Powder Miner

Satomi wouldn't be honestly able to say that her anger with Lucille had completely dissipated, but thanks to the reassurance by Armsmaster that things hadn't been completely ruined, it had settled into more of a twinge of annoyance with the girl. Still, with that problem more or less avoided for now, and Satomi's efforts not gone to waste, she decided to focus on something else... specifically, Armsmaster's compliments, which caused the little samurai to practically puff up with pride; she very much enjoyed having her engineering work given compliments, especially from such an evidently miraculous engineer as Armsmaster. "I would greatly enjoy working with you in the future! Even this brief opportunity opened up an incredible window for me! I do think that I am about satisfied, for now, however." After she finished speaking, Satomi immediately got to looking over the crossbow she had created, and it gave her both reason to be proud and to frown ever-so-slightly. The crossbow was absurdly light, and Satomi briefly amused herself by balancing the entire thing on one finger, but she had to imagine that its structural integrity would be rather poor. She supposed that's what she got for so eagerly having the material weight setting cranked down. Part of that had been getting the opportunity to create perfect materials, but still. This also meant that compressing the strong spring when reloading without breaking the device was going to be a long and arduous process. The mechanisms of the device themselves, however, were a smashing success, and she figured that if she hit the trigger enough times she could absolutely pepper any given target with multiple crossbow bolts, a thought that got a triumphant grin on her face instead of that little frown from earlier. And it would beat her scevenged junk crossbow by miles.

Cutting a considerably less composed figure than Snow is a teenage girl standing with a slight fidget in the middle of this newly arriving group, with tanned skin and her black hair in a ponytail. For the greatest part, this girl looks more or less normal, wearing a white dress, a black jacket, and with a white and black choker around her neck, and the only hints that she's as much of a combatant as the rest are the fact that that jacket, upon further examination, looks darker than should be possible, and that there's a sporting-grade crossbow strapped to her back. The teenager, one Perlita Diaz, turned to the equally teenaged boy standing next to her, her stiff and awkward posture making the turn a little bit of an unnatural motion. "Jeez... that really is quite a few people, isn't it, Gabriel? Here's hoping no one gets all... confused and hostile..." She muttered to him in a tone that was nervous and just a little bit wary.

Satomi had been fooling around with the nanolathe, tossing frequent questions at Armsmaster while she did her best to translate her crossbow design from her notepad into the strange device in front of her. She had been content -- the thing in front of her was completely confounding, and she was barely managing to operate it even when her questions were answered, and it was really quite the challenge, but for all of its confusion it had a potential large enough to have her giddy and almost dizzy. She had been completely absorbed in her task, even. So she hadn't quite registered that Lucille was talking until suddenly a strange and awful sensation at her ears put her off her balance and got her to stagger. Then she picked up what Lucille was saying, a long rant about the apparent dangers of what Armsmaster was doing, or at least the dangers of something in her world, a long rant where Lucille made no attempt to hide her alternate-dimension nature, and where she in fact actively used it to chide Armsmaster. Satomi felt a very ugly stab of anger pulse through her, then. She knew that Samurai were meant to abide by honor, to not be ruled by such things as emotions, that they must present a face of one whose very existence worked off of Bushido. But... she had been trying very hard not to give the group away, not to make them all look afflicted by madness. She had been trying not to reveal the fact that this world was one utterly, irresolvably alien to her, that it was a world where nothing was familiar. Trying not to show that this was a world where even their most mundane things were beyond familiarity, where even their tools they wrote with were small bundles of miraculous discovery. Trying not to react too tellingly the fact that they had buildings which must have run off of miracles, glittering spires of glass and roaring metal devices and where even the poor lived in veritable little blocky fortresses. Trying not to give away the fact that she found this unfamiliar world as terrifying as it was utterly, fascinatingly beautiful, down to its mysterious, colorful box library devices. She had been putting a very stressful amount of effort into this task, and Satomi figured that she had been mostly succeeding in it. Sure, there were moments of uncomfortable silence, there were moments where she had to ask Harry or Kusuke (that would be harder now) or someone else about some strange thing, there were moments where she knew she was shaming herself and failing her efforts, but she felt like the effort she had been putting in had been worth it. And now this girl was going off on Armsmaster, spoiling the entire effort because apparently despite being actually familiar with many of the things on this "Earth Bet", she could not find it in her to even try. It was unseemly and a (typical) failure of her Honor, but Satomi couldn't help but let some of that emotion out, her face warping into a teeth-clenched grimace. "Maybe," Satomi let out, a word said with a tight voice and more than a little bit of bite, "You should not antagonize the man with your... your... ramblings, when he is letting us use his machines." His beautiful, fear-inspiring, fascinating, incomprehensible, wondrous machines.

