My Playground

Your bar finally had emptied of customers and decided it was time to close, the only person still left was the Ghoul, which you didn’t mind. 

Taking the seat next to him, you take off his hat that you had been wearing for most of the night. This time he took it and put it back on his head. 

‘Got anywhere to stay tonight?’ you say watching him take the final gulp of his drink, he shakes his head, ‘gotta keep movin’’ he says. 

‘Well if you need a place to rest, I have a room you can have for the night, free of charge’ you smirk at him. 

He finally looks at you, a glow in your eyes made it hard for him to refuse. You pointed him to the direction of the room, ‘I still gotta clean up, you go rest that cowboy head of yours’ you say cheerfully. 

The Ghoul didn’t mind your enthusiasm but only responded with a nod. His room was on the same floor as the bar. When he opened the door a single bed was snuggled into the corner. It was neat and tidy, something the Ghoul appreciated as it wasn’t something he saw often. 

‘Enjoy’ you holler as he hears the sounds of glass clanking as you put them away. He shuts the door and goes for the bed. You had treated him well all night and all of the alcohol you had given him made him feel numb, which was exactly what he needed. 

He takes off his hat and puts it on the bed side table. The springs on the bed were loud as he laid his body down. He could still faintly hear you moving around the bar. 

He wouldn’t usually have taken up such an offer but his body was starting to beg him to rest and no amount of alcohol or chems could keep him going. 

The Ghoul’s chest slowly rises and falls and he begins to finally rest. 

You had almost finished cleaning up your bar, you liked to keep it well maintained, so this was a part of you nightly ritual. 

Your friends had cleaned up most of the blood that stained your floor, but you decided it needed another mop over before you were happy with it. 

You went to the back to collect water in your bucket and when you come back out, five individuals had somehow managed to come through your locked front door. 

‘Sorry folks, I’m closed for the night’ you say sternly.

‘We won’t take too much of your time’ one of them says, ‘some of our people who were following a Ghoul, last place people said they were at was here. Any idea where they could’ve gone?’ their voice sharp. 

This wasn’t the first time you had to deal with a bunch of Wastelander thugs, you were becoming more upset at the fact you’d have to clean even more blood off your floors. 

‘Same place I am going to tell you to go if you don’t leave’ you spit out, ‘the fucking ground’ you pour out the water from your bucket onto the ground. 

The intruders were puzzled by this action but the hostility coming from you was enough for them to be on guard. 

‘You think this Ghoul is worth your life?’ one of them barked, ‘I guess we will find out’ you respond back. 

‘Go get the bitch’ one of them orders. As they run at you, the bucket you were holding comes swinging at their head, knocking them out cold. 

You then pull out your pocket knife and run at them, tackling one of the bigger men over. Frenzied you stab them multiple times. 

The others pull you off him and begin to beat you. One hitting you with a bat so hard it knocks the wind out of you. The cracks loud as your arm takes the blow of one kick as you try to protect your head. 

The beating didn’t last long as a shot was fired into the air. One of them pulls you up and puts a knife to your throat. You could barely focus on what was happening before you. 

‘Party is over’ the Ghoul growls, ‘take a shot at us and the girl is dead’ they spit back. 

‘Don’t try me’ he responds back, his gun quickly firing at two of intruders, however the third who was holding you had already tried to slice at your throat. 

You collapsed to the ground. The Ghoul aims a final shot at the person who had a hold of you. 

The Ghoul comes over to you and rolls you over, your hands around your neck to stop the blood from rushing out. He puts his hands over it, trying to help as much as he can. 

Though you were losing consciousness, you could see the Ghoul frantically try to figure out what to do. ‘Key. Pocket. Meds. In box. My room. Upstairs’ you try to use any remaining energy to speak what feels like your final moments. You cough out some blood. 

He could see you start to lose colour in your face. The Ghoul picks you up and carries you up the stairs. His foot steps rushing each step. 

He lays your on your bed then searches your pockets. He finds a key and then tries to search the room for a box. 

The Ghoul was becoming increasingly frustrated but manages to find a box under your bed. Unlocking it he finds a plethora of chems. He finds your stash of stimpacks. He puts one into your thigh.

As he is looking over you, he doesn’t seen any sign of improvement so he puts in another. 

The blood continues to gush out, so the Ghoul decides he needs to inject another. 

You try not to scream out in pain, the Ghoul senses this and takes off his glove to put in your mouth, which you take and bite down hard. He puts in another stimpack as you let out a painful growl.

