Briar Ch 6
#6 of Cadi, Volume 4: Briar
After everyone had moved in over the pub, things became a lot better for her little, found family. She still had Kestrel and her family, who they were now practically neighbors with. She had even helped with the earthwork for the lake that they had decided to build.
Once that project had been finished, she helped out evaluating the various warehouses and factories around the district to see which ones were even in usable condition. With such limited space, Director Christine was adamant that they couldn't afford to have any unused or unusable land, and Briar really couldn't argue. Many of the factories in the district really were a dead write-off, their structural integrity having long since started failing from neglect.
She worked with the team demolishing them and clearing the land. They didn't have any of the heavy equipment to break up the slabs or foundations, but they did have several exceptionally strong furs, including a couple of elephants, who were able to do quite a number on the concrete. Still, it took them much longer than it would have if they'd had the proper equipment.
But, they got the land prepped and ready for the purpose that Christine was really eager to use the stretch of land for. They'd already seen that the food that was being provided to the district was... far from spectacular. Highly processed, or dry goods like rice and beans. There was meat, at least, but on the whole, very little of anything truly fresh came into the district - the meat coming in frozen and vacuum packed, and what veg came in was largely canned. Christine's solution was to start growing their own vegetables.
Briar was delighted to continue her work on the plot of land, converting it into farmland while she prepared seedlings back at the pub. It felt... amazing for her to be working the land like that, really getting down into it with her fingers, and it wasn't long at all before the first field was ready to receive her seedlings.
Only... they all died. Briar cursed herself before she took a soil sample back to the lab she'd built in the back rooms of the pub. She had been expanding to increase the capacity of her production space, and with the farm project being assigned to her, she'd built a proper little horticultural lab. She ran a number of tests on the soil and cursed so loudly that even a few of the patrons in the pub on the other side of the building were startled.
A moment later, Alisa came to check on her, looking very concerned. "Briar? What's the matter? You're not hurt are you?"
Briar was breathing slowly, trying to calm down. "The soil..." she said, needing to pause for a moment as she took a deep breath, holding it for a long moment before she let it out slowly, "The soil for the farm is toxic..." she said, her teeth gritted.
Alisa's heart fell, her eyes going wide as she came over and looked at the results of Briar's analysis. "Shit... okay... So... we'd need an entire load of new topsoil?" She looked at Briar with concern.
"It's worse than that. We'd need to excavate down for several feet, drag that soil off, line the hole to keep any of the underlying toxins from leeching into the new soil we put in... and that's assuming that we'd be able to get enough new topsoil, which I just can't be confident that they would supply us with. They haven't exactly been generous with things like that," she said, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes. "At this point, I'd probably be better off trying to... figure out a way of detoxifying the soil."
Alisa nodded her head slowly, just doing her best to be calm for Briar. "Hey, with how good you are with plants and chemistry, if there's anyone who can figure out how to do it, it'll be you," she said with a reassuring smile.
Briar looked up at her and smiled tiredly. "Thanks. Mind letting the director know what's going on? I'm... going to get to work on trying to figure this out... you've got the bar until I do," she said, knowing that Alisa was more than capable of taking on that job, and had been doing that quite a bit already while she'd been working on the farm.
"On it," she said, leaving Briar to get to work on the puzzle before her.
She didn't solve it within the day. Or the week. It was getting close to a month of experimenting with chemical compounds to neutralize the toxins in the soil, but nothing she was trying worked. She was stubborn, though, and she wasn't giving up on it.
It was late one night, with the lights out in the rest of the pub and brewery, just the corner of lab area that she'd been hammering away at the problem in. Her eyes were starting to go out of focus, but she was still pushing forward.
And then... something interesting happened. She... kind of just let her brain slip out of her hyperfocus. She just let it drift, letting it free-associate as she sat there. It was an odd feeling, and her hands just started working, adding things to a beaker, apparently at random, but she was following her instincts at that point. Her hands danced around the lab bench, moving more like the hands of a pianist than a scientist.
She even began humming as she worked, and it wasn't very long at all before she slowed and finally stopped, looking at the beaker. On a rational level, she knew exactly what was in the beaker, but she had no idea what had possessed her to combine those chemicals. She was at least sure that none of them would have negative reactions with one another, but what they were doing combined like that was... beyond her.
She took a moment to stir the chemicals together, feeling that heating them wasn't the right course to take, and when her gut said that they were properly mixed, she took a sample of the contaminated soil that she'd been working with. "Hell... time for a leap of faith..." Briar said as she took an eye-dropper and drew a measure of the liquid, adding a few drops to the sample.
She watched the wet puddle of dirt, and was curious to see the liquid seeping through it. It went in as a slightly cloudy, white, but as it made its way through and made a little pool in the dish under the sample, it was a much darker color. She carefully separated out a sample of the liquid before she ran tests on it, along with the sample of dirt.
Her eyes went wide as both samples came back negative for any of the contaminates that were plaguing their garden. The dirt having been cleansed would have been one thing, but it would have left the complication of simply washing the contaminants off deeper into the soil, which wouldn't have done anyone any good. It would even put the lake at risk if that's what happened. But no... even the liquid had come back clean... which meant that whatever she had done... something in the synergy of the compounds had truly neutralized the poison in the soil.
