Bath Time!
Who: Rowan and Helena Where: In the forest When: Afternoon What: Washery Rating: XXX! Nah, kidding. Maybe PG because of nakedness
Rowan picked yet another little green-winged leech from her skin with a sigh. Little bastards were all over the damn place, sometimes in yellow, sometimes in white, sometimes faintly other colors. All in all, if she ever got home, she was never looking at a moth or butterfly the same way again. She flicked it over into the grass and continued her way to the stream. There, without any real regard for the idea that maybe it wasn't the best idea to strip down nude in front of everyone, she stripped down nude in front of everyone and started rinsing out her clothes. It may have been muddy and damp everywhere, but her pajama pants and tanktop were filthy and stained with mud, sweat, and purply-green grass. At least this way they'd get partially clean.
Helena came around the tree and paused as she saw Rowan squatted in the nude, swishing her clothes through the stream. The mother-to-be was a little sunburned here and there and sporting a few of the slowly trickling bites from those awful moths that were flitting around today. She had a few of those herself. "Ro, what on earth are you doing? You're going to give Bazzer a heart attack."
"Rinsing these ragged things out so that I can wear them without feeling sludgy." Rowan said brightly, ignoring the bit about Bazzer having a heart attack. "We need to find something to start weaving into proper clothing, my dear - these things aren't going to last forever." She held up the tank-top up for a visual inspection. "And they probably won't fit me in a month. And definitely won't fit me after I have the baby - I'm not usually this big around the middle."
Helena smiled and set her hands on Rowan's shoulders. "C'mon. Let me show you where those soap pods are growing. We'll give our stuff a proper scrub and if the water isn't too gross and the leeches aren't too bad, we'll swim a bit." She had loved swimming while pregnant. The buoyancy and the excercise were great. "I found the best pool but it's a bit of a walk."
"Well, if we're going to do that, maybe we should wash the blanket and pillow cases too - I think we have enough daylight left that it'll dry by tonight." Rowan shielded her eyes and looked up at the sky. "What do you think?"
Helena nodded. "Good idea. We tracked mud into the hammock last night. I gave my pillow case to Cross, though. So that he could bring back anything he found more easily." She turned toward the tree. The hammocks were mostly down today, draped over the lower branches in the hopes that the blankets, sleepingbags and sheets would dry after the storm. She climbed and gathered up Ro's forest green quilt and pulled it down again. "Get your stuff. Let's get walking." She smiled at her friend.
Ro picked up her sopping mess of clothing out of the stream - it wasn't really moving all that fast for all that it had started to be flooded barely two days ago, it was just a little deeper, since the water level wasn't completely down - and slung them over her shoulder, letting the cold water trickle down her back. When Helena came back, she picked a leech off the woman's shoulderblade. "Well, I'm ready. Shall we?"
Shuddering as Rowan tossed the leeches away. "Ugh, those are so gross." She had no free hand to put pressure on the tiny weeping wound. She sighed instead. "I almost irrationally hope it gets really cold and kills them all off." Sadly, the human componant of the forest would also likely die if the weather plunged below freezing. The laughers had thick coats and could probably withstand the cooler weather. The humans werescantily dressed and fire for warmth could not be brought up into the tree. She set a course west, following the stream.
"They'll probably die off in a couple of days." Rowan said comfortingly, though she obviously didn't know for sure. "I mean, they weren't really here when we first got here, right? They'll probably ride out the damp weather and then die or whatever." She used her fingers to wipe the few drops of blood away from Helena. "We'll live."
"Yeah, we'll just be annoyed." She sighed as they moved along. "Look how the citruscress is thriving though." She gestured to where the electric purple plant had spread much further out from the edge of the stream than before. It was latched on to not just the rocks but also the lower portions of the nearby trees. Not the climbers though, she noticed. She bent to pull up a handful, offering half of it to Rowan. Food was even more scarce now that they seemed to have killed off most of the trapped blue fish.
Rowan took it happily and nibbled on it. She'd developed a taste for the stuff, though she couldn't eat a lot at once or the lemon taste became rather overwhelming. "When things dry out more, we should really concentrate on gathering and preserving food, since apparently the rain really does a number on making stuff grow around here. I mean, you can practically hear the moss sucking up moisture and spreading." She paused, musingly. "We've got a lot that we could have, if we worked together to gather it all instead of just grazing around like horses."
