Travel Diary of the Golden Islands Correspondent, April 16th 1714

Thus, I was allowed to sit in on the 50-th year study classes regarding the art of military technology and warfare. The reader may well wonder why me, an outsider who had barely proven himself to the Golden Empire, was allowed access to this sensitive military information. But the fact is, any military technology and information becomes obsolete after six months even in the most heated and secretive warfare. As I had more or less no contact whatsoever with the outside world, it would be at least 20 years before the information had a chance to filter out of their society and into the world at large, after which it would have already been surpassed even by the 'lesser races'. Furthermore, my handlers informed me, they had confidence that the lesser races would do a poorer job than the Golden Elves even with the information. With all I have seen, I can hardly disagree.

The Golden Elves believe that it's important for a fully mature Elf to do everything himself; it is not an unfamiliar concept to humans. But here in the Isles, they take things to the logical extreme, as with everything. As an example, for two years (!) we are studying, in the 5-decade group, the electro-magical pulse disruptor, also known as an EMP grenade. I will transcribe an excerpt from the introduction of the textbook (it amuses me to note here that the 5-decade old students are eager to foist them off on me, as their bodies can barely withstand the weight), which one of the worldly wise 9th decade students described fondly as 'the EMP lexicon.'

"So we can see that the Q5 research team, though they were better-equipped to perform the task of designing the runes to withstand the EA Gatebreaker model, though they utterly deserved success in every aspect of the process, failed because they made the fundamental error of assuming that the technology was the key component which the enemy would be targeting, when in fact the enemy always targets the weakest component of the defense, which in this case constituted not the individual components of the design but how the components all worked together..."

Thus do the Elves transform a class on pulling a pin and throwing a brick into a crash course on the management of military research scientists. And all this to a group of students but 5 decades old! One of whom still has difficulties going to the bathroom on his own. This is excused as perfectly normal, and explained as a sign of 'typical late neuro-muscular development' in the child. It is true that he speaks with the same eloquence and fluidity as the rest of them.