She breathed deeply, carefully writing down everything that she had just done, creating a recipe for the cleansing compound. And then she got to work making a farm-sized batch of it.
When Alisa got in the next morning, she came back to check on Briar, finding her curled up asleep on the floor next to a large, industrial barrel, snoring softly. Alisa was surprised. Briar hadn't really been sleeping this peacefully or soundly for quite a while now... ever since they'd discovered the toxins in the soil.
She walked over and looked at the notes on the lab bench, not understanding them well enough, but she saw the part about both the soil and the liquid that came away from it being free of the toxins. She blinked, her eyebrows raised as she looked at the barrel and then down at Briar. She smiled and sighed before she went to the kitchens, having them knock up a good breakfast for Briar.
Some time later, Briar woke, lifting her nose into the air, sniffing at the smell of a lovely hot meal. Her nose told her that it was on the lab bench, and after a moment, she finally managed to open her eyes, seeing the steaming plate waiting there for her, with a lovely mug of black coffee beside it. She rose and climbed back into the chair, digging into the meal with a will.
Alisa had stepped away to check on a few things, but when she got back and found Briar eating, her body looking very relaxed now, she smiled and came up to her. "So... solved it at last?"
Briar lifted her head and looked at Alisa, "Yeah. Saw my notes?" Alisa nodded in reply, making Briar smile. "I have no idea why I chose to mix those things... but I did... and... it felt right. And... it wound up being right..." she said with a tired laugh before she covered her mouth as she yawned nice and big.
Alisa beamed at her at that. "Wonderful! That's amazing news! I guess that sometimes, you just have to trust that you know what you're doing," she said with a little chuckle and a sigh.
Briar nodded and stretched, "Yep, I suppose so." She looked at the barrel with a powerful sense of pride. "Once I'm done eating, we'll get this out to the field, and see what we can do."
Briar got things arranged with a tractor-mounted sprayer, the kind that would be used for things like pesticides or fertilizer. They loaded the contents of the barrel into the tank, and took a conservative pass over the field, trying not to use all of the compound in one go. They then took a watering pass over the bare earth to help coax the concoction to work its way down more easily. They gave it a good hour before Briar took a deep core of the soil and brought it back to the lab.
She would normally test down along the length of it to record the contaminant levels throughout, but this time, she started at the very bottom, feeling... strangely confident in her creation. Her confidence proved to be justified, when the lowest part of the sample, which was a good eight feet down, came back completely clean.
She came out into the pub, where the rest of the farm crew were waiting for the news, sipping on Briar's brew while they waited. They looked up at her as she entered and walked straight to the bar. She pulled out a bottle of Bran's reserve and poured a measure of it into a line of glasses, one for each of them before she picked up hers and held it high, "A toast," she called out, and the crew came over to each take a glass, holding it high to be ready for the toast. "To a fine harvest in clean soil," she said before she took a deep drink from her glass.
"To a fine harvest in clean soil!" The others repeated the toast before they drank their own whisky and cheered, beginning the celebrations in earnest... before the work got truly underway.
The earth of the garden was not only clean, but it was now quite fertile, and it wasn't unduly long before the first vegetables were ready for harvesting. Director Christine came down personally for the harvest, smiling as she saw the bright, red tomatoes being carefully picked and loaded into baskets. Briar was overseeing the process, and when Christine arrived, she smiled and snagged a tomato fresh off of the vine.
She walked right over to Christine, beaming at her. "First fruit of the harvest, director?" She held the tomato out to her, and Christine couldn't help but smile, bowing her head to Briar.
"Fine work. It still bottles the mind what you've accomplished with what we had to work with," she said with a dry chuckle, looking out at the furs out picking tomatoes in the field. "It gives you hope at what we can pull off when we work together."
Briar grinned back at Christine. "When we work together... for the good of us all... we can take the worst hand that they can deal us, and make something beautiful out of it," she said, just looking so happy.
Christine smiled and brought the tomato up to her mouth, taking a bite of it, having to react rather quickly to the juice that came from it in order to keep it from spattering over her white suit. "Mmh! Mmm..." she muttered as she chewed the bite, a look of delight on her face. "Mmm... Briar... I think you've just made a fine contribution to the morale of the district. Another fine contribution, really. Your pub's really a wonderful community space, even if we can't all fit in it at once," she said with a chuckle, smiling lopsidedly as she looked at the field, where rows upon rows of different fruits and veg were growing. She honestly looked as though she was fighting not to tear up at the sight.
Briar smiled and rested her hand on Christine's shoulder, standing beside her and looking out across the field. "We'll make it through this, Christine. They've done their best to stack things against us. But we're not alone. None of us. We'll make it through this. We just have to stick together."
Christine laughed with a half-choked sob as the tension broke, though at least without an accompanying stream of tears. "You sound like you've practiced that line," she said with a smirk, shaking her head.
Briar laughed softly, shaking her head. "No. Someone important to me said that to me," she said with a deep breath, "And I've taken it to heart. It's what it is going to take. Sticking together."