Satomi began to write something down in her notebook with the pen she snatched from Piggot's office (she was getting ideas about making something similar to her gempukku project, a repeating siege crossbow, but miniaturized to infantry crossbow size), but one or two lines into drawing the body of the crossbow she was suddenly once again utterly fascinated by the writing device she held in her hand. Even in this little writing tube, the technology was far beyond the bounds of what her homeland of Rokugan was capable of. So she found herself distracted from the nanolathe and its potential for a couple of minutes, proceeding to disassemble her pen instead of work on her design. But this sudden bout of curiosity had dividends for Satomi, as among the parts of the pen she found a coiled piece of metal, which exhibited force opposing her when she pushed it, or when she pulled it... with the thinness, poor material, and size of the spring, it wasn't a lot of force... but it was enough to garner Satomi's interest. It reminded her of some of the kinds of metal she'd seen when lucky enough to meet some of the greater Kaiu engineers -- wires or rods that would pull back when used in a siege weapon thanks to the treatment of the metal. She suspected that the coil of metal was in fact one of those components, just... more advanced. It did, after all, provide force in a single direction, from force provided in the opposite direction, and when she twisted it she could see that the force worked with torsion as well. Fascinating... and in the mundane piece of technology that these people wrote with! Satomi had an idea! She had already been planning on making a repeating crossbow, but one mechanic that she had taken as a given with a repeating crossbow was that the winch had to be pulled after each shot to pull the crossbow. It had been the case with the repeating o-yori that she had completed for her graduation project, after all. While it had had its uses she recalled that, with its size, it took either two men or an incredibly strong man to pull the reloading lever, and that had limited it. But with usage of a spring, she could provide the crossbow with force to reload itself on the rebound, with the spring pushing back a clasp which would remain closed when pushed, pulling the bowstring back as it went until it caught at the maximum pull. Then, when fired, the clasp would open up and push back down onto the spring, with the spring one interval less compressed, with a number of intervals equal to the bolts in the box. The fact that the nanolathe could produce strong mechanisms, good string, and a strong spring would help as well. This would have the disadvantage of making loading in each box of bolts harder, but that was an acceptable loss for a crossbow that could fire on each trigger pull uninterrupted. She moved to write this idea down while she was still freshly calculating what she would need in her head, but then promptly remembered that she had just in fact disassembled her pen, and took back out the ink-pot and brush, writing down the schematic in something of a fury until finally she had completed it. Then she excitedly walked up to the nanolathe, grinning almost goofily to herself and bursting with energy. "Armsmaster, I've completed my design! Ooh, this will be a significant improvement to the honestly junk crossbow I made last night! I am very, very excited to try making this out! This beats even my gempukku project solidly! It would be the most complicated thing I've ever made, but with the offer of practically perfect materials, and one or two other discoveries, I think I can make this work!"

Her confusion abated a bit when the others got to work in their respective specialties, as she more or less figured that she would have no need of what Harry was using. But then Armsmaster offered to give her access to one of his fancy machines, which could apparently just produce things wholesale, and even more excitingly, produce them without flaws and impurities. She didn't have any idea what "raw molecular stock" meant, but that creation ability was absolutely insane! The Kaiu would have declared her mad if she ever told them of it, even with their reputstion, and she wouldn't even blame them! She grinned and let out a little bit of an excited sound, before turning to Armsmaster, her hands clenched into excited fists and held close to her chest. "OK OK OK, I just want to clear something up before I get too excited, your "nanolathe", it can create for me mechanisms that fit in my palm, right? As without having to worry about these mechanisms bending and breaking from the normal impurities of smithing? This could be VERY exciting for me. Could this allow me to create a body for a crossbow that is actually in one piece without having to find a sizable chunk of material? Because I have an idea..."

