Powder Miner thought for a brief moment. "Well, I thought it might be a bit presumptuous to want to be one of the
best... And about the clan... well... I guess noone ever asked about the mark on my cheek or anything related to it, so I never thought to explain. We come from the northwest corner of the country, and we're laborers, military and civilian, seeking to gain fortune, master our trade, or such things like that. As each of us chooses a labor, we get a painted mark on our cheek of the labor- I have a pick -as a kind of second cutie mark I guess for the clan.
Our names also come from that, we're simply "peasants". I'm named "Powder" because of our clan's religion, far different from that of the preacher Grapple's. We believe the world's made of of a number -quite a lot- of elements. They're not exactly intuitive, and a few of them confuse even me, for example this weird white condensed magic thing called Ceyfor. Powder is an element, representing, dust, dirt, and leaves, and there's an order to them but I don't want to list them right now. Your first name is basically your element in order of if you were the first second or so on of your profession and then your profession. I was the first miner where I was born and hence my name Powder Miner. And then you have your last name to distinguish you.
We have a rank system for how well you do your labor. The number of ranks is the same for all of them, but the criteria are custom-tailored for all of the jobs. As a miner, I'm... currently I think... professional because I can reliably mine out boulders without significant risk of injury in the process, not counting faulting patterns of mining that would cause the ceiling to drop on my head. My great-uncle, Torch Miner, was a legend of a miner. He was pretty famous around the clan for being able to dig out large areas in small amounts of time almost every time effortlessly churning out a usable piece of rock. He even brought down a ridge on the heads of a diomedian siege once."
He turned to Mortar. "Yes, I'm here to dig. That reminds me- I should finish digging this out before it falls out on it own. I think I can hear it beginning to creak, should have dug it out before I began to talk." At this Powder Miner put his pick in the corner of the half-dug-out boulder and gave a quick twist, rendering the boulder free of the wall with a crack.