He lands in the middle of... well, absolute chaos.

There's furniture upended, some of it on fire. A bookcase has been pulled down and shoved in front of a door, and most of its contents are now smoldering, spreading little brushfires along the carpet.

There's also several grotesque-looking little men attempting to stab an equally little but rather more distinguished man, with downy white fur all over his body and a gentle, mousey face screwed up in fear. He wears the robe of a holy man, some kind of rosary with an unfamiliar symbol around his neck.

He's defending himself competently against their attack, barehanded though he may be; he's clearly trained in some martial art. There are three of them, though, with swords. So he's not winning - though the fighting seems to have paused while the combatants figure out why there is now a Hob in their midst.

Huh. Well that's sure... several new types of guy that there are. With real swords? He hasn't seen anyone do a sincere attempted murder with an actual sword since the first Great War??

"Hwæt þe shite?"(*) he says, and then picks up a flaming book from the ground and pitches it with surprising force at the nearest sword-wielder's nose. 

(*) Translators' Note: He is in fact speaking modern English, but this is roughly what it sounds like to the locals.

The sword-wielder's nose breaks impressively, and his head snaps back as he falls to the ground, squealing in agony. (He drops the sword in favor of clutching his face.)

The distraction and the reduction in odds against the mouse-man give him an opening, which he takes to kick one of the sword-wielders in the stomach, then pivot and punch the other in the sternum. They go down, and he relaxes his stance.

"Thank you for your help," he says, in... a language that really shouldn't sound as English-like as it does, frankly. "It didn't look like you arrived here on purpose, but with all due sympathies, I can't say I'm sorry you did."

He's midway through casting about for another improvised weapon when he realizes this is no longer required. He blinks and relaxes, peering with fascination at the little mouse guy. He sounds like he's... John Tolkien's secret pet project to find out what modern English would evolve into by the year 5,000 AD, or something. One would do that sort of thing with mice, right, short generations and - not important, worry about it later. 

"Yeah, I have no idea what happened, but, uh, glad to help, you did not seem like you were doing anything that obviously justified a murder attempt. Where am I, please?"

His best guess is that he is on Mars, judging from the little green dudes, but this will sound both stupid and racist if he says it out loud and is wrong, so.

"The academy in Neverwinter, on the Sword Coast - and, um, I don't want to be rude, but can we leave the fine details for later? I have an urgent task to complete, and more of the building is on fire already than I'm entirely comfortable with."

This is clearly an understatement; he's visibly distressed, as if this building holds some moderate significance to him. Not a childhood home, necessarily, but maybe a hometown institution.

The academy in -

Right, the problem of 'where the fuck even is that' is temporarily shelved in favor of the realization that the person in front of him is a frightened student whose school is on fire. It is now Professor Gadling's job to protect him, obviously.

"Oh. Yeah, of course, absolutely, how can I help?"

A hopeful smile colonizes a small but significant region of the student's terrified expression. "Thank you. Um, if you've any skill with a blade, you could help me fight the goblins and undead along the way? Or - if that's too much, I mean, I don't want to press you into service, you've helped plenty already -"

(The hopeful smile experiences unexpected resistance from the native terror.)

In most situations he would cheerfully deny having any knowledge of how to operate a sword, seeing as his current identity has no reason to have that skill. However in this situation, doing that would disappoint this small and earnest creature who is clearly trying very hard under deeply adverse circumstances, which just seems unacceptable.

So instead he puts on the warm and encouraging smile normally reserved for anxious grad students who are freaking out that their objectively very clever thesis isn't good enough. "I know what it's like to be drafted, my friend. You are in no danger of doing it accidentally by asking very politely."

He picks up one of the goblins' dropped swords and weighs it somewhat dubiously in his hand. Short, broad, stabby sort of thing, clearly made for swarming somebody bigger than you in a group and getting inside their reach. Not ideal for the exact opposite use case.

"Like a longer blade if I can find one," he says, "but I can work with this. Goblins and undead, huh? We talking zombies or vampires?"

"Skeletons, thank the gods," the student shivers. "Vampires are more than I want to deal with. - I'm Jojo, by the way. I can lead the way to... well, my objective... there's a plague and we're under attack because someone doesn't want us to cure it. I need to protect the - the components - alright, they're not components, I need to go protect the creatures we need to extract the components from, most of whom are entirely consenting and the other is going to be released as soon as we've got the cure, it sounds very morally ambiguous and that's because it is but there is a plague and we need it cured and I'm babbling. Sorry."

