Solitaire POV: Day 50

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

I’m aware that my upbringing wasn’t exactly conventional, born into an apocalypse cult to a paranoid schizophrenic with genius level intellect, I really never had a chance of anything resembling a normal childhood. And I’m aware that something is lost in the gap between my formative years and a normal person’s. That something, of course, is the knowledge of how to make black powder.

But don’t worry, boys, girls and that wide rainbow in-between, because your uncle Solitaire is going to show you how it’s done. To do this at home, you’ll just need a few raw ingredients.

The first is charcoal, this should be easy enough to buy from a supermarket or DIY shop, the kind used in barbeques should work fine.

Next comes the sulphur, you can probably buy this online for a fairly cheap price in extremely high purities.

Finally there’s the potassium nitrate which, once again, you can buy- though this is quite expensive, and if you buy it and the sulphur The Man might get suspicious and try to infringe on your civic right to make whatever the fuck kind of powder you want.

Now, once you’ve gathered your ingredients, you want to grind them all into separate powders. Mix your charcoal and sulphur in a 3 : 2 ratio, then mix the resulting powder in with rubbing alcohol at a 6 : 1 ratio (going by volume, not mass). Dissolve your potassium nitrate in boiling water gradually, using about 400ml of water per kilogram, and then mix your sulphur/charcoal/alcohol into that. Cool the hot result down by mixing in more, cold, alcohol (1 : 2 ratio is my usual), then stir until they’re fully merged and leave in a fridge to cool. Finally you can filter the liquid through a towel, cloth or other suitable fabric, and the granules that get sieved out are genuine, authentic black powder.

All that’s left is drying it out, wringing it to ensure a uniform composition and then cooling it for safe storage. If you follow these simple steps then you, too, can have the government after you!

Well, they’re simple steps back on earth, anyway. I wasn’t on earth, though, and I didn’t have anyone to buy 99% pure ingredients from. Not ebay, not amazon, and not even anything that wasn’t created by the shadow government to brainwash the masses into complacent, consumerist cattle.

I had potassium nitrate, of course. Mother Nature, the freedom-loving bitch that she is, was kind enough to ensure that every mammal on earth naturally excretes the stuff in our shit. One must only extract it. Charcoal was a no-brainer too, I could make that with a tree, axe and some dirt if I had to.

The sulphur, though…That concerned me. As did the potassium nitrate’s extraction process. It all came partially down to luck, really, and I felt that fact weighing heavily on my shoulders as I turned to the first of the idiots Xangô had sent my way.

“Is there an alchemist in the village?” I asked.

My answer came from one of the women, grubby-faced and hard-eyed. I decided I liked her before the slow, plodding processes of her cognition could even vomit out an answer.

“There was, but he died early into the attacks.”

I swore, and sighed. “Take me to his workspace.”

Fortunately, with my Detect Element, I could be sure of identifying whatever I saw by sight. If not for that then I’d have been stuck using trial and error, I wouldn’t be able to read any labels, even if he’d used them. Damned illiteracy.

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She led me there quickly, and I studied the ill-maintained little shack as I closed in on it. Realistically, we were lucky to even have this much, Redacle wasn’t the sort of place where an educated man was found in every village, but I couldn’t help but compare it to the far less run-down and budgeted establishment I’d gotten my ingredients from back in Jhigral.

The inside was musky, dusty and smelled faintly of acid and ozone. A familiar smell I’d learned to pair with chemistry. It was a good sign, the sorts of chemistry I tended to do would definitely have a heightened ingredient overlap with black powder. Everything was shelved, and neatly tucked away, which would make things easier, so I decided to start from the door and work my way outwards.

It took a lot of looking, a lot of fucking looking, but eventually lady luck gave me my just deserts. A nice, pale-yellow powder tucked away neatly inside a jar. The container, like everything in the place, was made from clay rather than glass- part of the reason I’d taken so long, being forced to open everything to examine them- and it didn’t contain nearly as much of the stuff as I’d have liked, but it looked to be about three litres in all, and maybe four-fifths full.

I picked my brain for the relevant data pertaining to black powder creation, then worked it through the old meat calculator to quantify ratios. 2.4 litres of sulphur, with a powder density of double water. So that gave me 4.8 kilograms of the stuff. Luckily, sulphur was only a tenth of the final product by mass, which meant I had enough here for 48 kilos.

That wasn’t as much as I’d have liked, but it would definitely make a boom as big as either of the larger bombs I’d crafted back in Jhigral. Bigger, even. Knowing it was a finite resource, though, unnerved me. Part of me started kicking myself for not pressing Xangô on buying more of the stuff back in Wolney, but no. We wouldn’t have been able to afford much, anyway, just enough for an extra kilo or two of explosives. Either way that wouldn’t be getting much mileage.

…On its own, at least, but I’d never been banking on that anyway. First thing was first, though, we needed to actually make the explosive.

The potassium nitrate would be first, I decided. Mainly because I wanted to get the shit-handling over and done with. I had my happy little helpers scrape the barn floor and bring the refuse over to me, then examined it all with my Detect Element and started dumping the “purest” bits in a nice big cauldron the late alchemist had owned. It was big enough to hold probably 50 kilos or more, but I left it about one third full to make room for the other ingredient, water. Once it was all nice, wet and revolting, I started heating it up over the fireplace and waited.

If you think, in your entire life, you have smelled something bad, and that thing wasn’t literal boiling shit, then I’m sorry to say you’ve underestimated the human nostrils’ capacity for agony. It was like inhaling acid. No, worse, it was like inhaling glass. Glass dipped in acid, and heated to a hundred degrees. My eyes watered, my nose watered, god it was bad enough to make my damned arsehole water.

And the worst part? I could see the scent. My shitting vision, my special little power, was showing me the faecal pollutants as little flashing symbols in the air. The carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen. I was acutely aware of exactly how densely concentrated it was in every breath of oxygen I drew in, and my horrible, nasty computer of a brain was automatically calculating how much was left inside my lungs based on the difference in my exhalations. Whether I wanted it to or fucking not.

But I had to tolerate it, because I couldn’t just leave the extraction on its own. If something went wrong, god forbid a fire or damage to the cauldron, we were screwed. So I waited, tolerated, and made a lovely promise that any rotters I ran into with a still-functioning nervous system would die extra slow.

I’d leached the shit into the water already, and filtered it good and proper. The evaporation was the worst stage by far, but compared to broken ribs or broken friends I could manage the scent long enough to reach the most crucial stage. Crystallisation. I gave the remnants of my newly-made sludge some time to cool and settle, and when I returned I found, as I’d suspected, that there were plenty of crystals separated and clinging to the sides of the vapour-emptied cauldron. I sieved the rest of the liquid to get all of them, then left them out to dry.

And there I had it, potassium nitrate.

…Or, rather, there I had 0.7kg of the stuff, according to the scales. I resisted the urge to pull my hair out, resisted the urge to start crying, and got back to work.

After all, I’d need about ten times as much to make all the black powder I had enough sulphur for.