Helena nodded. "I've been thinking about that. Agricultural exploration too. I know you're trying to get the ying yang beans to sprout. We can preserve the ones we want to preserve though, right? Like lentils? Or peas that you can buy for split pea soup? Those would travel well in the climber leaf pouches that Thorne makes. I also suspect that the roseberries will dry like raisins. How do they dry grapes without them mouldering? Especially in an environment that's so moist." He hefted the heavy blanket higher into her arms. "And the mirkweed really are similar to both potatos and rice in a way, right? Potatoes are grown from seed potatoes which I think are just the tubers replanted. But they need a muddy bottom and a body of water. I wonder if we could concoct some kind of aquaduct fed man-made mirkweed paddy, if we had the time. No matter where we end up." She gave Rowan a curious look. "And the roseberry bushes seem like they spread much the way that strawberries do, with root runners." This was not telling Rowan anything that the botanist likely didn't know. It was nice to air out everything that she had been thinking about though.
Ro rubbed her chin thoughtfully. "Well, when things are a little drier, we can definitely use the sun to dry out fruits and vegetables. I could even build a drying rack at the top of a tree so that the laughers can't get to whatever we choose to get up there, and it'll take direct sunlight - sunlight will hinder the mold, weirdly enough, especially if it's dry. Our biggest issue would be that we would have to see if whatever we brought over would thrive in the new environment. For all we know, the mirkweed might like it here because there's some nutrient in the soil or water that's missing from other places. I'm actually thinking that if we can dehydrate the mirkweed, we could turn the tubers into flour - like potato flour. It would travel well that way as long as it was kept dry. Of course, where ever we end up it might be better to use the plants and animals around that area so that we're not flooding an area with non-indigenous species."
Helena nodded. "Well," she chewed her lip, starting to keep an eye on the swollen bank of the stream as they drew closer to the area that supported soap pods. "I see what you mean. I was thinking of some of this, fruit drying and such, to be sort of a passtime for the people who are spending their time at the climber tree as lookouts." She glanced at her friend and shrugged. "They'll have to fill their days with something, right? I was thinking food drying. Collection of clay from the west and maybe climber resin as well. Slowly, we're getting a handle on what tools nature has provided us with here." She stopped. "There, see them?" The stalks of the wax looking green stems were swaying in the water. The pods were fatter than she recalled, as though they had sucked up more of the water as well. In fact, as Helena looked around she noted that all of the climbers had baby vines shooting out in abundance. Apparently, Rowan was right. This whole forest thrived on the flood. It must be a regular occurance.
"Yeah, I see them. I see the little bat things wheeling around, too." Ro chuckled and pointed out the tiny fuzzy flying things doing ariel acrobatics in the branches, too. There was a bit of a flock going on up there, and they were making tiny, piping flute sounds. "Be damned if they aren't kind of cute from a distance. Anyway, there's also the grass roots. I bet you they could be dried out for traveling and they'd absorb water real well once they got to where ever they needed to be. They're not bad for eating, either. They taste sort of like green bell peppers."
Helena nodded. "I tried them! So we have the makings of a wonderful salad." She chuckled as she set the blanket on the bank and waded into the water. The current tugged at her here, where the stream dipped downward and got deeper. "Careful if you're coming in. The water is faster here. Should I grab four of them?" The pods had grown to about the size of her fist, nearly doubled in size.
"Yeah. We can always come back and get more if we need them." Rowan nodded, and wondered how well the pods would keep if they wanted to transport them. Well, she could try preserving one another day, after she was clean. Clean was more important right now. "I don't know how much foam a single one will make - you've found them, what do you think?"
"I think four will be more than enough," Carefully, Helena snapped four pods off below the bulbous knob on the end. She was diligent not to squeeze the round knob because she knew from experience that they broke open easily enough and these ones seemed so ripe that they would split open if she breathed on them. Returning to the bank she handed all four of them to Rowan like they were a bouquet. "The pool is just a little ways down further." The earth sloped slowly downward the further west they went, explaining how all of the flood water drained away so quickly. "There it is," she pointed to a rocky grotto, the unbroken bowl of a massive boulder than had ben scooped out by the stream.
Rowan sniffed the soap pods curiously and, for no real reason she could explain, licked one. Deciding that it was definitely not food, Rowan continued to follow Helena to the bathing grotto she'd found. "Like something right out of a fairytale!"
