"Yes, yes. No promises." Affectionate shoulder bump. 

Aaand now it is indeed time to experience the world's almightiest hangover. Where is he and how much does everything suck? 

...less than he could reasonably expect?

Hob's hands are folded across his chest. His head is on a pillow, though he's on the floor. There's a man with pointy ears standing over him, looking concerned, and looking as if concern might be the only face he knows how to make.

Nailed it. Comfiest corpse ever. 

Ow, though. 

"...good ... morning?" he says to the ??elf??, scrambling to sitting-upright despite the way this makes his spinal column complain loudly, and patting himself down anxiously. Does he have his clothes, his armor, his jewelry, his book? 

The elf's brow furrows further. He taps Hob on the forehead, and his spine suddenly feels completely fine.

"Good morning. I'm sorry, I'd cured the hangover but I didn't realize you were injured; was that enough healing?"

His possessions are present and accounted for.

Okay so technically this is all much better news than he could possibly reasonably have expected on every possible count but what, what, and furthermore WHAT, the fuck? 

He blinks, rolls his head around experimentally, stretches each of his limbs in turn, processes the fact that he's... still in the inn room, actually. Where Grimgnaw apparently just. Left him? Neatly arranged on a pillow? Without even taking his stuff? 

This is incredible death cultist behavior. He is terribly charmed. 

"I believe I'm no longer injured, thank you. ... sorry, uh, I don't mean to impugn your incredible kindness by immediately asking a bunch of pointed questions but who are you and why are you here and how did you find me." 

"I'm Fenthick Moss, arcane theurgist of Tyr's temple. Your friend Jojo told me where you intended to stay the night. It's a few hours after sunrise, and he was very anxious to find you, but if he ran into trouble we'd be down two agents rather than one, and I'm powerful enough to defeat or escape most plausible threats."

He sniffs the air in dismay. "...that is more blood than I had realized. Would you mind if I clean up a bit? It shouldn't take long."

"Oh! Well any other friend of Jojo's is also a friend of mine, he's a good kid. ...maybe don't tell him I called him a 'kid', I know young men around that age get understandably prickly about that. In that case I unreservedly thank you for coming to find me. I would have been able to walk back to your temple under my own power in an hour or two probably but it would have hurt the whole time. If you have some convenient magical way to clean up this mess please be my guest, I think the fellow who stabbed me paid the tab but I'm sure the innkeep would still rather not have to." 

He flicks his fingers, and a fine red mist rises from the pillow and the stain on the floor beneath. Within a few seconds, the already faint smell of blood is gone.

"Elven senses are a mixed blessing," he says ruefully. "And I don't know Jojo personally, but my fiancée is very fond of him. Aribeth actually wanted to come herself, but she's very much needed elsewhere. Besides, she's already met you, and I wanted to get my own impression. Speaking of which:"

He removes a box from his pocket and tosses it over. Inside is a pair of smoked lenses.

"Lenses of arcane sight. Per your requisition."

And can you see my fundamental awfulness as a person like I'm wearing a nametag, Hob doesn't say. "I wouldn't know, I've never met anyone of the species before. Just a stronger sense of smell or can elves also, like, see past the horizon as though the planet were flat?" 

He takes the lenses very carefully and with great fascination. 

"How fragile are these, on a scale from 'keep them in their box and only ever put them on for ten seconds to look around when you're really sure you're not about to be attacked' to 'wear them in combat, they'll protect your eyes'? I understand they're very expensive." 

"Enchanted glass is about as sturdy as steel. They are designed to be worn through combat without impediment, but they're not more than a slight protective edge."

He flicks his fingers at Hob and says a brief incantation. "That should protect you from divination, by the way. For the next twelve hours, no one will be able to magically determine anything about you without a good deal of effort. Important for tracking down a hostile sorceress, and generally helpful for one's peace of mind. ...and, no, elves have sharp senses in general but we can't see through the horizon. It isn't magic, we're just sensitive."

That's a lot of strategically relevant facts. Hob sort of stares into your distance for a couple seconds, processing them. 

First off it's probably not elves particularly that can see him being Evil, then, if they claim their senses aren't magical, though he supposes Fenthick could also just be lying. He does not want to think Fenthick is lying, he seems like a nice guy, but the problem is this leaves him with only increasingly stupider theories about the power somehow being located in the organization in a way that encompasses Aribeth and the quartermaster but not Fenthick or Jojo. 