"Wow, okay. How is there always somehow yet another fucking asshole who wants there to be plagues, no reasonable person likes plagues, they are the worst. Nice to meet you, though, Jojo, circumstances aside. I'm, uh - "

He's tempted to improvise an entire fake identity on the spot, honestly. But if this is superhero bullshit, and falling through a dimensional wormhole into an entire plague in a city he's never heard of complete with alchemical shenanigans and hostile animate skeleton armies probably is, the Justice League will notice if he tells obvious lies. He's equipped to tell them non-obvious lies, sometimes, you can't have that much money and not either commit to the Lexcorp strategy or be chill with Batman periodically auditing you, but his intentionally extremely boring corporate arm normally handles that by actually not behaving in a suspicious manner or touching any of their things. Too late, already emotionally invested.

There's very much a detectable and somewhat anxious pause in his sentence while he thinks all that.

" - my name's Robert Gadling. Sounds like a great objective to me, lead the way." 

Jojo giggles nervously. "I know, how are there so many people who want plagues - I wonder sometimes if it's just their only way of getting something more comprehensible that they want, if that could be satisfied somehow with the resources of a god who wants everyone happy? But I've never spoken to an open Talonite so I suppose it'll remain an academic question."

He moves out, listening at the door for a moment before opening it. Then he hurries down the hallway, expecting Hob to be able to keep up what with his significantly longer legs.

Hob indeed can follow along briskly, keeping an eye and ear out for sounds that might be supernatural bullshit.

"What's a talonite?" he wonders as he does. "Honestly, can't decide whether it'd be more worrying if the answer is you have a specific evil plague cult here or if your weird dialect has an entire generic noun for 'person who wants there to be plagues'." 

"Oh, Talona is the goddess of plague and disease in general," Jojo says. "Talonites worship her. I suppose where you're from you might be under some other area of concern."

Hob has read a frankly unhealthy number of books about obscure gods and is aware that his planet of origin does indeed have a couple of those, but his understanding had been that usually one prays to such entities in hopes of fewer, rather than more, diseases. "...You have a nonspecific evil plague cult here. Terrible, okay."

Wry smile. "Evil gods are terribly inconvenient that way." Then he freezes, his fur puffing out slightly. "- I hear scraping down that hallway," he whispers. "Maybe the skeletons. Unfortunately that's our route."

Careful pause, listening headtilt. "Sharp ears," he murmurs, impressed. "Get close as we can, then you go left I go right?" 

It's been... several centuries... since Hob has been a professional thief, and he cannot walk as quietly as a literal mouse, but he can make a respectably close attempt.  

"Good idea. Hopefully they won't be very tactical - skeletons without a master nearby don't tend to be."

Sneak sneak sneak. The skeletons, once they become visible, are yellowed and cracked with age and don't really look that intimidating, once you account for the sheer how is that thing moving factor. They get closer than one might expect, before one of the skulls creaks around to look at them -

and Jojo blurs into motion and splinters the skull with the palm of his hand. Bones clatter to the floor; if Hob wants a surprise attack on one of the remaining skeletons, he'd best act quickly.

Those sure are... actual moving skeletons made of actual dead bones, yikes. Well. Nothing for it but to make them stop moving.

Hob's instinctive first swing with the stabby little goblin sword would have disemboweled a creature possessed of any bowels to speak of; this, of course, does nearly nothing, but the great thing about the element of surprise is the opportunity to try again, this time with a bludgeoning pommel strike, before your enemy can hit back.

This skeleton, too, crunches under the blow and falls to pieces. They're apparently pretty fragile - but there's several of them, and now they're all aware of their foes.

Fortunately, as Jojo implied, they're also quite stupid. They get in a few good swipes with their surprisingly sharp phalanges, but they're crowding each other rather than properly flanking, and with a bit of tactical maneuvering it's not difficult to dispatch the remainder.

Ow.

"Oh, well done. You doing all right? I might have a couple of bruises later but nothing serious."

(He probably has a fractured rib, but not for long, so this is almost like not lying, right?)

Jojo, in addition to some bruises (or possibly "bruises") of his own, has a scratch on his forehead from dodging a skeleton going for his eyes. It's smeared a good bit of blood over his facial fur. He grimaces as it drips a bit more. "Nothing that'll keep me out of the fight. Though it would be an excellent time for my sacred oath to Ilmater to grant me the miraculous power to heal my allies and myself."

Your sacred oath to whomst the fuck, he does not say, because it seems kind of rude to distract someone with an obligation to explain their religion in the middle of a time-sensitive emergency. Maybe this is just a language thing but he thought he'd heard of most of them. 