Satomi stared wide-eyed at the devices in the room, but frankly that gaze was more than a little blank, and she tapped her pen on her notebook again and again, never actually seeming to find a word to write as she looked over the lab and its various devices. She started to get closer to some of them (including the power cells), peering in to get better looks at the details with her terribly nearsighted eyes, but even after she got in her closer looks, her notebook received no new words, and her gaze didn't get any less confused. Eventually, she let out a sigh, and spoke in a voice that was defeated and more than a little disappointed. "Okay... this... is all far too advanced for my comprehension, I admit." "Still, though it's not due to anything of... um, power origin, I did create this last night." Here she takes off and presents the crossbow on her back. It looks like junk, frankly, with the terribly segmented nature of the body, and the string looking like twisted strips of plastic. "I am, um, aware that this does not particularly look like a weapon of quality, but I made this last night just by exiting the PRT building, looking around, and finding a single plank of wood, plastic bags, and then, this strange metal club that had a thin and long handle," A wince grew on her face as she started to describe it, as she suspected her inability to recognize it would be suspicious, but she had already committed to the description, "Um, and then, um, a thicker round bit at the end extending in one direction from the handle, um, and then I worked through the night and put this together with just those materials."

Satomi listened to Armsmaster's explanation of Tinkers... and then proceeded to look away and puff her cheeks into a disappointed pout. "Ah... well, that is a shame. However... I do have another question. Is the entire process of your Tinker creation incomprehensible, or do you have a comprehension of engineering that I would be able to get something out of? I am still holding onto that possibility that I might be able to watch people work, perhaps set things up, in ways that I can learn from. Ah, the technology..." Satomi got a little dreamy for a moment, before suddenly: "Um... of course, any pieces of non-Tinker technology are likely already mundane to me." This was a blatant lie, with Satomi feeling the need not to seem all low-tech or outsider, "But I could still get something out of watching any engineering that is comprehensible, if there is some!" At least that's true.

Satomi, despite her earlier unsureness thanks to the argument on the boat, has a note of eagerness enter her voice when the topic of Tinkers starts to be brought up, speaking excitedly. "Oh, I really do greatly hope they let me attend the tinker meeting. There's so much that I could learn...!"

Navin let out a long sigh after Cu dissolved, and stood back up from where he'd been down on one knee. "...now that the battle is over, and now that the danger has passed, I must apologize to those whose lives I took." First, Navin located the large splatter of gore and body parts that the officer he had slain had been reduced to by his hands. Seeing the horrible violence that he had inflicted made Navin grimace, clenching his teeth, and he kneeled down (without dipping his knee in the assorted officer stains) gently, before speaking quietly. "If we cross again in some other life, I can only pray that you will not bear a grudge. Taking your life... it... is not something I take lightly, a casualty of war, and I will not be likely to forget the thing I have done here. I am sorry." He then stood up, moved over to the broken corpse of the other soldier that he had killed, and spoke the same, taking a moment to kneel somberly over the second man that he had killed. The deeply devout Hindu man would take life when it was just, and when it was absolutely necessary, or part of the war. But he was cognizant that he was snuffing out the life of a being every time he killed someone, and he made efforts to never allow himself to forget just what deed that was, and never to make a light affair out of killing. He'd seen too much of it, had dealt too much of it, had seen too many people revel in murder to ever allow such a failing. Then he walked over to Edmond. "I do not know, but... how long should we be staying here? We could likely be of great use if we made our way over to our allies in the other battles."

Satomi pored over the paper, occasionally screwing up her face and "hmm"ing or muttering quiet little "um"s to herself as she worked. Thankfully, being nearsighted rather than farsighted, reading was not much of a problem. When given the pen she was given, she elected not to give it back unless Piggot made her. Futuristic technology!

"Um... I don't have any bombs or any such devices. Just what you see is what I have." Specifically the two swords sheathed at her hips, and the bizarrely-put-together crossbow strapped at her back, neither of which she made any effort to take off. The crossbow being what it was, she was hardly going to be pulling it out for a quick attack, and her swords, her daisho, her mark of being a samurai, well, taking those off was unthinkable.

"Hmmmm..." Satomi hesitantly reached out and grabbed the Keyblade. Satomi wasn't hit with a sudden realization, or by any other such event, but she did have to admit that there was something clearly extraordinary about this weapon. It felt cold, and it seemed to pull towards its normal wielder... and there was some sort of power thrumming inside of it, which she couldn't really understand. Then it proceeded to disappear, causing Satomi to jump a little bit. On its own it wouldn't have done much to change Satomi's mind, but when combined with the testimony of so many of the other people in the team that their powers worked off of their soul or that they had experience with souls, Satomi couldn't help but be suddenly unsure. She leaned back against a nearby wall. "I... need to think for a while." Then the boat docked, but Satomi didn't reply to Assault.

Satomi was outright taken aback for a little bit by the sheer explosiveness of Kusuke's reaction. She'd expected maybe a little bit of indignation, but he seemed downright outeaged by what was just a simple statement of the way thungs were. Still, eventually most of the surprise faded from her face, replaced with a mixture of confusion and bullheadedness. "But um, uh, it's not just what I think. It's-- well, it's the way things are. If you're not Rokugani, you're not part of the Celestial Order, and, um, that means that you don't have a soul. And since noone around is Rokugani, that just means that noone around here, um, has a soul to steal. That's, um, just how it works."

