Welcome to "The Diary of a Miner"; a blog detailing the adventures and mysteries that I, Syeonyx, embark upon in my quest to further my mining and survival skills! It'll be tough, there will be good times and bad times, but I'll always be alive to post my adventures... probably...

Day 155: Prototype final construction

     I'm beginning to think that the Nether was having a bad influence on me, at least subconsciously. Since leaving the Nether I haven't had that dream once, and I'm beginning to wonder if it was just because of the environment that we were in. I obviously wasn't complaining about the lack f such disturbing images, but it did make me rethink whether there was actually any element of truth to them. After all, there's no smoke without fire... Apparently. I knew Amie and the others had been working just as hard as me and OROTHO, if not more, so I attempted t get out of bed without disturbing her. It didn't go so well; I managed to get to the foot of the bed, before accidentally kicking Chiron slightly, or yelped, waking Amie up.

"Going somewhere?"

I felt bad now trying to leave her whilst she was still asleep, but I said that I was enthusiastic about getting back to work. We had made a lot of progress yesterday, and I was fuelled and ready to go another day! I knew OROTHO was already likely to be awake and working away quite happily to himself in the lab, but that was how OROTHO had always seemed to work. Very little sleep lots of work... I honestly don't know how he managed to keep it up!

"I'll come with you then. I wouldn't mind seeing what you've got so far. I might even be able to help out."

I was more than happy with that, and after waiting for her t get ready, we had a quick breakfast before heading pretty much straight to the lab. Oddly enough a few of the others were already awake too; COLUS was using one of the PDA's, sitting in one of the chairs in the discussion room, while THEROS and AMPHIS were studying the map that SERVERE had pointed to. Taking a wild guess I would have thought they were trying to determine the size of the HQ from the blueprints on the PDA's and from the map in front of them, although I couldn't tell. As we entered into the lab, just as predicted, OROTHO was busying himself already with his back turned to the entrance, holding something in his hands. I took Amie over to the design that OROTHO had drawn, and was surprised to find it now a surprisingly neat and detailed model instead of the quick-hand one OROTHO had drawn yesterday.

"AMPHIS helped by neatening the design so it was easier to follow. I thought it was fine, but he insisted it might be necessary for when he archived it."

I pointed out the main design and Amie began to pick specific attributes out that I had alerted OROTHO too yesterday. She seemed genuinely interested in what we were doing and how far we had got so far, but with OROTHO working from some point early on in the morning, I was now intrigued to see how far he had gotten without me. Going over to him to see what he was doing, I noticed an array of precise tools laid out on the desk, and could see he was working with small pieces of glass and diamond.

"I'm seeing if it's possible to make use of diamonds instead of cut glass for an optical sight. It should work provided I can get the light to bounce in the right direction. Once that's done, there's a deal of calibration to be done to get it working within a tube..."

"Do you need any help with anything?"

"Well now that' you're here, I guess you and Syeonyx can begin constructing the parts of the stock and sliding mechanism. All the pieces are finished, they just need constructing... I think the barrel of the rifle would be the easiest bit so we can leave that until the end."

We set to work constructing the main parts of the weapon to form the basis of the rifle, and as we improvised with a few of the pieces, the rifle began to take shape slowly. Meanwhile, OROTHO continued to piece together the optical sight.

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"Bingo!"

Me and Amie whirled around to see what OROTHO was exclaiming about and saw him looking at us with one eye closed, the other with a strange tube pressed against it.

"I can see you!"

"We can see you too... Have you managed it then?"

"Indeed I have! Come and have a look. I'll check on your progress."

OROTHO placed the optical sight down onto the table top and walked over to us, whilst we crossed the room to the table. Picking it up, I looked through it towards OROTHO and was surprised to see an image of the far side of the room spring right into my view! It was surprising at how accurate it was; around the edges there was a bit of distortion, but the main vocal area of the sight worked perfectly. I passed it to Amie to have a look through.

"I now know the precise curvature of the diamond needed to make it into a perfect magnification lens. It shouldn't be too hard to replicate. And from the looks of this here, we could begin constructing the whole thing soon!"



Going back over to the other side of the room, I helped OROTHO craft a small barrel that could be attached to the end of the main body of the rifle and complete the construction.

"I think if we make the barrel slightly longer than necessary we can always clip bits off if we've made it too long."

"Actually the longer the better... If you have a long barrel you can gain more accuracy as the dart will have a longer horizontal path to travel down. That should keep it on a straight path more efficiently."

An hour or so later, we had a finished barrel which we attached to the main body. A series of clips had already been attached to the top of the main body in readiness for the sight, which OROTHO clipped to the top. Placing the entire finished rifle down onto the table, we stood and admired it for a few moments, as though it was some impressive work of art...



"I think we need to test this out now."

Amie placed a full magazine of darts onto the table top and smiled. I was beginning to feel slightly bad abut having too much fun with this. We were supposed to be finding ways of ensuring our safety in a real life scenario, but I had had a lot f fun with OROTHO and Amie over the past two days!

Syeonyx singing off

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