"...Bullets are round, yes. We do rifle some of our guns; the strelsi, the rota of Erengrad, fight with rifle and bardiche. Probably half the rifles in Kislev are within five miles of us right now, though, the strelsi are very unusual. The Imperials have a lot more handguns but I think most of them are still smooth-bore, only sharpshooter units get rifles."

Sheppard takes out a spare magazine for his pistol. "This is what we call a magazine. It holds several cartridges so we can fire repeatedly without reloading." He works one cartridge out of the magazine. "This is what we call a cartridge. It holds the bullet and the propellent needed to launch it. When our guns fire they ignite the propellent and then eject the outside of the cartridge which we call the shell to make room for the next cartridge. I can't easily separate out the bullet from the cartridge but as you can tell from the tip the bullet isn't a ball. It's a sort of rounded end on a cylinder. Some other types of bullets are closer to cones."

"I think I saw something like this from a boyar boasting about his dwarfen pistol. Why the different shape?"

"Rifling is more effective with bullets like this. It helps with accuracy and it makes the bullets cut through the air better. Compared to the first guns we made the ones we use now hit harder and more accurately over a longer distance. The bigger guns we have are effective out to around 200 meters and even this pistol is effective at 25. The maximum ranges are longer you can only hit something at those ranges with healthy does of skill and luck. There are guns that have effective ranges five times that but we're not carrying any with us."

"I suppose it's not that different from an bodkin arrowhead. I think an expert can hit moving targets about that far with a southern rifle, though they're very slow loading. Yours looks rather different there, is that what the 'cartridge' is for?"

"It's really a combination of the magazine and the cartridge. The cartridge means you don't have to measure out powder you just always have the perfect amount. The magazine and some bits inside the gun combine to let you fire a lot of bullets in a short time. With our bigger guns we can fire a magazine with 50 bullets in about four seconds at full speed. Usually it's better to fire slower to save on ammunition but we can."

"Gods above! The best man-made weapons I've heard of can only do twenty in a minute, and they're notoriously finicky before they jam, repairs after every battle."

"It's something we've spent a lot of time refining, the guns we're carrying now depend on a lot of precision manufacturing techniques and something like two centuries of innovations."

"Two centuries seems remarkably short, but I suppose two centuries ago Kislev didn't have any manmade guns at all, and even the Imperinyi only had cannon three ago."

"Oh we've had guns for something like seven or eight hundred years it's just in the past couple centuries that they've improved significantly. Before then the main advantage they had over bow and arrow is that you could train people to use them a bit faster and they didn't require as much strength to use."

"History seems a bit compressed in our world comparatively. As far as we can tell, people didn't really invent agriculture until about twelve thousand years ago and the countries Sheppard and I come from were only founded in the past three hundred years."

"Twelve thousand years! That's even older than the elves. They only track back, I think it's around seven thousand, to the Great Vortex."

"It's an approximate date. We don't have any writing from back then, so we're relying on archeology and paleontology. The study of relics and fossils. As far as we can tell from paleontology there have been approximately modern humans on our world for between two and three hundred thousand years. We can track the history of life back a lot further then that, based on the evidence we have there's been life on our world for between three and four billion years."

"I don't know what you mean by a 'fossil'." And in fact Rodney may notice he said that as a loanword from English, not Kislevarin. "The oldest graves I've heard of are only two thousand years or so before Kislev, a thousand before the Empire's Sigmar. Hundreds of thousands of years... I don't know, no one even has legends that far back. I can't even imagine what it would mean for a world to be billions of years old."

"You came up with a good guess, fossils usually start out as bones although sometimes there's other things that can be fossilized. In either case, something becomes a fossil when the conditions are right for stone to take on the shape of what it's replacing.

"The billions of years thing is hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around. Paleontology and another field called Phylogenetics, which studies how the blueprint for lack of a better term that's used by our bodies to make themselves, relates to the blueprints for other living things by studying those blueprints we've built out a history of how all the plants and animals on our world are related to each other.

"The documents we've found suggesting that Atlantis was on our world several million years ago complicate those histories but there's enough evidence that it doesn't make sense to ignore it."

That wasn't actually intentional but he'll take the credit. "I've never heard of anything like that. Where are fossils found? Would they show up while mining?" The other stuff seems a lot harder to do anything with or check, but stone bones sounds interesting. Actually. "Or, wait, I have heard of something like it, but only as an unusual and possibly-magical feature of a species far to the east whose horns and skull turn to stone as they age."

"Sometimes people find them when mining. It's not the most common. They're usually in sedimentary rock, which is to say rock that used to be things like sand and mud. If your world is actually only eight or nine thousand years old it might not have been long enough for fossils to form the process of bone turning into stone takes a long time. With all your gods and magic it seems pretty plausible that they made your world or at least terraformed it relatively recently as these things go instead of it developing life naturally."

"The elves believe their gods are only slightly older than their earliest ancestors. I don't think anyone remembers... well, Chaos, probably, they're immortal and stories say some of their mortal servants are bitter about controlling the world before any of the races of order were born. But they're very vague stories."

"Are there stories about the gods shaping the world or making people?"

"Not in Kislev, but our myths start with our ancestors refusing Chaos and fleeing west to make a deal with the gods who live here, and what we did before then is not retold. I've long suspected that is because it was more 'renouncing' than 'refusing' and they were ashamed of their past. In the south, I think so, yes, there are at least stories of gods reshaping the territory of the Empire to create home cities for their favored people - Ulric with the mountain of Middenheim, Taal with the Taalbaston crater where Talabheim sits. The whole planet, none I've ever heard, you might have to ask the dragons."

"You did say there were dragons didn't you. I don't think what you said before mentioned that they were the best ones to ask about history. Would I be right to guess that it's not often safe to approach them?"

"Almost never, but they're the ones that aren't mad and older than the elves. There's one who's a mercenary, and his partner's memoirs say he intends to outlive this world. I thought it was figurative, but now that I think about it..."

"In the fullness of time stars die. Planets don't tend to but the life on them probably wouldn't outlive the end of the star they're orbiting. Stars take a really long time to die though so they're probably referring to something else if they're being literal."

"Asur work with them, sometimes and call them 'sun dragons', 'moon dragons', and 'star dragons', in ascending order by how scared you ought to be to hear them approaching. They're supposed to be very, very old, and they say moon dragons can fly to Staryaluna, and do, to prove their adulthood. If 'star dragon' is equally literal..."

"Maybe that's possible, but if the stars here are as far away as they are in our world that would require being able to go very fast or else being able to fly for a very long time. The sun was five hundred times further away than the moon on my world. The closest star was two hundred and forty thousand times further than the distance to the sun."