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."
Well, he had guessed that. If she just knows the recipe, though, it makes sense.
"How much coal for how much iron?" he asks instead.
"Single visitors sleep in my visitor bed usually," Penþa tells her, when it seems like Lhemur has exhausted his questions. "Other places can have you, though. Do you care?"
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."
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"Being surrounded by trees and hugged by my mother, and seeing older kids running around."
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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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?
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.
She walks around, trying to remember as many useful forms of insulation as possible. "Where can I get paper?" she asks Penþa. "I want to note something down."
"I have a bit spare in my house," Penþa admits. "But for notes, could you use a tray of clay or rope instead? Paper is expensive."
They don't remember there being a lot of paper in stories about the other place, but maybe it's not the kind of thing the prophets have felt the need to mention. Certainly the other place has enough magic that they should be able to make paper grow on trees, or something like that.
"Well, that's not the case here. Let's go grab some clay from the forge."
Then soon she will be the proud recipient of a thin sheet of wet clay inside a wooden carrying frame, and a stylus with one pointed tip and one flared tip, with which she may make as many notes as she pleases. Although if she doesn't happen to have an alphabet somewhat like cuneiform memorized it might be a bit tedious.
She'll come up with a good, clay-friendly alphabet next, but now she can just write down the names of things good for making insulation. And maybe teach people so they remember and she doesn't have to write everything, once her power is knowing the different methods?
If she mentions her plans to Penþa, they will point out that they already know how to use dried grass or straw for insulation; the problem is keeping it dry, so that rot doesn't set in.
Then you need a different kind of insulation. Eventually, Cynthia decides that she's ready to know how to turn the materials into insulation that is warm and dry, to make the other insulation keep working.
With an increasingly practiced ease, she swaps out the sparks.
And the knowledge of how to actually process these materials flows through her. She could make rot-resistant insulation from the right kind of wood, but the easiest thing to do in this climate might be to use lime stucco to seal the insulation to the wall and wick out moisture.
Yes, that's a thing to do, and to show them how to do. Making insulation means making a big volume of things, so lots of transport, but transport follows steel so that's still a ways away and a thing for later.
Cynthia starts explaining how to rot-resistant insulation gets made.
Penþa listens with interest as she starts to explain, and then interrupts to ask if she minds going and gathering some other people who will want to learn, so that they can get it directly from the source and she doesn't have to repeat herself.
"Yes, you'd want to get many people to hear me to learn how to stop the rotting."
Penþa takes her on a brief walk around the village, collecting people as they go, and ending up in the central square on a collection of benches. Many people are out working or fishing, but enough have portable work to come and listen.
So the audience spins, knits, weaves, chops, and so on as they listen.
Cynthia talks to them about how to make insulation that can handle rot and last, so they can keep their homes much warmer and burn much less smoky, nasty fuel.
They immediately grasp the utility. Once they've understood her explanations, there begins an extended discussion about how to prioritize different buildings and how to fit the necessary production into their existing schedule for the year.
The general consensus is that the icehouse should be prioritized, even though that will mostly bear fruit next year, and once they see how much it impacts the ice storage it will free up a good amount of time in the early winter for other work because they'll have to take in less ice.
Penþa does some calculations with an abacus as the discussion continues, and then nods decisively.
...Jigs. Assembly lines. Cynthia thinks about how to make the process of insulation making faster and have less moving around. She's sure they can do an enormous amount of it if everyone does their best.
The villagers are more dubious. Yes, they can absolutely get a lot of straw around harvest time; they already have to produce and store a lot of hay. But they can't collect less wood until seeing how well it works, which means that there's not that much spare time to dedicate to the project. And getting the limestone is going to be harder, since that actually requires quarrying stone.
