sixthiterationlogs | 004 ❝ God's in his Heaven ❞

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004 ❝ God's in his Heaven ❞

WHO: Helen Magnus
WHERE: woods, river, butcher's shop
WHEN: 10 June - 12 June
OPEN TO: All
WARNINGS: TBA
STATUS: Open

i. ❝ the year's at the spring ❞

Helen found that paper was a precious and limited commodity around the village and the bits and scraps she had leftover from her gifts over the winter were rapidly dwindling. She had written on every inch of paper as best she could, cramped writing fitting every square of space, and she was reminded for not the first time of Carentan and how things had to be made to last and last again well beyond their original expiration date. In this, she felt her age for one of the first times in her long life. She felt as her friend Tolkien had once described thin, like butter scraped over too much bread and facing her mortality head on wasn't a position she thought she'd ever find herself in.

She didn't particularly face it head on now if she could help it. This morning she'd found herself in the woods hunting for herbs but, honestly, they were few and far between. The sun was up nearly all the time now and while it flirted with the horizon, it never sank beneath it at night. The best they got was a few hours of near-twilight but no true night fell over the land and hadn't for the past several days. To add insult to injury, it was stifling hot and miserably dry. The grasses had either been eaten down to the earth by the grazing animals or withered and dried up.

Her basket woefully empty aside from some indigo for dyeing, she made her way back to the village, brow furrowed a bit with worry. She made a note in her already-cramped notebook: Sun - constant. Arid. Vegetation scorched.

ii. ❝ the hillside's dew-pearled ❞

Later in the day (for a given definition of day, anyway), Helen made her way down to the river to make observations there. It was dangerously low, the banks exposed to a worrisome degree. Much of their food came from the river by way of fish and if they didn't have that resource and the plants were scorching under the bright sun, what were they going to eat? Rations would need to be put into place regardless but this was escalating to a degree that had Helen wondering if they ought not call a meeting to discuss it. It was something she would certainly be discussing with Mark and Ravi when she got home to see if they ought to bring it to the village at large; her roommates were always a good sounding board for such things.

The bright sun glinted against something bronze and shiny against the dried mud of the riverbed and she picked it up, uncertain of what it could possibly be. It appeared to be some sort of arrowhead but she knew the people here who fletched and made arrows typically used flint for them, not bronze. This was something that didn't seem to fit with the activities that the residents normally engaged in and she slid the arrowhead in her pocket, intending to ask about it once she'd gotten back to the village. Perhaps the others might have a better idea as to what it could possibly be.

iii. ❝ all's right with the world ❞

In spite of the strange happenings of late, some things never changed and one of those things was the need for soap. A village like theirs with about five dozen people, give or take, went through a good bit of soap both for personal bathing and for laundry. It took a lot of Helen's time each week to make soap, cut it, leave it to dry and to distribute that which was ready to be used. Each batch of soap had to be cured for at least three weeks to a month before it could be used but given the bright, beating sun of the past month or so she'd had luck with curing soap for much less time.

"The only good thing to come out of this bloody heat is that I can turn over the soap much faster," Helen muttered, stepping outside the butcher's to get away from the hot lye and fat mixture bubbling over the fire and get some sort of relief. It wasn't coming to her here, given it was nearly as hot outdoors as it was inside, but at least she could fan herself and get a chance to get a few deep breaths without inhaling the scent of soap-in-process.

She slid off her t-shirt, standing in just her bra for the moment, and used the soft cotton to mop off her brow.

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Ever since her encounter with Mark, Sam had been loitering around the butcher shop. Not because she needed soap--although she was a fan. But rather, she was hoping to run into his mysterious friend, Helen. As far as she was concerned, anyone scientifically-minded enough to know how to make soap had to be someone worth meeting. Fuck, did Sam miss the luxury of the Ordo Dracul. She'd been spoiled by the opportunity to constantly be surrounded by other scientists. Now she felt like she was in a fucking science desert.

Less tragic than a food desert, but at the moment, no less annoying.

