- then he's on the ground, the fading sparks of a lightning bolt still crackling off the walls -

- then, very quickly, he is not on the ground, the sword substantively preceding the incomprehensible snarl along the arc of his lunge toward the wizard. 

Jojo looks shocked, for a moment, but only a moment; then he's launching himself at the wizard in turn.

The wizard is ill-prepared for, frankly, any of this. He had intended to take both of them out in quick succession, not be stabbed and beaten with tiny fists. He raises his wand again, but Jojo decisively snaps it with the flat of his palm.

He doesn't last long, after that. (Perhaps a bit longer than Hob is used to people lasting after being stabbed, but it does vary anyway.)

"Ooof," says Hob, looking down at the broken wand once the wizard has decisively stopped breathing. "Thank you, I very much did not want that a second time, it hurt like hell. You okay?"

"Yes - you're alright, then? I saw it hit you straight-on, I thought you were dead!"

Sheepish ear-tug. "Yeah, I am as a rule much easier to knock down than to keep down. I usually get up a bit slower, though. Sorry for the alarm, I'd've warned you if I knew my thing was going to do that, your planet seems to have different metaphysics than mine."

Well, if he'd known it was going to do that and also had known that it would be perceived as a normal sort of thing that magic can in theory do, if only part A were true then he would absolutely have lied, but, minor details.

"Alright. Then let's get to the cure -"

He kicks open the stable doors, revealing a rather chaotic scene.

There are a dozen or so goblins, and the corpses of at least a dozen more. There's a man wearing an ominous black helmet and wielding a sizable morningstar. The man is attempting to use his morningstar to bash the brains out of a nude green woman, who is making this very difficult on him by ducking, weaving, and occasionally manifesting shields of solid wood between the man's weapon and herself. Behind the woman, in a refurbished horse-stall, is a dog-sized animal which looks rather like a green-scaled rooster, puffing itself up and hissing at any goblins who come near. (There are several statues of goblins in various poses surrounding it, some of them broken.) Behind the rooster is a... brain. With legs. Which is merrily rolling about in the grey matter of one of the dead goblins.

The man with the morningstar glances towards the doors as they enter, leaving an opening for the green woman to slam a wooden shillelagh into his kneecap. He howls in pain and staggers back. "Kill these scum!" he hisses to the remaining goblins. "Or our masters will punish you for your incompetence!"

Then he tosses a pebble at the ground, there's a flash of light, and he's gone. The goblins reluctantly advance on the woman, who grips her club tighter in her hands.

What in the entire hell.

Okay, snap field judgment, go.

Evil helmet guy: wants to kill Jojo. Mental blue tag for enemy.

Little green dudes: work for evil helmet guy. Inherited blue tags.

Taller green lady: fighting evil helmet guy. Mental red tag for friendly.

Bird medusa (??): friends with green lady. Inherited red tag.

Brain (???) creature (??????): ????????

Hob moves to engage the goblins with his back to the bird and his flank supportively adjacent to the green lady. He's already in melee range by the time his mouth catches up to his reflexes and says, "Jojo, what the fuck is that?" in the general direction of the brain.

"I have no idea," Jojo says, assuming a similar position and kicking a goblin in the face.

     "It's a horrible abomination," grunts the green lady, taking a relieved step back and making some gestures with her hands. "Don't kill it. Not in danger, not currently dangerous. Don't step on the cockatrice, he's riled and you might get stoned." She finishes up her gesturing, and yellowish grass sprouts beneath the goblins' feet, winding around their ankles and tripping a few of them to the ground.

It's a horrible abomination, don't kill it.

... okay.

Some goblins caught in allied unfriendly grass (??) can get stabbed. "Is it possible to interrogate these guys about their boss, shouuld we try to capture some alive?" He's heard them make noises that are language-like in nature but not any words he actually understood.

"Oh, if you insist," the dryad grumps. She makes another gesture and locks eyes with a goblin towards the back of the crowd. "Go stand in the corner," she suggests.

     It blinks at her.

"Dammit," she mutters. She points vigorously at the nearest corner.

    The goblin takes the hint and trots off happily to press its nose against the wall.

Huh. "Neat trick."

Can they dispatch the rest without disturbing either the cockatrice or the Abomination(TM)?

The goblins are less of a threat with each one that falls, and with the dryad's help they fall in short order.

"Thanks for the help," she says curtly. "No offense, though? Get the fuck away from me, I don't know who you are and I have not ruled out that you're also here to kidnap me after luring me into a false sense of security."

Hob tucks the sword into his belt and backs away obligingly, raising his hands in what he hopes is a universal gesture of definitely not attacking you. "Sure, sure. Entirely fair, I also do not know you! The amount I know what is going on is, uh, apparently you are experiencing... plague cultists? Which I am opposed to?"

Jojo backs off as well.

     She relaxes a bit. "Sorry. Been a day. Been more than a day, if we're honest."

"I was sent to protect you from the attackers," Jojo contributes.

     "Great job," she says. "Thanks. Continue to remain at least ten feet away from me."