Second off holy shit, magic divination protection. Hob has spent so many centuries being so paranoid about that. He visibly relaxes some tension he wasn't even consciously aware of holding. 

Third off, enchanted glass is as strong as steel?? He understands how this is not generally understood to replace a helmet but it sure will comprehensively outperform not wearing a helmet. He puts them on.

What does arcane sight look like? 

Well, this guy is really fucking shiny now! He's got several colorflavors of shiny on his clothes and accessories: his headband is a bright, squishy orange, his mantle sharp silver, the pendant around his neck a brittle green. On his left hand is an ultramarine road flare, centered on his unobtrusive silver engagement ring.

Fascinating!! 

"Oh wow," he breathes, delighted. "Is there an instructional manual on how to interpret this sensory input or is it idiosyncratic?" 

"The colors are almost always consistent across members of the same species. Blue for abjuration, protective spells and anti-magic; yellow for conjuration, summoning and teleportation and some oddball applications thereof; grey for divination; pink for enchantments that affect the mind; red for evocation, manipulation of most kinds of energy; purple for illusions; green for necromancy, the direct manipulation of negative or positive energy; and orange for transmutation, which... does an enormous number of frequently unconnected things, because it's less of a thematic category and more of a universal principle."

Intrigued nodding. "A universal princ - oh, is that how the phlogistonless fire works? You just have a local fundamental force that turns stuff into other stuff, so you don't need an energetic reactant? Wild. Thanks, I'll try to keep that in mind." He's up now and, if Fenthick seems amenable, inclined to start walking back downstairs and then templeward. "The hostile sorceress in question is likely to be distinguishable by trying to hide, right, so - purple for illusions? Is there any other common use of that?" 

"Dozens," Fenthick says absently. "The most common by far is vanity. It's cheaper and easier to make a mole invisible with a daily potion-cream than to take it off for good. But you should be able to tell the difference between that and someone hiding that they're covered in scales. A full disguise spell will make the caster look purple or orange all over, a cream will be very isolated."

Fenthick is very amenable to leaving. They pass Garvukh on her way upstairs while they're heading down. (Hob may notice a distinctly purple tinge to her face.) She squints intently at Hob.

     "Did he resurrect you?"

"Not at all," Fenthick says, somewhat surprised. "His injuries were very minor."

     Garvukh's jaw drops. "Y'really did fuck the mad dwarf!" she half-shouts, then claps her hands over her lips as her face flushes blue with embarrassment.

A normal person would presumably strenuously deny this. 

But, see, it's a very convenient believable explanation for the observed events that isn't the truth, which he has spent six hundred years paranoidly trying very hard to avoid anyone ever being sure of. It's very easy, almost instinctive, to instead play along. 

"No comment," he says, with an extremely commentlike smirk.

Look of extreme concern. "...with that amount of blood?"

     "That's the only part of it I'd've believed last morning," the innkeeper says distantly. "How much bleach do I need?"

"I cleaned it," Fenthick says reassuringly.

     "Y'just earned yerself a tankard, elfboy."

"I'll be sure to come back some time I'm not on government business, madame."

     "Righto. On with the business, thanks for stoppin' by and thanks for not dyin' on my floors."

Not cracking up, not cracking up... 

Polite nod for the innkeep. Once they're out of her earshot Hob waits a couple beats to see if Fenthick now wants to ask him additional questions about that before he proceeds back to the Serious Government Business part of the agenda. 

"I apologize for complicating your story," Fenthick notes. "I work better when I know what to conceal."

"Um. So yesterday about four or five drinks into the evening I met this charming death cultist, name of Grimgnaw. We agreed to go hash out our catastrophically irreconcilable ideological differences upstairs instead of on the main bar floor and I immediately lost embarrassingly badly because it seemed to me like a gentlemanly dueling situation and apparently he felt it was a backstab situation." He rubs the back of his neck ruefully. "There was no euphemistic stabbing, but it struck me as soon as the innkeep said it that it would be safer to let people think so than to leave the only available explanation being that I'm alarmingly difficult to kill. Especially since he seems to have left me decidedly unlooted and that's probably going to make it harder to deny." 

Nod. "Alarmingly difficult to kill is a good trait, and an even better one to keep hidden from anyone you expect to make an attempt on your life. I'm not... implying anything, it would just be disingenuous to pretend I hadn't noticed."