Welp. Now imagining famous magician Zatanna Zatara in fluffy bunny slippers and PJs using her phenomenal cosmic power for magic laundry day, and as a result giggling somewhat inanely. 

"You are not wrong that it sounds a bit mad to me! But if you've got the magic lying around for it to be bought ... uncommonly good use of government funding, really, laundry is terrible." 

"It is! In my home village it was all lye and bleach and river stones, absolutely frightful. - there, that's the door to the chamber with the cure component creatures. It's a repurposed stable, actually, though we've cleaned -"

There's a fizzling arcane sound, and then a bang as a man appears before the door Jojo indicated. He's wearing grey robes and carrying a bone wand, and he looks furious. "Meddling fools!" Then he points the wand at Hob, and there's a blinding flash.

Has Hob ever been struck by lightning? Because that's what it feels like.

"Meddling! I just got h - "

He has, in fact, been struck by lightning before. Unfortunately this ... doesn't really make it hurt less.

(For a split second, before his consciousness vacates the premises, he flinches, not away from the lightning, but towards the wall, reaching instinctively for where, in the bird's nest of a ship if he had been standing in one, there would be a railing.)

Down goes Hob.

"Robert!" Jojo's voice sounds very distant, and very afraid.

"Greetings, Sojourner. How may I serve you?"

A deep voice, the kind the word sepulchral was made for. Cold stone underneath his feet.

He's standing, which is odd in and of itself.

" - ere," gasp, "ow," gasp, "what the fuck," gasp, lean on knees, "hi, hello, the fuck do you mean sojourner, I will not be sojourning anywhere other than right back wherever the hell I was, thanks very much, there is a scared kid who I promised to help that just watched me get shot," deep breath, "sorry, sorry, who are you? Where's the uh, the usual, you know, that lovely lady with the - " he taps his collarbone where a necklace would hang if he was wearing one, " - she on vacation or something?"

He's never actually asked who she is. He knows, but some part of him has always sort of been afraid that if he says it out loud she might stop sending him back.

For all that he's breathing heavily, his rib is no longer hurting, and neither are any of the other scrapes and bruises he managed to pick up. Also, not electrocuted.

"If you wish to return, I can return you to the moment after your intended death," the entity before him says smoothly. "But time is not currently passing in Toril, and if you wish you may also spend some time here to recuperate and organize your thoughts. As to your other question, I am the Reaper, the Gatekeeper, the Servant to the Dead. The lovely lady of whom you speak has... temporarily delegated some of her duties to me, where you are concerned. If something kills you more thoroughly than a simple wand of lightning could manage, you are likely to see her again, but in the simpler cases, I will serve as I am able."

Once his panicked heart rate slows down to a remotely normal human level his breathing will level out somewhat.

"Temporarily... delegated," he repeats, dryly incredulous, as he processes this stack of astounding claims. "Sure. Okay. Why not. Possibly only the second weirdest thing that's happened to me today. Hope she's having a great vacation about it. Nice to meet you, Gatekeeper. You say time's not ... "

Not being injured while he's a disembodied soul is normal. Being frozen in time isn't; he typically wakes up having lost however many seconds, minutes, hours, etcetera it requires his body to heal itself back to a state capable of housing his soul.

"...Toril's the planet I was just on? Is time still passing on Earth?"

"No," the Reaper says. "We are outside time at the moment, you might say. Or, more properly, between times. When you return, time will pass normally again."

"I stand corrected, this is absolutely the weirdest thing that's happened to me today. Uh, am I going to wake up a normal amount barely-not-dying or a weird amount technically-still-dying or mysteriously not at all dying or....?"

"Mysteriously not at all," the Reaper says. "We may perhaps say in your case that, while no time will have passed, enough time will have passed that you will have recovered completely. I do not know if this is a helpful metaphor; helpful metaphors are not a particular skill of mine."

"That sounds astoundingly convenient, aside from how I will in this case immediately have to somehow explain to the devoutly religious academy student that I am totally not in any way a demon. This is... a one-time event, a temporary vacation measure, a permanent policy change, a feature of the planet...?"

"You may call it a temporary vacation measure. But it will only occur once in every twenty-four sidereal hours; this is a limitation imposed upon me, but it is one which you may treat as set in stone. Anything more frequent than that, you will recover from in your own time."

He may call it that, huh. Well, all right. It's not like he's not already in the habit of cheerfully accepting the obvious deflections of mysterious magical creatures in black outfits with ominous dark voices and uncomfortably close relationships with Her. The last one was way prettier though we are not thinking about that right now thank you. 

"Right. That's very good to know, thanks."