" ... it sure would, if that's the sort of thing that your, uh, order? can usually do?" It has been known to happen but it's not, in his experience, common for faith healers to not be, well, not to put too fine a point on it, liars. "Uh, in the meantime - handkerchief?" He rustles around in his pockets for a moment and offers up a linen square, dyed a friendly sky-blue and embroidered around the edges with tiny flowers. 

He takes the handkerchief gratefully and mops up some of the worst blood. "Yes, as much as any clerical order - well, any holy order, the unholy ones are usually busy withering people instead. I wouldn't be able to heal as well as a proper priest, but it would be nice just to be able to refresh myself a bit. And you too; those bruises don't look fun by any means."

He beholds the handkerchief, now pretty well bloodstained, and winces. "I... can probably get a laundry-mage to take care of this," he hazards. "Once we're out."

What an astoundingly bizarre answer in nearly all respects. Not only confident that his religion's faith healing is real, but also that everyone else's faith healing is equally real, and also with absolutely no expectation that anyone might possibly not think it was a real thing. 

(Any clerical - okay, that's got to be dialect mismatch, he cannot possibly mean that he is expecting to get magic powers from doing administrative paperwork - )

"Sure, I wouldn't turn down free magic healing." He fondly regards the handkerchief, which is loyally doing its job. "That'd be very kind of y- wait, a laundry mage? What on Earth is a - no, no, sorry, time-sensitive emergency, tell me later, lead on."

Jojo does lead the way, folding the bloodied handkerchief and putting it in a robe pocket. "I suppose where you're from magic isn't so common; I know many people come to the city and think they've got wizards doing laundry, are they mad? But it's so easy for a wizard to clean a load of clothes, and you don't have to be very much of a wizard at all to do it, so Neverwinter has a good number of people who can do a couple of magic tricks, and they handle the laundry for their neighbors and pick up some copper for it - the city actually subsidizes it some, just because it's nice to have people with that kind of magic around."

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."

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 -

- 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?"

He's in literally god-damned biblical Sodom. The city itself has been cursed with a horrible painful death that gets you if you aren't sufficiently piously optimistic about it not to be scared, or already divinely blessed, and especially if you try to run away, because how dare you. And for what? Building a beautiful oasis of human flourishing out of the ice? 

Oh, he hates that. He hates it. He hasn't done a cold-blooded murder(*) since the second Great War but this -- this is -- yeah, someone's going to die for it. If it's a half-dozen local gods, well, he hasn't sworn them any oaths, now has he. 

(Hob considers himself to be already forsworn of basically everything he's ever formally promised in front of a priest, but in 1856 in the middle of a drunk history debate in a bar with an antitheist friend, he'd said, if God's irreedemably evil what hope is there for the rest of us? I think He's trying to be good and as long as He keeps trying I will too, and he'd meant that one.) 

Well. No time like the present to get started on that. He's on a deadline. 

"Is there a known enemy that is probably to blame even if they're not publically taking credit, or is it just that it's an obviously hostile phenomenon? If it's the second thing are there candidate enemies?" 

(*) editor's note: extremely load-bearing adjective

"Neverwinter has enemies aplenty. An old favorite is Luskan, an unusually well-organized pirate haven to the north watched over by a circle of cutthroat archmagi. The question remains of how they could possibly do this, but it's less urgent right now than how we can fix it.

"As soon as the clerics' initiative failed, the city naturally sent for aid from every source we could. I personally was sent to the tower of Khelben 'Blackstaff' Arunsun, one of the most powerful wizards on the continent - the kind of man to whom laws of reality need not apply. He investigated the matter and concluded that we could create a cure, with some alchemical reagents whose donors had a chance to acclimate to the curse's magical influence. Those alchemical reagents are the hair of a dryad -" (gesture to Desyyra, who waves ironically) "- the feather of a cockatrice -" (gesture to the green chickenlizard) "- some spinal fluid from an intellect devourer -" (gesture at the horrid brain-thing) "- and the blood of a yuan-ti. The first three were more or less willing to cooperate; the yuan-ti, on the other hand, are generally hostile to anyone who isn't also a yuan-ti, and after efforts to negotiate with individual members of the species fell through, with the death toll mounting daily, we kidnapped one, with the intent of freeing her once the cure was complete. She did not appreciate this. However, we only had to keep her for a week."

She gestures to the goblin corpses. "Due to enemy action, we did not successfully keep her for a week. But her acclimation was nearly complete, and she will have no more luck fleeing the city than any other resident. If you can find where she has gone to ground, we may yet have our cure."