Laughing, Helena the blanket down on one of the concealing boulders and pulled her t-shirt over her head. "Like there is anything around here that isn't?" Now that her fears, at least her local fears, were mostly understood they didn't hold a lot of power anymore. She swatted a leech viciously when it tried to land on her elbow and scowled at it on the forest floor. "Except for maybe those." That done, she wiggled out of her boxer shorts. When she and Edward had gone through their time of trying to produce a family, Helena had the benefit of the best doctors money could buy. When she had her first cesarian section the scar was pretty much unnoticable. The second one was a little bit more pronounced. A small slice right above her pubic bone, for any who were looking. A thin white scar, now. Also low on her belly were the three red ribbons left over from her last pregnancy, the only one that had given her stretch marks. The one that had been so close to succeeding. They hadn't begin to fade yet and they stood out on her skin.
Rowan, of course, had her wings branded into her back - fundamentally different from Bazzer's, of course, since they were hers, but close enough to be a little bit on the spooky side. She also had the world-tree tattoo on her back, and a lot of stretch marks. Fresh ones. They stood out starkly on her tanning skin. "I don't know. Another world? Sounds more like science-fiction to me. Maybe a knight on a white charger will come out of nowhere and carry off us ladies if we believe enough in the fantasy, though." Ro laughed softly and carefully stepped into the water, since she didn't know how deep it was. "...I kind of miss home."
Helena offered a hand to steady her as she knew the sides could drop suddenly. "Careful. It's pretty deep." She waited until Ro had her footing and then carefully stepped in herself. She sighed even though the water seemed a bit more chill than normal. "Ok, so ourselves first? Or the clothes?"
"Oh us. Us us us. My hair feels so dirty it could crawl off my head." Ro sighed, and ducked her head under the water for a moment or two. When she came back up, she was beaming, and she laid back to float back towards Helena. "We could do the hairdresser thing. I'll do your hair if you do mine."
Laughing, Helena plucked one of the pods from the bank. "Well check this out. You're going to love this. Using her thumbnail, she carefully scored a deep groove through the belly of the pod. Instantly, a thick milky white fluid began to seep. The little pool area was flushed with the fresh and familiar scent of cucumbers. "Aaah, this is a good one. It's full of soap. Here, feel it. Feel how it's gritty? Do you think those are tiny seeds? Because this thing seems to burst on it's own, naturally. The white gunk leaks out and into the water. It tastes pretty bitter and nasty, so my guess was that the taste was to prevent anything from eating it...or...I'm not sure."
Of course Ro had to taste it to see for herself. She promptly made a face and started to wash her mouth out. "Tastes like the soap my mother used to wash my mouth out with when I swore. Bleh. Still, it smells really nice." She got a little of the fluid in her hand and rinsed it to see what the grit itself was. "Could be a seed. I'm not sure. We could always plant it and see if it grows." She grinned. Experimenting was so easy when you just wanted to learn the very basics! She washed her mouth out again. "Maybe there's something that likes the taste - who knows?"
Chuckling, Helena scooped a bit of the gunk out into her palm and made a 'turn around' gesture as Rowan. "Here, let's test out it's hair washing abilities." When she got her hands on the greasy, wet chestnut locks of her buddy there commenced some hair washing. The soap did in fact lather up like any bottled shampoo on the market. A few dunks and Ro's hair was relatively grease-free and smelling like freshness. "Ok, my turn." She handed over the pod and dunked her head under as well.
Ro had to use a little more of the soap goo on Helena's hair, just because she had more of it, and she hummed cheerfully while she lathered Helena up - and even lathered Helena's back for her, too, since that was always a bitch to try and reach on your own. "Man, this is nice. This is practically like a spa. If this were back on Earth I bet you it would've once been a shrine or something here. Like, a place where only women could go. They used to have those."
Helena smiled as she relaxed into Ro's gentle ministrations. "That's nice. I'm sorry you're missing home, Ro. I've...kind of been coming to grips with the fact that I don't think we'll ever see it again." She kept her eyes tightly shut as she felt the foam edge down over her brows and sunk her teeth into her lower lip. "I can't imagine why we are here but I'm pretty sure that whatever brought us here isn't going to change our minds. If we don't have a quick transition from the dark ages to the information age..." She sighed. "I just don't think it's going to happen, no matter who shows up in the field."
"True, true. Still. I wouldn't mind having the benefit of real painkillers in a couple months." Rowan patted her tummy and went back to washing out Helena's hair. "Have you considered naming the stream? Or the field itself? Or even this world? Or the sun here? Dunk your head, I'll rewash it to make sure we got everything else."