Where does he even start on trying to orient to this mess before jumping directly back into a fight with some kind of maniac lightning magician.

" ... so uhh. The walking skeletons. What's the deal with that. In your expert capacity as a skeletal sort of fellow would you say that's a normal thing to have happen." 

"The undead are by no means unusual in the world of Toril. They are animated by negative energy, usually at the behest of a necromancer but sometimes as an unintentional consequence of disrespectful or mass interment of sapient remains."

"Negative energy, huh. By that do you literally mean 'bad vibes' or is it a technical term?"

"Ah. No, in the local magical parlance there are two forms of quantifiable energy, positive and negative, which sustain the existence of the living and the undead respectively, bar a few exceptions. ...you will be unsurprised, I imagine, to hear that they were not named by undead magi." (There is perhaps the ghost of a smile in his voice.)

"Wild. Yeah, that'll happen. Are they just being arbitrarily rude or is this like the electron polarity thing? ... not gonna lie, it would bring me great joy to get to Well, Actually a real life wizard."

"In fairness to them, a negative energy construct with the same structural complexity as a housecat, such as the skeletons you destroyed, is an unthinkingly destructive force, seeking only to break that which is whole and kill that which lives. With sufficient control over negative energy even such entities can be bound to a more complex purpose, but it is not until one reaches the upper echelons of necromancy that a negative energy being can be created which is not... problematic in this way. This sours most scholars on the entire exercise, and has had an effect of evaporative cooling on the field of study, such that most students of the dark arts are more interested in the destructive than constructive elements of their field."

He pauses. "Or so I have read, and observed in my capacity as judge of the dead. I do not see much of the living world, you understand."

Oh goodness, wizard academia inside baseball. What a delight.

"Huh. Yeah, I see how that's both an understandable field of study to flinch away from and also super unfortunate for anyone who wants to do anything useful with it without being immediately pigeonholed as Creepy Dark Arts Guy. Not much of any kind of Arts guy myself, but I mean, it seems pretty likely to me that there's lots of beneficial stuff getting lost there. Heck, I'm probably - actually, maybe you can just tell, am I the kind of thing that is made of 'negative' energy instead of 'positive' energy? Or if there's a principled magical distinction unrelated to whether one's heart has stopped beating am I technically not undead because I have technically never died?"

It would probably be rude to ask why this guy doesn't get out much. It's either that he gets torch-and-pitchforked by people mistaking him for an unthinkingly destructive force flavor skeleton, which would probably be hurtful to bring up, or that he has social anxiety, which would also probably be hurtful to bring up, or that he doesn't get vacation days, which... Hob is not at this time prepared to try to encourage Her employees to unionize, that seems hazardous to his health.

The Reaper shakes his head. "You are a positive-energy-based being, like any other human. The interventions of gods and greater beings, like your... friend, need not follow the laws of mortal magic. Not that whether your heart has stopped beating is entirely relevant to whether you are undead. Healing and resurrection magic is another phenomenon common to Toril which you may not have encountered before."

your (long pause) friend, huh.

Feels a little bit like blasphemy to claim to be personal friends with Her, especially when the other one got so offended, but he's not going to deny it, that seems possibly worse.

"Oh. Well, good, that's probably convenient for me. Shouldn't like to be mistaken for a vampire again, giant hassle every time. ... I am familiar in principle with resurrection being a thing that happens occasionally but I wouldn't have said it was common, no. Jojo - that's the religious teenager - seemed to think faith healing was a perfectly normal thing that every church has, is he actually not living in a weird cult bubble and that's just true here?"

"No, it is quite normal. The gods grant powers to their followers, approximately on par with what wizards and sorcerers can achieve through study or internal focus respectively, but differently oriented, we might say. Wizardry and sorcery are concerned with useful but somewhat arbitrary effects, like cleaning laundry or raising skeletons or shooting lightning, each such effect scaffolded by a past practitioner; divinely granted magic, meanwhile, is more thematic. Healing, bolstering one's allies, smiting one's enemies with raw negative energy, these are the core of a priest's repertoire, plus spells based in their god's domains. A cleric of Talona is advantaged in laying her enemies low via plague, while a follower of Lathander the Morninglord receives boons for healing and destroying the undead."

"Oh that reminds me! Why is there a plague god? What kind of asshole prays into existence a plague god??"

The Reaper shrugs. "Mortals have been harrowed by plague since before they could speak a name to it. Talona was conceived as a face to put to the silent killer, someone to hate, someone to appease through sacrifice in hopes that She would strike elsewhere. But to name a thing and fear it is to give it power, and Her power grew and grew; She grew too proud to be misdirected, and powerful enough that some saw in Her service a path to their own ends."