"Well that's a horrible way for magic to work." Sigh. "I am not... thrilled... about the prospect of kidnapping an arguably innocent person to do blood magic to her? I have found historically that every time someone explains to me in a very convincing manner why this time it's necessary and good to do some horrible thing, it turns out later that actually I am the worst." He is maybe not trying to stop doing that for maximally ethical reasons (it is admittedly mostly that he doesn't like being scolded in the middle of an otherwise successful dinner date like a child who hasn't learned to chew with his mouth closed) but he is trying to stop doing that. "That said I do understand that you're under a lot of constraints right now. Does she need to be hauled in unwilling and alive for this magic spell or can I just kill her and bring you a jar?" 

His understanding is that people often prefer death to being kidnapped by their enemies, women especially. He is not totally sure why, it is very difficult for him to imagine wanting anything less than dying, but it's their life. 

"I am not - my city is not - in a position to demand her in any particular state, unless you find her before sunset of this day, which is unlikely. If killing her is more in line with your code of conduct than delivering her to captivity, or if it has less chance of allowing her to escape again, do it. If you somehow convince her to donate her blood in exchange for her life and freedom, I will personally guarantee it. This is a matter of gravest urgency, and I will not dictate your methods."

Jojo speaks up, looking somewhat agonized. "Lady Aribeth," he stammers, "this- this isn't what a paladin is supposed to do. You can't just delegate sins."

"I know perfectly well that I will be responsible for any sins Robert commits," she says flatly. "If I must Fall to save my city, I will Fall."

Oh, that word definitely had a capital letter. 

Oh.

Oh no. 

Note to self, the unfamiliar word paladin in this language means angel.

That's. That's fine. 

Do not say 'if you can say that it's too late' -  

Do NOT SAY 'if it'll make you feel better we can do some more fun sins first, ease you into it', for fuck's sake, she is so small and so exhausted and so good, it would be a damn war crime to try to teach her to cheat at cards or something even though it would be really funny -  

"Uh, I don't know what a yuan-ti is," is what he lands on, instead of saying anything about the ethics situation because unholy fuck is he ever not qualified to counsel an angel regarding lesser evils. "How rubber forehead alien are we - sorry, idiom - are they obviously not human on sight?"

(Jojo is also visibly freaking out!)

"She has the scales of a snake all over her body, and her eyes are serpentine. She may be able to use illusions to hide this, but we caught her in the first place because she was not disguised thus; I'm not sure if this was a limitation on her abilities, or a philosophical objection to hiding her nature."

"So probably recognizable on cursory inspection but possibly not on sight from an appreciable distance, got it. Do we have any theories about where to start looking? Are there known tells for disguised yuan-ti, like common street foods they can't have? For example can they digest cheese or are they obligate carnivores -- or, hang on, does your civilization even have cheese or for that matter any other food commonly consumed by mammals? It's suddenly occurring to me that I have not actually met anyone of my own species here." 

"We have cheese. Also, I'm half human. Most of the communal races of Toril share the general shape of their diet; humans do enjoy some seasonings that most races find disgusting or toxic, but if you desperately want garlic and pepper stew, you can just find a human tavern. - I am getting badly distracted from the point. She's an obligate carnivore, and if she fails to disguise herself she'll be quite memorable, and if she does disguise herself she'll be visible to magic sight. We can give you something to track her, but it needs twelve hours to attune and it won't be perfectly reliable, just give you a compass heading."

A sensible person, he thinks, would at this time be drawing useful conclusions about how nephilim work in this world (he was under the impression they could not Fall, that being sort of a done deal?) but actually Hob is quite distracted from that question by the sharp flood of relief at the reassurance that human food exists here. For a moment there he could feel a very old fear yawning under his feet like a dark pit and he has to take a couple deep breaths to stop feeling like he's still about to be swallowed whole by it. It's fine, he's fine, he had plenty of breakfast this morning and he's not even hungry yet. 

Right. The point. 

"A compass heading does sound dramatically more useful than nothing and I'd appreciate it. Do I have to do something active to attune it, or could I for example turn it on and then start orienting myself to your street layout while it warms up? Also, is there a way to get 'magic sight', I don't have that." 

"I'll requisition you a pair of goggles of arcane sight with your basic equipment. They'll be worth more than some houses, so do try to return them afterwards. Unless you want them as the reward for your help, which we should probably negotiate."

