The next morning, Rachel led me out of the manor, giving me my first proper view of the surroundings.

We'd been staying in the country estate of a very successful and wealthy lord, and the surrounding countryside was lush with life. Over here, a field that lay fallow, lush with grass, cattle, some other four-legged grass-eating animal I'd never seen before in my life, and a lot of literal bullshit. Over there, a well-ordered orchard. A village, with children running through the streets, laughing and playing. A few teenagers fishing in the river.

Burly Alphas, tall and broad and stronger than oxen, pulled carts while short, curvy Omegas spun wool into thread while keeping an eye on the children and chatting with their neighbors, and medium Betas went this way and that on every sort of errand. Everyone wore rather simple clothing, but well-fitted, and dyed in bright blues, reds, yellows, and greens. If I recalled correctly, blue came from woad, red came from a plant called madder, and yellows came from another plant called weld.

Some of the houses in the village were bigger than others, seeming more prosperous. Our destination was one of the biggest houses, placed at the edge of the village where the space was less tight, and the work of the non-farming specialists who lived there could be conducted.

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"It does, upon consideration, make perfect sense that I was brought to a cartwright's shop," I said. "What other woodworker would have a ready supply of wooden wheels?"

"Well, a wheelwright," Rebecca Cartwright said. She was a big, burly Alpha, as tall as I was and twice as broad, and wearing a bright green shirt with the sleeves rolled up and white leggings under a brown leather apron laden with pockets and small tools. "But then, my shop has always had a wheelwright in it, so maybe you're right that nobody else would. Now, what do you need a wheel for? Need yourself a new handcart?"

"Not quite, no," I said, shaking my head. "I need your help to build a machine to spin roving into yarn. I don't suppose anyone in your household spins yarn?"

"Of course we do," Rebecca said. "Where do you think my clothes came from? But I do take your meaning- we'll need someone to actually test the damn thing."

"I trust you two have it from here?" Rachel asked.

"We're civilized adults with a common interest," I said, nodding. "I'll be just fine, and you can get back to reading or sparring or whatever it is you do when I'm not looking."

Rachel, in lieu of telling me what the hell she did all day, simply nodded and left the cartwright's shop.

"Now, first and foremost is the wheel. Do you have any that are roughly... oh, two feet across?"

"That's a bit on the small side, but yeah, I've got a few," Rebecca said, nodding.

"Excellent. I've brought enough iron with me to make the necessary metal hardware, so... let's grab that wheel, the crappiest scraps of cheap wood you've got, and hack together a prototype."

The first step was to build a frame to hold the wheel up and off the ground, and in a way that allowed it to spin freely, while around us, the shop continued its daily thrum of activity, with apprentices and wheelwrights plying their trade on other paying work. This is also where I brought out half of my iron to shape into an axle- it was my great pleasure to realize that Earth Manipulation affected metals too, not just rocks.

"The axle's too long," Rebecca pointed out.

"It is not, in fact," I said, before bending the overhang over about ninety degrees, and then bending it back out a few inches down, creating an offset shaft. I then thinned out said offset shaft just a bit, moving the excess into a smooth bulb at the end, so that I could tie a string around it without risk of it coming off. "Now... I don't suppose you already know what a treadle is, do you?"

"Sure I do," Rebecca said. "We use one to pump our lathe."

"We're gonna need another one here, to turn this wheel," I said. "So, how do we..."

I'd done a bit of amateur carpentry back home, but I wasn't a professional woodworker, nor was I terribly familiar with these old tools. Rebecca, however, was. She drilled holes, turned round tenons, and fit together the treadle with barely an hour's work.

"And now for the moment of truth," I said, tying a thick, sturdy twine around the shaft at one end, and the treadle with the other. It was, altogether, pretty simple: pump down on the treadle, and pull down on the offset shaft, causing the wheel to spin. Release the pressure and momentum would carry the wheel through the upstroke, and then you could put the pressure back on. It took a little practice to get the timing right, but once I got it, it was just a matter of moving my foot up and down with some rhythm, and if there was only one thing I learned from middle school band, it was that I wasn't cut out to be a musician. But if there were two things, the second thing was how to move my foot up and down with some rhythm.

"Well, I'll be," Rebecca said, watching the wheel spin. "It's a neat trick, but... how's it meant to spin yarn?"

"Well, okay, it's a moment of truth," I said. "We're going to need another, longer twine, and we're also going to need to turn a groove into the wheel for that twine to ride in. And then we're going to need another bracket for holding the spinning thing your apprentice is making, which'll be a great deal smaller than the wheel is."

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"Then what's the wheel for?" Rebecca asked.

"We tie the twine in a loop around the wheel and the flyer- that's what the smaller spinny thing is called," I said. "We pump the treadle to spin the wheel, the wheel pulls the twine loop, and the twine loop pulls the flyer to make it spin even faster than the wheel spins, because it's smaller than the wheel. It'll all make sense when it's done."

