Awww, thank you frenci! Soooo cute! 30 kilos melt away like magic, I should keep you folks around more often.
*ahem* A "bit" more background / wall of text about my character.
Helle-Mai Räätäli, age 50s (*mumble mumble*), immune, based in Saimaa area, Finland
"These tools belonged to my grandfather. I spent quite a bit of time with him when I was young, and he would tell me stories. He was a teenager when the Rash illness came to Estonia, and his father and sister died of it. His mother fled with her two surviving children and her orphaned niece. They made their way to Finland, and stayed a while in Lahti. That was where he met his first wife, Katri. She was apparently quite a lively and daring person, and they used to raid abandoned houses in Lahti together after most of the surviving populace fled to Saimaa.
It was on one of those raids that he got these tools. He’d loved drawing as a boy and had been shown how to make woodcuts, and he took up the practice again to while away the evenings in their safe house. I still have some of the blocks he made. See this one?
It’s supposedly about a real true story, about the time Katri was attacked by a troll while taking a sauna. Seems she managed to lock it in there and she stoked the fire to get the sauna roaring hot. After about an hour, she opened the door to the sauna, whereupon the troll staggered out and lurched to the stream here to cool off, and then stood up, thanked Katri and walked calmly into the woods, never to be seen again.
But Katri died somehow; I don’t know if it was Rash or not, my grandfather would just shake his head and sigh and change the subject. My grandfather came to live with the rest of his family here in Niinisaari, married my grandmother and they had my mother and uncles. One of my uncles went up and worked on one of the boats on the Keuruu-Pori waterway, but the rest of the family stayed here. I’m one of four children, well six originally I suppose, two of them died as babies, the first one and the one right before me. My husband comes from a really big family, he’s one of nine! We don’t have any children, but two of my nephews live with us.
I get by from the honey from my hives and the birch beer and mead I make with my nephew Jukku, and a bit from making these stamps for all the official paperwork. I sometimes try to make pictures like my grandfather used to make, but I have no talent for it. He said a lot of his pictures had meant to be book plates, but he also told me he didn’t have books before the Rash came, they just had some sort of, I don’t know, magic apple where the stories would appear on it and you could turn the pages by waving your hand over the apple. He left his behind in Estonia because they couldn’t bring anything from the Rash areas. I don’t know, doesn’t make sense to me either, he said it was an apple. It’s probably like sending a troll to sauna and having it come out like a human, just a story."
