Texan In Another World

The roof was replaced with a set of retractable sails that, when pulled tight would cut the light off from the outside. The hours of the world were close, but Mike wasn"t sure about the times exactly. That was one of the reasons why he had been looking for a clock maker.

"It would probably be a good idea to get a good door lock for the Lab. I wonder how advanced locks are in this world."

Every day he would go check on Plants, he had only planted the two times. The first seed that he planted near the Magistrate office was already a foot an half tall, The light was significant enough to keep the inter-nodal length down to just under 3 inches. Mike couldn"t see any nutrient deficiencies or curling.

The second plant in the planter had all three seeds sprout. They grew in opposite directions but didn"t b.u.mp into each other. Mike was worried that he would run into s.p.a.cing problems that could lead to mildew or prominent spots for bugs to hide, but he couldn"t find any bug nearby which left Mike a bit confused.

Asking a guard nearby Mike found the answer rather quickly. There was a barrier around the city that kept bugs out with sonics that barely registered for the Poocha. Mike took note of it and went to the market square for a bit to look at other products that the people were making.

Mike eventually found what looked like a make shift art gallery. There were carvings of all manner of beast laying about and paintings stacked against the walls. Noticing a bucket of paintbrushes, Mike grabbed one that looked unused.

"Do you have any more of these, I"ll need about 20." It was a tall order indeed.

The Shop owner hand crafted everything in the shop. Paintbrushes required banding, glues, and most importantly bristles. The only source for bristles that were in season were the wild pigs outside of the city.

"Send the bill to Prince Troeg, here is a deposit."

Mike dropped three gold coins on the table and continued down the road with his paintbrush in hand.

"These aren"t bad" Mike whispered to himself as he roamed the stalls.

Occasionally he would find something interesting. When he finally reached one shop he saw a Telescope and nearly fell on his a.s.s.

"I"ll take this, do you have any more?" Mike pleaded with the shop owner and eventually got him to sell his lenses. Mike had an idea for a Jewelers loop to help him determine a better bloom harvest schedule.

He also had a few solutions to the bad locks that were currently attached to the building, but Troeg was paying the bill. Mike had carpenters and blacksmiths working day and night for almost a month. He had wanted a clock maker to come by and help him with timers to open and close the light barrier. If he could get it to where it was somewhat automated, he wouldn"t even have to rely on a staff to bring contamination into his grow.

Prince Troeg managed to find the gla.s.s blower that made the lenses for the telescope and set him to make the flasks and tubing for isolation. Mike needed a super cooled liquid gas to separate the good stuff from the plant matter, but creating Butane was another story all together.

Mike wasn"t into chemical businesses like the Oil companies, His grandfather had worked on Wells, but Crude oil was a far cry from Quality Butane. Kicking himself for not paying more attention to late night television doc.u.mentaries, Mike decided to look for other solutions. The method would have to change a bit, but The desired outcome was a different story.

Mike didn"t have a lot of opportunities to screw up. He could always make Basic Essential Oil extracts or teach people to bake. He put a pin in the idea and went back to supervising the construction and layout.

Every now and then, the Gla.s.s blower would ask for specifics. Mike had him making beakers and test tubes, spiral tubes and condensers. His biggest issues with making essential oils with ethanol or whatever high temperature alcohol these people had was that they wouldn"t be able to screen it properly. The netting and fine wire they could produce was a mess at the best of times.

Most of the time when Mike would do an extraction, he would use a .45 micron screen. But these people didn"t even know the word. After some thought, he remembered hippies making mushroom tea.

"Coffee Filters!" The idea suddenly came into his head.

Mike knew he"d lose a lot during the filtering process if he used hand made coffee filters, but it would probably be the best he could do. The parchment that was used for the books was about the right thickness. Mike would have to do a few experiments when the time comes to be sure about the removal of particulates but it was at least plausible.

The gla.s.s blower made a storehouse for replacement parts that numbered in the hundreds, he had to make a few different versions of things in case they needed to be changed out or adjusted.

The blacksmiths had created the railing system for the drying room, it was set up just like a winery. There were racks and rows of stands to hang cut plants on. Because half of the building was located underground, the average temperature in the dry room was a nice cool 68. Mike really had to appreciate cheap gas station toys. He had a few really useful items that were just laying around in his truck.

He had a thermometer/hydrometer combo that sat on his stash buckets in the truck. He had four of them with sensors, so he removed one and used it for testing the environment. There was enough airflow with the top removed from the building, during the night cool air would keep the humidity to a low as long as they didn"t water too early in the night.

It was always better to water in the morning before the sun came out. That way the plant wouldn"t get the chills and go purple, the wrong way. Anandamide was an excellent thing to have present in plants, Grand Daddy Purp was one of the first to be recognized for its high levels, but If a plant is subjected to regular colder than average temperatures, I could easily bruise itself purple tints. It was somewhat rare to find a strain of purple.

Mike sat down and took another Dab in his office. He setup a pulley system with a fan on the roof to power a fan in his office. Albeit a bit crude, Mike found himself relaxed in only a moment after taking his first hit of the day.

"Nestebaha!" Mike blew out his. .h.i.t and praised the first release of his day. After fighting in the Middle East, Mike had gone over to Egypt to see the culture from the other side. What he found was a bunch of poor people who didn"t care that they were poor, they cared that they were sick.

Many of the population did whatever they could to dull the pain, giving rise to some of the earliest forms of Hash. Mike was successful in getting some Hash plant seeds, but the Bongo from Alexandria was terrible in comparison to modern cultivated plants. For a while Mike collected seeds, His seed collection was impressive enough but it wasn"t with him when he came to on this world.

