You push the button.

Ding.

The table has gone, taking all the leftovers with it. How sad.

However, there is now an old wooden butter churn in the room.

And next to it sits a bucket of cream.

Which there are surprisingly few pictures of online. The internet has given me a thousand pictures of cream colored buckets and buckets of ice cream, but buckets with cream in it... One. And that was from a dairy farm, to show how to measure the temperature of fresh milk. Weird.

Well, there aren’t any instruction manuals or anything, but you can probably guess what you’re supposed to do.

You’ve seen enough old movies and have been to enough museums (or at the very least have seen a YouTube video that touched on the subject) to know what this thing is. You know what it does. You know how it works. It’s not exactly rocket science.

What will you do?

…

….

…..Really?

You’ve seen that button survive water to the ceiling and a stupid amount of mud. You’ve tried stabbing and stomping on that thing. Other people have tried all manner of inventive things to break it. Nothing affected it in the least. Well, except one guy, who landed in a room with a battle ax, but we've removed that room.

You really think some cream is going to do anything other than piss off the cleaning crew?

Ok, fine, I get it. It’s the principle of the matter.

You take the bucket over and dribble some cream on the button.

Do you feel fulfilled?

Good.

You stick your finger into the bucket of cool cream. After looking it over, you lick your finger clean.

Well, clean-er.

It tastes like cream. Not particularly sweet, especially to modern (and even less so to modern American) taste buds. But there is a definite sweetness to the cream. It has plenty of fat in it, plenty of calories, so to your brain the cream tastes “good”. It has none of the horrible taste of spoiled milk to it. This stuff is fresh.

Why?

I mean, I don’t judge, but why? Well, to be specific, I’m not supposed to judge. Someone else does the judging. But they’ll judge Subject B5, while I’m judging you. On your weirdness. Unofficially.

Well, your foot is covered in thick, dripping cream. Congratulations?

…Eww…

You take the top off the churn, pull out the plunger thing, and look inside. It looks waterproof. Or, creamproof. Both.

Then you pick up the bucket and pour in the cream. You kind of presume that we’ve given you a proper amount of cream for this churn, since you aren’t an expert.

...

...So there.

Then you put the plunger back in, replace the lid, and start churning!

Yep, you churn. And churn. Aaaaand churn. Push and pull, push and pull.

After a while you really wish we’d given you a chair or something, because this is tiring. I imagine that if you happen to be some kind of quadruped like a wolf or something it’s double tiring.

I wonder if the cream here came from the cow we saw earlier?

…A quick review of my notes informs me that it came from Walmart, to ensure that it’s pasteurized. Hekkin laws about food safety regulations, they make everything boring.

Five minutes in and your biceps are getting sore. This is surprisingly hard work. Mideival women must have been amazing at arm wrestling.

Ten minutes in and you can feel a difference in the cream. You take the lid off and look inside.

It looks… different, yes. The cream is starting to separate, that’s for sure. You’ve got lumps of yellow cream, and, well, buttermilk. Cool.

You replace the lid and get back to work.

Fifteen minutes in and you’ve decided that the butter is about as buttery as it’s going to get.

You take off the lid and find a decent-sized lump of butter floating in a bunch of buttermilk. You use a finger to taste some, and realize that without salt, butter is pretty flavorless.

Who knew!

It’s also weirdly warm.

Did you know you can make butter in a blender? All you have to do is put cream in there and turn it on. It becomes whipped cream for about eight seconds, and then separates into butter. Which is annoying if you wanted whipped cream.

But enough about that! You’ve made butter in a churn! I’m sure your ancestors would be proud of you.

Satisfied with your work, you nod and turn away.

DO YOU PRESS THE BUTTON? Yes No