Boddynock takes another sip of his water.

"Mister Gadling, I propose a thought experiment. Imagine that you are speaking with someone you have met in a bar. You know little of their home country, except that it is different than your own. You come to the topic of the dangers of... I cannot guarantee any specific substance is shared between our worlds. Let us say that there is a very potent acid, which is also terrifically flammable and releases toxic gas, called Floond. You say yes, I've never seen any myself, and I am certain I should not want to. And they say oh, lucky man; I hate to wear the special raincoats for Floondstorms."

He sets the glass down with undue force. "You have phlogiston in the air?!"

"... where else would it go? People've been burning things for millennia. I think if people couldn't breathe it in in small quantities then our... bones... would be wrong... somehow... I'm neither an archaeologist nor a biologist but that's how it gets in the ground, bones decaying. Otherwise the ratio in the atmosphere would just increase until it hit saturation and fire would stop working. Does the magic of your planet just directly leech it out of the air? The burning corpse piles aren't in sealed boxes." 

At our bones would be wrong somehow Boddynock imperfectly suppresses a twitch away from Hob as if his skeleton might explode at any moment.

By the end of the explanation, his equanimity returns. "Praises be to Garl, Mystra, Tymora, Oghma... and to whomever else it may concern. We are speaking of different substances, which besides their name share only the trait of driving men mad and killing them in sufficient concentration. The substance of the ocean between worlds is highly flammable, I am told, but it is not a logical prerequisite to fire."

"I suppose this is not the first time I've noticed vocabulary that seems to have drifted in meaning between your dialect and mine, yes, the blacksmith at the Shining Knight made such a face at me this morning when I said on my home planet his species is fictional, but..." puzzled fingertapping, thoughtful beer sip, sudden recollection that his drink is a magical healing potion which he was just thinking before he got comprehensively nerdsniped was a lot less magical healing potion than he really should have needed.

Holy shit does he have superman powers because on Earth humans are spending all their heretofore undetected regeneration ability on inhaling phlogiston??? 

"...it might be that the substance beyond your crystal sphere is a different thing but you've still got to have it, surely? Where's the fire come from? If you don't have a combustion driver substance wouldn't that suggest chemical reactions just don't... require reactants... but things rust here, the armory guy mentioned it...." 

"I have very nearly no idea," Boddynock says. "Natural philosophy is not my area of expertise."

"Oh. Fair enough. I guess I will interrogate a chemist if I find one and it will be a fair trade for the number of questions Eltoora was obviously dying to ask me. What is your area of expertise?" 

"Unnatural philosophy – that is to say, magic, and the nature of the planes. Also, due to circumstances, some amount of archaeobotany."

"Archaeobotany? ... ancient... buried... plants?" 

"Not necessarily buried, but yes. Plants which have died out from the world at large can sometimes be restored, if adequately preserved samples are found. My father is something of a specialist in the field, and I have encountered a handful of such samples in my travels to send back to him; knowing what to look for entails a certain amount of expertise. Let me know, by the way, if you ever find one or more iridescent gemstones shaped like sunflower seeds. One of those would be the single item of greatest personal value which you could ever give me, and while I could not reward you proportionately, I would reward you."

"What an astoundingly valid quest," says the man who has lived long enough to desperately miss a lot of plants that used to be staples of his diet and no longer exist. "I will absolutely keep an eye out." 

"You needn't be too attentive. All evidence indicates the Prism Blossom was mythical in the first place... but I would not like Father to lose his chance to see it, just because of that."

Boddynock takes out an honest-to-Huyghens 17th-century pocketwatch out of his robe and examines it. "I must wake early, and it is time for me to retire to my rooms," he says, hopping off the stool and landing with a faint flumph on a cushion of air. "I thank you for a fascinating evening, and look forward to meeting you again."

"Cheers." 

He probably should also sleep. First he should thank Tomi for the brawl and the bar in that order, though, he feels much more emotionally settled than he did four hours ago. Where has the other tiny alien gotten to. 

He's chatting with yet another kind of very short person! Well, chatting might be less the word. Trying desperately to escape a social situation involving such a person.

The new type of person is less short than the two previous – somewhere in the 4-foot range – and much stronger-built. He's also visibly the person in the room having the least fun. He wears a robe and a prominent amulet, plausibly religious, featuring a skull larger than a rat's but smaller than a human's.

