Company
Who: Rowan and Helena Where: Rowan's bedroom, then a field apparently When: Night, then morning. What: Arrival time! Rated: G
Rowan McKenna - botanist and soon-to-be mother - was having a hell of a time getting to sleep. Not because her bed wasn't comfortable. And she was neither hot nor cold. She wasn't hungry, or thirsty. She didn't have to pee, even though she had to do that pretty damn often these days. It was because there was a baby's foot or hand or possibly very small head thumping against places that really shouldn't have been thumped against. Like kidneys. And ribs. She tried adjusting her position several times in the bed, gave up, and took a little walk around her bedroom. This seemed to calm the baby down, happily, so Ro went back to bed and rolled onto her side, because that was the most comfortable position she could find. "Goodnight, baby." She patted her stomach. A few minutes later, and she was deeply, thankfully, blissfully asleep.
Helena hadn't really slept much since her arrival in this strange and awful and amazing place. Days were really better times to sleep if you could handle all of the little things that came out and picked strands of your hair out or peeked up your nostrils. She was so agitated and flustered by these little things (she'd been calling them pesks) that she'd actually started to snarl at them and bear her teeth, hoping to drive across to these off little creatures (which she determined looked like the mating between a chameleon lizard and a flying squirrel) that she was a predator, a meat eater, and if they persisted in bothering her while she was attempting to sleep the safe afternoons away, she was going to bite their beady eyed heads off. As a result of the lack of sleep, her natural sweetness was somewhat diminished.
For two days, she had done her best to cope with this odd, incredibly strange situation. It had taken the passage of a day for her to realize that she really was someplace very far from home. Best case scenario was that this was one of those highly weird and isolated islands in like, Micronesia. As much as she was a person who enjoyed to life in hope, she had a sinking feeling that the best case scenario had a slim likelihood as well. So after the first day where she had to admit that there was no civilization to find, no humans to seek shelter with, she'd passed a quivering, terrified night clinging to a tree with all of her worldly possessions draped over branches and shoved into the joints of the boughs. There were things in the night. Strange, guttural, high pitched laughing things that seemed to be sharing some kind of blood thirsty joke that she wasn't in on. She couldn't explain it, but Helena had felt certain that she herself was the punchline.
The second day, once the Laughers had scurried back to wherever they went during the day, Helena had bundled her pillow into her blanket and slung the whole thing over her shoulder like an enormous hobo sack and then she had gone looking. She needed a place where she could camp that would be secure against the Laughers, near water, but also provided eyes on the field. The field was important, she was sure. If anyone was going to find her, they were going to find that odd, rectangular clearing in the jungle.
It hadn't taken her too long to locate the perfect tree. Even though the trees here were unlike any she'd ever seen before, there was one breed of them that seemed to be ideal, if one wanted to live in a tree. it had a high, broad canopy made if of waxy broad leaves nearly the size of dinner plates. They fanned out and provided some dense shade. They were also slightly bowled, these leaves, so in the morning they had often caught a sip or two of dew. The trunk was so thick around that Helena wasn't sure that she and six clones could link hands around it but there were these tough, strong vines that seemed to grow up and over the branches as well. Basically, her students would have called it The Perfect Climbing Tree. Helena found a creek with a rock bottom and beside this fresh trickle of water was the largest of these climbing trees.
Before nightfall on the second day, Helena had managed to yank her duvet out of the brightly colored red, orange and pink duvet cover and, using some of the thinner vines, a sharp bit of rock and a little bit of death defying ingenuity, she had made herself a hammock to sleep in. She'd been worried that the Laughers would notice the bright colors but after passing another noisy nights of nerves, none of them seemed to come near her tree, despite a pair of the bulky, black furred creatures stopping at her stream to drink.
So bleary eyed, Helena climbed down from the tree, leaving all of her worldly possessions in the hammock (where hopefully the Pesks wouldn't do more than poke at them) save for the sharp chip of stone she'd found and been using as a very dull knife, to crouch at the stream and do her business. She peed downstream of the tree and then climbed upstream a ways to gather a few handfuls of water, taking the time to rub some of the water over the back of her neck. The nights were warm and the afternoons were humid and hot. It was barely light but it was already heating up. Spotting a chunk of large drift wood, she seized it and started to drag it back toward the field. She was amassing a stock of wood in the center of the field, hoping that she could somehow make fire, some sort of rescue bonfire to attract the attention of planes or maybe some nearby village she wasn't aware of.
