Ten Miles Down

He probably should have been more careful, Ground had been negligent in properly assessing his surroundings, and nearly ended up beneath approximately five hundred pounds of rock. Ground narrowly escaped the cave-in - barely, and began slowly limping back home. Dented up with a far more damaged pride. On the tread back, he didn’t realize how damaged he’d been. A shredded leg, dented frame, and the side of his head was so severely dented that his coms had been knocked offline entirely. Great. 

Despite the damage, he limped his way home, back to the castle. Ground lumbered into the repair bay, with little service robots following behind him - offering him aid and cleaning the floor of oil drops behind him. Ground lay on the table with a sigh. He waved off the flock of robots behind him. And he closed his eyes while the machines worked to repair his coms. 

In all honesty, hearing from Hornet was the best thing to come out of it. He had been alone for a while, staring at the ceiling, left to his own thoughts of how stupid he had been and how he could have avoided the cave-in entirely. Not fun. He needed to take his mind off of it. Ground sat up, and called for one of the service robots. 

Let me think....maybe, about one year ago during the winter. I recall it being cold. I had no luck for about a month, found nothing of any worth. So I decided to travel to some old hunting grounds in the midwest mountain ranges. There are no people that live there, so I turned off my GPS for a short time, just fly blind. 

I was digging around, 150 to 200 meters under the earth through some hard granite. I stumbled upon, or rather fell into, a fully submerged abandoned mine. I do not do well with water. I had to dig further west to find a way to drain the place, seeing as I could not go up. There were some unstable rocks in that cavern that had been loosened from the water, and old wooden supports were completely rotted away. Needless to say, nearly two tons of rock fell on my head. 

I had found a space surrounded by more stable rock and dug further into the mountains. I had about given up with the journey after all that misfortune. However, I discovered yet another open cavern. This time, it was dry. It was about 20 to 30 meters from floor to ceiling. And there were massive quartz crystals. Massive. The biggest ones towered all the way from the floor to the cave ceiling, maybe higher. They were beautiful. Quartz isn’t worth much, but I took one of the smaller crystals. For the memories. I still visit that particular spot, it’s a great place to sit and think, it’s very quiet. 

After finding those crystals, I felt reinvigorated and traveled outward, toward a near valley between two mountains to look for any sign of more, hopefully dry mines. I found one. And when I scoured the place I found a large chunk of raw silver and iron ore. I found quite a lot of undiscovered ore in those mountains.