Ew. Ro!
Who: Thorn and Ro Where: Up! When: During the day What: A medical discovery! Rating: E for Everyone
Rowan didn't feel like being quite on the ground at the moment. Not for any particular reason, but because while she'd explored a lot on the ground she'd suddenly realized she hadn't explored a lot of the up. So this is what she planned on doing. And she did it, too! Well, she gathered up her shirt and twisted it into a knot at her side, leaving her very pregnant belly bare and started climbing - now that she was getting a semi-regular source of protein, she was feeling much healthier and stronger. And a lot like a monkey, what with scrambling up the tree.
She'd found a couple of little puddles of water with some pretty little bugs hanging out around them, and since they ignored her, she ignored them. And she climbed higher, and found some dried, cracking branches that she pulled off and sent down below for people to take to the fire. But when she pulled one branch, it the stench was almost overpowering. It made her eyes water. Putting a hand out to steady herself, she felt something sticky, saw something green, and then suddenly it was like sticking her finger in a lightsocket for a moment. It hurt. And then her hand went numb.
Ro blinked at her hand. The hell? "Thorne?! Thorne!" It was shouted at the ground in an 'oi, it's not an emergency but I need you anyway' sort of tone.
Thorne was doing his best to try and help Kenneth with the wagons by laying out climber hanging climber vines and tying rocks to the ends of them with grassy cord so they would harden very straight. As he did so he was thinking of other applications for these. Like...hut walls and the base of roofs for thatching. That was his one concern about going east was that there were fewer climber trees, of course, if they could tame the grazers, they could get back to the forest in half a day and haul some back.
Rowan's voice broke his wool gathering and he looked up. He was a little worried, but not too much. Please let her not be going into early labor. When he found the tree she was in, he started climbing up, "What's wrong, Ro?"
"My hand is numb and I don't like it. So..." She thought about how to put this in the most delicate and sincere way possible, which was really hard. "So, come fix it or help me down or something." She waved her numb hand at him - which wasn't exactly numb completely, just parts of it were numb - with the dark green stain across it. "Like, it hurt for a second, then just went numb. Whoosh-fast sort of thing."
"Uh..." He finished climbing up to wear she was, braced himself on a branch and reached for her hand. "As much as I'd love to do something about it? I can't really make things not numb." He looked it over carefully. "What's the stain from? Did you touch something?" Touching something was far, far preferable to random numbness without purpose in Thorne's opinion.
"Yeah, I think I squished a plant. It smells like a rotten egg left out in the sun after rolling around on top of some several-day-old dead animals." She helpfully smeared his hand with the stain. "Um." She looked around. "That plant there. That's the smelly one I squished." She pointed it out.
Thorne wrinkled his nose as she wiped the stain on his skin. "Ew. Ro!" He wiped his hand on his pants, but he could already feel a sort of mild tingling. "Hmm..." He reached out and very carefully tried to pick a few bits without squishing them. "Here..let me just....get...a couple and then we'll go down."
"Bleh." Ro covered her mouth and nose with her 'good' hand, making a face. "That injures easier than a magnolia flower. What a smell. Even the pesks are staying away from this tree now. Lovely."
He tucked the bits into his ever present pouch then reached for Ro's hand. "Okay, well, we can study it now when we get down, but how are we going to get you down if you can't feel one of your hands? That's going to make gripping a little tricky..." More than a little tricky and a fall was not what Ro needed at the moment.
"It's like novocaine at the dentist. I still know it's there, I just can't feel it." Rowan open and closed her hand experimentally for a moment, then looked down. "I don't think we've got a lot of choice here."
"Yeah, but when you can't feel your lips at the dentist...you drool all over yourself. Just because you can open and close your hand, doesn't mean you'll realize if you've got a bad grip.." Thorne looked down as well. "I really don't want you risking a fall....what if I got some of the cord and braided rope Kenneth is using for the carts so at least you have a safety net?"
"That'd take a while. I guess I could sit here until the feeling came back to my hand." Rowan said thoughtfully. "I mean, it shouldn't take that long considering I wiped a lot of it onto you. I bet if I washed the rest of it off, the feeling would come back faster. Oh, hey, am I a helper? Did I find something you can use properly?"