Soup Style Bk. 04 - Elsebet

Bk.4 Elsebet

Chapter 1: Morning Wood?

Reading along in any of the soon to be voluminous books in the Soup Style series, you may recall that Elsebet had a small but capable home hobby woodworking shop? Yes, a functioning woodworking shop. But, what she also had was an accomplished career in welding. She was, formerly, working as a welder. Oh, also, she was a glassblower. And, not to ignore, she was also a metallurgist. Ah, darn, so many skills!

She had some artistic notoriety as a ceramicist. Later reduced to making beads with the neighborhood girls for fun arts and crafts. so it was common to see the girls in this neighborhood adorning clothes, hair and almost anything with beads self-made at Elsebet's. If you are familiar with the concept of a maker's fair, that was the neighborhood precursor here. Elsebet had started with an entire product line to her credit, before licensing litigation put a stop to that! Her earliest ceramic work was loosely based on stories of a pigtailed daughter of a pirate from her childhood reading, but, oh, well, enough. In our age with 3D printing and computer tooling, instead of the old trade of tool and die making, all those skills might seem, well, obsolete?

To protect the young Elsebet from the rapes, kidnappings for ransom, and ordinary risks of the time in which she was growing up, her parents repeatedly shipped her off to relatives where, they hoped, there might be more safety for her.

Elsebet came from a long family line of tool and die makers. She had gone into welding but it was fun for her to feather in the skills that were far more nuanced of a toolmaker. The work was physically less demanding. The work took her about the same amount of time. The pay was better. Better enough that she was retired at age forty-four.

Cultural hindrances to sexual experiences differ among the many cultures of our time. Even within a country, different cultural mores and boundaries are in effect. Elsebet, growing up in Sweden, when she did, experienced all the social stimulation of her culture. All the sexual exploration. All the freedom to find herself that was norm for that time and place. At parties with her schoolmates, taking turns to be in a bedroom were normal. Normal. Frequent. Ordinary. She soon learned that even if she didn't want to have sex, her mind could instantly be changed. Similarly, she concurrently learned that even if she had no interest in that guy (or girl), her mind could instantly be changed. Easy sex. Once she was touched, even if she had not sought to be touched, she was instantly in a situation that called for sex, sex was inescapable, sex was unavoidable, sex was to be fulfilled. That was her nature. That was her special vulnerability. A vulnerability all too easily exposed, exploited. Exposed. Exploited. Easily. Too easily. For that risk to potentially be greatly reduced, she would ultimately be shipped off to the scene for this story, in an altogether foreign place.

During the years of Elsebet's childhood, her parents had worked as industrial designers. A successful industrial design shop in a country famous for design. Coincidentally. both were from long lines of tool and die makers. Shipping her off to relatives was essentially a practical career rotation for her.

Had she not been shipped off for those experiences, the risks facing her had she stayed in urban Sweden at that point were bad beyond terrifying for her parents. Girls reaching the age of ordinary explorations, of commonly experienced alienation from the confines of parental supervision, were recruited into relationships that led to sex trafficking. The common one that had her parents most terrified were the stories from girls who had worse than a pimp for prostitution been rented out as a wife, becoming a wife for sex before divorce and then marriage immediately to the next man waiting for a rental wife.

Instead of learning the skills of a rental wife, Elsebet was schooled in trades. After her career, she kept fond memories and valuable skillsets. She was doing less work with her skills, but, luckily as well as only occasionally, still had some repeat business as well as the odd hire for something that someone wanted done with her skillsets. She kept her equipment, but, often joked that it was aging faster than was she. Each time a yard cleanup began, she wondered whether to toss her tooling out, this time, a final closing to her career?

She most frequently was called upon for custom glass blowing. She had the annealing equipment and the skills to use them. In a sense, Elsebet was a sort of independent folklore materials scientist. She could make, modify, test and produce articles that might otherwise not be prototyped, or more often, otherwise not authentically recreated. Best of all? Meeting the people needing such interesting work done. Also a benefit worth enjoying? The people who were attracted, aroused, interested in a woman of her, err, strengths.

A welder and a cop. Not a lesbian couple. Just housemates during an age when few could afford housing without housemates.

Her housemate, Sara (who herself is a law enforcement officer), being targeted for investigation in the case of the badly behaving men who had been pinned down by arrows, had freely allowed visual inspections of the equipment that was in Elsebet's armory. Armory? Err, maybe an inventory would be better than describing the resources on site?