"Extremely noted on the goggles. Short term all I need as compensation goes is enough money to eat and somewhere to sleep without getting rained on, neither of which I currently have as my house and bank accounts seem to be in a different," what's the term the reaper used, "plane? Medium term I am plausibly very interested in magic vision goggles but what I actually want is a way to go home. Under normal circumstances I'd be thrilled to solve the immediate problem and then spend several decades exploring your planet but I have an appointment in about six months that I really badly don't want to miss."

"I can get the Cloaktower mages on it, if you succeed. Until then obviously we'll house and feed you, or grant a line of credit that'll let you eat anywhere outside the Blacklake district, which is closed anyway. If you need anything else don't hesitate to-"

"I'm going with him," Jojo interrupts.

"Are you."

"If your honor depends on his, then I'll make sure he behaves honorably even if you think you can't afford to. I took an oath, just like you did. And I took it seriously, just like you did."

He seems to be done stammering; his voice is quiet, steady, and very intense.

"Great, thanks, I'll - "

Oh no, Jojo. He is going to make sure Hob behaves honorably, is he. ... No, let's be real, he probably actually is. Hob is in fact not going to do anything that displeases the painfully earnest tiny priest of the god of other people not being in pain unless he really has to.

"Can't promise I won't do anything in contravention of an oath I did not myself swear but I'd welcome your help navigating the city and if you'll give me a rundown of the rules you're following I'll try not to break any of them?"

"You don't need to conduct yourself as strictly as a paladin, but I will certainly warn you if you're doing anything that might be morally or ethically dangerous. And we did fight well as a team."

"We did at that. All right. What's the deal with the magic compass?" 

"I'll have it and the arcane goggles ready for you by sunup tomorrow. If you wish to spend the rest of the day familiarizing yourself with the city... however much you can, in its current condition... you certainly may. I will grant you a pass to be outfitted at the paladin armory at the Temple of Tyr, which can at least get you fitting armor and a sword that wasn't made by goblins, even if our stock of enchanted materiel is currently limited."

She also tosses him a small, heavy pouch. "For lunch and sundries. Jojo, I assume you'll go with him?"

"If he'll have me. I'm not going to insist on shadowing your every move, just, you know. The action."

Oh, goodness, armor. That's going to be a nostalgia trip and a half. He hasn't worn real armor since... hell, the sixteenth century? Fifteenth if you don't count ceremonial armor, which you shouldn't. 

"Excellent, thanks," he says, carefully stowing the pouch of coins in his jacket pocket. "I'll head thataway, and Jojo you are absolutely welcome. Honestly, follow me around to your heart's content, I don't know anybody else here yet and I get lonely easy." 

You'd think you would build up a tolerance, after six hundred years, but it turns out that, at least if you are Hob Gadling, you don't really. 

Aribeth collects the enchanted goblin who has been humming in the corner for the last several minutes, with Desyyra's assistance, and begins bundling him out the door to wherever his interrogation is to take place. "The work of the righteous never ends," she says. "Our hopes ride on you; try not to die."

Jojo will in fact follow Hob around like a duckling for as long as seems reasonable.

"Conveniently for you I am mediocre at many things but really good at not dying!" chirps Hob cheerfully, and then sets out to attempt to understand the layout of Neverwinter, starting with finding the temple armory.

The Academy is (was) physically located in the Beggar's Nest, technically, but it adjoins the City Core so that students don't have to walk through the slums to get to the tavern from class. The City Core contains lots of very large municipal-looking buildings, one of which Jojo points him to.

"It's not just the temple of Tyr," he mutters as they walk up the imposing marble steps. "I mean, it is officially. But there's shrines to a lot of gods. And an entire wing for Ilmater. I guess most of the paladins are Tyrran."

"Huh. Only most of them? Where I'm from there's only exactly two kinds, the ones attached to one particular God and the ones that used to be and have since Fallen." 

"...huh. How many gods do you have? Are most of them Evil, or Neutral? Not even Lawful Neutral, there's paladins of Kelemvor..."

"Depends who you ask. There's at least the one. There's a staggering number of other things that might be gods, they have the most amazing debates about it at theology conferences, I went to one once and it was fascinating. Even the people who go around insisting that their favorite caped vigilante who is definitely for sure the most good person on the planet is totally technically a god because they made one creepy shrine, or whatever, don't generally dispute the provenance of paladins. I'm inclined to figure there's just the one and the rest are something else, whether they're evil or not, but I'm not a theologian." 

Jojo boggles somewhat at the claim that there is "at least one" god.

"Well," he says eventually, "here there are many gods who can endow paladins. Ilmater is my favorite, partisan as I am; He made me a paladin, even though I was just a scrawny beastkin teenager with too little sense to run away from bandits, and I've honored Him since."