After several weeks of misses, her daily visit hit paydirt. She hoped. At least she was reasonably sure the woman she saw wasn't Mark.

Surprisingly timid for a girl with bright blue hair, she peered in through the doorway. Yeah. That definitely wasn't Mark. Mark didn't have boobs.

Politely, she cleared her throat.

Moana didn't use soap all that often. She knew that there was some in the inn and she'd used it when she was helping clean things but, like everything else that wasn't hers, she tried not to use it and she tried to use it sparingly if there was no other option available to her.

Thanks to making her own dress she doesn't need to wash it like cotton. It isn't as porous as cotton and doesn't hold liquid or smells and Moana prefers to bath without soap, letting the water rinse her each day.

Even so, Moana was naturally curious. She didn't know where everything came from or what everyone was doing. She hadn't really seen Helen around either, so when she spotted the woman outside the butchers shop she felt the need to stop and investigate.

Moana's hair was pulled into a bun on the top of her head as she stepped forward, her dark eyes looking down at the bars of soap curiously. "What are you doing?"

It took Helen a moment to realize she had company and once she did, she swiftly tugged her shirt back down and straightened her hair a bit so she didn't look quite so disheveled. In this unbearable heat, no one looked their best but she wanted to try and look more put together than the mad scientist she'd come to be over the last several months.

"Sorry, I didn't hear you at first," she said, flashing a quick smile. "I just had to step outside to get away from the heat of the lye for a moment. The combination of the fire and the chemical reaction is unbearable in summer."

"Making soap," Helen said, stirring the pot of lye and animal fat in order to render it down. This was the horrible, messy part of the business and once it was done, she could actually get to the bit where she added the aromatics and made soap into the sweet-smelling surfactant that everyone recognized.

"This batch is for use on the body," she explained. "Sometimes I make cakes of laundry soap or the kind you use on your hair for shampoo but not today. We go through more of this kind than anything else."

Moana looked a little closer, her dark eyes taking in the parts of the process that she could see. Her nose wrinkled when the smell of the lye and animal fat hit her nose. That did not smell like soap.

"How does that turn into soap?" Possibly a stupid question but she didn't care. She wanted to know and the only want to know was to learn and the only way to learn was to ask.

"I didn't know that. I've seen it at the inn but I don't really use soap." Given the heat Moana might start thinking about it but it hadn't been a problem just yet. "Can I help you make it?" Mostly because she wanted to learn how.

"And if you can't stand the heat, there's probably something wrong in the chem lab," Sam said. "That's what my favorite teacher used to say. Not sure if that was a general expression, or just for me." She would occasionally get a little over-eager in her extra credit work.

She'd been a downright menace.

"Didn't mean to sneak up on you," she added, giving a slightly apologetic dip of her head. "I'm looking for someone named Helen?"

Cougar's been starting to worry.

Each day, the heat is worse than before. The fish don't seem to be in the river and the plants cannot keep going. Even with his limited knowledge, he knows that much. The only solace he has is that the rabbits still breed and the chickens still lay their eggs, no matter how hot it gets. They will not starve soon, but he doesn't know what will happen in the winter if they don't figure it out.

At the river, he sees a familiar face and tips his hat upwards, slightly, to approach and see if Helen has any ideas. When he's close enough, though, he sees her pocketing something, making him give her a curious tip of his head, gesturing to the pocket he'd seen her hand slide into.

He may not have had the same skills of survival in the wilderness as some of the other people here, but Gracchus knew enough to know this heat was a problem. It was nothing like what he'd experienced in Junonia, but the fact that the sun changed its path in the sky and now never seemed to sink properly beneath the horizon was alarming. He was no farmer, but he was a landowner, before he came to this place, and a patron of farmers, and he knew a little of what unexpected weather could do to farms. And this before they'd had a chance to build more stockpiles of food after the long winter.

