What a good dramatic speech. The sepulchral rumble really gives the whole thing gravitas. He should do theatre if he ever gets vacation time.

"I see. Horrible. Are there other things like that here? Do I need to be keeping an eye out for similarly opportunistic cults of the evil gods of, I don't know ... dementia? Alcoholism? The ocean? ...Aging?"

"Aging and dementia are generally thought mortal failings, too inherent to demonize, but there are indeed sea-gods, and storm-gods, and gods of the wild beasts that rend children who stray into the woods. Alcoholism is in the purview of a handful of deities, some of them because it is a form of madness, others because in embodying the domains of wine and merriment they must reckon with its consequences; however, I am not aware of any gods who take addiction as their primary domain." The Reaper considers. "Likely there are demon lords of addiction, but my awareness of demon lords is relatively limited, as they are less relevant than gods to my duties."

Could be worse. Do not love the phrase demon lords, but so it goes. "Extremely useful knowledge, thank you. ... on a hopefully slightly lighter note, Jojo mentioned his god was an 'Ilmater'?"

"Ilmater is the god of suffering, endured and relieved and taken from others unto oneself. He is a powerful force for Good in the world, although His followers sometimes break themselves in their efforts to emulate Him, which I am led to believe has caused problems in the past, and limited the reach of His church."

" ... ooof. Yeah. I do not love that. Like, very admirable as a thing to do yourself, kind of worrying as a thing to teach kids. ... Uh, what's the age of majority situation around here, actually? Jojo seems... teenaged....ish... and I have no idea whether in this culture that's 'everyone will get mad at me if I act like this obvious child could possibly have adult decisionmaking capacity' or 'this perfectly independent young adult will be mortally offended if I imply he's a child' or somewhere in the middle or what."

He's familiar with both. It's a weird transition to live through.

"I have absolutely no idea," the Reaper says apologetically. "Age of majority is an intensely mortal concept, an arbitrary line along which a spectrum of fantastic depth is split."

"That is entirely fair. I suppose I will just have to do my best not to insult and/or morally injure either of those hypothetical Jojos until I figure out which one I have actually met. Hm. What else should I know while I'm in this extremely convenient time freeze. ... Oh, do you know geography facts or are those also too mortal?"

"I know little of it myself, but I can conjure an atlas for your perusal if you like."

"You can conjure books?"

"My Realm is an extension of myself, and I am a being of power comparable to a lesser deity. I can conjure many things, here. ...you might also find relevant the Well of Lost Things, from which you may retrieve possessions important to you which you would otherwise never have found again. Unlike the other things I can create, those objects may stay with you even when you return to the world of the living."

"Which I would - things I would never have found -?"

Okay he is going to come back to the book thing in a second because that is also very cool but he needs to look in the Well now.

Most people, looking into the Well of Lost Things, see a few objects floating in its misty water. Childhood toys and heirlooms, mostly, but only ones that left a real impression. A person who cared much and had lost much might see a dozen, perhaps two dozen items clinking against each other in its depths. It always has room for more.

Hob Gadling looks into the Well and it seems fit to overflow.

He sort of... drifts... slowly to his knees, staring. 

(The first book he ever printed with his own hands, complete with stray inky thumbprint on the cover. Jim's favorite necktie, with Peg's slightly askew little embroidered fish along the edges. The wooden rosary his mother carved him for his first communion. The hand-painted locket portrait of Eleanor and Robyn that he'd tried to show the Stranger. His first sword, notched and weathered but sharp and unrusted, as it had been when he first laid hands on it. Robyn's sketchbook. Lou's favorite hatpin. His first pocketwatch, painstakingly handwound for decades, long ago shattered irreparably to pieces - )

It takes him several minutes just to gather himself enough to reach out, and even then he is trembling fairly badly.

(Is this real? Has any of this been real? He's been shot in the head before and his brain kept working just fine, he's only ever hallucinated when on a staggering quantity of drugs and he doesn't remember taking any, but maybe it is a dream, or a trick, or...)

The water in the well is not real. His hand passes through it without resistance, like a mirage.

But his hand closes on a real object, and when he pulls it back out, heart in his throat, it does not disappear.

Hob Gadling has had hundreds of years to get used to losing things, see. By the time he was married, by the time he had a child, he was used to objects being fundamentally perishable. He still gets attached - he can't not, no matter how hard he tries - but anything he's ever laid hands on since maybe the third or fourth time he died, at best, has been with the quiet understanding, in the back of his mind, that it's eventually going to be gone. There is no such thing as careful enough. You can have a thing or you can preserve it, never both.