Satomi's reaction to this, perhaps surprisingly, was not a shift of expression to anger, or fear, or even further suspicion. Instead she tilted her head ever so slightly, and her face screwed up into what was clearly honest confusion. She then speaks up without even the earlier dangerous speed of speech, her slowness now instead being occasionally halting. "Um, but that can't be it at all, though. I'm sure that, um, whatever this "essence" is, it isn't their soul, um, because..." Satomi got a little bit awkward then, as could be probably divined from the "um"s peppered into her speech, because she was well aware that she was talking to a bunch of gaijin. But what Arminius had said just didn't make any sense. Her voice wasn't malicious at all, just perhaps dismissive, but given the next words out of her mouth that probably wasn't much of a comfort. "Um, the criminal wouldn't hae had any soul to steal. Gaijin don't have souls."

Satomi's expression morphs into narrowed eyes and a frown at Arminius' statement, and she speaks more slowly. "...what do you mean by that you "stole the essence" from one of the criminals...? Their blood?"

"Pfeh, you say, um, "fucking around" and I say saving lives and preventing damage. But you are missing the point, um... Sooomato... trope? Somatotrope." Her name was kind of hard. "It was not a fight, because except for one or two people we avoided engaging him, as I have said. Lung was captured because Armsmaster arrived to take him in, at which point Kusuke did bravely go after Lung to weaken him and aid Armsmastee, but I hardly believe that is something to be condemning. It probably prevented many problems." Her expression changed to one of pensiveness as she addressed Arminius again.. "I suppose that if you did find another duty to fulfill, it becomes harder to criticize you, but I still find this attitude of criticizing people who had the Courage and Duty to stand up and help people, and successfully for that matter, infuriating. ...speaking of goblins, though, where did the second one come from?"

"The problem with your approach here is that we were not, in fact, stupid. We kept engaging Lung himself to a minimum, and instead we directed our efforts to helping those whom he would have placed in danger. And we were successful. We were actively avoiding being suicidal, and had you been there I'm sure that you would not even have been wounded at all. I do not believe that more than one or perhaps two of us even received any burns at all. That is what I meant by the situation not being insurmountably deadly, because it was not, and we surmounted it."

Satomi had mostly been fiddling around with her mess of a crossbow until now, fussing over it to make sure that it wouldn't need repair before she went through whatever testing that the people here intended to put her through. But now, on the boat, satisfied with her maintenance job, she suddenly looked at Arminius with a smile that was half triumphant and half smug. "If you will notice, Arminius, none of us that went to help out with Lung are dead, and we are missing noone. ...actually, we appear to have one more person than we started with, apparently, even. In the future, you ought not assume that any acts showing a little bit of spine are insurmountably deadly."

Satomi listened to Kusuke try to explain his way around it (silently noting his usage of a honorific -- wherever he was from, that was another way he was similar to a Rokugani. It was a little strange, really) with her hands on the non-screen corners of the computer. The frustration didn't leave her face, but at least she seemed to be thinking a little bit more than before. "I'll try to remember that function, though with as singularly wondrous and advanced a device as this 'computer' seems to be... I do not know. It's a lot to try to comprehend at once, I think, even for me." Satomi sighed wistfully. "This place practically puts Crab lands to shame. It must be many centuries ahead. I'm sure that someone from one of the ultra-orthodox clans, like the Crane or Lion, would have snapped and tried to go on a murderous rampage by now." Harry would have found his search interrupted for a while as Satomi proceeded to just snatch the mouse out of his hands and wave it around on the screen a little bit, somewhat startled once she managed to track the aimless movement of the mouse across the screen. Thankfully, Harry managed to get the mouse back from her before she did any damage to his browsing. Then he mentioned Jun, and the tiny engineer peeked over the row of computers and squeaked a little (kind of adorably) with surprise when she saw the armored figure sitting at another computer. "H-how did I miss that he was there?!" Also, despite the fact that she hadn't been addressed: "I made a crossbow last night. It is interesting, the materials that this place has. These "plastic bags" seem very bizarre, especially, and the club I made the metal pieces from looked like a very fragile and clumsy design to me. At least the Crab Clan has better blunt weapons than this world does, hmmhmm."

