Bench injury story—feel free to skip if injuries squick you.

So I was sawing some swirls out of a sterling silver spoon today (really ornate silver spoons are 1) surprisingly cheap and 2) great sources for decorative bits that I can use on jewelry) and the saw blade broke.

Now, this happens regularly—jeweler’s saw blades are very fine, less than a millimeter wide and a tiny fraction of that in depth. Unfortunately, this time the blade broke while I was bringing the saw down and I drove the upper blade fragment through the nail on my left middle finger, right next to the cuticle. Ow.

Since I’ve injured myself at the bench before I knew what to do. I squeezed the fingertip gently to get the wound bleeding freely (this helps flush out anything that might have been driven into the nail bed), washed it thoroughly, put on some of the good antibiotic ointment I got last year at the hospital, and bandaged it. It’s making typing a bit of a challenge but I think it should be okay—none of the saw blade got left in the wound. If it swells or turns funny colors I’ll head into the doctor and get them to look at it.

And yes, I had a tetanus shot five years ago so I’m good on that. I was talking about it with Lyndon later on and he said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but to be honest I’m surprised you don’t have more injuries from making jewelry.” It helps that I’m careful and precise, but sometimes things slip and you wind up slicing open a thumb or stabbing a nail. *shrugs* It happens.

Welcome to a new feature of the blog where I talk about stuff that’s occurred to me while I’ve been out in the garage working on jewelry. Metalsmithing is actually part of my writing process because while my hands are busy, my brain is free to keep itself entertained any way it can, and it usually does that by coming up with stories.

Now and then, however, I find myself musing about anything from politics to why Zendaya clearly should be cast as Joan of Arc based on her Met Gala dress. Tonight, while I was working on the sterling settings for a pair of earrings, I started thinking about Westworld and some of the backstory involved (by the way, I was VERY pleased to have called it on Delos trying to transfer human consciousness into hosts and thereby becoming filthy rich from 1%ers who want to live forever, but I digress.)

Specifically, I was thinking about how in Season One, Dolores’s original loop was to be the daughter of a rancher and his wife. The family’s whole reason of existence was so that they could be killed (Mama and Daddy) and raped (Dolores) by guests who wanted to act out various black hat scenarios. Which is more than a little creepy (and I do wonder if Dolores was specifically put into that scenario as punishment by Dr. Ford for killing Arnold), but it set the viewer’s understanding about how the hosts are viciously abused by human guests on a regular basis.

Fast forward to that monumental scene at the end of “The Original” where Dr. Ford is questioning Dolores’s “father” Peter and asking him what his main drives are. Peter replies that he’s supposed to tend to his herd, look after his wife, and protect Delores. When it’s determined that he’s glitching too badly to be repaired, he’s lobotomized, stuck in cold storage, and is then grabbed by Charlotte Hale and turned into a walking thumb drive with 30+ years of Delos research shoehorned into his head. Needless to say, he no longer has the processor cycles necessary to worry about looking after his wife, much less his herd, although he does briefly remember Dolores in S2E3. And Dolores/Wyatt is hellbent on conquering mankind and making them pay for their sins, so she’s doesn’t seem to be all that concerned about Mama’s whereabouts, either.

But that doesn’t change the fact that Mrs. Abernathy is still somewhere in Westworld. Moreover, since Dolores was with Teddy right before that climactic party in the last ep of Season One, we can hypothesize that the Abernathy homestead wasn’t targeted for assault that night since a major part of the “entertainment” was gone. So Mrs. Abernathy should still be alive and with Peter Mark II.

But the hosts are slowly gaining sentience and access to their memories from previous builds. If that’s true, wouldn’t Mrs. A wonder where the hell her daughter is? Would she realize that this “husband” isn’t the one she’d spent so many years with? Mightn’t she then go off in search of her family?

I completely understand why the \W/ writers wouldn’t focus on her — Maeve would be undertaking the mother’s journey to find her daughter, so Mrs. Abernathy (I keep wanting to call her Anna and picture her as being played by Diane Lane) wasn’t necessary to the plot. That doesn’t change the fact that she’s still out there, most likely intact, and may in fact be in search of Dolores and Peter, assuming she hasn’t been killed by the Ghost Nation or the Delos recovery teams.

I doubt this would happen, but it would be cool if she pops up somewhere down the line. Granted, she’d probably be used by Delos as a way of luring Delores into a trap, but maybe she’d stumble into whatever armed camp Dolores had taken over at that point only to discover that her sweet, art-loving daughter had turned into a ruthless revolutionary. There are all kinds of fun things the writers could do with that.