"Holy crap bro! Where did this artistic talent come from?" Devin asked, looking at the print for the propeller.
"I didn't draw it, Jerod did, and he is quite the artist." I set down the plans on a drafting table. "At the moment, the propellers are too powerful for their own good, and rip themselves off their mounts."
"Isn't the easy way to fix that to just to enchant the mount?"
"It would be, if we had someone willing to sit down and spend all their Eneru charging batteries. Plus, I want to make this blueprint public for the humans to use, well, as soon as I get an engine running."
"So what is your plan? I can't imagine you called me over for nothing." Bock said
"There is no word for it, but I'm making -steel.-"
(AN: Nobody, except Ingen, can understand words between dashes, as they are from his original language.)
"You're making, what now?" Devin asked.
"It's an alloy of iron that is super strong for its weight. To make it, I'm going to need a lot of heat and charcoal."
"Why? If you are getting charcoal, do you really need a fire mage?" Bock asked
"Yep. The charcoal isn't for heating, it's part of the alloy. I'll turn it into coal coke and put it into a cementation furnace and then boom, steel."
"I see you've broken your habit of talking about engineering things for fun." Devin quipped
"Maybe a bit. I'd like to say it's because it's so cold out here that it hurts to move my lips. Anyway, I'll get to work making a place to make coal coke. Bock, you can go back to work, but just know that we are going to be calling on you soon." Bock took my advice and left.
"Devin, you're going to use that big brain of yours to look for clay, we will need it for both the coke oven and the refractory furnace. I'll gather as much iron as I can with flow manipulation."
"How am I supposed to find clay?"
"Go down to the river and look for discolored spots, and if they are, melt the frost and touch them, if they are slippery, then you will know that it's clay. Luckily it's getting close to summer so you should have an easier time."
Devin left to do his task as I sat down, cross-legged, and perceived the flow. The familiar torrent of energy flew past me, it was flowing from my right to my left. Since I could see the flow, I could more efficiently redirect the flow, and even get extra range by guiding the flow and letting it work beyond my control. Over the next hour, I managed to gather half a ton of wrought iron and Devin found a clay spot for us to gather. Then I started digging a pit.
"What's that for?" Devin asked, he was watching me since he found the deposit.
"This is for making charcoal, start cutting the wood down to size, we have to get burning logs for this."
Devin gathered some of the airship team and we chopped a bunch of wood down.
"Alright, here's the plan, put all the wood in the pit and mostly cover it."
With most of the pit covered, I had Bock light a fire and I covered it.
"In five days we will uncover the pit. There will be charcoal in there."
"Up next is the clay, team airship, we have some mining to do."
We spent the next day and a half digging out the clay, obtaining enough for our purposes, and cleaning it of impurities.
Thus began the tedious process of molding bricks out of clay. The charcoal finished and we shoveled it onto the airship for storage while we were working on it. After a few days of working, we finally had enough bricks for the cementation furnace, so we had to fire them.
We continued to work on the airship and actually finished the hull before the clay was finished firing. In the time after the hull was done and before the firing was done.
I wiped my brow and stacked the bricks with practiced precision. "We're about halfway there, just a few more days of work."
A day later we had laid the furnace and could finally get to work. We packed the iron and charcoal into a stone 'coffin' and sealed it I put a bunch of charcoal underneath it and lit the pile, it would stay lit and Bock would watch over it for a total of thirteen days. I inspected the 'blister steel' (Impure steel) every day to see if it was ready, John had a good eye for this kind of thing so he helped too.
Once we were satisfied, we removed the charcoal and waited for the 'blister steel' to cool, and once cooled, we removed them and worked them into 'shear steel,' the end product.
"Boom, I can't use flow manipulation on it because if I do the carbon is left behind, but it still works. Let's get to work."
We heated the shear steel and had John and Fabiru forge it into beams, that were cut to my specifications and attached to the ship.
"A little to the left! Right there!" I shouted, then I felt a hand touch my shoulder. "Huh?"
"Ingen, the balloon is nearly done, we should have it finished by the end of the week." Bella said, furs adorning her now that her prison uniform was battered.
"Good, this is all going swimmingly." I smiled and relaxed for a moment.
"Grrrrr" Orin growled menacingly
'Two spirit beasts, stay on your guard,' Orin tapped into our mind link
"Well, I guess this is what we get for overhunting." I drew my spear and called for my golems