As she jerked the branch free of the underbrush and into the open clearing, her shoulders slumped. Someone, or more likely, something had scattered her neatly arrange tee-pee like woodpile. Muttering and grumbling, she carefully stomped (her bare feet were already painfully cut and scuffed) across the field toward it, logs scattered every which way. It was then that she spotted the green. Not green like the strange purply green of the foliage here but that deep, mysterious and yet somehow lush green of evergreen forests back home. This was no plant. This was a quilt and it was covering a lump with a fall of brown hair. "Hey!" she called out, nearly dropping the log she was dragging on her bare foot. Helena hurried toward the person sleeping in the field. Where had they come from? What hadn't she heard or seen them arrive?!
Rowan was busy with a very nice, proper dream where she could literally smell good, clean earth and feel the prickle of grass shoots under her cheek. She was pretty sure she heard her answering machine picking up on someone, but who the hell would call this late at night, she didn't know, and she burrowed further into her little nest of a quilt and her pillow, mumbling something abusive about telemarketers. She loved dreams like this, where the sensations never quite went away, even when you were half-way to awake. Vivid as orange flowers on a cactus in the middle of the desert. She sighed softly, brushed a grass blade or maybe a random stray hair or whatever, off her nose, and went back to sleep.
"Hey!" Helena said again as she dropped down on to her grass stained knees (not just green plant juice but some purple as well, mottling like bruises on her skin) next to the sleeping new arrival. She sounded out of breath despite the fact that she hadn't really moved far or all that fast. Reaching out, she gently grasped what she thought was a shoulder. She'd heard a mumble and saw some movement so she was fairly sure this person was alive. It was also shaped all wrong to be a Laugher, so she felt no fear when she shook the person awake. "Wake up!" she commanded, her voice sounding far too hopeful and relieved.
Well, that certainly startled Rowan awake. In fact she she rolled away, flailing, so quickly she came within a centimeter or two of whacking Helena in the face. She managed to get to her feet but, still mostly asleep and utterly over balanced because of her belly, she fell back over onto her ass. "What the fuck woman! You scared three quarters of my life out... of... what the fuck?" The second time she asked the question it was an actual question and not so much a statement, and it sounded much more confused. Rowan looked around, kind of dopeishly, and more than a little stupidly. "Not my condo."
Helena stayed crouching where she was, hands up in a 'don't kill me' or 'we come in peace' kind of gesture. She let the new woman flail, noting with some dismay that the dark haired girl was most definitely pregnant. Very pregnant. If they were stuck here for very much longer, that could be bad. For now though, Helena pushed that worry away. She was far too glad to have someone to talk to. "How did you get here?" she asked. "When did you come? How do we get back?" Her black eyes were hopeful on Rowan's confused face. She had to have some answers, right?
Uh. Rowan blinked rapidly. "Whoa, whoa. Not so fast. I was asleep in my bed like five minutes ago. I ain't getting up until my alarm clock goes off. Sorry, hun. Little Nameless here keeps me up enough that I need every bit of sleep I can get." She'd decided on the fact that this had to be a dream strictly because it didn't look right. Everything was green, sure. But it wasn't a right kind of green. It looked discolored. Broken in a way that she couldn't quite define beyond color. She dug her toes into the grass. "Probably be soon, though. Too bad. This is a nice one."
Helena knew she must look like some sort of half wild person. She shook her head, her ratty and unwashed pigtails flipping back and forth. "No. You are not dreaming. You aren't. You're awake and...I guess you're lost just like me. There's no one else around and there's no towns or villages. There's....nothing. Nothing familiar at all." She swallowed them, like swallowing a golf ball through the backlog of emotions that were running through her system. How could someone else have shown up without anyone or anything making any noise? That didn't seem right at all.
Rowan gave the other woman a definitely doubtful look. Of course a dream person would say that, wouldn't they? They wouldn't know they were just a dream. Though Rowan was a little surprised she hadn't woken up already; usually when she finally recognized she was dreaming, she woke up within a couple minutes. She couldn't do the lucid dreaming thing. "Alright." Rowan decided to go along with it. "If this isn't a dream, where are we, then?"
