The woman pours a strong smelling liquid onto the washcloth, Bina guesses that it's probably distilled alcohol, and wipes it over her cuts. Then she rummages in the box and returns with a large medical eyedropper and uses it to spray the alcohol through the holes in Bina's arm.



It hurts. A lot. Not as bad as the wire, but bad enough to make her hiss through clenched teeth, and bad enough for the room to go all fuzzy again for a few seconds.

The woman doesn't stop talking through the whole procedure. Now her, she wanted to use the engine to turn a galvanometers dial, like they would in a REAL experiment, like at the Royal Society, but her husband… well her husband disagreed. He fancies himself something of a showman and insisted MOST STRONGLY that if he was going to shut down the factory for a whole morning, and move three days worth of beets out of the loading area, that they would have to provide a show that was more impressive than seeing a tiny needle move around on a dial.

He came up with the idea for using the observation engine to turn on a light. He said it was poetic. Lighting the fire of a new age and all that. He even went down to the theatre last week and borrowed one of their little gel's to put over the light cover so that it wouldn't be a 'dull white light', but something a little bit more interesting.



The man doesn't know anything about physics or electricity, but he can sell sugar to just about anyone, so she has decided to trust his instincts in this regard. If he thinks a coloured light will make people sit up and pay attention, then he's probably right.

The woman finishes tying on a clean new bandage onto Bina's arm. She tells her that she's going to have to see a real doctor about those cuts, as soon as she can. Puncture wounds are nasty at the best of times and it looks like these ones might be already getting infected.

Notes