The atmosphere in the office calmed down as the professor embraced his role. He had had some administrative work to do, but he postponed that. It may as well have not existed, as far as he cared. The professor heaved a deep breath before beginning his first lecture with the Emperor of Water.
"Let me begin with the origin of String Theory," the man began. "Two decades ago, shortly after the Unfolding and after we made knowledge exchanges with the elves, I set out to investigate hadrons. Hadrons are any particles made up of quarks held together by the strong nuclear force. At the time, these were relatively new concepts to us. Most of our sciences before that were esoteric, and while we had a conceptualization of the atom and the nucleus and its components, we hadn't discovered the existence of quarks and force-carrying particles such as the gluons."