"He... made you... a..."

Please hold while Hob reboots his understanding of this vocabulary word. Paladin = Angel Saint?? 

Is Aribeth a ... half-saint ... or is she half human half something else and unrelatedly this planet's equivalent of Jehanne d'Arc. EIther option is wild, really. He's probably going to continue mentally filing her under 'teenage angel, sort of', though, on grounds that this is probably the closest guess on whatever it might possibly mean to be a half-saint. After all, this did not at any point fail him as a model for d'Arc, up to and including the point at which she disemboweled him, so it ought to work for Aribeth even if (here's hoping) he manages not to induce her to do that.

"Huh. Good to know. I was going to guess you were raised in a church and was kind of worried about it but that's actually just completely reasonable on your part and His." He considers this backstory and grins wryly. "... also, you know, bewildering metaphysics aside, sounds remarkably familiar? Unfortunately mine didn't introduce himself." 

Jojo winces and takes in a breath. "I, well, I was raised in a monastery of Tyr for a while, three years, I was ten when I managed to convince my father to let me leave home and train with them. But then, um, the monastery was raided by orcs. And the monks told me to flee back to my village. ...which had also been raided by the orcs, and burned. So I, um, headed for Neverwinter, after... burying as many as I could... and then I ran into some bandits on the road and I was. Tired of running. So I charged them. And I would have been killed if Ilmater hadn't given me His blessing. But. He did. You didn't ask about any of that, I'm, I'm sorry -"

Sniffling mouseboy. He retrieves the extremely bloody handkerchief from earlier and starts attempting facial triage.

Oh.

Opinion of Ilmater sharply revised to 'Hob's favorite local god' until further notice.

Hob pats Jojo sympathetically on the tiny furry shoulder, and what he was intending to do was say something contentlessly reassuring, but he's thinking about what it means for there to be things in the world that do that when brave teenagers throw themselves into unwinnable fights because they're too good not to, and what actually comes out of his mouth is "If my world had had gods like that my son might have lived past twenty."

... that was. Not really. A reasonable response.

"-Sorry. Um. I mean to say, I am really glad that yours does, so people like you can keep being in it. And anyway it's all right to not be perfectly composed, it seems like you've had a hell of a day and also a hell of a several years, yeah?"

Jojo gives him a weak and watery smile. "The three since I became a paladin were going pretty well until. Well. It's been the Hells of a month, at least. ...I'm sorry about your son."

He's led them, mostly on autopilot, to the supply room of the paladin barracks. The quartermaster looks between them with deep confusion and some alarm.

Right, why does this guy find him alarming then? Admittedly he is currently carrying a bloodstained goblin sword but everyone here is going around armed and they were literally invaded by goblins like an hour ago.

On reflection they do seem to have approximately medieval materials science here from what he's seen so far and he is wearing modern fabrics in a modern style and a lot of jewelry. He probably just looks like some rich asshole and that is kind of a weird type of guy to be visiting the armory immediately post-attack.

"Hello, sorry to bother you, I'm sure it's been a day," he says, offering the guy the pass he was given. "Lady Aribeth gave me this and told me I should ask you for armor and a better sword?"

The quartermaster squints, then turns to Jojo.

Jojo nods, still wiping his nose. "He's under my supervision."

"You are aware that he's -"

"Yes," Jojo says, sounding preemptively tired of the number of times people are going to ask him this. "I don't think he's a danger to us."

Quartermaster shrug. "What do you want, then? Plate, leather, chain? We've got good selection on swords, some decent axes and maces, bows and arrow..."

Oh. It's that again. Wow, he does not like this business of random people being able to detect his fundamental awfulness on sight. How is he ever supposed to build a useful reputation for being pleasant and trustworthy under these conditions?? Unfair. Well, no, completely and obviously fair, actually, but ugh.

Anyway. Right. Armor. "Great question. Been in the bad habit of fighting without armor for a while. Hmm... shirt of chain and as much plate on top as I can reasonably carry, which unfortunately," he gestures with cheerful self-deprecation at his general state of not being particularly large, "is not a lot. Let's say... gorget, boots, poleyns, and if I get shot in the face I deserved it." Not having visibility inconveniences Hob more frequently than dying and as a result Hob doesn't really like helmets even though objectively this totally does get him shot in the face an annoying amount. He definitely needs the steel-toed boots, though, he's wearing oxfords right now and while it's not the first time he's gotten in a scrap that way it is, in fact, not ideal.

