"Maybe we'll find out what the difference is, if the legends are true."

"Maybe."

He goes to check on how the other two expedition members are doing. They appear to have charged up the chopper artifact and are chopping various things with it and measuring how much force it exerts.

"They must have used magic for a lot of things if they used it for this thing."

"Yes, what little we know of them implies they had a lot more access to mana than we do. And they seem to have been able to use it more efficiently as well; we can make more cuts with this than we could do directly with the same amount of mana."

"Maybe magic things are just more efficient than magic people?"

"Could be!" They take the blade out of its holder and watch the holder chop uselessly up and down without it.

"Do you know why everyone here died?"

"No. All we know is it happened all at once. Eight hundred years ago, there was a Cataclysm that killed nearly everyone on this continent and most of the people on the other one. Civilization collapsed, and sapients almost went extinct before they could build it back up again. Finding out what caused it is one of the goals of our expedition."

"Sapients?"

Vocabulary time! "Elves, humans, and dwarves. The three kinds of people, as opposed to animals or plants." 

"I don't think we have kinds in the other alucines where there are flowers."

"You look like a human to me."

"As the merchantman said to the barmaid."

"That was a reach even for you, Derron."

"I don't get it."

"Derron decided to deliberately misinterpret what I said as a sexual remark, because he thinks that's amusing. This time he was mistaken."

"That is the most academic description of 'as the merchantman said to the barmaid' I've ever heard, I love it."

"Okay but why a merchantman and a barmaid?"

"You know, I'm not sure. Possibly because where there are barmaids and merchants together the merchants are probably drunk and therefore more likely to make sexual remarks." (He's trying to remember if he explained the word "drunk" yet. He probably did, he gets drunk often enough.)

Apparently not. "Drunk?"

"Ooh, you're about to get an explanation from a world-class expert!"

Snrk. "There's a process you can do to some plants, where if you drink the result it makes you temporarily happy, and friendly, and more willing to say or do stuff you might otherwise choose not to, and also have problems walking straight. And if you drink too much of it you fall asleep and wake up with a sore head."

"Oh, that.

Anyway we don't have kinds of people, just - humans if I am a human."

"Huh. Pinehedge is about half humans and a quarter each elves and dwarves. No dwarves on this expedition, but there are some working in the Archives--that's the organization that sent us here."