A woman rushes into the barn brandishing a hand-and-a-half sword glowing with a soft golden light. "Jojo! Thank the gods - Desyyra, thank the gods again - is Gulnan -"

She sees Hob and flinches, holding her blade higher. "Jojo, who is this."

"...his name is Robert?" Jojo says.

Hob does not stop holding his hands up in a friendly and nonthreatening manner, but persons in possession of a high Sense Motive skill may be able to detect that he is now thinking very hard about how fast he can stop doing that and draw his sword if this new person attacks him, which she looks worryingly likely to do.

"Hello, yes, Professor Robert Gadling, I teach literature and history," he says, in his best soothing professional I am a harmless nerd voice, "at, uh, a university that is almost certainly too far away for you to have ever heard of it, but due to some sort of spontaneous dimensional anomaly I arrived here while while some of those little green fellows were trying to murder Jojo and he seemed obviously not at fault about that so I tried to help and now I am here. Who're you?"

Her body language says she's in charge but her generally being like nineteen says that is nuts, so he's not going to try to guess.

"I am Lady Aribeth de Tylmarande, Seneschal of Neverwinter and paladin of Tyr. You have the aura of either a minor fiend, an undead impostor, or a concerningly powerful human who has committed many evil deeds. Since you protected my protégé, however... and because merely being Evil is not a crime... I am not going to stab you unless you make sudden and very alarming movements."

She lowers her sword to one side. She does not sheathe it.

"I apologize for my rudeness. It has been a stressful day for us all."

Hob stares at her in frozen, horrified silence for a long several seconds.

" ... third thing," he offers eventually, quietly. "I'd still like to help, though, if you'll let me. I understand if you don't trust me to be altruistic but I also just really hate it when people die of plagues specifically? Because. Um."

(the Black Death, smallpox, Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, it keeps fucking happening and somehow they don't learn -)

"Personal reasons." 

"You do mean that. I won't turn you down, then, not with half my city dying and another tenth dead." She turns to consult with the dryad. "Desyyra. I'm glad to see you safe, and the cockatrice and devourer - did Gulnan escape?"

     The dryad nods grimly. "There was a man here, with the goblins. He dispelled the wards on all of the stalls - I think he'd hoped we'd all run for it, but the bird and the abomination like each other and the bird likes me, so they stuck to me, and like Hells was I leaving. Gulnan likes exactly no one, so she ran for it cackling like the hateful witch she is."

Aribeth grimaces. "Someone will need to find her, then... and I'll be stuck pacifying the mob for weeks. Not that I could go out and fight personally without panicking the whole city..." She turns back to Hob, considering him. "You said you knew little of the situation but that there is a plague, and that you have a distaste for them. Would you like more explanation, before I conscript you into service?"

"I would like that very much, yes. Start from the assumption that I have never heard of not only this city but also whatever country it is located in."

"Interesting. I'll try it. You stand in - the repurposed stables of - the Academy of Neverwinter. Neverwinter is a city-state on the northern Sword Coast; we export glasswares, often lightly enchanted, and jewelry, often heavily enchanted. The city and its environs' climate is maintained by some unfathomably potent ancient magic, allowing us, under normal circumstances, to be mostly self-sustaining with the aid of our surrounding farmland, and a massive trading hub, with the only warm-water port for a hundred and fifty leagues."

"The circumstances are not normal. A plague struck, five weeks ago, now called the Wailing Death. Victims take on sores and a persistent cough; then, they become almost catatonically weak; then, they die. Through the process, they suffer full-body wracking pains, escalating from a bone-deep ache to an agony so terrible that men have begged me to slit their throats to stop it. I saw a girl whose condition was not so advanced as to kill her, but she had screamed so terribly that her lungs had collapsed, and died of that instead - perhaps a mercy.

"The Wailing does not behave like a normal disease. It jumps from victim to victim in the normal fashion, but it also strikes those who have had no contact with the outside world in weeks. It seems sometimes as if the fear of the plague alone can spread it, but if that were the case even more would be dead than already are. When the death toll rose from terrible to alarming, there was an effort among the holy orders of the city to cleanse as many victims of their illness as possible by magic. This caused their symptoms to recede entirely, and then return within the week. Subsequent attempts halved the length of this reprieve. That was when alarm turned to blind panic.

"Paladins and monks who have attained the blessing of purity are immune, praise all the gods. No one else is safe - not even those who have contrived an enchantment to make them immune to disease. Our suspicion is that the gods can protect their own through the channels already available to them, but mortal magic, even god-granted, cannot.

"Most alarming of all, the plague is... centered. Within the city. It is only within city limits that men fall ill from nowhere. Visitors to the city are just as vulnerable to infection, but do not suffer the same consequences. And anyone who leaves city limits falls ill immediately - at first it was one in ten, then one in five, and now everyone. We have closed the gates and harbor, of course, but cannot tell the people why. It would finally make it obvious that this is enemy action, and many would suspect a traitor within our walls. There would be lynch mobs and worse."

She wipes her eyes and takes a drink from a bottle on her belt. "I'm sorry. I will get to your task - do you have any urgent questions about what I have told you so far?"