“Here’s another one. People keep telling me to ‘just ask Ceridwen’ so I’ll follow their advice.”
She nodded expectantly.
“Let me start with guns. No one can explain to me why gunpowder doesn’t work. And is it only gunpowder, or also the newer smokeless powders?”
“You have a gun, then?”
For the second time that day, George reached under his coat and pulled out his revolver. He unloaded it and handed her the empty weapon.
She held it in both hands and examined it from all directions. “The last time I saw one of these it looked very different. It was in one piece, made partly of wood, and had an ignition mechanism that used a piece of flint.”
“That’s, um, a bit out of date. Flintlocks went out of fashion almost two hundred years ago.”
He quickly outlined for her the development of perc
