Chapter 5: The New Ride

The day was bright as the sun rose to the top of the head. But for Aina and her daughter Rhielle, she could feel the heat, but not the sunlight. Thankfully, the big forest trees provided shade. But even so, it was a small comfort as the trees barely had leaves and the few leaves it had were yellowing from the lack of water.

“Mother, this is red-spotted lady. The leaves and stalk are edible after the flower has bloomed, but the flower itself is not edible. Before it blooms, the whole plant is poisonous, so don’t pick it up before you see the petals fall. And never eat the petals, it can cause blood weeping.”

Aina nodded as she bent down to pick up a few red-spotted lady that had shed their petals, being very careful to not touch the petals on the ground. According to Rhielle, these stalks have a slight salty taste and can be a substitute for salt when cooked in vegetable soup.

For the past few days, Rhielle had been teaching Aina how to identify edible plants. Unfortunately, Aina was so bad at it that Rhielle had to inspect everything she collected every day. This made the whole foraging process slower as a result.

Aina felt like she was a burden, but she couldn’t just stay at home and let her young children go out. Child labour might be normal in this world, but her modern sensitivities couldn’t allow it. Especially when all she did was sit at home.

“Mother, I think it’s time to go home. Do you still want to look for vines?”

“It’s okay, I have enough for now. Let’s go get the scooter.”

“Mother, mother, Vila wants to ride the scooter!”

“No problem. Vila can ride, Rhielle can ride, mother can ride too!”

“Are you sure this thing can carry all of us, mother?” Rhielle asked as she secured the basket on the right side of the scooter, a wooden contraption with a carved wooden wheel in front and another in the back, connected together with two long logs with a handle attached in front.

Rhielle had never seen anything like it. Her mother said it was a kind of vehicle that could carry people and goods like a cart. But what kind of cart doesn’t have a cart space? Instead they had to hang their goods on the sides of the two long logs and secure them with nets made of twine.

Her mother-in-law had asked her husband and the second brother to cut and carve wood the past few days to make this ‘scooter’. Meanwhile, her mother-in-law had her and the youngest daughter to split vines to make thin twines. As for her mother-in-law, she was busy making something she called a ‘wood lathe’ and then was busy using it to make small wooden ‘things’ that make lots of small wooden shavings.

Rhielle truly didn’t understand her mother-in-law. Before, her mother-in-law was lazy and cruel, beating her at every opportunity. This she could understand. After all, she wasn’t the only daughter-in-law who was treated badly by their mother in-laws. A daughter married off is like spilled water after all.

But since coming back from the dead, her mother-in-law had not once beaten her. Didn’t scold her either. Even when Rhielle had accidentally raised her voice, her mother-in-law just meekly accepted it without fighting back. And now she had made this strange vehicle that nobody had ever seen before. 

It's almost like the person standing before her was a completely different person. This made her recall the story of Luan The Steadfast, a general of antiquity who went on a journey to find the flower of revival to bring his beloved wife back to life. And at the end of the story, a warning was told, "Those who left do not return. If they do return, that is something else."

“Now Rhi, you sit sideways here. Vi, you sit on this lateral bar,” Aina said as she checked that the baskets were secured properly to the central bar. After making sure that everything and everyone wouldn’t fall off, she put her limp left leg on the back of the scooter, both hands on the oversized front handle, then pushed off the scooter with her right leg.

“Mother, it’s moving!” Vila yelled excitedly.

“Close your mouth, Vi! You’ll bite your tongue when it picks up speed,” Aina warned.

Rhielle didn’t really understand what was the big deal. After all, it was only slightly faster than walking. She could just catch up to it by running a little bit. But she changed her mind as it started to gain speed.

The scooter was FAST! She felt wind rushing against the side of her face, blowing her hair and dress around. The scenery passed by so fast, she was clutching to the body of the scooter so hard that her fingers turned white.

Meanwhile, Vila who was sitting astride the scooter slightly in front of Rhielle laughed heartily. Completely ignoring her mother’s warning, she had her mouth open wide, the wind rushing into her mouth causing her cheeks to bulge out. To Vila, who had spent her entire seven years of life living in fear of punishments and never experiencing a mother’s love, this was the first time she could understand what ‘having fun’ meant.

Vila didn’t want this to stop. When the scooter slowed down as the elevation of the road increased and the momentum slowed, her happiness fell. But when it picked up speed again, so too did her level of happiness. By the time the scooter slowed down just outside the village, she had already had her fill.

Yet she still hoped for more. She wanted to ride the scooter again tomorrow. And the day after.

Rhielle was still frozen stiff. Her fingers white from holding on too hard. Her body trembled in fear even as the scooter came to a stop. Her mind was already blank by the time they passed the mountain closest to the village, as if her soul had departed during the journey.

Aina put one foot on the ground before dismounting completely. With both hands on the handle, she started pushing the scooter forward. She lovingly ran her hands along the oversized handle and admired herself for the performance.

She didn’t invent this scooter of course. She once watched a documentary on an unpowered, pedalless vehicle widely used in Africa and thought that it would be so much easier to build than a bicycle. Drawing the blueprint on sand, she noted the inefficiencies and problems of the original design and improved them in her mind.

If she could build a robot, then she could certainly build something like this. She improved the efficiency and mobility by adding wooden bearings and wooden suspensions that she made herself. To handle the fluctuations in speed or sudden accelerations caused by elevation changes, she added wooden flywheels to the rear wheel. This allowed the scooter to mitigate the effects of extreme speeds riding downhill and maintained speed longer on flat roads or uphill rides.

Engineering problems require an engineer’s solution. The result was an overengineered unpowered scooter that was unnecessarily complicated. But it was an overengineered, unnecessarily complicated unpowered scooter that Aina was unexpectedly proud of.

As she pushed the scooter along the village, the other housewives gossipped.

“Isn’t that the lazy Bitch of the Virell House?”

“What is she pushing?”

“Are those her daughters sitting on that thing she’s pushing?”

“I thought she beat her daughters? Why would she be willing to push while they just sit?”

“You know, I’ve always wondered. Why has she been so quiet since she returned from the dead?”

“Yeah, I thought she would’ve gone from house to house sucking everyone’s blood or eating everyone’s limbs.”

“I thought so too. My husband and sons stayed up all night for the whole week expecting her to attack us in the middle of the night. They were so tired that the fields were neglected.”

“Could it be that her daughter-in-law was the one who revived her and turned her into a ghost slave?”

“What? What are you saying? That her daughter-in-law is a necromancer?”

“You don’t hear this from me, but I heard the Argen household of Richfield used to be a family of court sorcerors.”

“No way!”