"As for weapons..." He should pick up a bow if he's in back in the land of no guns, shouldn't he. He's had a great deal of practice with the damn things, if much of it legally mandated. Sigh. "Longbow, yeah. And an arming dagger and some kind of short polearm? Bill-guisarme by preference but I'll take anything about so long," he gestures slightly above his head, "with a hook and a spike."

The guy hands over a suitable swathe of chain and breastplate and associated accessories. "It's minimally enchanted, just enough to keep off rust and make it a bit more solid, the very basics."

Then a bow and a few quivers - "again, not much reason not to enchant it enough to keep away warping and termites and all that but don't count on it finding your target from across the battlefield for you. Ammunition's standard, enchanted arrows are for special occasions."

A dagger is handed over, then the quartermaster hesitates. "We're, ah... I'm not going to say we don't have polearms but they tend towards the glaives and warscythes - elegant, straightforward, deadly. The hooks and spikes of a guisarme are seen as... more complicated and, ah, showy than practical. I don't personally hold this opinion, but the fact of the matter is that I don't stock weapons the paladins don't want."

Ah yes. Of course. His favorite peasant weapon. Showy and impractical, that's the problem with it, and not that, as the man says himself, it is not elegant. Rich people are such a way (he says, in full awareness that he himself did have a bit of a Phase(TM)).

"....riiiiight. 'Course they are," he sighs, while he's putting on the armor. Magically enchanted not to rust, that he's excited about. Jacket off, light gambeson on over his modern shirt, chain shirt on, jacket back on, plate bits on top. God, he looks like he's about to go to a bloody rennfaire. He's not giving up his modern fabrics, though, so. "Glaive it is then, thanks." He can arguably competently use a scythe but he took off his own foot with one once and has disliked them since. "S'pose medium term I can probably find a blacksmith, any personal recommendations?"

"Shining Knight Arms and Armor," the quartermaster says, handing over a very shiny glaive and looking grateful not to have been called out. "They're down the hill a ways, and they can get you anything that's not too exotic - the forgemaster does solid work and his enchanter's reliable too."

"Cheers, I'll bring it back when I've got a replacement then. You need anything while we're here, Jojo, or are we good to go learn microgeography facts?"

"I fight unarmed," Jojo confirms. "Ilmater has blessed these hands."

The quartermaster frowns. "Will you at least take a cold-iron-shod quarterstaff. You can use it as a walking stick if you must."

Jojo shakes his head; this is obviously an old argument. "If I face a demon, I'll Smite it. If I face three in a row, I'll run and get someone more qualified. There's no point in giving me an expensive weapon I'll be tossing aside half the time."

"Fine," the quartermaster says reluctantly.

"Is that a going concern, demons? ... Am I allowed to have a cold iron weapon or are those only for paladins."

Hob is equipped to kill the kind of demon with which he is familiar (and in fact has done it unarmed in this outfit because somebody made it bloody illegal to carry knives six months ago) but it'd sure be easier with the proper tools.

The quartermaster nods. "The dagger's cold iron - ah, you're not used to the system, of course - the glaive's enchanted like the armor, no rust and a bit of an edge, but the dagger isn't, it's just cold iron so you've got something if a demon comes at your throat. Harder to enchant cold iron, but it works into a blade like anything else. So keep it polished and all."

"We are really very unlikely to encounter any demons inside city limits," Jojo says firmly.

"Ah! Brilliant. Will do." Hob grins wryly at Jojo. "It is also very unlikely, I am given to understand, to encounter skeletons in your school, and yet here we are."

"...well. Admittedly."

Jojo seems a bit pensive as they exit the stockroom.

Hell. That was probably kind of an alarming thing to say to the kid already experiencing a lot of upheaval in his life. "Sorry, I didn't mean to worry you. Sometimes it feels like madness comes in waves but if skeletons and demons are unrelated sorts of weird things to have happen the rarity of demons is probably the same it was yesterday. Which you'd know better than I."

"...it's not that, really. I'm just considering that I... can't go back. Even if they rebuild the Academy, I've outgrown it. I've been training since before my voice dropped, and in one day of real danger I've learned more than I had in these last three years. If I keep at it I'll be a real hero, like Aribeth. It's better than cooling my heels in school. But... it's a bit sad not to have the choice."

"Oh. Yeah. It's a big adjustment, isn't it, from self-defense in theory to someone actually trying to kill you. I'd like to say reassuringly that you get used to it but actually you're just right, training scenarios really don't ever feel the same again. I must say, though, I've seen a lot of young men meet real battle for the first time and you're handling the shock really well. When would you have left school normally, if this hadn't happened?"