Helena shook her head again. "I don't know. I'd hoped that you knew." She turned away to hide her disappointment, taking a few deep breaths as she peered back across the field toward the tree where she had left her stuff. When she looked back Rowan she gave her a wry smile. "Let me guess. Went to bed last night and nothing seemed odd. You don't remember anyone moving you here at all?" She asked hopefully. "Were you sleeping alone?" she asked, her dark eyes stealing down to the bulge under Rowan's tank top. With that though in mind, Helena pushed herself to her feet, rolled on to her tip toes and peered across the grass while moving in a circle. "You are the only one," she said, sounding disappointed. She didn't know why she should be. Maybe this lady didn't come with answers but at least Helena wasn't alone anymore. As she considered that, she felt the flutter of panic in her chest begin to subside.
"No, I wasn't alone. I had little Nameless here." She patted her tummy with a grin. Rowan was already one of those mothers who thought the sun rose and set on her baby, and it hadn't even been born yet. She winced when Nameless decided to try and grab one of her precious, precious ribs, though, in response to the patting. Rowan got up of her rear end, though it took a little doing, and started gathering up her blanket and her pillow. And one of her socks that had fallen off in the scramble of getting away from the woman who'd randomly woken her up - that she put back on. "So. Er. What exactly were you doing before I apparently sprang out of nowhere?"
Helena sighed. "Well, I had been building a signal fire over there." She gestured to the scattering of the fell-wood logs. "But I think some of the Laughers must have torn it down in the night." She shook her head. "I'm not too sure if there's a lot of point in putting it back together if they're just going to scatter it again while I'm hiding in my tree." Turning the other way, Helena pointed toward the grand Climber. The bright orange, red and pink hammock was visible from where they stood, hanging from some of the lower branches and supported by a weaving of the Climber's vines.
Rowan listened to that, then gave her a slightly odd look. "What's a laugher, then?" She picked a handful of the weird purple grass - it just reinforced her belief that this was a dream, because it was a) purplish and b) like no other grass she'd ever seen - and started plaiting it without even thinking. But the scientist in her started thinking. "It must either be a large predator or dangerous herbivore if you're afraid enough of it to be above the forest floor." That was how chimps did it. They went above the beasties that could do them damage.
Helena looked back at her, curious for a moment. She found herself watching this young mother-to-be braiding the grass instead of answering the question. "Um," she said distractedly, yanking her eyes back up to Rowans. "I haven't actually gotten a good close look at them. They're bulky, I know that. And black or dark brown. They have three legs and they make this....sound." She got chills just remembering it. "The first time I heard it, I thought it was people. I ran toward it, you know?" She couldn't believe now that she had been so dumb. "They only come out at night but I saw them on the edge of this field, just over there." She pointed to a corner of the perfectly rectangular clearing. "Even in the dark and being so relieved to have found people, I got the picture well before I got much closer than this to them. It's in the sound." She shook her head. "They just seem so mean and dangerous, when they laugh like that. And they do it all night." The more she talked, the more it became clear that this petite Asian woman was both exhausted and terrified.
"Jesus." She continued making the cord out of the grass, looking thoughtful. "Okay. I still think this is a dream, but on the ten billion to one chance it isn't or that I don't wake up from the dream or whatever, maybe I'll just stay above the floor, too." It wasn't a difficult task she was doing, and she added more grass as she got short. She still didn't look like she was paying much attention to it, though. "Um. Oh. I'm Rowan."
Helena looked surprised and then sheepish as she offered her grubby hand, roughened from climbing her tree all day. "Oh, um...I'm Helena. Helena Chu from New York City, formerly of Clairmont, New York." She made a gesture toward her Climber tree. "Um, my tree is this way. There's more than enough room to make a hammock of your own." She eyed what the woman had with her and pointed to the blanket. "Is that a solid quilt or a duvet inside a cover?" If the bedding could be separated then so much the better. It could be cool up in the tree, she imagined. Especially if they have some chillier nights. Did this place have seasons, she wondered?
Rowan shook her hand, with a musing little smile on her face. And she used the thin rope of grass to tie back her hair, keeping her bangs and the dark brown locks away from her face. She tied it underneath - though loosely so that it wouldn't break. It was definitely warmer here than Edmonton. "It's just a solid quilt. I didn't need much more. Next time I'll pack for a camping trip, though." Ro added the last bit with a touch of dry humor, and looked around the field again. "Though I'm heavier than you. How much weight will the hammock hold, y'think?"
