Heck. It's been like forty years since that class and he's going to mangle explaining thermodynamics to the medieval elf wizard so badly. He's going to have to try, though. For science.

"I stress that this is not really my area of expertise but I will happily attempt it. ... Speaking of dialects, what is yours called. In my world what I'm speaking would be called 'modern British English' and you're clearly using something that is somewhat like an English dialect but a much weirder one than I've ever heard."

"I'm speaking Neverwinter's dialect of Illuskan. You are speaking a mutually intelligible Illuski-Netherese-Thorassic pidgin spoken natively by no one I have ever heard of except the immortal archmage Elminster."

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"I have so many follow-up questions that I'm not sure where to start."

"The pidgin theory is only a theory, but your 'modern British English' does share several significant features with all three of those language families - the structure is largely Illuskan, but Thorassic word roots and occasional outright loanwords crop up with some regularity, and there's just enough Netherese mixed in to make my ears twitch - I'm a leading scholar of Netheril and its innovations, you see, so I have to keep the language frontmost in my mind's ear... there we go."

She makes a few arcane passes with her hands, incants briefly, and taps Hob's book. Nothing visibly happens. "Your book is now safe. Come back in eleven days and I can do it again, especially if you've got that diamond dust by then. Don't take that as permission to leave, though -" She makes a few more arcane passes and incantations, and says "Say 'entropy' again. For that matter, use it in a sentence, or define it if you've got a definition to hand."

His book is magically safe now. <3 <3 <3

There will be a brief delay in Hob conversational response while he inspects the book and pats the book and hugs the book and carefully puts the book back in his jacket pocket. As he's doing this he murmurs something to it, fondly, that might be a prayer or might just be a recitation of some of its contents.

"-sorry. Thank you so much. What?" He belatedly processes everything else Eltoora said. "Oh! Right. Yes. Erm, entropy is - the state of being disorganized? Hm, no, that's not quite right, it's - it's the amount of being disorganized that a thing has? Like if you have a large ice cube and a fire you have less entropy and then when your ice cube is melted and your fire has gone out and you just have wet ash, you have more entropy. The universe trends towards higher entropy over time, much the same way if you leave the ice cube and fire alone together the ice cube will melt, until the whole universe eventually becomes undifferentiated quark soup or whatever," except him probably, "except maybe if the Lantern Corps figures out how to make it stop doing that. Does that answer your question?"

Eltoora looks entranced. "No! It gives me more of them! What in the bloody fuck is quark - that lantern had very different connotations than I'm used to - can I read your mind, it makes this so much easier -"

Jojo reasserts himself from his parallel conversation getting a wizard to Prestidigitate Hob's handkerchief, shaking his head rapidly. "We're currently in possession of state secrets. And a high-priority task to do with ending the Wailing Death."

Extremely pout. "I... acknowledge... that those might be considered prohibitive. By the lawkeepers, if not my intellectual peers. Is it so high-priority that I can't verbally pick his brain for a few hours?"

Jojo gives Hob a look. "It's ultimately up to him, but we do have things to do today."

"Quarks are... the thing that is smaller than protons? Which are the thing that are smaller than atoms, which - ah."

Look at the tiny teenage hero and his rapidly solidifying spine. He's so good.

(... Man, this is how Batman ends up with all those tiny fighty batchildren, isn't it. Heck. He used to lowkey judge that guy every time he saw a picture of a teenager in a neon outfit, but now he kind of gets it.) 

" - right," he says, apologetically, "yeah, Jojo makes an excellent point, we do have an urgent quest, but I'd be delighted to drop by again as soon as I've got a couple hours free or eleven days from now whichever comes first?"

Eltoora sighs extravagantly. "Fiiiiiiiiiiiine. But if you die on your quest I'm going to find your corpse and use that rock in your ear to have you Raised and interrogate you then, I will not let you get out that easily."

Puzzled earring-touch. The diamond is just a memorial, made of a dead friend's ashes, it's not magic.

He glances back again at Jojo, who is absolutely correct that this is not a priority right now. "Well. I now have several additional questions but if we start in again on 'things Gadling doesn't understand about magic' we'll also be here all day. I'll try not to die, though, I'm quite good at that and it would be such a shame not to continue this conversation, it has been lovely to meet you. Thanks again for protecting my book!"

And then he will flee, before he can start freaking out excessively in front of the wizard.

"Did she say raised," he says somewhat shrilly to Jojo, halfway down the street, "as in, it sounds like from context, raise from the dead, as in resurrect, as in I am not just having a dialect collision here and she does not just mean heal someone who was extremely about to die but actually make somebody alive again who was actually dead?"

"...yes. It's - the spell, to bring someone back into their body a day or a week after, is about as hard for a priest as those spells she was talking about, turning someone into a frog, would be for a mage. If you want someone who's been gone months or years, or you only have a lock of hair or a knucklebone or something, it's exponentially harder, there's probably only a few dozen priests across the continent who'll do it at any price. If you don't have anything, or if they've been dead longer than a couple of decades... I know the spell exists. I know there are people who can cast it. I don't know what could convince them to do it."

"More than. A couple of. Decades," he repeats, slowly, and somewhat mournfully. 

Robyn's been dead for three hundred and seventy-nine years. He might be able to find and dig up the skeleton, if he were on Earth, which he isn't. He is not going to say this out loud; you don't go around outright admitting you're six hundred even when the pretense of being a normal guy is otherwise well and entirely lost. That's how you get vampires in your life and nobody wants that.  