Calling the girls over to discuss the finer points of what he was trying to accomplish, the girls had a few ideas that completely caught Mike off guard. He was talking about the process of extraction, and what the end goal of the process was. When they found out that it was separating the resin heads and oils from the leafs and pedals of the flower, the girls all chimed in rather quickly to a solution.

"Just use Magic, Deconstruction magic is one of the most basic since it doesn"t make anything." Cara hadn"t spoken in a while, her voice caught the others off guard and they let her speak.

"The book is over here."

Cara grabbed the book off the shelf and pa.s.sed it over to Mike. She was pretty proud of herself as she sat down next to her jealous a.s.sociates.

Mike poured his spirit into the book and got the summary of the skill into his consciousness. He could understand why she would say what she did.

"This will work for part of it, but the efforts we"ve made aren"t in vein."

Mike was excited, if this idea was possible, then he could have the possibility of exacting isolates and monoterps. Mike had experimented with strains and found an excellent source of 13% CBG, it was the source of Euphoria in the form of a nuerochemicals.

After his attempts he was able to refine out a 20% stronger CBG extract from the plant and fuse it with Lemonine. The taste was exquisite, it left you feeling like you had just eaten a lemon-head for a considerable amount of time after the exhale.

"Cara, this will help me a lot. Thank you. This spell will allow the plant matter to separate from the oils and resin heads, they will all fall off. the problem is that it will only break down baser elements. Some of the oils need to be separated to make different things, but this will do most of the hard work" Mike praised Cara for her contribution.

Mike had also considered trying to make a heat press and do a solvent-less extract squeeze. It would also lead to a waste of materials over time, parchment paper in this world was not the same as a baking sheet on earth. Squishes would literally get fried, it was almost better to just grow the Herb if that was the case and so it was quickly dismissed by lack of technology.

The blacksmiths made the finishing touches on several racks, rails, pipes and even a hand crank soil tumbler. The Carpenters were still creating cabinets to dry buds, Mike had a few humidor buckets in the truck that were filled with concentrate. They didn"t need to be inside of them, so Mike put them to purpose for their intended use.

If he cured the first batch of buds inside the bucket he would have a better product to showcase to the Council of Elders, the Prince and the Kingdom. He might even keep his head.

Mike wanted to get the best results he could get, he was more impressed with himself than he thought he could be when s.h.i.t finally hit the fan. The first load of fertilizers had arrived. The lower caste of the population had been sent out to gather pig s.h.i.t from the fields outside of the city. As a great wild source of a variety of nutrients, it was probably the easiest solution to the problem.

It was nearing lunch time on the 9th week of construction when Mike noticed a change in his plants. The first plant that he grew near the Magistrate had started to double in size, it was nearing a shorter light cycle.

The grow room was nearly complete. Except for being light tight at the correct time, it really didn"t need much else. Mike was still waiting on a clock maker for help on a timer for the cover but ultimately it didn"t matter for the first season.

Using an Hour gla.s.s to measure time was a bit absurd. Mike resorted to using the clock in his dashboard more than anything. Whipping the Truck out of a Ring from time to time to check the time felt nonsensical as well, but Mike still needed to keep a proper light schedule in mind.

When the Room was finally completed, everyone rejoiced and Mike threw a party. He had all the girls try the Dabs once, they had all inquired about why they were growing it and why it was important. Mike didn"t have all the science answers, he was in it for the treatment for his mom. The high was nice, but it wasn"t the motive that drove him to running it across border.

As the days got shorter, the Two mother plants had gotten rather large. It was time to clone before they entered a flowering cycle. Mike had considered doing it when they were just a few weeks old and virulent, but He wanted to see how far they would grow without his help and naturally.

The plant in the planter didn"t lose out too much to the plant in the soil near the magistrate. It has grown to about 5 feet wide and 9 feet tall. Its three large trunks sprouting from the center made all the plants lean away from the middle, giving it a lot of room to Monster-crop. If the plants were laying down flattened, more sunlight would cover its surface. Then the plant would spend that energy making more of itself.

It was a Win-Win to scrog and super-crop, cloning would take considerable efforts since cloning gel wasn"t available and supplies were limited. It would be better if Mike pollinated the plants himself. He had bought a paintbrush just to make sure. By tapping the dry paintbrush against the flowers, he could impregnate a single bud on a single plant and retain the others as sinsemilla.

"Mona, Can you go ask the lead Blacksmith if they"ve finished making the frame for the water tank." Mike wanted to get underway with his next project.

A grow, once setup can operate on minimal efforts until harvest time. Since there were not lights to keep the plants in a veg cycle, they had to work with the natural seasons and the sunlight. Mike wasn"t sure how long winter would take to arrive or how low the temperatures would get, but he wasn"t going to gamble either.

Mike set up a schedule to help shorten the light the plants were exposed to. He had a Tent made up to cover the one by the Magistrate, Prince Troeg had someone put in charge of maintaining roughly 10 hours of daylight. It did not take long for the plants to start blooming and the fragrance filled the commons near the Offices and Lab.

Mike was lucky that the planter was moved to the grow, He could use the cover over the ceiling to block out the light. A 10/14 would produce buds faster than 12 on, 12 off schedule. If mike could only find a source of light, he would be able to try out Gas-lighting someday.

Taking another Dab in the Truck, Mike cranked the radio. He had an Mp3 player that attached to his tape deck. "Billy Currington"s pretty good at drinkin beer" came across the speakers and brought some life to the quiet atmosphere.

Mike pulled down his tailgate and laid down in the bed of the truck.

"This was a lot more than I bargained for." Mike"s torch needed another refill, He had a Can and a half of Butane left.

After that, There would be a problem.