Have You Seen Our Canary [P]

Spoiler:

Having worked in the black smith for a couple of weeks now, Kouma had gotten quite used to working with things throughout the shop, including the smelting and hammering, so this was quite fun for a long while. Sadly now, however, the black smith store was closed, as the owner of the store was currently working on something that was very important, and so there was something else that Kouma was tasked with doing while the black smith owner was doing hius important thing, and this was going to a near by mine and grabbing something that was actually raw. Kouma had gone through the entire process of forging weapons, tools, and mechanisms for his puppets, but he had not actually been able to excavate the metals and other raw materials out of the ground himself, and he thought that this was going to be something really fun, and he definitely wanted to be part of the entire process. Kouma was making his way down the street, passing by a group of people he usually passed by each day, but they seemed to wonder where he wqas going when he suddenly took a turn that he did not take usually. He would usually just head straight to the black smith store when he would walk down this street every day, but this day he was going to go somewhere else. He needed to head towards a mine, where he was going to meet with the other miners and the foreman there who would give him a large number of tasks that he would do throughout that day. Kouma was pretty good in terms of his strength, he was not the strongest person there was, but he was much stronger than average people as he grew up as a ninja under going harsh training with his master.

Kouma walked down the sunny street, and it was almost noon, as the mines would be very cold in the early morning, so most people would not start mining there until around ten, but him and the other people that were going to be with his team were scheduled to come a couple of hours later, so that they could relieve some people that were mining fairly intensely from two hours ago. It was bright and sunny outside today, so it was a very pleasant walk to the ouyter edges of the village, and off to a side road that would take him all the way to the mine. The trail that l;ed out of the main part of the village and off to the mine was very pleasant as well, althought it was only a small dirt path through the grassland type area of the fields. It was very relaxing walking through a place that was mostly engulfed in nature, and it smelled nice and clear as well when he was walking. Kouma saw the entrance to the mine from a while out, considering it was suddenly a decent amount of small buildings and people suddenly there out in the wilderness next to a large mountain. As Kouma got closer, he actually saw the size of the mountain was not very large, and it simply seemed more imposing from far away, and wondered if there were any super large mountains out there in the world, as Kouma had not gone any where outside of the village for his entire life, and was hoping that he was going to get the opportunity to travel soon enough. He could not wait for the chuunin exams that were going to be held in this village, as it would be great to meet new people and to exchange stories and culture.

Kouma finally made it to the entrance of the mine, and immediately looked for the foreman of the mine that he was supposed to report to, and found him fairly quickly, as there were people almost constantly going upo to him for things, talking to him, asking questions, before scurrying away to do their tasks quickly. Every thing here looked rather efficient and stream lined, so Kouma was excited to start the day here. He was still a little early, with about twelve minutes to spare before his work would actually start, and because of this, he did not disturb the foreman person from doing his job, so he calmly sat and waited for the man to have a bit of extra time before he would walk u-p there and announce his presence. After a little while, no more than five minutes, Kouma walked up to him and introduced himself as the ninja that would be accompanying the team down into the mine. His job was going to be to watch out for the other people in the mine while also mining out his own special steal. He would then get to smelt and fold it into a big steal bar, and he would even get to keep one of the smaller ones from today's harvest. All of this sounded fantastic to Kouma, as he imagined himself sitting there with a hard hat, swinging away at the wall of a cave, finding the glittering ores before making them into something shiny and usable. He looked around, and saw that there were quite a few people covered in dirt, but no one covered in coal, and so Kouma sort of lost a bit of the aesthetic in his mind about this job.

Upon thinking about it a bit more, he realized that he was in fact wrong, and of course they would not have coal on them right now, as this was not a coal mine, it was for mining iron, although there was a bit of coal off to the side for combining into the steal later on. Coal was something that had a high carbon count, which would be perfect for adding into the iron to make it into steal, as steel needed extra carbon to bond to it to become stronger. Kouma had learned that from the black smith that he was always working with back in the main part of the viullage. He was hoping his psuedo master black smith would be proud of him when he saw the immaculate steel he had made, and so Kouma got to work immediately. He was given a simple set of gloves, a hard hat, and then a pickaxe to go into the mine with, and Kouma was going to work with another saet of people that were actually miners, so he was set on what to do, as he would ask them quesstions whenever he did not understand something related to what he was doing. Kouma followed the lead there into the mine, and soon they had gone a couple hundred feet deep within the min, where they soon stopped. Kouma enjoyed looking around the mine, seeing the lanterns hung up on the wooded support beams that were keeping the mine stabilized, and he also enjoyed that the deeper they went into the mine, the colder it became. It was pretty enjoyable for him simply walking around this place, and he was never shy of hard work, so he started digging immediately.