Helena gestured toward the tree. "Well, the single blanket means that you wouldn't be able to sleep with a blanket on top of you. Um...I think it'll hold. Do you think you can climb the tree?" Some people couldn't. At the best of times their balance would fail them. Now Rowan had a little front end weight that she perhaps wasn't entirely good with. "Well, I mean...you'll have to climb the tree eventually," she said with apology in her voice. "I don't think you would be safe on the ground. The Laughers come right up to drink at the stream." They could hear it, the burble. The bottom of the stream was rocky and very clear. The rocks on the sides were spongy with a thick electric purple moss. "See the vines? I can cut through the thinner ones with a rock I found. We can use it to support your hammock." Her neck was already craning as they passed under the broad canopy of her climbing tree. "We just need a couple of branches that'll work for tying the hammock to."
Rowan eyed the tree. Given another few weeks, and maybe not, but right now? "I think I can climb that. It looks simple enough." She started meandering towards the tree, rather amused about just how awesome her imagination was. Purple! She realized what seemed broken about them before, and it was that none of these plants were anything she recognized. At all. Whole new species cropping up in her imagination. Rowan grinned, and stepped towards the tree. "And these laugher things can't climb?"
Helena shook her head as they arrived at the base of the tree. "Not so far that I've seen. I made sure that as soon as it was fully dark, I was up in the tree. I stayed quiet and either they didn't see or hear me, or they knew I was just out of their reach. They didn't seem to bother with me though, even though a few of them sniffed around the base of the tree last night." Helena wondered if one small human hadn't been worth the trouble, but maybe two humans would be. What would happen if more and more people arrived? Eventually they would need to find another tree.
"Oh." Rowan thought about this, and looked up into the tree. Then she decided she was going to try climbing this now, rather than later, while she could still see what she was doing (assuming she didn't wake up in the meantime). And while she wasn't particularly fast, Ro had done a little wall climbing back at the local gym, so she at least knew how to do it. So it wasn't scurrying and the shift in center of gravity did have her fumbling a few times, she managed to get to a branch that would support her weight, and sat down on it. "Ha! Did it!"
Helena stood ready to at least break Rowan's fall if the unthinkable happened but the woman made it. "Whew. That was the scariest thing I have ever seen." She shook her head. "Ok, you sit there," She bent and tied Rowan's quilt around herself like an enormous super hero's cap, and started to climb herself. "Here, hold your pillow." She offered it to Ro as she drew up along side her. Helena found a nice wide branch and carefully draped the blanket over it. "Now we need to find a good spot to make your hammock. Someplace that's full of strong branches that you can get to easily." She didn't want it to be too high up, either. Pregnant women had to pee a lot. She didn't want Ro falling out of the tree in the night just trying to take care of business. "See anything that looks promising?" She asked, grasping a vine tightly so that she could lean out a little ways.
Ro took the pillow and cuddled it. It was that biodegradable memory foam stuff, and was great for her neck. Usually. When she wasn't carrying more weight on her front. She looked around from her perch. "Closer to the trunk would be good, because branches are thicker closer the tree, of course, so..." She tilted back, and pointed up and around the tree a little ways; it wasn't particularly far, it was just kind of blocked by the rest of the tree. "How about that one?"
Helena was getting used to living in a tree. With her toes gripping the bark of the branch she stood on and a firm yank on a vine to be sure it was well attached, she swung across a dizzying gap and landed on a branch closer to where Helena was pointing. Squinting up, she nodded. "I think that might work." She looked around at the vines. "I think...I think maybe I should go around and hit a few of the other climber trees in the area and collect their vines. I think we could maybe weave little nets or rope ladders. I can certainly do a basket weave thing here to make your hammock extra secure." She looked down at the ground. "I found a sharp chip of rock yesterday that cuts through the vines with a little bit of elbow grease. I'll climb down and find it. I think I left it next to the stream." She balanced along the wide lower branch she was standing on, touching other branches and vines for balance.
"Um, okay! Bye, then?" Rowan blinked, then looked around and stood up very carefully, right next to the trunk of the tree. Curious, she used her fingernails - short and neat, none of those acrylic nails for her - to scratch the bark and then pull a layer away until she got beneath it, and sap started to bead up. She was a botanist, even in her dreams. She had to check the tree out, of course.