Satomi listened intently to Harry's explanation of the boxy device. She hung off of every word, staring at the boxy device and occasionally giving it another poke. After listening to Harry work his way through his occasionally-halting explanation, occasionally nodding, she stayed silent for a couple of seconds, still looking at it, nodded one last time... and then sighed. "...I don't get it." she admitted, visibly deflating and a little ashamed of this (no matter how insanely wondrous this world was), "...but this is called a computer, and it somehow communicates and somehow holds many books. I can remember that much." Satomi, though still looking a little disappointed in her noncomprehension, shrugged fluidly. "Perhaps later, after the testing and likely after I get a little bit of rest, I can try to ask questions about the individual elements. But for now... you said that this device holds the text of many books, right? What are you reading about right now?" Satomi leaned in over Harry's shoulder and started to read the text off of the screen, letting out a little hmmm noise. "This definitely is not structured like a book. It is a little bit hard to parse, I'm afraid..." Her voice grew a little bit frustrated with her further inability to understand much about this computer.

After Satomi finished up with her work, she began to look around for any of the others who had stayed around the PRT building... and thankfully she ended up finding them before she got too nosy with her wandering around inside of the highly important building. When she walked into the computer room, a couple of things were different about the short samurai: First of all, more normally, Satomi was starting to look a little bit sleepy, the situation with Lung and her hours of work beginning to take a toll on her stamina. Secondly, she now had a completely new device on her back: something that could aptly, if perhaps a little uncharitably, be described as an abortion of a crossbow. It looked like the body had been carved out of multiple smaller pieces of wood and kind of segmented together, and the mechanisms had traces of paint on them from the outside of the golf club they'd been hacked from, but the worst part was that it looked like the crossbow's string was made of plastic bag plastic, if tightly tied. When she saw them on the other hand, she immediately strode over and leaned in towards the strange boxy device that they were looking at -- glowing and colorful on one side, with text displayed, Satomi found herself utterly mystified as to what this strange device could be. And indeed... "Harry, Kusuke..." Because they were gaijin, she wasn't using honorifics. It wasn't meant as an insult, they just weren't part of the Rokugani hierarchy, "What could this strange device possibly be?" She poked the computer.

Satomi was clearly tickled pink by Armsmaster's assertion of his belief that she couldn't have performed her repairs so far without having some sort of super power, because she blushed and put her hands on her cheeks. As she saw it, more or less, she had just been called so amazing an engineer that it was literally unbelievable. "I... am truly flattered," she said after a little bit, "but, no, I really do not have any... um, non-mundane abilities. I just learned from talented engineers, and I have practice with repair like that." Her humility was only a little false here -- while she was plenty aware that she was something of a prodigy, she had very deep respect for the Kaiu family and her sensei, and she believed with all of her heart that she would be nothing without the training she had received to become a samurai in the first place. "Um, I do not really have any other business to request at this meeting. I am just looking forward to tomorrow." The one thing she would try to do tonight, however, was to scavenge some wood, metal, and twine or other string, and try to throw together a crossbow, or at least start creating one. If she was going to be present at this "tinkertech" meeting she would at least want some practice with her weapon creation.

Satomi nervously tapped her fingers together for a few moments before she found her voice, carefully considering each of her words before she said them. "Um... I also do not possess any powers, though I do possess some skill as an engineer. If I sign on as an affiliate along with the rest of the group, would I be allowed to attend this tinker tech meeting anyway? I could get a lot out of just watching everyone work."

One of the most clearly nervous people in the office was Satomi, who was kind of lacing her fingers together and then unlacing them repeatedly so she had something to occupy herself with. See, Satomi knew that if she opened her mouth it was extremely likely that she would screw everything up, because she could tell that even some of the mundane staples of this world were wondrous to her, and pretty much a thrid of anything that anyone wanted to talk about was going one hundred percent over her head. Parahumans? Tinkers? Shakers? Power testing? She was lucky that they were mostly talking about things like "disaster relief" that she could figure out fairly easily, but she still didn't say anything. Just sat there quietly and nervously.

Satomi's hour in the van had been for the most part a process of her continuing to go through her notebook fast, but this time around mostly because she was taking notes of the other members of the party. She also spent some time going through just the things she had already written and writing remarkably small little notes in the margins (with a brush, at that!). When they actually got to the office proper, Satomi took note of the rather unhappy-looking woman. Satomi figured that she was probably unhappy because of the arrival of a bunch of thoroughly strange people, that was understandable, but for the most part what Satomi found notable was that this woman had quite a bit of weight to her. Clearly, this woman was quite wealthy if she were able to afford to be fat like this.