Helena dunked as requested and came above water again. "Sure, but everything I think of seems really silly. Bazzer calls this place Wonderland." She chuckles. "I thought about naming it after myself, since I was the first one here out of our group." She sat still for Rowan to lather her up a second time. "Or something equally cheesy, like New Eden or something?" She wondered what Rowan had thought of for names. Her friend had a far more whimsical imagination than she did.
"Hm. Planets are supposed to be named after gods." Rowan said thoughtfully, working her fingers carefully through Helena's snarls and tangles. "Do you suppose this planet is a boy or a girl?" She was running through various mythological figures through her mind, from Geb to Demeter. "Or we could do something else entirely; I don't think anyone from the astrological society will give a fuck."
Chuckling, Helena shook her head. "Well, given the fact that we're a group of diverse beliefs, I wouldn't say that we should name it after religious figures of any sort. Um..." She shook her head. "I really have no idea. I thought...I don't know, maybe Homestead? With a pioneering spirit, I guess."
Rowan nodded thoughtfully about that. "Sounds good. The stream could be Finding River. The field can stay the bloody field, I don't want to name that. It's too unnatural for my tastes. At least it gives us grass roots, but that's all I can say about the thing. There, you can rinse it out properly now."
Helena ducked and rinsed out her hair and came back up. "So shall we check out the pod soap's brightening or at least freshening ability on our clothes?" She swam closer to the edge reached for the trailing tail of the blanket. She tugged it into the water and it floated on the surface as it slowly soaked up more water. She plunged her hands into it to hurry the process along.
"We need some rocks or something to scrub them against." Rowan said. "Or we'll be here all day, and we'll be naked all night while waiting for them to dry." She looked around, trying to find something that might function as a washboard, and finally settled on a bunch of medium-sized pebbles that didn't look too dirty. "Maybe those?"
Helena nodded and reached out for the pebbles with a faint hesitation. "So how do we do this then? Just rub them against the quilt?" It seemed to her that behaviour like that would wear out the quilt eventually. How long did clothing and bedding last prior to the invention of washing machines?
"I think if we get the quilt wet and soapy and scrub it against the pebbles it should do fine." Ro figured, though this was hardly her area of expertise. She decided to try it with one of her socks first, and she got it all wet and soapy and scrubbed it. Most of the dirt did come out, though, happily, and she held it up for Helena's inspection. "Thoughts?"
"An improvement, definitely." She was still holding on to the massive, soaked quilt. If she let it go she was sure it might slip away downstream. She wasn't in any mood to follow it, so she held tight. "Ok, so lets get this bad boy soapy." She squeezed out a pod directly onto the massive blanket. Rubbing vigorously soon turned their entire pool into a frothy bubble bath.
"Man, that smells good!" Rowan helped scrub, though she paused long enough to scoop up a handful of bubbles and blow them at Helena, and grinned when it floated to her. The rocks were good for clothes, she noticed, but not so much for blankets because of the size issue, and how thick it was. She had to resort to using her hands more than she thought she would. "Everyone is going to be jealous of how clean we look, and now nice we smell."
It was tiring work and sweat mingled with the water drying on their skin. Helena thought she must have been naturalizing much faster than she would have expected. Here she was, naked as the day she was born with another woman in just the same state of affairs, scrubbing blankets and clothing and each other. Wow. It was amazing, the ease with which humanity could fall backward in civilization.
Rowan loved every second of it. Civilization, in her opinion (even before she'd gotten to Oz), was highly overrated. "In some Earth cultures, they had something called echo songs, or something like that. They were made up on the spur of the moment by some girl or guy, and everyone around them would echo. It made the work go faster - sort of like military cadences. This was back when storytelling was an art form and television didn't exist, of course. There's only a few cultures that even continue doing it, and they're usually way up in, like, Peru and stuff."
"Is that so?" Helena asked with a smile, pausing to try to work her fingers through her tangled hair. The shampoo might smell nice but it didn't have any conditioning aspects to it. They needed to make a comb or brush somehow, sometime soon. "I'm really not much of a singer," she said shyly.
"Psh. The point of folk songs are that they're for normal folk." Ro pointed out cheerfully. "Not that crazy gotta-reach-pitches-only-dogs-can-hear bull." She shook her head and started in on the next quarter of blanket, with a grin. "And besides. It would drive Arlo bugfuck."
