Rotav Gelee

Overview

The Rotav Gelee is, despite its name, not a yummy jam or a marmalade-type of topping for your bread or cake; no, it is the intermediate step between the Rotav fruit and the Crúor-Windcatcher.

To be fair, during the processing of the Gelee it does look like a fibrous jam. But at some point its normal state looks like skin with veins in it. And it produces some kind of gas which can make you giggle for hours on end.

Don't forget your mask, lad.

— Proverb inside the workshops

Origin

As said, the Rotav Gelee is the intermediate step between the fruit of the same name and the Windcatchers. It is created during the slow-cooking process where the fruits are slowly cooked and disintegrate into the sticky goo which is the Gelee.

With the addition of a decoction it slowly becomes the red, sticky, fluid-like goo which is ultimately the basis for the Windcatcher sails.

Processing

Once the Gelee is settling in and when there is barely no fluid left in the pot, the Gelee is scraped out from the large pots - one Terbera uses cast-iron pots, the other one huge copper cauldrons - and put into huge barrels, which are lined with a thin layer of metal, so the Gelee doesn't bind itself to the wood.

The barrels are shipped to the Windcatcher manufacturer. The workers need to put on their masks - sometimes the Gelee still emits the gas - and then they scrape the Gelee out from the barrels, which are transported back to the Terbera for cleaning and further usage.

Now the workers prepare metal tubes with linseed oil. The oil creates a barrier between the Gelee and the tube itself, so that the Gelee doesn't stick too much to the tube while getting flattened. Every two or three rounds of flattening the tubes need to get a fresh coat of linseed oil.

The Gelee gets longer and more flat with every round the workers drag the tubes over the Gelee. At the end of the surface, where the Gelee is laid out, it gets cut off and used for the next round.

During the flattening the Gelee does not dry out, which is a good thing, because the flattening needs a lot of time. Rolling the tube too fast over the Gelee and it will rip and tear, which is not good for the final product, because it creates fissures, ripples, and general chaos in the internal structure with the fibres, which will weaken the end result, the Crúor-Windcatcher. Nobody wants a ripped main sail because someone got too hasty.

When the sheet of Gelee is only the quarter of a finger thick, it is brought into the next area, where the sheet of Gelee is dried by fire, day and night, until it feels like cloth and is evenly dry on the edges and in the middle.

Like during the cooking the sheet can still suck out any red out of your clothes, so the workers wear aprons to protect their skin and clothes. Green spots show where the Gelee came in touch with the worker.

Once the Gelee sheets are properly dried, they are getting colour and cut into the Crúor-Windcatcher themselves. At this point it stops being a sticky Gelee and becomes a cloth-like substance for the Windcatchers.

Sticky jam

"Hold still, you are making it worse..."

"Why is it doing that?!"

"The decoction serves as a binder for the fibres and the liquid. The problem with that you are experiencing firsthand. Let me get the oil and don't move!"

— Senior worker to the new guy covered in Gelee

"Does it burn? Can it burn?"

"The Gelee? Not really. It dries out and shrivels, but you can't use it as fuel for fire or a firestarter. The Windcatcher can burn. The decoction itself is not flammable itself. The gas... in a high concentration it can burn, but that is just in theory. We do not have enough Gelee or decoction here to store up enough gas in the workshop that it becomes a problem. Not sure if there is a building in the entire city which is sealed off enough to actually do that."

— Worker to the same new guy

"Can I... when the Gelee is a dried sheet, can it be used as clothes?"

"I would assume so. It is behaving like some kind of cloth, so why not? I do not know of any case where a sailor or a captain reported any kind of issues like blisters while working with the sheets. Ask the boss if you want to try it. Maybe he lets you have some leftovers for trying."

"Wait, there are leftovers?"

"Bits and bops. We can glue the scraps together to get another Windcatcher, but often we have half a bucket left. Just ask the boss, he don't bite."

— Senior worker to a curious friend