Alter looked at Finn, doing her very best to seem as cute as possible. "C'moooon, just one time! We can handle it! Nothing bad will happen, Finn!" Finn smiled fondly. "We cannot use the explosives to mine, Alter. We don't have the expertise to do that, especially since this isn't our mine- we wouldn't want to annoy the locals and get banned." Alter groaned "I just want to use them once! C'mon, maybe just a little one?" Finn shook her head fondly. "Maybe if you hurry up and get this tin home we can ask Bloo about using them in our own mines." Alter sighed. "C'mon Crown, Wait, we have to hurry home!" The two other miners raised their eyebrows "We have to make sure we're thorough, Alter. We'll get back when we get back- but if we still don't have the tin we needed after today, we'll just have to come back tomorrow. There's no use rushing, really." Crown explained, with Wait nodding besides her "We really need the tin for those copper pickaxes, remember? If we don't get it today we'll just have to return- an that means you get dragged along for longer, too." the belemoid added.

Alter groaned dramatically, slumping his shoulders in exaggerated defeat. "Fine, fine," he muttered. "But I’m telling you, one tiny explosion could save us so much time." Finn chuckled an gave Alter a light shove. "We'll do fine without blowing anything up for now, I promise." Crown, who had been busy examining a rock, turned back to the group. "Anyway, we’ve got a good chunk of tin here, so it shouldn’t take much longer. Let’s just focus and finish the job." Her calm tone always did wonders to calm Alter down, especially since Alter would never want to upset the sensitive tsabhua. Wait, who had been mostly quiet, chipped in. "Crown’s right. We’ve come this far, and if we rush, we might miss something important. We don’t want to make another trip if we can help it. If we just mine and load up this tin now, and do so properly, we can hopefully go back home before nightfall." Alter grumbled but began helping Wait sift through the rocks they had mined, making sure they only brought home the ores and not the empty rock surrounding it. As much as he loved adventure, mining wasn’t always as exciting as he wanted

it to be. "Hey, look at this!" Wait suddenly exclaimed, holding up a glinting piece of tin ore. "This one’s pure! I bet we can just melt it straight without messing with it too much. This should help a lot with the copper tools." Alter’s eyes gleamed with renewed excitement. "See? That’s why we need to hurry- if we can get enough, we won’t have to come back tomorrow." Finn shot her a knowing look. "And you think hurrying will make that happen?" "No," Alter admitted, her voice trailing off. "But I just can’t help it! I hate dragging things out, and this is taking forever!." Crown smiled warmly. "Patience, Alter. You’ll appreciate it once we’ve got everything sorted. Rushing leads to mistakes, and we definitely don’t want any mistakes down here." After a while, the cart was half-full, and the afternoon light started to fade. "We’re getting close," Wait said, wiping her brow. "Just a bit more, and we can head home." Alter perked up at that. "Good. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can talk to Bloo about using those explosives!" Wait chuckled. "You really don’t give up, do you?" "Nope," Alter replied with a grin. "If

I did, I wouldn’t be me now, would it?" The group's mood improved as they worked, the last rays of sun slowly dissapearing. They had agreed to stay out a tad longer, to make entirely sure they would have plenty of tin to take home. When they finally loaded the last bit of tin into the cart, Crown looked around at the group, proud of their efforts. "Great job, everyone. Now we can head home and focus on the next step." Alter immediately brightened. "Explosives, right?" Finn laughed and shook her head. "We’ll see, Alter. We’ll see." As they were heading some, Alter having darted out in front of the rest, Wait shot a couple of worried glances at Finn and Crown. "We're not actually giving him explosives, right?"