"Ok, be careful," Helena warning. "I'll stay in shouting distance but be careful anyways." She smiled as she reached the trunk and started her own careful climb down. Her little rock was just where she had left it so she tucked it in her pants. As she paused, she looked up at where Rowan was studying the tree. "Are you sure you don't want to come with me, maybe? Maybe you can spot something edible. I'm starving and starting to consider eating this purple moss down here...." She eyed it longingly. "It kind of smells likes parsley..."
Rowan tasted the sap from the tree and immediately spat the bitter stuff out. "Well, the tree definitely isn't. Too much base in the sap." She spat again, getting rid of any residual taste for the most part, and started climbing down. She didn't like the implications of that - she'd never tasted things in a dream before - but she shoved the idea out of her mind. "Or something. Way too thick, anyway - what purple moss? That purple moss?" And she gestured to it.
Helena looked down. "Yeah, this stuff." It was hard to miss. The rocks were gray and dark and wet just like rocks next to a stream ought to be, however an electric purple moss had grown over some of the most shaded rocks. It was a thick and spongy carpet as one followed the stream back into the trees. "Can you smell it?" she asked as Rowan made it to the ground. It was easy to smell the fresh, clean water but underneath that there was the fresh, herby smell that previously, Helena had always associated with the colour green. The vivid green of her windowsill herb garden, to be precise.
Rowan thought about it for a moment, then pulled off her socks and stepped into the stream a little way to wash out her mouth, rinsing and spitting several times before it apparently worked. Then she made her way back to Helena and picked a little of the moss. That was taken to the stream and washed off. Then she popped some in her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully. "Hm. Well. Try a bit now. If it doesn't make you feel weird by tomorrow, try a bit more then. If it still doesn't affect you, eat more the next day. If it still doesn't make you feel weird, we can consider it edible. At least raw, and for this time of year." Booyah. Clan of the Cave Bear taught her basic survival skills for a dreamscape. "Tastes okay, though. A little bit on the sourish side, but nothing awful - you might want to wash it off better than I did though."
Helena, out of incredible hunger ripped off a chunk that was nearly a handful and swished it quickly but thoroughly in the cool water. Once she was satisfied she got all of the visible grit and slime off of it, she popped some in her mouth and chewed, her brows drawing down in contemplation. "So it smells like parsley but maybe it tastes...a little more like lemongrass, or...no, no it definitely tastes like parsley. But parsley that's been soaking in lemon juice a while. Do you agree?" She asked as she looked at the woman who was the closest thing to 'in the know' that she could hope for around here.
"Something like that." Rowan agreed. "Definitely a cross between parsley and lemon, maybe something else, too." She nibbled a little more, considering. "I'm going to call this edible for the moment, anyway, but we should definitely be a little careful with it until we know for sure, okay?" She paused. "That's how I read it in a book. You can test out new vegetation a little at a time. If it numbs or makes your mouth and tongue tingle, spit it out right away. If it doesn't, then you try a little at a time."
Helena took another bite and chewed it thoughtfully. "What did the book say about wild berries? I noticed some the other day but wasn't quite hungry enough to try it. Want to take a walk and have a look? I'll gather up some of the climber vines as we go." Moss and now maybe berries. Maybe they would make it after all, at least until someone rescued them. Her was still sure there was a chance that she could catch the person who brought her and Ro there.
"Well, you can try all new vegetation that way. As for berries, ten percent of all white and red berries are edible, and ten percent of all purple and blue colored berries are toxic. So you're best off finding the purple and blue ones. But lets see the berries, and then we can decide." Rowan grinned, setting the rest of her moss down and making sure it was fuzzy side up - it would grow back into the rock this way, and it wouldn't be wasteful. She wasn't quite as hungry as Helena, after all.
Nodding, Helena tucked her sharp rock into the waistband of her boxers at the back. "Ok, it's this way along the field." She waited for Ro to step out of the little rock embankment and lead the way back out into the clearing. She skirted the field all the way to the next short edge of the rectangular clearing. "They are right there, see them?" The tangle of bushes stood three feet tall on the edge of the treeline, right where they would get morning sun and late afternoon shade. As they approached them, Helena drew in a deep breath. "It was the fragrance that tipped me off. Is it just me, or do those bushes not smell like a rose garden in full bloom?" And yet, there were no bright coloured petals and blooms in view. However, behind the leaves there were flashes of rosy pink berries. They were long and oblong, like pills. They grew in clusters of eight.