Finally your wound begins to heal and you could feel every muscle fibre reconnecting in your neck. 

Gripping the sheets in your fist you try not to make a sound but you let out a groan, ‘almost done’ he says softly.

Your face is covered in sweat now, breathing heavily your eyes beg the Ghoul to stop. He reaches for a med-x you had in your box. He stabs it into your thigh, you yelp. 

‘Sorry-’ he says genuinely, ‘-give me more!’ you yell as pull his glove out from your mouth. He gives a short smile at your demand.

The Ghoul reaches for some more chems and begins injecting different drugs into you. Your breathing returns to baseline and you let out a big exhale. 

As it all begins to hit your system, your eyes become heavy and you lose consciousness. The Ghoul checks for your pulse, still feeling a strong beat against his ungloved finger. 

He silently breathes a sigh of relief and takes a moment to look at you. A now noticeable scar etched into your neck. 

The Ghoul then gets up promptly and goes back down to the bar. He smacks his lips in annoyance at the dead laying in front of him. 

Dragging each of the bodies outside, he piles them all on top of one another a bit further from your shop. He then takes one of the many bottles of alcohol from your bar and pours them over the bodies. 

Taking out a cigarette from the box you had given him, he lights it up, taking in a big inhale before throwing the cig onto the bodies. 

Quickly the alcohol ignites and fire engulfs them, the smell of burning clothes and then flesh hits his nose. A muffled scream then comes from the pile, begging for help. 

Realising that one of them must have been knocked out, he takes a swig of the leftover alcohol from the bottle he just used on the bodies and then chucks it in the pile. The cries become louder, but the Ghoul pays no attention to it. 

Walking back into your shop he notices that they must have lock picked the door to get inside. 

The Ghoul checks out the rest of your bar, making sure every window and door was locked. Finding a crowbar at the back, he shoves through the door handles at the front, making sure that nothing could come in. 

He makes his way back up to your room, where you were now soundly asleep. He pulled a chair from your desk and sat next to you to keep watch. 

Taking a long breath in, he lit another cigarette out and begun smoking the whole pack. 

Looking over at the bed you laid in, you were peaceful. He wondered how you even managed to fight some of them off. He was even more impressed that you didn’t at least yell for help.

Cigarette after cigarette, the room was quickly filled with smoke. The Ghoul then decides to take some of the jet in your med box. A quick inhale and it hit his head, but his focus was still on you and making sure you were still breathing. 

Soon the sun started to fill the room, the Ghoul did not leave his post, now guarding you and your bar. 

Your eyes flutter open. Your whole body ached and you let out a groan. As your eyes focus, you see the Ghoul sat beside you.

At first you can’t say anything, the Ghoul hands you a flask that was on your bedside table, with the little strength you had left, you take slow gulps. 

You smile and look at the Ghoul and lay your head back down on your pillow. 

There was silence between you.

‘I guess it was worth it’ you voice dry. The Ghoul tilts his head but doesn’t question you. 

‘You’re trouble’ he mutters, ‘I know’ you respond back. 

────﹒♡﹒────

I know this maybe wasn't necessarily a request BUT it got me thinking and I wanted to continue to this story BC I THINK HE WOULD BE PROTECTIVE IN THIS SITUATION WITHOUT EVEN THINKIN ABOUT IT! he doesn't even know her name but here he is! doin the most <333

I start back uni next week and im just like :(((((( how dare I put myself (voluntarily) through my masters </3

INTRO

Welcome to Daelf's most involved rambling about old tools so far :D

So, in august, friends who are rarely around were coming to Paris, so we planned a guided group visit of the Arts & Métiers museum (meaning "crafts & professions"— it's all about technology, from the transformation of materials to communication and data, to the purification and precise measurement of scientific elements, to going to space, and also they have a Foucault pendulum and fun vehicles.) Great! We'd never been there!

I loved it from the start, but *then* we got to the first ~textile~ room and OH. MY. GOD. so many semi-automated looms, and strange shuttles, and… ONE spinning wheel? huh. I get closer to it, and it looks… Weird. I am instantly obsessed, but the guide is moving on, so i can't do much about it… YET.

Fast forward a couple weeks. Our son Perco is coming back from summer camp, I have to go pick him up from the train station and then we have to wait for a few hours until Fifo arrives with the car so we can all get home with the *enormous* suitcase and assorted Stuff. … Hey, why not put all that in the lockers at the station, and go to that museum you didn't see because you were away at the time, and yeah, don't worry about the thing i want to see more closely, it's fiiiine :] … i spent like twenty minutes *just* in that room, taking as many pictures as i could, before Perco literally dragged me away because we were running out of time -_-° IT WAS NOT ENOUGH. OBSESSION HAD ONLY INTENSIFIED.