"Ah, Tomi, there you are, wanted to catch you before you left and thank you for introducing me to this excellent tavern." Hm, simply provide an excuse to both leave or rescue Tomi by instead distracting his interlocutor? ... second thing means meeting a potentially interesting new person, we're doing that one. "Hello, pleasure to meet you, Robert Gadling, historian." Handshake? This seems like a serious handshakes before questions type of guy rather than the offhandedly remember to introduce yourself several questions deep type of guy. 

Tomi stands on the stool and claps him on the back. "Yes, yes, absolutely, I was just leaving – Grimgnaw, this's my dear bosom companion Hob, you'll get on like a house afire, I've really got to go launder my cat, Hob I'll see ya in three days with the cash –"

He says most of this while walking backward at a dangerous clip.

Grimgnaw watches him go, then turns to Hob. Looks down at the proffered handshake.

"Your bosom companion attempted to pick my pocket," he says neutrally. "But his company was entertaining, and killing him would have been disappointingly easy, and so I allowed him to live. How entertaining are you?"

Snort. "Yeah, that's approximately why he owes me money. He is oddly charming, isn't he? Met him a couple hours ago and fell hook line and sinker for his show of being a small human child. ...How entertaining am I?" 

Hob has now had like four drinks and this guy is wearing a skull pendant. 

"Well now that depends. I've got a great speech, if I do say so myself, on the subject of death, and I imagine whether you love it or hate it, if that there lovely piece of jewelry has a religion attached you at least won't find it boring." 

The man... smiles.

"You are the most entertaining person in this room. Tell me your speech. I will not interrupt you."

He sits down, the better to gesture effusively without spilling his drink, and grins. "Right! So. Death's a funny thing. I used to think it was a big, sudden thing, like a huge owl that would swoop down out of the night and carry you off. I don't anymore. I think it's a slow thing. Like a thief who comes to your house day after day, taking a little thing here and a little thing there, and one day you walk round your house and there's nothing there to keep you, nothing to make you want to stay. And then you lie down and shut up for ever. Lots of little deaths until the last big one.

"Everyone's died. Everyone I've loved. But I don't think anybody has to die. The only reason people die is everyone does it. You all just go along with it. Somebody once told me you don't really die until everyone that knew you is dead, too,(*) and that's very beautiful and everything! I personally get a lot of value out of the observance of remembering the people I have lost to keep them alive in my heart, I'm looking forward to the festival you apparently have here about that exact thing, but the thing is, if you rely on that for yourself, and you sit down and stop, well, eventually the world will run out of people who knew you and then you're too dead to meet more, aren't you. I don't care to try it myself. 

"Nobody ever listens to me about this! Everyone says, Hob, that's insane, you can't just decide not to die, you can only be really good at not dying for a finite amount of time and eventually it'll catch up to you, but what kind of reason is that not to try? If you never try not to die you'll never know if it would work." 

(*) Editorial note: Everything from 'death's a funny thing' up to here is directly quoted from the source material, though in the original it does not all appear together in this order. 

Grimgnaw's smile only grows as Hob speaks. By the end he's grinning as wide as his talisman.

He leans in. "You," he pronounces, savoring each word, "are the most vile heretic I have ever had the pleasure to meet. The Silent Lord has not taken you yet because He knows that I am the only one who could savor the reward of your death."

"Oh, so it's one of those skull pendant religions." Is it terrible that he is a little pleased to get to increment upward the number of religions he is a vile heretic in? Probably. Ah well. "Tell you what, it'd be terribly rude to this lovely establishment to leave a corpse on the floor in the middle of the bar while they're still open for regular business, so how's about if you really wanna fight we get a room and whichever of us lives pays the tab tomorrow morning." 

Grimgnaw has a deeply dissonant laugh: deep and hearty, like an uncle who's had a boilermaker too many. "Were I not bound to kill you, we might be fast friends."

He stands, graceful as a dancer despite his frame. "Garvukh? We will need a room for the night."

     The barkeep tosses him a key. "I heard. One bed."

"We need none."

     "I don't got rooms without beds."

Wouldn't they just. Hob finishes his drink, nods appreciatively at the bartender, and stands to follow. "Does your species not sleep?" 

"They do. Indeed, I do. But sleeping on cushions ill-suits me. I've broken legs that suited me better."