While he was not simply wildly swinging his pickaxe into the walls of the cave, it was not that far off from the truth, and soon he would go through a barrage of instructions over and over, so that he could slowly learn to swing properly. He did not know how long it was, nor did he care with the harshness of the pain in his arms after swinging that for a while, but he finally got the hang of it, at least to the poijnt where the miners he was working with were no longer criticizing him and he could simply work at his own pace, which was starting to turn sluggish. He underestimated the work down here, and simply thought that you needed strength to do this type of work, but that did not matter. The pickaxe was not really that heavy, it was more about your precision and most importantly, your stamina. You needed to be able to last quite a while hacking away at the wall of the cave, and soon Kouma had a fairly decent sized chunks of rock, that the other miners assured him there was some iron in there. Kouma silently dopubted them, thinking that they were going to use this opportunity to make fun of him and prank him, watching him take a useless chunkj of dirt or rock back to the main area for them to gawk at, but these worried were unfounded. The people here were actually pretty helpful, and although they had made fun of him because of his swings with the pickaxe, they saw that he was diligent and hard working, so they let it pass.

After a couple of hours, the current shift was over, and it was time to drag the rocks and ores out of the mine so that they could get cleaned up and smelted down into raw materials for use in the shops around Hoshi. Kouma wondered if the black smith went out and got his own ores, as it seemed that the ores here were going to be smelted with the coal to become steel on the spot, which did not make sense, as the black msith he had trained under had always smelted his own ores. Kouma threw that distracting thought to the back of his mind before heading off, following his group with their bunch of ores in a small cart. It was not a lot individually, but when all the groups that were down in the mines came out and put their metal next to each other, it seemed quite a daunting amount of iron to process. The foreman came and told Kouma that he was going to move on to the next part of the mission, which was helping with the processing of all of the ores, and smelting a bit down into the special steel that they made. He would not be in charge opf the ratios of coal to iron, but he would be at least involved in all of the other processes, which made Kouma fairly happy. He really liked experiencing new things, especially when he could directly use this information that he learned to become a better puppet master. Carrying his specific piles of ores back to the large furnace that they had on site. This was not like the black smith's smaller forge, this seemed large and industrial, for smelting large amouns of iron and other metals at a time, and it could also funnel it through to another chamber for combining with another metal to make alloys, or with the powdered coal to make steel.

This is what they would be doing today, which was combining the iron with coal to make steel, and Kouma was eager to see the process of the metal slowly melting with the powdered coal to become steel, as he was fascinated with the science behind it. He wondered how high the heat needed to be to successfully fuse coal into the molten iron, as that did not seem feasiblke at lower temperatures, but maybe there was something at work that Kouma did not quite understand yet. He was contemplating these things as he made his way to the large furnace to drop off the iron he had procured from the mine. He saw the iron lift up from the ground on a lift, before it was dumped into the forge to slowly begin melting. The chief there told Kouma that they needed to control the amount of powdered coal added in precicely, so Kouma would just be in charge of the bellows with nother person. All he needed to do was to get on the other person's rhythm, as they had a lot of experience doing this, and it showed. Kouma took a bit of learning to actually get on the same rhythm, but soon he was doing a perfectly fine job at it, controlling the other bellows that fueled the smelter. although the heat was scorching, it wasn't horrible, and so Kouma got to see inside the furnace, which he had to shield his eyes from, but he still got to see the flakes of powder fall down, slightly cool the boiling hot mixture, before melding with it, so it was super interesting.

After that, it was simply poured into a mold, and Kouma knew what to do from there, as they simply needed to fold it a few times for it to keep its shape and to strengthen it. After a few rounds of doing this, there was now a rather large pile of steel ingots ready to go out into the world and supply Hoshi with their steel, and Kouma got to be part of that. As a little bit of a prize, he even got to keep a chunk of steel, which was the initial draw to a mission like this.

EXIT
WC: 2177
Claiming 4100 ryo from mission and genin rank
Claiming 20 ap from mission
Claiming High Grade Steel
Claiming 1125 words towards Puppetry: Slicing Threads (1500 with 25% discount for max stats)
Claiming 750 words towards Augmenting Tika Tika with Aluminum (1000 with 25% discount)
Claiming 300 words towards Augmenting Tika Tika with High Grade Steel 300/100 left

Approved