Chapter 28

After grabbing her food, a bowl filled with rice and fried chicken, Laura walked into the cafeteria, where she found Gabe and Daiki eating their Lunch. Moving over to their table, the Kitsune sat down on the edge of a free chair as her tails would just get pinched against the back of it otherwise.

"Oh hi Laura." Gabe greeted her as she sat down, before shoving some more of his lunch into his mouth.

"Hi Gabe, Hi Daiki" She said to the two humans sitting with her before taking a long drink from the glass of water she had gotten herself alongside her food.

"Hey" Daiki quickly said after swallowing. "How's your day been so far?"

"Decent enough, class was canceled so I spent most of it so far in the workshop." The Kitsune replied with a smile, before trying some of her chicken.

"Lucky you." The american commented between mouthfuls of rice. "I only got half an hour break for lunch to day, then it's back to class till 7pm"

"Yikes, good luck with that." Laura offered as she digged into her rice as well, although no where near with the same gusto and haste as Gabe.

"Thanks" Gabe said after swallowing the last of his food. Finishing his drink as well, he stood up, picked up the tray of dishes and turned to leave. "See you two tonight, or probably tomorrow I guess."

"Goodbye." Daiki said between bites of food, while Laura gave a slightly more cheerful "see you"

"So what have you been up to today?" the spirit asked her remaining friend as they continued their meals.

"Mostly classes." Daiki responded quickly. "Going to do some studying later today."

"Ah fair enough" Laura concluded their short conversation before the two finished their lunch in relative silence and headed out of the cafeteria, the spirit back to her workshop, the human to his next class.

Once back with her two projects, Laura got to work on making a sheath for her sword. Placing the first of the pieces of wood underneath her sword to be, the Kitsune carefully traced the shape of the blade on it. After setting up the grinder properly, Laura turned it on after once again struggling to fasten the safety goggles to her head, and began to slowly remove bits of wood inside her markings. Checking how the blade fit into it regularly, she was soon left with a groove the blade fit in comfortably, albeit half of it still stood out above the wood.

Satisfied with this, Laura repeated the whole process with the other piece of wood, and after confirming they would fit snugly around the blade, she carefully brushed wood glue on their raised portions, letting it dry just a bit before placing the pieces atop one another and clamping them together.

As she waited for the glue to set enough that she could continue working on the scabbard, Laura pulled one of the stools out from under the table and opened up her CAD program on her tablet, where she began to design a model of her engines housing that was better suited to being milled out of a block of metal. While the initial step was rather simple, as she created a block of metal, then had the programm subtract the rest of her design, adding all the little things she needs to consider now that the housing would be four pieces bolted together took quite a while.

Some were rather simple, like the partially unnecessary access for fuel lines, after all she did plan on trying to run this engine on magic, others were a bit more involved, both design and physics wise, as she needed to make sure the bolts keeping everything together would stand up to at the very least idle speeds of the rotors, and keep the interior of the engine sealed tight.

A couple hours later, while still not quite finished with all four pieces, she decided to return to working on the scabbard to take a break from the last few things she struggled to get as good as she wanted them to be.

Tracing the blade's outline onto the outside of the wood, Laura added a few centimeter in every dimension before grinding the scabbard to shape. At first this went rather fast, but as she came closer and closer to the final result, moving to higher and higher grit wheels, the progress slowed down as she began to be more careful until after nearly an hour of grinding, the last quarter of which she had to do by hand, it was done. Oiling the wood with a generous amount of oil, she wasn't quite sure what kind it was, but judging by the piece of leftover wood she tested it on, it seemed to work just fine, the Kitsune admired the fruit of her labors for a bit.

While the oil seeped into the wood, she finished up her designs, after which she tied and glued a strip of leather around the top of the scabbard, which would allow her to tie it to her belt form now on.

After attaching it to the belt holding her yukata closed and inserting the untempered sword, the Kitsune realized she should probably wear it on a seperate belt, to make sure the added weight did not cause any accidents with her clothing.

Making her way to the cafeteria in hopes of catching the tail end of dinner time, Laura began to ponder how she would go about quenching her weapon, more specifically in what container of water she could do so, as she could always just circumvent the need for a forge with her pyromancy.