But when he was young, he didn't know.

When he was young, he thought to himself, people die but things don't, if only I am very careful I can keep them. And so he'd saved his pennies, slowly, painstakingly, for decades, dreaming of seeing past the reach of an illiterate peasant soldier, dreaming of finding new things about the world to love that he could not have imagined as a child, and he had bought a book. So he could learn to read.

The Canterbury Tales, hand-scribed and illuminated. He'd read it so many times he could probably still recite it. He had been so, so careful, with this most beloved of objects, imagining it possible to keep, this first key he had found to the world outside his immediate field of view. Wrapped it carefully in oilcloth, never bent the pages, re-bound it by hand with fresh twine a half-dozen times.

It had been dust in his hands by 1500.

"Oh," he says, very softly, as he sits, fingertips brushing over the achingly familiar texture of old linen paper. "Oh, thank you so much." 

(He's not really going to get to keep it. It will dissolve again, eventually. He'll love it all the more, until then, knowing.)

"There are many things I do not understand about mortals," the Reaper says, his voice a respectful undertone. "When I took my position, I understood less, and I came to comprehension only slowly. But I was amazed, even then, at how they loved. I fought the gods for the right to install the Well, because they said that clinging to the trappings of life would belabor souls' path to eternity. I do not know if it is true. But I know that the petitioners who come here are frightened, and alone, and often their destination is more frightening still... and when they see what lies in the Well, they find strength in the things they loved. You are not a petitioner; you are a Sojourner, and you will not approach your final destination for some time. You have little to fear. Still, I am glad to offer you this small comfort."

What an astoundingly excellent person. Hob is possibly going to personally fight anybody in Toril who tells him that undead are universally inimical to human flourishing.

"Well, I suppose I very precisely wouldn't know, as far as the dead folks are concerned, would I, but I think you're right," he says, somewhere between encouraging and deeply grateful. "About the things being valuable and important. It's true that you do have to learn to move on, to survive living forever, but it's not - it's not good, to have to. Just necessary. And easier, when it's not all at once."

There's a long pause, while he contemplates his impossible gift. But even without time passing around him, he is not the sort of person who sits still for long with things to do.

" ... so. 'Sojourner', huh? That a technical term?"

"Not precisely - it is my term, for one who passes through my realm without passing on to their end. Most have possessed my Relic, the keystone to my being, which grants them a measure of control over me; your case is, in this among other ways, unusual."

"Ah. Yes, I do love to be a weird special case. Er, the... the keystone to your being? Yeesh, that's an alarming sort of thing to have it be possible for other people to lay hands on, my condolences." 

"On the contrary, I am so thoroughly bound already that the leash hardly chafes, and it is one of the few things that can bend some of my restrictions, which is a welcome relief. And one day, I have faith some bearer of the Relic will manage to break my chains, and allow me to fulfill my purpose."

"Huh. Fair enough. Good fortune, then."

Far be it from him, after all, to judge someone for taking joy in a life that others might find crushingly uninhabitable.

"Right, so what was it we were talking about before I got comprehensively distracted - oh, books! You said you could conjure books! Such as an atlas!"

He has tucked his Tales into the front pocket of his jacket and can now again gesture excitedly about this prospect.

A sizable table appears between them, with a map unscrolled on its flat top, and two tomes pinning down its east and west sides respectively. The map covers the table entirely, rendering the continents and geography of the world in fantastically obsessive detail. The eastern tome is labeled Nations of Faerûn, the western tome The Sword Coast.

"Will this satisfy your needs, Sojourner?"

"Most excellent, thank you."

In the total absence of any markers of the passage of time, such as hunger, tiredness, changing light conditions, etcetera, he will entirely fail to track how many hours it takes to read both books cover to cover, periodically peering at the map and muttering to himself to try to memorize place-names. It's probably quite a few.

He will, however, eventually get bored of this activity. He is not the type of person who can spend months in a row doing nothing but reading, no matter how cool a time stop is.

"Right. This has been extraordinarily helpful and I appreciate you very much, but unless you have any other critical Toril advisories I think I probably ought to go deal with the - lightning wizard? Or whatever that was? How do I do that."

"Step through the door in the center of this room, and you will be returned to your body. Unless you meant how to deal with the wizard, in which case I do not have strong advice, apart from the general observation that few mages are as threatening in close combat as they are at a distance, and that you have a sword."

Grin. "I do at that. But yes, I meant the door." He sketches an old-fashioned bow. "Until we meet again, new friend."

The Reaper bows in return.

Through the door -