(Medical) Much Ado about Not so Much

So, after a night of fasting and worry in spite of my rational mind, and a quick, efficient doctor's visit, I am left with three things:

• The knowledge that my medical issue is inded the minor, if painful problem I thought it was. No cause for alarm.
  
  
• A really bad case of gas.
  
  
• A set of pictures which, my lovely wife has informed me in no uncertain terms, nobody will want to see.
  

The last confuses me a bit. After all, nobody wanted to see the pictures I retained after my root canal, or the x-rays of my oddly-shaped sinuses. OOne would think people would have more curiosity about biology.

In any case, I bow to the will of the majority. No pictures scanned and posted, no new livejournal icons. Just the relief of knowing I have a clean bill of health.

(Under the Green Moon) ELFS!

One of the things I've been doing in my Under the Green Moon setting is simply writing up random setting elemts as they occur to me.  For instance, this is my response to the statement that any fantasy setting MUST have an elf race in there.  That notion immediately set of my sarcasm generator.

This is the result: the write-up for elfs in my fantasy setting. 


ELFs

ELFs are rare and highly cherished, so much so that some city-states have had an ELF advising them for generations, as much for the prestige as for the erratic usefulness of their advice. Anyone finding a live ELF can likely trade it for a large sum of wealth.

A sleeping ELF appears as a black obelisk of some unknown, hornlike material, around two feet in length, with a small diamondium crystal in the top. This is actually the domicile or protective shell of the ELF; if it is cracked when found, , then it is sadly, dead. Normally, ELFs are found in a quiescent state; to awake one, the obelisk has to be exposed to bright sunlight for some hours, until blue or red hieroglyphs appear inside the surface of the base. Then if spoken to, the elf will appear above the tip in a swirl of light. ELFs have a highly variable appearance. Often they appear as foot-tall humanoids with sparkly wings, and a cheerful, helpful demeanor; they may also appear as floating heads of men or women of many different races. All ELFs though are translucent and intangible. They easily change shape, taking the form and appearance of items and concepts they are discussing. They will originally appear speaking their own dead language, but rapidly learn any language.

All this alone would make an ELF a wonder, but it is their store of knowledge for which they are most valued. An ELF has an immense body of learning, though much of it will be thousands, even tens of thousands of years out of date. Also, while always helpful, many of the answers they give are cryptic, refer to concepts or processes that are long out of fashion, or simply have no translation in modern languages. Because of this, knowing the right questions to ask an ELF is an art in itself, and some scholars have attempted to learn the dead language of the ELFs. Those attempts have met with failure so far, as ELFs politely insist on speaking in the tongue of the inquirer. As a result, nobody has yet learned the meaning of the strange phrase “ik-stur-nl lahy-brer-ee fuhngk-shuh-ner-ee ak-tuh-veyt” that they recite when coming awake.