Tristan looked around at the base camp. He had left before his parents had woken up a piece of him wanting to spite them by not saying good bye. As Shadow Fist’s dark kern always let him know when the sun was rising, so Tristan had to get up early to pull it off. He ended up arriving on Conni’s doorstep just as everyone at the mine was waking up.

Conni opened the door to find Tristan standing before him, “Your back early,” He noticed the lack of crutches, “how are your lungs treating you?”

Tristan nodded good morning and answered, “Well, I can’t run as long as I used to, but if I am not pushing myself then it is barely noticeable.”

Conni grinned, “Well, lets get you breakfast and get started on your training. I think after a few days we can test you out in the mine itself.”

“One other thing, “ Tristan said, “My parents don’t want me in the Forest Caldera, so I was hoping that I could stay at the base camp.”

Conni ran his hand over his scalp, “What are parents doing these days,” when he saw Tristan’s confused expression he continued, “This is supposed to work like a light internship, you come for a day or two a week for the next six or seven years, and start working full time when you are an adult. However, between you and Luke I’m starting to feel like a day care.”

“Is Luke not helpful?” Tristan could not imagine that they would have difficulty finding a place for someone as scary as Luke. He would go great in an elemental kill squad if he was trained.

Conni sighed, “No one is willing to work with him after how Carl died. They all believe he’s going to snap at the wrong moment.”

“I’ll work with him,” Tristan was scared of Luke, but the older boy had saved his life. He owed at least company to Luke.

Conni shrugged, “He can help you like he did the other day, then.”

An hour or so later Tristan found the miners eating breakfast and took a seat beside Luke, “Hey, I need to tell you something.”

Luke was holding the plate to his mouth, pausing his shoveling long enough to raise an eyebrow at Tristan, “I don’t want to talk about the idiot who jumped over the table.”

“No, no, I wanted to thank you for not hurting me when we met. I went home and all my friends turned on me and some even knocked me down and kicked me. You were the exact opposite,” Tristan said. Luke set his plate down and gave him his full attention, “Do you want to be friends?”

Luke inspected Tristan’s outstretched hand, he made no motion to take it, “You know people call me a monster, right, even my own father called me one?”

Tristan shrugged with a sad grin, “I just found out that I am a demon, and my parents told me not to come home.”

Luke grinned and took Tristan’s hand, “I have always wanted a minion, uh, I mean a friend.”

Luke finished inhaling his vegetables and pushed his chair back. They started their day with the wheel barrow training, there was more accuracy, however the distance was not improved.

Tristan explained how it felt and Luke decided on a different course of action. He started throwing scrap metal from the wheel barrow at the blindfolded Tristan. The goal was to increase his sensitivity as apposed to his area of effect for his sense. It worked, but not well enough to avoid being struck. The feeling worked very similar to noticing a ball just before impacted his face. One could blink, maybe flinch, but not avoid it.

Dinner came then night. It was the first night Tristan had spent away from home. It was noisy in the bunkhouse, Shadow Fist didn’t snore, so thirty sweaty men all snoring sounded like the den of a dragon with respiratory issues. At first Tristan was worried about some large predator being attracted by the cacophony, but nothing larger than a fly came through the open door.

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Tristan’s days fell into a new rhythm and his skills slowly increased. It was not that he could feel the metal essence farther away than he could before, more that he got better at isolating the feeling that it gave him. The essence gave him a feeling of safety and inviolability, which contrasted hard against the untethered feeling the rest of his life gave him. In a way he supposed he had his parents to thank for that.

A month passed and Luke asked if he was going to go home, but Tristan refused. The hard men at the mine were better friends than he could find in the Forest Caldera, at least they would share a meal with him. After another two months Conni deemed that his skills were good enough to test them out in the mine.

Tristan and Luke were attached to a team of five led by a wiry man named Chase. He was nice enough and knew what he was doing. He had an earth kern at tier one and the light was handled by another tier one with a light kern. Her face and muscled arms glowed a monotone pink bathing the cave in an odd light. It made everything appear slightly sinister while deepening the shadows that were already there.

The other three men were all earth kerns, however they were like Tristan. With tier zero kerns they could do little more than activate artifacts and sense the earth essence in the tunnel. It was an odd feeling for Tristan, being the weakest by every metric, but also being the most valuable to their progress.

Chase stopped at the end of the tunnel and asked, “what way do we dig?”

There was an odd shape in the wall like something had been removed as a complete object. Tristan pressed himself against the wall and while he was working asked, “What did you pull out of here?”

Chase held his hand off the ground at about neck height, “A chunk of metal about this tall, it was weird though, it was hollow and the inside was filled with glass and metal chords wrapped in glass. It had a piece of glass on the top and it was scorched black inside like someone had lit a fire in it.”

Luke seemed interested, “Do you think it was some kind of oven?”

Chase shrugged, “There was no room for a tray, so I don’t know what could be cooked inside it.”

Tristan finished his circle of the end of the tunnel, finding nothing. He knew in the back of his head that the deposit had to be either big or close for him to feel it. However, there was three dimensions in which they could dig, so he laid down to get as close as he could to the possible deposit.

The light kern, who had gained the nick name Sun Set due to her pink glow said, “Conni told me that they found a more complete one that had a glass bubble on top of it. It was cracked, but he assumed it had once been filled with water or some kind of gas.”

Luke nodded, “That would explain how they got the fuel to cook the food, maybe they put meat on the wires to cook a kind of corn dog.”

Chase laughed, “Man, now your making me hungry.”

They all jumped when Tristan yelled, “Got it!”

He was pressed up against the bottom edge of the tunnel. Lying down as he was, he felt silly, but it was worth it. Tristan stood and pointed down at about a twenty degree angle.

“My senses only go about thirty feet, and the farther it is the bigger it is,” Tristan said exitedly.

“Good,” Chase said, “please stand back while we use our artifact to dig.”

Sun Set stood back with them, “It really was a stroke of luck that you two came with us.”

Tristan watched the men set up a plow looking device, “How so?”

“Well you free us from needing to spend a slot on a surveyor, and the little monster-,”

Sun Set was cut off by Tristan, “Don’t call him a monster.”

She froze up, glancing warily at Luke, who made the situation more awkward by giving her an evil grin, “Well, he has a wind kern, that means we can have four people with earth kerns on the team. It allows us to do this.”

The four miners started pouring essence into the artifact. It did not shovel dirt backwards, instead its plow, which was taller than Chase pushed the dirt to the nearest edge. It made the resulting earth extremely compact, most likely as hard as stone. Though it did not appear fast, the tier three earth artifact pushed aside the earth at an astonishing pace.

It took Chase and his team almost five hours to push though the dirt and hit something hard. One of them yelled , “Thirty-two feet.” They started backing out of the tunnel about half way before turning the plow towards the wall and compressing a little cubby for it.

A metal wall was revealed, the metal was rusted and blue paint was flaking off. The tunnel was clearly off center on the building as half a door was revealed. A one with three stars and an illegible language were barely visible through the rust.

“well, kid, I guess your the real deal,” Chase grinned, he pointed at one of his men, “Jones go get Siren, we have a potential residence to extract.”