Without anything resembling fear or worry, Rowan went over to them and picked one of the berries - a darker pink then the rest, so more likely to be ripe. And she broke it open, and smelled it. Then she did a weird thing - she licked it. Considered the flavor, or any weird sensations on her tongue, and then nibbled it. She promptly spit out a seed. "The fruits are good, wouldn't bite into those seeds though. Bleh."
Again, as if cut loose, Helena snagged a few of the berries quickly and shoved them in her mouth. She ate them so fast that she didn't really consider the flavor of them. They were sweet and ripe and lovely. They had the consistency of grapes which was comforting and familiar. The burst just the same way between ones teeth. "That's so good." She eyed Rowan. "Do you want to maybe do some harvesting while I do some climbing?"
"Sure. When you get up there can you cut loose a couple big leaves and some skinny vines? Maybe I can make something that'll hold so we can carry these." Rowan said. She figured if she coned the leaves, she could use the vines to hold them together and carry them that way. Definitely be easier than carrying a bunch in her hand, anyway. While she waited, she, picked a piece of that fancy purple grass and chewed on it without thinking.
Helena studied the nearby climber trees and nodded. "Sure. This one over here seems to have a lot of skinnier vines. Let's try this one first." The tree in question was narrow enough that Helena could wrap her arms entirely around it and it's lower branches were quite low to the ground. She was up in said branches in no time. She wrapped one sturdy vine around her body just in case she lost her balance and then started to saw back and forth across the highest portions of the vines she could reach. Good ten to fifteen foot lengths of various diameters began to tumble one at a time out of the tree to coil amidst it's roots.
Rowan squeaked and raised her arms above her head to ward off these things falling on top of her head, and grabbed the thinnest, shortest lengths. "That's good, that's good! No more!" She started laughing. "Send down a few leaves, please! Um. Not a lot, just like three or four!" It was probably going to take at least that many to make a proper container thing. Rowan would have think about this for a while. She picked another berry while she waited, spitting out the seeds as she did so. They really did taste nice.
Helena stretched on to her tippy toes to snap off the wide leaves at their bases and three of the broad foliage fluttered down to the floor. "They're cool leaves, aren't they?" She called down to Rowan. "I drink out of them sometimes, if they seem clean, because of the way the edges roll up. They're sort of like bowls." The leaves were a bit more fleshy than one would expect from an earthly coniferous plant. They have a bit more of a tropical leaf feel to them. Like a rubber plant, or a very thin aloe.
Ro considered this, and then gently ripped one of the leaves on the side, down to about the more convex area in the middle. Then she overlapped the two halves of the rip so that the bowl shape became much more pronounced. "Ha! There!" Except now she had no idea how to use the vines to keep it from springing apart. Maybe Helena could do it while she held it together? Rowan didn't know. This survival stuff was for the bloody birds. "Helena, when you come down could you tie a vine around this so that it doesn't come apart and I can put stuff in it? I didn't really think this one through."
After cutting a few more of the thicker vines, Helena climbed back down and gathered up the vines, rolling them up around her shoulder and elbow like one might do with a garden hose. She peered over at how Ro was holding the bowl but something caught her eye and she stepped over to pluck up something from the ground. "Look at this!" she said with surprise. She turned back toward Ro to present one of the leaves but it had obviously fallen some time ago and dried out. In it's drying it's bowl had become much more pronounced and when Helena tapped the glossy eggplant purple side of it, it made a sound like tapping plastic or maybe wood. "It's so light." She handed it over for Rowan to look at. "Would it take the weight of berries, do you think?"
Well, hell. If bowls were just going to be lying around, the hell with making one. Rowan let go of her random torn leaf and took the dead one from Helena (the previous one falling to the ground with an undignified flopping sound). She tapped it curiously. "Damn, that's weird. Yeah, it should, as long as we don't overfill it or anything. I wonder if we took leaves and made them into the shapes we wanted, if they'd dry like that, like this one did?" Curiously she flipped it over and traced over the vein system, then back again. Be damned did she ever have a great imagination. A world where pretty much everything a person could ask for in terms of crafts were provided by a single tree. "Let's just use this instead, then."
