Announcer: Are you having problems dealing with that pesky dragon that keeps eating your people and unsure what to do next? Need advice on dealing with raging demon hordes in your house? Trying to figure out how something as small as a dwarf can grow so much hair? Just Ask The Experts!

Rom-al: Thank you and welcome to the inaugural episode of Ask the Experts. I’m your host and resident researcher, Rom-al. Let’s jump right in and go to our first call. Caller, you’re on.

Caller 1: Yeah, hi. I have a question about elves. In most of the books, they’re described as fair skinned. Does that mean they burn easily?

Rom-al: Interesting question. For the answer, let’s go to…

Aeorn: Me!

Rom-al: Um.. Okay. We go to my right and throw it to our resident dwarf and animal master, Aeorn.

Aeorn: The answer be simple, caller. O’course elveses burn! The trick be t’nae leave them on the fire too long!

Rom-al: Some how, I don’t think that’s what the caller meant. For the actual answer to this, we throw it to Wusheng, sitting next to Aeorn, an elf and a demon hunter. I think what the caller meant was, do elves sunburn?

Wusheng: That can actually be a tricky question, caller. Certain elves, such as sea elves, are much more susceptable to the sun than most elves. They dry quickly and risk suffocation. To answer your question, though, your average elf has nothing to fear from exposure to sun sort of extreme desert conditions.

Rom-al: Thank you Wusheng. Let’s go to the next call. Caller, you’re on.

Caller 2: I was wondering why certain items work in Faerun, yet almost identical things don’t, like smoke powder and gun powder.

Rom-al: Excellent question. To answer this, we throw it to the dark elf and a powerful mage in his own right, Du’ongst.

Du’ongst: Good question, caller. Basically, as you know, most electronics cannot work in Faerun. This is due to energy waves generated from the weave. How, you ask, does it pick what works and what doesn’t? I spent a lot of time working on that and here’s what I came up with.

Du’ongst: To determine if something will work, you take the mass of the item divided by the weight of the center of the nearest black hole, multiplied by the result of the number of solar flares plus the square root of pi squared…

Rom-al: Can you make that a little less technical?

Du’ongst: Sorry. An easier way to estimate if something will work is to divide the coefficient of…

Rom-al: Okay… A lot less technical. Pretend you’re explaining it to a dwarf.

Aeorn: Yeah. Hey!

Du’ongst: Um… Because Mystra says so…

Rom-al: What about the smoke powder - gun powder thing?

Du’ongst: Oh, that’s much simpler. Smoke powder was invented with-in the realms, while gun powder was imported. That is why smoke powder works and not gun powder.

Aeorn: Because Mystra says so?

Du’ongst: Exactly.

Announcer: Tune in next time when Du’ongst tries to explain exactly how you weigh the center of a black hole…

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