NPC: Frawlin

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Due to multiple options when speaking, text below may not be in comprehensive order.

*You see a filthy-looking man standing and peering into the poolEL-DB.com.* Will you just look at that! That's so gross! It's disgusting!

Who are you?

Frawlin. My name is Frawlin.

What's disgusting?

That water! It's unfit to consume! Look at all that garbage in there! If someone thought they could make a huge pot of soup in this, they failed miserably. Nobody flavors their veggie soup with wooden crates, a dinghy, a bale of hay, a stick (although they may have been using that to stir), and a skull! And look there, it appears they threw in the recipe book too!

A skull? Gross!

You can say that again. And it appears to be quite small! *His face suddenly turns quite pale.* Oh my GOD! Was someone trying to make Gnome Soup? I think I'm going to be sick... Now the bottles of wine and ale all make sense even though the proportions are way off. I wonder who it was...

Who was making the soup?

No! The Gnome! I wonder if I knew him or her. What a tragic loss of a wonderful person and all the knowledge that person had is now lost forever.

What knowledge?

Exactly my point. See? It's already lost. Fortunately, gnomes are prolific documenters of their cogitative processes. Even though I'm human, I've personally been doing so since I was 3. It wasn't until I was 7 that I changed fundamental volume calculations with a single number. That certainly ruffled some feathers let me tell you.

What?

I'm glad you asked. You see I've always been fascinated with numbers. Even as an infant I knew the difference between even and odd. Unfortunately it took my parents a while to figure out that I would refuse to eat an odd number of anything they put on my plate. I like things even. It didn't matter if it was my favorite thing to eat, I had to have an even quantity of it. Later, when I was verbally adept,

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I would just look at what they placed there and say, 'That's odd.' When I was 2 I discovered Algebra. By the time I was 3 I'd mastered Trigonometry, Calculus, and Differential Equations. Skipping ahead, tradiEL-DB.comtional avenues of knowledge and skill acquisition were problematic for my parents. Instructors are inexplicably incensed when their misconceived conceptualizations about quantifiable abstracts are proven to

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be incorrect by a child. Skipping ahead again to the moment when I fundamentally changed volume calculations. I was attending a lecture that had all the professors at the Engineering School where I was working my way through the library and using their construction labs for my own experimentation. The lecturer was at one time a respected, noteworthy engineer. During the course of what was planned to be a

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3-day lecture he tried to tell the audience that he had determined the volume of the ocean and proceeded to write out his formula on a blackboard behind the lectern. It was pure hokum. Just as he was about to reveal the number, I spoke up and told him and everyone else the correct number.

Then what happened?

He made the classic mistake of challenging my assertion. I walked up to the blackboard and lectured him on the correct way to execute the now outdated formula he so publicly mangled. Then I told him that calculating the volume of water contained in the ocean was child's play.

Child's play?

It was a way my parents occupied my attention. It lasted about a week because by then I had switched to my own formula and was doing the calculations in my head.

So you're a genius?

Are you operating under the misconception that arbitrary numbers assigned to cognitive skills obtained through faulty analyses determines self-worth? Let's just leave labels out of this, ok?

Ok. So what do you do?

My current task involves applying my volumes formula against various other kinds of things.

What things?

Societal EL-DB.comdetritus.

Is it working?

Of course it is.

What's that in Common?

Garbage. I'm calculating the volume of space garbage will consume if current levels produced in Sedicolis is maintained indefinitely. I report directly to the Mayor, but when I try to explain the details so that he appreciates the work I do, his eyes tend to glaze over. What complicates matters is the fact that different items decay at different rates. Once I solved that problem, the rest was easy. He just

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keeps telling me to clean it up, but I've been through my calculations a dozen times and it's as clean as it's going to get. Because of this, people have began to call me a garbage man in these parts. Every time I hear that blasphemous term, I correct them and tell them my occupation is not that of a low-life garbage man, but of the highly-regarded sanitation engineer.

Garbage is useless.

I beg to differ. Humanoid waste found in outhouses is not without its uses. Ashes from burned branches are also not useless. Put them together and what have you got?

Uhm... Saltpeter?

Precisely, as long as you've got a bucket with you! Hardly useless, wouldn't you agree? That's what LaForge teaches us: how to look at things differently.

Who is LaForge?

LaForge is the god of Engineering, the god I serve, the god who frowns on discarded materials that can become useful if only you open yourself to looking at things differently. If you're interested in learning more about LaForge, I suggest you travel to far off Arius and seek out his priest - just be prepared to be challenged before you're able to see him. *The odd man seemed to stress the word 'see' a bit.*

Goodbye

Although you use very few words, I find yEL-DB.comour company acceptable. Travel safely....