A few hours pass until Ion returns with a small army of volunteers...?

"The Empress let us 'borrow' this many people for our search. She also pointed out at least 10 unexplored mines and 5 mines semi-explored." (Ion)

"Do they all know what the materials look like?" (Hayden)

"Yes. That's why it took a few hours. I had them all memorize the materials." (Ion)

I nod and look at them all, I then return to my desk as Ion floats next to me with a map.

"The mines are all recorded here with the known materials in it. None of the mines they have have any of the materials we need. Only a ton of coal and other things." (Ion)

I take a look at the mines. Five of them are quite close but the others are a a fair distance away from our current location.

With this small army of explorers we could search four mines at the same time...

"Ion. Split them up into four different squads. Send squad one to Hipsire mine. Squad two to Koro mine. Squad three to Varille mine and the last squad to Potomo mine. Me and you shall go to Hipsire mine with the first squad." (Hayden)

Ion does as I ask and the squads start heading off and so do I after letting Ion tell the research squad to just relax until I come back.

We walk for two hours until we reach Hipsire mine.

"This is Hipsire Mine. Nobody has explored it yet since there is a far bigger mine, which has some rare materials which we don't need, just a mere hours walk away from here." (Ion)

I grab my electric drill out of my backpack as we head into the mine or more like a cave.

The Empire pre-emptively named all the mines so it would be easier to understand which mine to go to next, probably...

We walk in a pattern that kind of looks like a Roman two. Ah, good old Rome... We found a ton of records about them in a facility near the Alps.

About thirty minutes and nothing. Just pure stone. Even Ion isn't detecting anything else than stone.

An entire hour has passed after we've entered. We've found small traces of aluminium but not enough to build an entire helicopter.

Two hours have passed after we've entered... We found the holy grail. The Holy Grail of metals.

We hit a dead end as well but the dead end contained all the things we could've hoped to get.

Ion's detected aluminium, tin, zinc, copper, silver, iron and a slight bit of gold as well.

We've got over half of the materials we need but we still need more copper and aluminium.

I start mining with the others and Ion uses his laser to cut through the stone surrounding the iron pockets to 'mine' them as well.

We mine for at least an hour and a half without any breaks and there is just a massive pile of ores in the middle of the area we are mining.

Suddenly we hear somebody running towards us and when I look at the tunnel I see one of the people I sent to the Koro mine.

"We've found what you call 'Oil'! The leader sent me to immediatly give you this information after we found the pocket of it!" (Explorer)

"Ion." (Hayden)

Me and Ion immediatly head off to the Koro mining site.