He'd heard people talking about the river, the water, with some concern, so he'd come to see for himself what had happened. He didn't come here often, but it was often enough to know the flow had been substantially shrunk since the last time he'd been here, and he murmured a dismayed word of Latin as he stared at the dried banks.

It was only then that he noticed Helen, and nodded his head to her.

"Ave, Helen," he said, greeting her in his own language before switching to English, as was becoming his custom for the sake of practice if nothing else.

"Although I think none of us are very well now, no?"

"You can certainly help. I always need more hands," Helen said, giving her a bit of a smile. She motioned her close, invited her to peer into the pot that she was rendering the lye and fat in currently.

"What happens here is a chemical reaction. The lye comes from burning wood," she explained. "And when it reacts with the fat, it creates a substance that we call a surfactant. That means it makes bubbles. Once it gets to a certain point and all the lye is neutralized, we can start adding things that make it smell nice. You can tell by how it looks when I stir it when it's ready. It'll look smooth. My mother always told me it looked rather like a pudding, actually, though comparing this to food is always a bad idea. You should never touch it. It will burn you until it cools."

"You've found me," Helen said, flashing her a quick smile. "I would shake your hand but I've been handling lye and if you've experience in chemistry, you know that ends badly for all parties involved."

Chemical burns in a place with limited medicinals was always a fear of Helen's and she tended to be overly cautious, if she could.

"I find myself at a disadvantage, though. What's your name?"

Helen pulled it out to show it to him, the bright bronze glinting in the ever-present sunlight that seemed to be beating them all into submission. The sun could be both an ally and an enemy and Helen was hard-pressed to determine which it was at the moment.

"It looks like an arrowhead. Is it one of yours, Cougar? I thought everyone here used flint."

"Ave," Helen gave back, giving Gracchus a tight smile in return. It seemed that he, too, was taking a look at the depressing state of the river and she had no idea what to do about this current state of affairs. If they lost the river, they would lose much more than a source for fish. They would lose a source for water, irrigation for crops and a whole host of other issues would crop up.

"I am worried about this river," she said, pressing her lips together. "If it doesn't rain soon, I'm not certain what we'll do for water."

Sam liked her immediately. Of course, she'd always been partial to ladies in the sciences. Probably a reaction to all the dude-bros she'd met on campus. And there too was Grace's influence. There was no woman more badass or boss.

She rippled her fingers in a small wave. "Hi. I'm Sam. Kinda a n00b, but I heard about you from a guy named Mark. He said you were the one making the soap, so I figured that meant you were the resident chemist."

Not for the first time, Sam found herself wishing she'd studied a more practical science. Chemistry, physics, even botany had marketable skills to offer, both after the Rain of Fire and in a place like this. There was little call for a geneticist in an emergency. Still, there was transfer to be found.

If only she could find it.

Moana stepped closer, her bare feet moving silently across the ground. She didn't want to mess anything up and so she kept her hands at her sides. Her eyes were large and bright and it was obvious that she was eager to learn.

"so sufactant is bubbles." That was easy to remember. "And don't touch." Keeping her arms at her sides had been a good idea then. "So we can make it smell like pine or flowers... what if we tried to make one smell like the ocean." Though they didn't have salt water and the more Moana thought about it the more it wouldn't have worked.

There was one question that Moana had that had nothing to do with soap. "Okay. I think I get it but what's pudding?"

"You still have paper?" The words are out of Credence's mouth before he realizes it, and from how his eyes don't widen or how he doesn't assume he's going to be reprimanded, it hasn't yet dawned on him that he's said this out loud.

He's trying not to peek, honestly, he isn't--but he does lean a little forward, slightly raised on tip-toes despite being taller than her. Her writing is tiny, and he's envious, and it's probably much neater than his. He's wearing clothes that are a little too small for him--he'd borrowed Kira's--but he's covered, head to toe.

"A pleasure," Helen said, waving back accordingly. "I'm actually a surgeon by trade, as it is, but in absence of a proper chemist, I've stepped into that role."

Having been born in the 19th century meant she had a lot of skills that had been left behind with the advance of technology, chief among them the creation of soap as pertained to this conversation.

