Lucinda has a studio in the Florence Arts & Industry building, which is a half-hour away by bike. The big whitewashed building is easy to navigate, and you find Lucinda between a botanica and a dance studio. A horrific humanoid puppet hangs above the entrance. It looks like you're burning to death in an old building with a tin roof and the tin is melting onto your eyes and igniting your hair. You don't like the puppet.
"Don't mind him," Lucinda says, bustling around a huge conic armature of twisted steel. "He's harmless."
Lucinda Palys-Nash is a white woman in late middle age, short and round but with a core of muscle, like a blacksmith. She wears her frizzy hair tied back in a bun and dresses in a stained smock and old combat boots. Lucinda has the friendly smile of a high school art teacher, but her eyes are sharp and just a little bit zealous: the same eyes as the pictures of Frida Kahlo and other surrealists pasted onto the walls. Hundreds of books line the shelves among the sculptures, tools, and oddities; her metal desk has an old laptop surrounded by photos of the Broad Brook Caern, including a slightly younger Lucinda with a teenage Hobland—the survivalist you met in the Hadley sugar shack, and photos of Harmonie and Melodie helping her around the studio.
"I bet you're here to learn," Lucinda says.
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