I mean, look at that. what the *heck* is going on.

So, a few days later, having found nothing in the online data about the museum collection, I phoned them to ask about it, ended up exchanging a few mails with the lady curating the Materials section… but her specialty is glass working, not yarn related at all, so she offered to invite me to see the thing *out of its casing* on a day the museum is closed to visitors, and HECK YES PLEASE OMG

It was planned for december 1st, and (sparing you the logistic details) early in the afternoon, I was there with my mom, who had helped me get there with my own spinning wheel.

THE WEIRD WHEEL

sadly, we were not able to take the wheel completly outside, because (as you can see in the first pic above) it's linked to a distaff by a length of combed wool, and the distaff is fastened to the wall, so we were not going to touch that. BUT. no glass.

So.

What is "wrong" with this wheel? "well it has only one pedal…" yes ma'am, but that's. normal, actually ^^° Modern wheels have two because it's more comfy, that's all.

no. it has a tiny bobin that's impossible to take off from the flyer, and in direct contact to the wheel itself, which means no tention adjustment. why.

but also, a very ingenious system, moving the yarn as it is spun so that the bobin is evenly and automatically filled!

in addition to that, there's a yarn swift to the side, with a complicated string-and-pulley mechanism… and between that and the wheel, a missing part, broken. (the vice in the background also seems to do nothing, so there might be a missing part there too.)

so…

… what to make of all this? especially in contrast with the demonstration I did with my own wheel, and all the talking of being able (well, having the *potential ability*…) to make pretty much any yarn I could want with it, it's clear this one was the opposite: make One Specific Yarn, but easily and fast, with All The Steps on One Tool. Not sure how the string and pulley bits worked, but they were a way to use the wheel to spin it instead of the flyer without having to do more than tightening a thing specifically for it. I suggested that the missing part(s) helped with getting the yarn on the swift, and the swift was there because the rigid nature of the 'fill bobin easily with very regular yarn' meant you couldn't fill it much before tension needed adjusting, and everything else meant that you *couldn't adjust tension* because the whole point of this model was predictavility and regularity.

And that's all very cool, but a bit frustrating that the lil blurb under the wheel didn't specify anything but "spinning wheel with yarn swift", dating it even more vaguely to "sometime before 1840". And that was it.

And I realized I'd forgotten to ask the lady to give me the restoration notes she had pulled from the archives, but she had also mentionned something else we (I) could look up…

THE PATENT

At first I was like. Wait. What? But OF COURSE there would be a patent for something weird like this made in the early 19th century! The industrial revolution!! All I'd needed was the suggestion that such a patent existed, and the information that a public archive website listed All Of Them.

So I looked. And came up with nothing about spinning wheels: all the machines were after, like, 1855. But then I realized there was *another* archive, for older patents, from before they were all numbered!

… And I found it.

I FOUND IT.

I haven't had the spoons to read *everything* yet (because, o boi, the cursive, and the *spelling*… it might as well be not-french to me)(yes, if you didn't get it yet, i'm french so the langue itself is not a problem, but. WELP) A few notes though!

I didn't need to read everything to know it's the right one because a/ it has schematics of the flyer (*only* the flyer though :/ ) and the description of the parts describes the motion of the yarn guide doing its work, so even though some parts are not clearly visible or a little different, clearly, this essential part of the machine is THE thing they wanted to file a patent on, and it's the same mechanism I found on the wheel at the musem

b/ at the very start, the authors of the thing explain why they did this, and as I deducted, it's mostly Time. But also saving up fibers and bits of yarn? I get how having one person do everything could save time (they apparently even did Tests, and mention Numbers on how much time was saved) but i don't know enough about the procedures of the time to get how fiber was saved. ah well. It definitely was important, though, because they specifically mention silk in the list of fibers it can be used for!

c/ I had NO idea how incredible it would feel to see a mystery object, have questions about it, get to answer them by looking at it up close (at least closer than a regular visitor of the museum can), discuss it with a professionnal who knew nothing about this specific tool but still A Lot about the textile industry at the time, formulate hypothesis about the Why of the Weird, and then *have them confirmed* by *finding the patent its inventors filed about it because they were super proud of themselves* (quite right, too!)

It was great. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.