Helena was busily gathering all of her cut vines and coiling them together in one spot. "Here's another one." She plucked another dry leaf bowl from just underneath the bushes of berries. "Ok, I think that's all the vines we're going to need." Holding the bowl, she scanned the area to see if anything else popped out at her. "This place is so weird," she finally murmured, a bit distantly. "I think my kids would love it though. Funny how kids can handle the odd things so much better, isn't it?" Her slightly vague gaze sharpened up on Ro's face when she asked her question with a bit of a smile. "I thought I was going to lose it completely before you showed up." She didn't really see that Rowan was still convinced this was a dream. Helena had just accepted Rowan's calmness as a mercy.
"No preconceptions." Rowan agreed, and she patted her tummy a little. The baby, uninterested in the conversation, didn't bother waking up or whatever it was doing in there. "They're pretty cool. Kids, I mean. How many you got?" Lazily, Rowan started picking berries - a few here, and a few there, never taking a lot from the same branch so that she didn't damage it - and putting them in the bowl Helena found.
Helena began picking as well, depositing them in the second bowl she'd picked up. She chuckled, realizing the miscommunication. "Twenty one," she flashed Rowan a quick smile. "All between the ages of two and four." It was an interesting age to know a child, she had decided a long time ago. With her teaching credentials she could have moved up into grade school but she'd resisted the challenges. She liked the experience of children opening up to the notion that the world extended beyond their home and their parents.
Rowan thought about that. "Foster mom?" She had to hazard the guess. "Day care instructor? I don't know. Um. You're going to have to give me a hint here. I'm just a botanist." Rowan lazily popped another berry into her mouth, spitting out the bitter seeds. They probably weren't any more harmful then apple seeds, but they were unpleasant. At least to Rowan, they were. "Little kid's swimming instructor?"
Laughing, Helena dropped another handful of berries into her bowl. "Pre-school. None of my own, sadly." Very sadly, but that wasn't a story she liked to share with people she had just met. Once again, she reached for her bright side - that she and Edward had at least managed to stay friends. They may have lost their passion for each other, but at least they hadn't lost the most important part. "So who is missing you right now?" she asked with a nod at Ro' belly. "Do you have a husband who's frantic right about now?"
"Oh, no. No no." Rowan laughed at the image of herself being married. She got a very fifties image from that, doing all the housework while wearing high heels and an apron, hair in a beehive. Didn't work for her at all. "I can't be bothered with the whole getting married thing. No boyfriend, no husband. No girlfriend or wife, either, if you're wondering."
Helena gave her a surprised look. "So just you and baby? Did you go to a clinic or something?" She'd seen her share of those, she certainly had. She'd had fertility doctors and any other kind of doctor relating to her reproductive difficulties on speed dial, both at home and on her cell. It hadn't panned out to anything but pain and disappointment though. No, she told herself. She was content to be there for the children of other people.
"Yup. I'm financially stable, have a good job with great benefits, a condo with two bedrooms, and I wanted a baby. So I decided to have one. But I couldn't be bothered doing that whole relationship thing, so I went to a clinic. Third time was the charm." Rowan grinned. "I can tell you that the father had dark hair and blue eyes, and an IQ of a hundred and thirty, though."
Helena gave her a smile. "So you know everything important then." She chuckled. "Well good for you. I don't see why a little thing like being single should prevent any woman from having what she wants." She tested the weight of her bowl and decided it was likely at capacity. "Ok, when you are ready, we'll head back and I'll start weaving vine nets all over our tree." She thought the vines, if woven tightly enough, might not break of a body fell on them. She hoped. Even still, anything she could do to prevent a possible tragedy, she would do her best.
Rowan didn't think it would help, but she didn't say so. Helena might be just a dream person, but she was very nice and Ro didn't want to dissuade her from that sort of thing. "I think I'm good." She held out her arm, offering it to Helena. "Shall we, my dear?"
Smiling as she stood with the heavy vines looped through one of her arms Helena looped her other arm with Ro's. She wasn't concerned that she hadn't washed with soap in three days. She didn't care that they were even out in the middle of no where with not clear understanding of what had happened to them. "Do me one favor, Rowan. If you wake up and this turns out to all be a dream, take me with you alright?" She chuckled with levity that she knew she shouldn't really be feeling. She couldn't help it though. She wasn't alone anymore.