Rebecca shrugged and trusted me. It helped, I suppose, that the treadle-spun wheel meant we didn't have to take it out of the wheel to put the groove on the rim, she just had to work the treadle while she held a turning gouge to it. And while we were doing that, an apprentice came to us with the wooden components we'd need for the flyer and the bobbin- a symmetrical, balanced wooden fork, and a handful of wooden disks, half of which had a groove carved along the rim. Rebecca put in a single wooden post that forked to offer support to both ends of the flyer-bobbin assembly, and it was time to finish metalwork for the assembly.

Now, was it possible to make all-wood bobbins? Absolutely! They needed to have a hollow tube for the center shaft, so they could fit over an axle and ride freely, but if you've got a lathe, you can in fact turn a dowel and then, if your workholding is good enough, drill a straight hole through the center of it.

But Rebecca's lathe was a kinda primitive model that wasn't equipped for that, and meanwhile Earth magic meant that I could make whatever the fuck I wanted out of iron, and we needed to use metal parts anyway, so who gives one, I'm using metal.

"Alright," I said, putting the bobbin onto the thin steel axle of the flyer, then the flyer-bobbin assembly into the bracket. "It's ready to be tested. Let's bring it to your wife, see what she makes of it."

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"So, feed a bit of leader string through the big hole in the front, out one of the small holes on the side- doesn't matter which, do whatever's easiest," I explained. "Pull it out, then around that first hook and onto the bobbin."

Siobhan Cartwright, Rebecca's wife, was alarmingly attractive- and, as far as I knew, the first Omega I'd properly met. She was short, barely clearing five feet tall, and very curvaceous. Objectively, her 'endowments' were barely any bigger than Allie's, but on the frame of someone six inches shorter, they very much looked a lot bigger, which was one of the advantages of being short as a woman.

"Alright, now what?" Siobhan asked, having followed my instructions.

"Give the wheel a few turns with your hand, make sure the yarn is winding properly," I said. "Once it is, give it a good pull and start treadling, drafting, and spinning yarn."

Siobhan nodded, and after a few tense moments... she was off to the races, spinning yarn on a wheel.

[New Skill: Mechanics, Level 5]

"Hell yes," I said, wiping my forehead. That new skill was promising. Maybe it'd help me fill in the gaps of my understanding for other machines that aren't as simple as the spinning wheel. "God am I glad that worked."

"It's a bit easier this way," Siobhan said, adapting to the spinning wheel quite easily. It wasn't a drop spindle, of course, but then, it wasn't like none of that knowledge or skill could translate. "When will you be making me one of these?"

"How soon do you want it?" Rebecca asked, patting her wife's head.

"As it so happens," I said. "I happen to need someone to actually use this thing on my behalf. I want to present the idea to the high seat of Nukem, while wearing clothes made from thread spun on this very machine. I'm not much of a spinner, personally, and since I can't practically use the machine myself, I'm perfectly content to leave it here in your hands, if you're willing to provide to me some of the thread you make with it."

"How much thread will you need?" Siobhan asked.

"I'm not sure," I said. "I don't know much about the practical realities of making clothing, I just know how the tools go together and how to use them poorly."

She snorted, smiling and shaking her head, still spinning thread.

"I'd say we've settled up for one outfit's worth of thread," Rebecca said, nodding. "Your knight gave us plenty of coin already, and then you've decided we can keep the machine."

"It'll have to be a fancy outfit," I said, tapping my chin. "Therefore, I'll have to help you build even more machines for making clothing, to pay for the extra thread. As it so happens, I was fascinated by a machine that knit socks faster than could be done with needles a short time ago, and could likely build a passable imitation, given enough metal. Which I will be acquiring through my knight, not through you, so don't worry about it too much."

"Iron isn't that expensive, you know," Rebecca said. "I keep plenty of iron on-hand for whatever tools we need."

I blinked. "...Huh," I said. "That was not how iron worked in comparable times back home, but I suppose it makes sense. Fire affinities are common, and earth affinities can shape iron without really trying. Back home, though, burning the impurities out of ore, beating the resulting blooms into bars with hammers, and then beating those bars into anything actually usable with hammers used, by weight, ten times as much wood as ore."

"...How did you have any trees left?"

"Well, in a lot of places, we didn't," I said. "It was something of a problem, really. I could talk your ear off about it, but I'm not sure how much of your time I've paid for, and I'd hate to waste it at no profit to you."

Rebecca barked a sharp laugh, clapping me on the shoulder. "Lucy, you will always be welcome in my home and at my ear. But, if you find yourself already homesick for the comforts of Manor Nukem, I won't keep you any longer."

"I'll be back soon," I promised, heading for the door. "I'd love to hear how you get on with the wheel."