my mother, and seeing older kids running around."