The next morning found Laura once again in her workshop after quickly eating a small breakfast. By now she had finished the plans for the first two pieces out of the four the engine housing would consist of. The Kitsune started up the milling machine first to start on the creation of her engines housing, taking some time to finish the design of the driveshaft connecting all the rotor blades and other moving bits in the engine.
Getting tired of double checking herself on that after a while, Laura pulled her blade out of its sheath and placed it on the table. Looking it over, she quite liked how it looked at the moment, with the different shades of black and grey covering the blade, hoping they wouldn't change too much during tempering, the spirit placed the metal that would soon enough be her new weapon between the pair of tongs again, and after securing the whole thing to the worktable, began to heat it until the metal reached a dull red glow.
While the blade slowly cooled down again, Laura thought about different ways to finish it as she worked on cutting the thick metal rod that would form the shaft of her engine to size. Cutting a pair of thin circles of of the unused rest of it, she carefully made sure they were about the right size, before grinding them into the two pieces that would form her swords pommel. Satisfied with how they had turned out, she returned to the work on her official project, welding together the blades forming the compressor of the engine carefully.
Once that was done, the metal of her sword had cooled down enough that she could work with it once more. After carefully measurements, she cut the pieces of horn she had saved to the right length, before grinding them into a mostly finished shape, which would need to be finalized once they were attached to the tang of the blade. The last pieces she prepared right away for the weapon were two strips of metal that Laura planned to use to strengthen the guard a bit more, and one metal spike she planned to weld to the side to function as a crude nagel.
At that point the blade itself had luckily cooled down fully and so the spirit took a dremel and a fine marker form the cabinets. After writing out the inscription of "Die Zehnte Lunte" with the marker in the center of the fuller, her ears perked up, and a few of her tails wagging from side to side at the mediocre pun she had thought of, the spirit began to engrave it into the metal with the small rotary tool. Soon enough she had completed one side, prompting her to flip the metal over and repeat the whole process.
Looking the whole piece over, Laura quite liked the contrast between the blank metal of the inscription and the black scale covering most of the blade and decided to preserve as much of that look as she could. This lead to her grinding the actual sharp edge very carefully so there was as little scale removed as possible, except for the pieces she would need to drill through to attach the guard, grips and pommel that is. That meant progress was going slow, and half way through the milling machine was finished with its current piece, which prompted Laura to take a break from working on her sword as she setup the machine to mill the next quarter of her engine.
Once the blade was finally finished, the Kitsune first welded the nagel to the additional guard piece that would sit on the swords right side, before attaching the two pieces beefing up the guard of the weapon with a quartet of pins. Before she ground the pins down to lie flat with the surface of the guard, Laura decided to weld the pieces together as well for good measure, which she too ground down till the whole guard seemed like one solid piece.
Carefully fitting the horn grips she had prepared to the handle, she prepared a vice to clamp the handle together with while the epoxy glue she had found in the workshop dried. After making sure everything was ready to go, she inserted pins through the metal, which was still roughed up from when she removed the scale, and spread the adhesive over both sides before finally pushing the grips into their final positions. After quickly grinding the pins down enough to fit everything into the vice, Laura clamped everything together to make sure nothing moved out of place while the glue dried.
While she waited for that to be done, the spirit sat down and relaxed a bit as she played with a little ball of flame she conjured, twisting it into this or that shape and tossing it from tail to tail.
Half an hour of 'practicing' magic later, she was confident the epoxy had dried enough to let her continue working on the sword. After attaching the pieces of the pommel in a similar fashion to the guard, using only three pins this time, Laura began grinding the handle to a until it sat comfortably in her grip. Once all of that was done, Laura gave her creation a few careful test swings, happy that each swing of the meter long, slightly tapered blade felt very close to the weapon she had used for practice back in Germany. As her tails flicked from side to side happily, unlike most times not hidden inside the locked workshop, the Kitsune sheathed her blade and, once the weapon as well as her tails were all invisible again, made her way to her dorm room to grab some snacks, as she had managed to miss lunch being too focused on getting her work done.