Helena rolled her eyes. "I'm not interested in antagonizing Arlo. Isn't that my job, as the unofficial leader? To make sure we all get along, as well as get fed and sheltered?" She fell quiet as she wrung out the blankets. "How successful do you think I'll be in weaving grass mats and sealing them with resin to tie up in the climber to provide at least a little bit more shelter from rain? They'd be slightly flexible but waterproof. If we could get the securely tied down, I think they might help quite a bit."
"That'd be a good idea, assuming we don't get another windstorm." Rowan figured, looking thoughtful. "I don't think something as light as that would survive, like our blankets did. But we'll definitely never know until we try!"
Helena nodded. "Well, you saw how hard that resin dries. I was hoping it'd come out sort of like a non-clear plexiglass. It might block some of the wind and probably a good portion of the rain. The key will be positioning them in a useful sort of way." She was one of the smallest women in the group, smaller even than little Meredith. She could climb pretty high and fairly far out onto some of the smaller branches. The trick will be positioning them in overlapping and expanding angles to direct rain away from the hammocks. Meredith would be a huge help with that.
Rowan hesitated. Not in the 'I think this is a bad idea way', not at all. It was her 'How to make this work' hesitation face, which meant she was giving it serious thought. "I think the trick would be more along the lines of finding a screen for it to bond too. But the threads from the mirkweed - they're thin. We might be able to make a screen for that. Because if we just lay it flat, it's going to stick to whatever we pour it on. ...If we heat it, it might flow better, too, and dry fast - holy fuck!" She jumped back when one of the little kamikaze birds flew right down in front of her face, snatching a leech that was fluttering towards her throat. Ro landed on her ass in the water, and she had to blink rapidly to clear the waterdrops from her eyelashes. "Yes. Dry fast." She said it rather wryly, picking up her sopping self from the water again.
Helena squeaked in shock and really, she tried to reach out to grab Rowan's arm before she spilled over into the water but her soapy hands didn't find any purchase before Ro was already splashing back toward the edge. She couldn't help but laugh, arms wrapped around her stomach. There were a few stirpips in the area, she could hear their easily identified chirps. "Are you okay?" she asked, wiping tears from her cheeks as she offered a hand back up onto the rock.
"Wet, but groovy." Rowan told her reassuringly. "Those little things are like miniature kamikaze pilots, I swear! I bet they fly right into the mouths of laughers, get eaten like popcorn." She snorted, coughed a little to get the few drops of water that wandered down her throat back on out of her lungs, and dusted some of the water from her person.
Helena laughed and shook her head as she started to wring out the heavy blanket. "I think this is clean enough, honestly. Now we just have to find a spot to hang it to dry." She craned around to see if there were any low hanging branches that would do the trick. "How about that one?" she asked, nodding across the pool as her slender fingers twisted and untwisted the fabric.
"Works for me!" Rowan said brightly, gathering up the wet blanket into her arms and carrying it over to the tree branch, where she started to hang it up. She brushed away some foam on her arm with her fingers, blowing it away, and completely failing to notice a pesk fly down to try and catch it. She reorganized herself, instead, and stretched out the blanket so the majority of it was in the sunlight. "Have you considered there might be physiological consquences to having a white sun instead of yellow?" Ro asked Helena curiously.
Helena was busy scrubbing Rowan's tanktop against the rocks and that question has her lifting her head up in surprise. "No, I hadn't really. Doesn't the white sun mean that it is much younger than our Sol? Don't they go from white to orange to red and then kaputz?" She knew that Rowan was no astronomer but hey, maybe she watched Discovery as much as Helena did. "What do you think the effects might be?" she tilted her head curiously.
"I don't know. I was just wondering out loud. I mean, twenty generations down the road we could start seeing children - females especially - who can see beyond our spectrum. People who produce more vitamin D from being out in sunlight, or less. Skin color could change over generations to a color that the absorption rate would be more or less perfect for this world." Rowan started squeezing the excess water from the quilt, looking thoughtful. "For that matter, ten generations from now children here might not be able to function on earth because of differing immune systems, or handle the high sodium and glucose foods from earth. Or even just the pollution levels."
Helena looked thoughtful at that. "That's very interesting but I see what you mean. I think if we really are stuck here, do you think we could even produce ten generations without some serious defects?" Their group was much too small at this point to be viable. "Really all that we can do is to attempt to keep our bloodlines from crossing as often as possible and hope that we pick up new arrivals to keep us fresh, as it were. And hopefully by the time our children are arriving, we'd have figured out how to survive well in this world." Some of it sounded bleak but Helena said it all with the same matter of fact, conversational tone. After all, they were discussing the future of the child that Rowan was already carrying.
