Petra seemed to be giving herself updates and experience points and levels according to some internal logic, while Nick's status never seemed to change. Her performance is a lot easier to quantify than mine. She has a specific list of accomplishments, things to build or synthesize or gather. Whereas I...can swim more laps than I used to.
Nick knew he wasn't quite being fair to himself. He'd started picking up some words in an alien language at the same time as he was teaching English. The English Language entry in Petra's status had risen to 10%. But he wasn't carving stone or carrying bricks any more. Petra kept building for him, so long as he gave approvals.
At one point, he explained to Petra that he wanted to grow apple trees. Petra responded by asking a bunch of questions about things like temperature range, water levels or humidity, light brightness and spectrum, size, foods required and wastes to remove. With enough effort, Nick was able to answer most of the questions, which he was kind of proud of, honestly, since he didn't know he was going to have a quiz on gardening.
The sticking point, as always, was the soil. Nick had no idea what was actually in dirt. What is dirt, anyway? It was the kind of basic question he might have spent his whole life never even thinking to ask or wonder about.
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Dirt wasn't the same thing as sand. If you ground up any rock, you pretty much always got sand, just in different colors. On the other hand, dirt definitely wasn't the same thing as shit, either. And he was pretty sure that “sandy shit” would not work.
At any rate, Petra built an entire underground tree farm. It was really impressive. The dungeon had dug deep into the hill in order to leave room for growth by carving the ceiling as needed. Lights rigged up in a stripe across the dome simulated the sun and its motion. There was a control panel for adjusting watering. Petra was even using actual groundwater, pumping it up rather than synthesizing it.
It was an impressive setup. He had saved apple seeds in the beginning, and Petra absorbed the designs from a couple of them. She could replicate them whenever he wanted. All they needed to do now... was reinvent dirt.
Nick tried some different “recipes”, then conveyed to Petra that he wanted her to try various combinations and variations. Each time an experiment was ready for his judgment, Nick grimaced. A great many of them, understandably, smelled like shit.
He wasn't a soil expert. When something looked like dirt and felt like dirt, he told Petra to try growing a seed in it. Trial after trial yielded 'no reaction.' Nick was starting to wonder whether the seeds themselves were somehow dead. He knew companies gene-spliced things so that they couldn't grow naturally any more. My apple trees might be behind a paywall.