Detectives especially felt suspicions would be rewarded if the woodworking might lead to the gotcha moment for bows and arrows. They had the (mostly broken) arrows. The arrows were held as evidence. They did not have any descriptions of the bow (or bows) from which those arrows had flown. Increasingly, the theory for the case was that the arrows had actually been launched from drones in sets that provided lighting as well as stealth weaponry. But, the basic investigation, the spadework, still had progressed without real progress. The arrow shafts? Made from wood. If made from wood, then Sara and Elsebet are that much more likely to be "involved?" The fletching with real feathers. Feathers? That neighbor from above whose house those bright floodlights were seemingly aimed during the arrow incidents must be "involved," too?

The old guy with the aviaries was "involved" with Sara and Elsebet. The surveillance caught his being called, coming over, and returning to his home. Booty calls. In the wee hours of the morning. Morning wood calling? No. Being called! Not a group scene, no, sometimes called by one, sometimes called by the other. Just "available" for either when called? Nothing else special about him? He was characterized by the lead prosecutor as "a fucking grand marshal at a parade of horny women," so of course others were jealous.

The detectives wanted to know the dirty details. They weren't getting any. No.

They. weren't. getting. any.

To rely on Hollywood narratives, the tooling marks on the wood must be capable of being matched from her workshop tooling, right? The feathers used for arrow fletching must be capable of being matched with feathers from the neighbor's aviary, right? Reasoning thusly, there was morning wood, err, morning swat team serving of warrants for searches. Conducting searches that went from rooftops to basement floors. Finding no lighting on the rooftop was a prosecutor's nightmare in building a case against these targeted suspects. What were those floodlights?

Bk. 03 Elebet

Chapter 2:: Glory Hole

The floodlights were troubling the prosecutors. That nobody could find them or even evidence that they had existed to meet the testimony of witnesses was going to create enough uncertainty about who was being charged that the prosecutors were reluctant to gamble their win/loss records taking this flimsy of a case to court.

No matter how sympathetic the shooting victims might seem when charges were brought, though, the prosecutors were worried about loose ends that could unravel if the judge were to allow more to be presented about these victims of arrows. The victims were themselves pinned by arrows from a vigilante. The criminal here was not the rapist but the vigilante. As a matter of public policy the rapists were not to be prosecuted. For the public good, to make the community safe, the vigilantes had to be prosecuted.

Elsebet also had a little fenced backyard kiln working area. A kiln? More than one from primitive to futuristic. Sort of a fire pit like a metallurgist might have had thousands of years ago, beside, a more modern kiln that looked like a tall, thin, almost TARDIS-like (bigger on the inside than appeared from the outside) pizza oven (which did sometimes heat pizzas, but was actually set up for frames for firing ceramics). Also one that looked as if it had been built and used within the castle or monastery walls from at least an eon ago, from some era in time long since lost to modern workmanship. Lost from understanding even to archeologists.

Going over their reports from the execution of the search warrants, the prosecuting and investigating team members had guffaws over talking total nonsense about the glory hole.

Elsebet, as a glassblower, had a furnace with a glory hole. The reheating hole from where she worked into the furnace where the glass was heated as she worked on it. That access between the working space and the reheating functional space imparts a view, a scene, a vision, of the glowing heat from within the furnace as the piece being worked goes in and out. That has been called a glory hole because of the glorious vision to behold such work in progress. While Elsebet was not making pieces for religious use, nor anymore for anal training tools, she did get to smirk at reactions to the name of her equipment.

Bk. 04 - Elsebet

Chapter 3: Toys

Elsebet had engaged in neighborly nods with the old man two houses down the block from her own. His granddaughter, Ashley, had joined in the "let's make jewelry" workshops she had done with the neighborhood kids. Having a lot of kids familiar with the respect for the equipment operating conditions was important to Elsebet. She would likely have done so without the call from her landlord's agent saying it was "suggested" by the property owner after the annual video inspection tour had been shown. Eventually, with his social skills, Ashley's grandfather had struck up some remarkable conversations with most of the mothers of the kids and with all of the widows in the neighborhood. Odd fact that he was the only eligible bachelor in the neighborhood. A grandfather bachelor? Bachelor. Grandfather.

One of the remarkable conversations that she had with him was about her glassblowing. She had oft-handedly talked about challenges from a client for glass sex toys. The idea was a proposition for her creating customized anal training toys that her potential client would then sell online. In sets. Sized appropriately. Or not. Ashley's grandfather had unambiguously offered to recruit women to try them out, get her feedback. He had even told her that he had some ideas of his own for sex toys within the fabrics of wearing apparel.

Together, they explored. Not just sex toys. His ideas for impellers in columns of stored, then released, rainwater, so that as you opened the valve to get water you also created power. They had talked through enough of his idea that she began calling him to come over to try looking at her iterations of models to do the job.

More directly sexual, she had delivered to him a set up on which to test combinations of sex toys if he had a lover so inclined. Oddly, at that time, she had not yet herself had sex with the neighborhood's charming, eligible, bachelor grandfather.