Rowan raised an eyebrow. "Personally, I don't think this is the only dropoff point." She shook her head. "That's just putting all your eggs in one basket. And there is evidence of other people being here before us. Let's say only one in fifty survived - that's bad odds for anything - that still means there are other people out there. And assuming one out of ten of the survivors are breeding viable, that's even lousier. But I think, and don't assume I know any of this, that we're dropped off here under the impression that we'll be a tribe of a sort. Eventually we'll meet another tribe, gifts and DNA will be exchanged, and we go about our merry ways again. It makes more sense then dropping off by our lonesomes unless tomorrow, the next day, next month, whatever, we suddenly get a massive influx of people - a minimum of two hundred breeding-viable individuals with the vast majority being female."
Helena nodded. "It's scary, not knowing what this is all about, you know?" She dunked Ro's tank top into the water and swished it arould to rinse the soap out of it. Removing it from the water, she wrung it out. "Besides, if we were chosen for our breeding viability? I don't understand why I was the first choice." She sighed and shook her head. She hadn't confided in her friend about her marriage had dissolved and her inability to carry a child safely to term. It just didn't seem like the sort of thing you discussed with an expectant mother.
"Oh, I know. I'm terrified. I'm a wuss to begin with. I'm allergic to pain. I was planning on being drugged out of my damn skull when the baby came. But I have to smile bright and happy because me? I'm setting a standard." Rowan made a face. "If we manage to get a breeding population, people are going to say 'look at her, Rowan didn't freak the fuck out when she had her child.' I gotta suck it up. Though I don't know why you wouldn't be a good choice. You're pretty, you're smart, you're not getting sick because the wind blew in your general direction. Seems like you've got a good genetic code there."
Helena shrugged mildly and confessed. "Because I kill my children," oh yeah, she let it hang there in the air between them for a second before she sighed. "I have an overactive immune system. My white blood cells attack a fetus and kill it, like it's an invading body. Which, I guess it is. My body just doesn't recognize friend from foe, you know?" She bent over her own t-shirt, half heartedly scrubbing it against the stones. "Mostly I just had miscarriages in the first trimester," she forced herself back into that conversational tone to keep the flood of emotion at bay. "But...a couple of them lived long enough to um...breathe, for a few hours."
"Remind me, if we ever get back to Earth, to have a chat with your doctor about the many uses of immuno-suppression therapy." Rowan said in that same conversational tone, and then she didn't know what else to say for a moment. "Maybe you were picked for another reason. I mean, you're obviously an effective leader considering the fact that you're still around and none of us have declared war on each other."
Helena gave her a smile and worked on rinsing out her t-shirt. "Must be it. Or maybe they don't look too closely at who they take." She shrugged her shoulders. "If we're assuming these are aliens who have taken us, maybe they just distinguished male from female and determined we need a pair to make a third. That's possible." The thought of being as brave as Rowan, becoming pregnant and carrying on through this strange world, that scared Helena right down to her marrow. Miscarrying at all out here was a frightening prospect.
"True..." Ro tapped her teeth - a bad habit - while she thought. "But it's also likely that they looked at us and said 'here's an extremely social species; in order for them to be happy, they need to have others around them'. I mean, we're so social we stack our dwellings on top of each other. I think the closest thing to that are hive animals, like bees, ants, or termites. So maybe they decided that we just need people, a good mixture of both genders no matter what else, in order to function."
Helena nodded. "That would be a logical observation. Whoever their zoologists are, thank goodness for that observation. I never want a repeat of my first two days here. Ever." She'd been the first one out of their group to arrive and it have been terrifying and lonely. She didn't know what might have happened to her if she'd carried on alone here. Maybe she'd have died by this point. Who knew?
"Of course, there's always the theory I have that everyone here, at some point, clicked on one of those 'you're the one-millionth person to see this website click here to claim your prize' banners on the internet." Rowan laughed softly.
Helena laughed too and shook her head as she stood to hang their clothing to dry along the branches. "Well, I'm definitely guilty there." She had to leave it to Rowan. Getting away with her for the morning was always the best way to brighten Helena's mood. Rowan and she could have interesting conversations about their situations, and laugh and joke just as easily. It was nice to have a friend when out on a strange adventure.