As it turned out, Laura had no classes this thursday, as the professor holding the one class she would have had in the early morning had yet to return to japan after spending the last semester lecturing abroad, as they were still there for the next two weeks overseeing Exams. It suited the Kitsune just fine, even though she found out only after waiting in the classroom for half an hour for class to start, as that meant more time to work on both her projects. Sending a short message to her rather small circle of friends, she went back to her dormitory, where she found Takeko lounging around munching on some chips.
"You fine there Takeko?" Laura asked as she picked up the slabs of wood she had bought the day before.
"Yes" was the Tanuki's response before he stuffed his mouth with another pawfull of deep fried potato.
"Okay, I'll be doing some more work, so don't make too much noise or people might get suspicious." Laura said as she turned to leave her room again.
"I'll try my best" The little spirit mumbled after her, mouth still half full as the Kitsune closed the door behind herself.
Her walk across campus was rather uneventful, although that was probably because she covered both the wood and metal she was carrying with illusions. This did make navigating the corridors a bit more tricky, as she could not actually see either herself, but with her tails holding the sword shaped slab of steel close to her body, it was somewhat manageable. When the Kitsune finally arrived inside her little workshop, she dropped the materials on the table before locking the door to be undisturbed.
After consulting her tablet with the CAD design of her sword, and looking through the cabinet for the right tools, Laura began to transfer the measurements she had settled on onto the piece of metal. To do so the Kitsune took a thin piece of metal left over from something or other, and ground it to a sharp point. Measuring out the edges of the Fuller, as well as where the blade should end, she first scored the corners of all these parts, as well as where she would grind down to offset the guard a bit. Next she used a longer piece of metal to connect all these, leaving her with what looked more like a metal version of a foam sword for the moment.
This changed soon enough though, as the Kitsune mounted a rough grit wheel on the grinding machine, and was about to turn it on before she tried, and failed, to put on a pair of safety goggles. Pondering this conundrum for a few seconds, Laura picked up a spool of wire, and tied two strands of it to each side piece of the goggles. Holding them in place on her nose with one hand, she twisted the wires together behind and above her head to keep the protective gear in place without ears to rest on.
With the safety precautions taken care of, the foxtailed woman turned on the grind wheel and picked up the sword to be, carefully keeping her tails out of the way. Holding the blade with both hands on either end, she carefully brought the middle of it close to the wheel. Once it started to bite into the material, she moved it from side to side carefully to slowly grind in the fuller on that side of the blade.
Satisfied with how it looked after a while, she put the piece down to let it cool of for a bit, instead taking the time to take stock of what she could to about making the housing of the Jet engine she wanted to build. In the end it became evident that the best way to go about it would be to have it milled out of blocks of metal by the milling machine, which meant she needed to draw up plans for that as well.
After grinding in the fuler on the other side of her blade, Laura put it down to let it cool once again, instead picking up the first stack of the rotor blade cut outs and ground them into the shapes she wanted,working very scarefully, and thus at a rather sedate pace, as to not mess up with any of them.
Those did take her longer than expected, but after packing them together again, she finally went ahead and began to work on the blades of her sword. For now she tried to make a flat grind, to which the Kitsune planed to add another grind to actually sharpen the blade after tempering it. Once again she paused after getting the first side done, returning to working on rotor blades until the sword had cooled down again.
All in all it took her until Lunch to get the blade to a state she was satisfied with, but when she moved to make the scabbard for it, her stomach let out a loud complained. So after reapplying all the illusions hiding her true nature, Laura made her way towards the cafeteria.