"...good to know, thanks. S'pose that means it's probably not getting any more urgent by the day at this point while I have something else I'm supposed to be doing. What again am I supposed to be - ah, right. Familiarizing myself with this city layout so I can effectively use a magic GPS. Cool landmarks? Should we visit that nice bridge? - oh, your quartermaster recommended a blacksmith?"

"There's plenty of landmarks, but if you want your bill-guisarme then we should probably head for the Shining Knight, yes. It's near the Peninsula district." Jojo leads the way, since he has at least an academic familiarity with the city's layout. (One might be forgiven for imagining he hasn't actually gone outside the immediate surroundings of the Academy and the Temple that much, though.)

Follow follow. "I can make do with basically anything that won't shatter instantly on contact with the enemy, really, but yeah, it'd be nice. Been a while since I was a young soldier but I still bet muscle memory outperforms improvising. Do the city districts have distinguishing features other than their geography?"

"Oh, yes. Blacklake is where the... aristocrats" (discreet wince) "live, and there's a bit of a sub-district for their servants called the No-Man's Land. The Peninsula is a relatively comfortable residential district, though it's less comfortable for those who don't like living near the prisons. The Docks are, well, docks; merchants, sailors, occasional criminal gangs. And the, well, Beggar's Nest, it's not the kindest name but it's not inaccurate, they're the slums. - and of course we're in the City Core right now, it's the hub, lots of important buildings and the handful of merchants who can afford to set up where everyone passes by on their way to the temple or the Cloaktower or what have you."

Don't make a joke about mice understandably not getting on well with aristoc(r)ats. Don't do it. This place obviously does not have television and it will not be funny.

"Oh, prisons, that's a useful orientation item," he says instead, following blacksmithward and attempting to affix street-level landmarks into his visual memory. "What's the criminal justice system here like? Do people generally go to jail for normal things like theft and stabbing each other and not paying their taxes, or do I need a rundown on what color fabrics not to wear and which sanctified pigeon species not to swat or whatever? Do aristocrat types get away with things under the table with bribes and so on or have you got that thing where if, say, the crown prince kills somebody, that's just legally not murder? ... is murder in fact a crime, it's suddenly occurring to me that if resurrection is a thing it might instead be the sort of thing you file a lawsuit about." 

"Resurrection is very expensive," Jojo clarifies first. "Powerful clerics don't just pop up like wild strawberries, and neither do diamonds. If you kill someone you will go to jail whether they come back or not. Ah, aristocrats do get away with things but they do at least have to bribe people to get things that way, if Lord So-and-So stabs his scullery maid and it's traced back to him he goes to prison. ...unless he's very well connected, but there'd at least be a public outcry. And I think the laws here are relatively normal but, um, I would, so you might want to read the code or speak with a lawyer."

"Huh. Honestly better than I expected at the tech level. I will at some point attempt to at least skim the legal code for signs of weirdness, though, good plan. I know you are not a wizard but do you by chance know what Lady Eltoora meant about my earring? It's not magic, I don't own anything that's magic. I guess aside from my book which is now enchanted."

"...it's the largest diamond I've ever seen. Lady Aribeth has a Resurrection diamond on a ring in her throat, in case her body is found too mangled to be Raised conventionally. Hers is smaller than yours. It's not much smaller, but it's smaller. And at that size, even a little bit matters a great deal."

"I see. Um."

The professional wizard commented on his clothes being less magic than she expected them to be, which means she can see magic, which means that if his earring was also less magic than she expected it to be, which apparently is quite extremely magic, she'd have noticed, and not commented on it like it was. So his probably does do the thing. That is... both potentially awesome and also potentially a problem.

"Should I be worried about extremely high-grade robbery attempts? I am used to people occasionally trying to mug me for my jewelry, but with like... a normal amount of effort appropriate to the fact that they are expensive nonmagical rocks that the average person can't even be sure aren't instead much less expensive fakes. Kids with lots of self-confidence and not a lot of actual skill who can be dissuaded by taking their weapons and punching them in the face, that kind of thing."

Jojo rummages through his brain for appropriate words, and does some math.

"I don't actually know how valuable it is, technically. It is worth more than ten thousand gold pieces, and... there's a chance that it's worth as much as you could convince Lord Nasher to pay you for it, which would be at least twenty-five thousand and probably not more than fifty.

Deep inhale. "One gold piece is worth ten silver or a hundred copper. A laborer eats for between three and five silver per day. It's possible to get by on one, though it's a bad way to live. But - at bare minimum, your earring could feed a man almost from cradle to grave."

"Christ. Okay yeah that's - that's way more than it's worth at home. And this specific one is sentimental, I'll be very upset if someone steals it. Um."

How confident is he about his ability to defend not just his immortal person but his possessions against unknown hostile action on this planet?

... well, on the one hand apparently he gets back up a lot faster here. But on the other hand he got murdered by a wizard like two hours ago and the Reaper specifically warned him the fast rez only happens once every twenty-four. He should be approximately zero confident until he goes at least that long without almost-dying again.

Hob takes off the earring and pins it to the inner lining of his jacket. "Thank you, I really appreciate your help with the cultural translation. Lord Nasher is your local... head of the jewelcrafters' guild?"