"Oh, nice. I apologize for implying earlier that you might be bereft of the ability to make friends." It's fascinating how the culture of mercenaries is almost but not quite familiar. It's probably the magic.  

Wobbly so-so hand gesture. "I make friends like anything. But, ah... some people, it has the opposite effect. Knives, axes, so on."

Snort. "Well, yeah. Can't win 'em all. Had a guy actually storm out of a bar on me once because he was so offended by the very concept of friendship, some people are just," vague gesture, "impossible." 

"En't that the truth," Tomi agrees.

The Trade of Blades has a sign above the door. The sign has two actual swords bolted to it, with a stein dangling between them. Tomi makes a completely impossible vertical leap to slap the stein on his way in, ringing it like a bell. A few of the patrons inside clap.

Hob looks.... up. 

He blinks. He looks back down at his new friend, who continues to be like three feet tall. 

...Okay.

"Local tradition?" he says interestedly, instead of asking how the entire fuck, since the answer to the latter is presumably 'magic' and if he gets bogged down asking questions about how magic works again, without Jojo here to remind him he's on something resembling a timetable, he'll never get anything else done. 

"Eh, more just a me thing. Tallfolk teenagers like slappin' doorframes, and I thought it looked like fun when I was a shortarse teenager, and I eventually picked up a Ring of Jumping for unrelated reasons and thought hang on a tic... and it is fun."

"A ring... of... jumping," he repeats, helplessly, because Tomi just said that like it was a normal thing to say and a what. You what. "Uh, understandable? ... how about that drink, before I learn yet more bizarre facts about how physics works here." 

"Sure, sure."

They approach the bar. Tomi leaps a more reasonable distance and lands on a barstool. "Oi, Garve! Humie needs a shot of Potted Priest and a chaser, and get me a Calim Bastard!"

     "Show me the money first, y'little shite," rumbles the large grey woman behind the bar.

"You have no charity in your heart," Tomi complains, fishing out his coinpurse and offering up a few gold dragons.

     She squints at them, bites one gently, and dips it in a bowl of something she keeps under the counter before nodding grimly. "Potted Priest, chaser, Calim Bastard." She produces, first, a clay jar sealed with beeswax; second, a mug of dark ale; and, third, a hollowed-out chunk of succulent which she fills with hot cream and eye-watering liquor before shaking some warming spices on top. Then she lays them out, opening the beeswax with a beltknife.

"Thankee ma'am," Tomi chirps.

New thing to try!! 

Tastes like warmth and home and--

?????? less ???? bleeding ??????

Bewildered glance from healed leg to glass. "Is it supposed to do that?"

Tomi squints over his cactusmug. "S'why I got you one, yeah? Healing potion and whiskey and a lot of honey, that's what goes in a Potted Priest."

Healing potion. Not just an invisible medicinal antibiotic or a gentle painkilling herbal tea but an actual honest to god fast-acting healing potion. Just casually served at a bar, for a friend you just met to buy for you with a mug of perfectly normal-smelling ale. 

"... don't have that at home," he settles on, still staring at the unbroken skin that was a lethal injury ten minutes ago. Or wait. That should have been a lethal injury and unrelatedly (??) wasn't. Do they just have this stuff in the air. 

"Ech. So if you're strong enough to get up when somebody spills half your guts but you don't have a healer handy, you... what, just lie in bed for months wishin' they got you in the neck?" Tomi shivers.

"Well I've never wished anything of the sort but I guess in general yes. We have whole institutions dedicated to the process of spending six months recovering from breaking your ankle or whatever." 

Squint.

"...no, that don't make sense. If you've got institutions for it, they'd have healers in 'em. Where the Hells're you from?"

"'Course they've got healers." This is not the usual nomenclature but it's not like it's unclear. "Every one of 'em'd probably do murder for a gallon of this," he's very cheerfully still drinking it between breaths, "except for how I think they specifically swear an oath of not doing that. Uh, my limited understanding is that somebody is going to have to do a research project to send me home, is how far away I'm from?" 

"When I say healer I mean somebody who brews a gallon of that on her weekends, not some two-copper herbalist. D'you actually know what magic is? 'Cause I've known enough wizards to know I don't know much, but I've known enough normal people to know you know less'n they do."

"Well the lady in the Cloaktower seemed to think I knew things even she didn't, I think she'd've tried to pin me to a corkboard like an interesting bug if she thought Aribeth would let her, but like, also, no? In my dialect magic just means - you don't know how it does that. Used to mean more things but we keep getting better at understanding how things do stuff." Probably whoever the current Constantine is would have lethal opinions on the inadequacy of this definition but he is not qualified to produce a better one. 

Tomi finishes his drink.

"I'm not qualified for this shite," he says wonderingly.

"I am," says a gentleman approximately his height holding a tall glass of iced water, who appears to have levitated his barstool into closer proximity. "My apologies; I overheard some of your conversation, which inspired me to deliberately eavesdrop on the rest."

"...who're you?"

"My name is Boddynock Glinckle," the tiny knobbly man reports. "An arcane practitioner hailing from the isle of Lantan -"

"En't they the ones with the wacky clockwork?" Tomi interrupts. "Thought they didn't like magic."