Looks like a shipment of weapons! There's a whole array of swords in here, no two alike, and even a few staffs and daggers. 

"Oooo. These might have been going to Oaklore Keep, for the knights! Do you think the sneevils would mind if we took them? They don't seem to be using them..." 

"… Well, they might mind if they knew. But if this was for Oaklore Keep anyway, then taking it there would be un-stealing and the right thing to do. We should probably leave the box, though."

Twilly nods seriously. "Yeah, I think the sneevils would notice a missing box. But it's okay, you can just put everything in your backpack!" 

It's so great to never have to think about encumbrance.

Elan slings the backpack that was definitely there the whole time off his shoulder and gets to work packing. Sword, sword, sword… Elan wonders if the differences mean they were custom ordered. If so, it'll be nice to get them to the people who asked for them!

Once the last dagger is safely tucked away, Elan replaces the lid and puts his backpack back on his back. It feels suitably weightier in a satisfying, not strenuous, way.

Time to check the other boxes?

Sure, they can check the other boxes that are lying around outside the entrance. Sadly, most of them seem to be empty.

Twilly hoists himself up on his paws to look inside one of the boxes.

"Oooo, Twillies sees someth—oop!"

He tumbles head-over-heels into the box, but pops up barely a second later. "I'm okay! And look, I found a ring!" He holds it up for Elan's inspection. It's a plain loop of brass, and doesn't look especially valuable as rings go. 

Elan leans forward to look.

"I wonder if it's a magic ring!"

He probably shouldn't put it on to check, because sometimes magic items are actually cursed items.

Twilly nods. "It feels a little bit magic to me! I's not sure what kind, though, it isn't any of the really obvious ones." He offers it out for Elan to take. 

Elan turns it over in his hand. He can definitely tell what Twilly means about it feeling magic in a nonobvious way, although maybe his brain is playing tricks on him.

Probably the smart thing to do would be to wait until they can ask a wizard before doing anything.

Elan tries it on.

Nothing immediately obvious happens! He doesn't feel particularly different. If he tries the next obvious test, which is "taking it back off again", it works fine. 

"Well, it isn't cursed in the specific way that means I can't take it off!"

Elan takes some string out of his pocket and makes it into a little necklace.

"Oh, do you want help out of the box?"

"Hmm..." Twilly pushes on the side of the box. Since it's empty, it topples over onto its side without too much effort, letting him escape. 

"Nope, all good! Let's go!" 

Let's go!!

Elan thinks of things to talk about on the way back to the keep. Mostly he's asked Twilly questions about this new world…

"Do you wanna hear about my friends?"

Twilly's ears are very big and very expressive, so it's extremely visible when he's excited about something, because they literally perk up. 

"I'd love to! Are they heroes like you?" 

"Yeah! Roy is the most heroic one. He's the party leader, and he's super smart. I bet he could come up with really good plans if he was here. He's also really brave—one time he jumped on the back of a zombie dragon to fight an evil lich! The lich killed him, though, and it took like five months to bring him back to life."

Twilly makes appropriate awed noises as Elan talks. "Woooow, bringing dead people all the way back to life is super duper powerful legendary magic!" 

"Back where I live it's more common, but it's pretty expensive! It uses up a diamond that's like this big."

He gestures to indicate the size of the diamond.

"Most of the time was because everyone in the party who could do magic—that's Durkon our cleric, Vaarsuvius our wizard, and me—got split up from Haley and Belkar, who had Roy's body. And there was a spell over the place they were stuck in that meant that our communication spells couldn't reach them. Eventually they were able to find a cleric who could send to us, and once we knew where they were we used Wind Walk to get there. Aw, man, that was so fun."

"Whoa! What's a cleric?" 

On the one hand, Elan probably should have been able to guess that the world where resurrection magic was epic-level wouldn't have clerics in the same way as he's used to. On the other, it's deeply weird to be confronted with this fact!

"Um… a cleric is a caster that gets their magic from the gods. Do you have gods here? Maybe if you don't have clerics it's because you don't have gods. Anyway, they're kind of like wizards because they need to prepare spells every morning, except they cast from wisdom instead of intelligence and their spell list is mostly stuff like healing and spells that make you stronger or protection or stuff like that. Oh, except there's domains, which are… uh, all of our gods are about something, and there are themed spells that go with that? Like there's domains for Good and Evil and Chaos and Law, and also the four elements, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember."

"Oh, yeah, we have those! We call them the Avatars. There's one for each of the...eight main elements. Does your world only have four of those?" 

"Yeah, we've got air, water, fire, and earth. There's this guy who can summon weird elementals that have square signs with letters and numbers on them? But Vaarsuvius said that those are distasteful and obnoxious, and the numbers go up way higher than four, so maybe they're a different thing with the same name?"

"Hmm, Twillies never heard of those! We have Air, Water, Fire, Earth, aaaaand...Ice, Energy, Light, and Darkness. And there's other ones too, that are sorta elements but don't have Avatars! We have Good and Evil, like you said earlier, but I's never heard of...what were the other two?" 

"Chaos and Law! Chaos is, um… well, I'm Chaotic Good and Roy is Lawful Good. So that means that he cares a lot about things being done the way they're supposed to, and not breaking rules, and… I dunno, do you have paladins here? They're super Lawful Good. Except when they go crazy and lose their powers. And you can be Lawful but not good, like my evil twin is Lawful Evil. But Chaos is doing what feels right and being open to lots of possibilities, even if someone told you not to or if you said you were going to do something different before, which kinda sounds bad but it's more about how maybe when you said you were going to do one thing you didn't know something important that would change everything, or about how the person who made the rules might want something that's wrong."

Pause for breath.

"Wow, explaining alignment to people from different worlds is hard! I almost forgot to mention that you can be in between Good and Evil or Law and Chaos or both, but there aren't planes of Neutrality. I think."

He shakes his head.

"It probably isn't super important anyway. Your other four elements sound cool! What makes Ice different from Water? Is it, like, the opposite of Energy?"

"Nope, it's the opposite of Fire! And then Energy and Water are opposites, I think. Ice is...oh, wow, explaining things to people from other worlds is hard. Ice is...ice? Does your world have—wait, wait, you knew it was related to water! So you must have ice!" 

"Oh, that makes sense! Yeah, but maybe our ice is less magic or something than your ice. Our ice is really cold water? Oh, and I think snow is a kind of ice. And there's ice cream! Which you don't actually make by mixing ice and cream. I can't even remember the last time I had ice cream…"

Hopefully they have ice cream here.

"Is energy just… the thing that makes things go? I think we have planes of positive and negative energy but I don't think we have a plane of just energy. Oh, positive energy is the thing that heals alive people and hurts undead, and negative energy is the opposite. Do you have undead?"