"I dabble in a few other areas as well, should the occasion arise. Are you a chemist as well?"

"It's something that one normally would eat...that looks rather like the thing in the pot right now," Helen said, inviting Moana to come forward and look at the consistency of the soap mixture as it stood at the moment.

"If you can keep stirring for a moment, I'll see what I can find that smells sort of like the ocean. Do you think salt and coconut might do the trick? I have some oils."

"Only the tiniest scrap and I've been hoarding it," Helen said. She had no intention of hiding it from Credence, at all, and while she guarded her paper preciously she normally had no issues with sharing resources. They needed to find a way to make their own paper here in the village to make it a renewable resource.

"It seems to go more quickly than I would like," she said, rueful of that. "And there is no guarantee that our strange benefactors will give us any more. They seem to be fickle at best."

A surgeon. Maybe there was hope for Sam yet.

"Geneticist," she replied, ducking her head a little bit. "Never got my degree. Kinda a college dropout. But I was still doing the work before..."

Oh, there were so many different ways to finish that sentence.

For simplicity, Sam cleared her throat and concluded, "...before winding up here, anyway."

Before dying. Before becoming a blood-sucking fiend. Before the world ended. Before we had to turn to hoodoo science to try to defeat fiends even worse than the blood-sucking kind.

The list went on.

Moana looked up at Helen and then over the lip of the pot to peer at the contents within. It was smooth and looked to her like milk but thicker. It was interesting and she really wanted to stir it.

"That looks neat." She took the spoon with a grin that betrayed her desire to stir and began to move the spoon through the mixture like Helen had done. She liked watching it move and flow and would have easily lost herself in the sight of Helen hadn't answered her question about smelling like the ocean.

"Yes! You have coconut oil!" Moana was very excited about that idea and if she could smell like salt and coconut she'd start using soap.

"Ah, excellent! I did a lot of work in genetics," Helen said, utterly delighted that there was someone else in the village with that kind of background. Granted, there was a difference in bog-standard genetics and abnormal genetics but she supposed the same principles applied regardless. She'd just have to be careful in her phrasing.

"It is a pity you didn't get to finish your degree, though. This place is terribly rude about pulling people away from important work to drop them in the middle of nowhere."

Helen found the bit of coconut oil that she'd gotten in her batch of supplies over the holiday and added some of the blood orange essential oil as well. Citrus and coconut seemed tropical enough, for her, and she tipped both into the pot with the soap that Moana was stirring.

"All right, keep stirring it. When it thickens up a bit more, we'll pour it into the molds and start letting it cool. When it's a bit cooler, I'll add the salt. If I add it now, it'll dissolve, and you won't get the scent of it on your soap."

Sam waved it off dismissively, although she felt a smile threatening the corners of her mouth. If only Helen knew about some of the crazy samples Sam had been working with. But she had to be careful. Even if she as human now, she figured, the Masquerade probably still applied.

Probably.

"I'm more of a hands-on learner anyway," she said. "Probably got more experience out of school than in it. Not that there's a lot of call for that shit here."

That was the real question, the real purpose of fishing around.

Was there a call for it?

...was there a call for Sam herself?

"Barely anything in the way of supplies, is the thing. Everything would have to be in the theoretical, which is not going to aid someone who prefers to learn hands on," Helen said, musing out the problem for a moment.

"If I manage to run across anything that would allow us to work on something of that nature, I'll keep your skill set in mind. It could prove useful, even if you're just a lab assistant while I do things."

It was a thoughtful gesture, even if it didn't really give Sam much of a sense of direction. Her shoulders slumped with the inevitable. But she gave Helen a grateful nod, nevertheless. It was nice, at least, to be seen as competent.

But fuck she needed something to do.

"Maybe you could teach me how to make soap," she said. Every single word hurt her. Making soap was about as far from her hopes and dreams as she wanted to be.

But at least it was useful.

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004 ❝ God's in his Heaven ❞

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