"It probably would've been two more years. - it wasn't my first real battle. Those bandits, when I was thirteen, they would have killed me if I hadn't killed them first." He smiles weakly. "I think you're right, though. The training didn't feel the same after. I think I knew, somewhere in my head, I was just killing time."

"Ah, of course. Sorry, I -- " forgot the deeply personal and emotionally resonant thing Jojo told him half an hour ago? was thinking about Robyn dying in an unnecessary bar fight and not even a real battle and just didn't count it? deep in his heart of hearts never quite learned to sympathize with the victims of bandit attacks because he is a fundamentally awful person who lived mostly on the other side of that blade for four centuries and everyone on this fucking planet over the age of sixteen can see it like he's wearing a nametag -- "didn't... think about that. Um." Deep breath. "Well, you know, I tell my students sometimes, when they understandably complain about being made to sit through mandatory history classes, if you feel like you're not learning the thing you set out to, often that just means you're learning something else you didn't know you needed. Like how to stand up to a famous superhero when she does something you think is unethical, maybe."

Jojo laughs. "A super-hero. I like that. Lady Aribeth really is something more than just a paladin... you're not seeing her at her best. I think I stood up to her because if she weren't so afraid she'd want me to." He considers. "Well - not afraid, the more powerful paladins stop feeling afraid after a while. But I think feeling like they can't do anything to help feels almost the same, to them."

"I think a lot of people who seem like they stopped feeling afraid mostly just got better at not looking afraid because it's bad for morale. And I'm not judging her, of course, nobody's their best on a day like this. But I think either way it was very brave of you - I know churches like to encouragingly tell everyone it's the most simple and obvious thing in the world to just not be evil but something being the right thing to do doesn't always make it not a hard thing to do, you know?"

"Yeah." Jojo shivers a bit.

The temple visit concluded, where would Hob like to go? Neverwinter is his oyster.

It is a lovely city. Even the ambient choking corpsepyre smoke and strident doomsayers cannot quite disguise the fact that it is something he hasn't seen in a long time: a whole city in stone and brick and wood, with not hide nor hair of a car. (He loves cars, don't get him wrong, they're incredibly cool machines, almost as cool as planes, but they take up so much real estate.) Look at these gorgeous wide cobblestone throughways! And that great big bridge over the river with people walking across it! And that big tree right in the middle of the square! What a good tree!!

Hob sort of idles in circles around the fountain for a little while, gazing raptly and commenting somewhat inanely on various completely mundane features of his environment, getting a vague feel for cardinal directions relative to the temple, and then eventually, his mood substantially improved, says brightly to Jojo, "So if there's laundry wizards are there library wizards? I was hoping I might ask one if there's such a thing as a book preserving spell."

"Oh! The Cloaktower's near here and if anyone knew it'd be them, they're the mages' guild, we can pop in? And I can see about getting your handkerchief cleaned while we're at it, I'd almost forgotten."

"Excellent, do let's."

Cloaktower! It's a proper wizard's tower if ever there was one, architecturally improbable and terribly imposing, grand stained-glass windows studded with faceted spheres all up its sides. Jojo goes to knock on the grand doors, which of course open on their own before he can touch them, revealing a long hallway leading into a circular chamber, its walls lined with bookshelves.

A pointy-eared woman in robes stands reading a book by the room's entrance, occasionally taking flaming notes in the air with her finger.

Oh that's incredibly badass. And a good sign; if she's comfortable with the magic fire that close to the book the book is probably magically fireproof.

Hob sweeps a dramatic formal bow (with a six-foot polearm in hand, this gesture has quite a large footprint), and prays wizards care less if you're evil. "Good morning! I am very recently arrived in this lovely city and have come to seek the counsel of those wiser in the arts of magic than I, if I may trouble you for just a moment, madame."

The woman looks up and raises one sculpted eyebrow.

Then she looks at his diamond earring, and has an abrupt coughing fit. When she recovers, she marks her place and closes her book. "Of course, my good sir. I am Eltoora Sarptyl, and I imagine I know enough of the arcane to assist you."

That was ... a different unexpected kneejerk reaction to the sight of him ... which is ... probably ... better? Maybe??

Well, nothing for it, he'll understand these people eventually or he won't.

"A pleasure to meet you. Professor Robert Gadling, at your service," because he's not not taking the opportunity to introduce himself as a fellow academic to a real live wizard, even though he kinda stopped really inhabiting the role of Professor Rob sometime this morning when handed a sword. "Though I suppose," charming c'est la vie grin, "if I spend too long distinctly on a different plane from my university I shall be fired in absentia and cannot reasonably go around introducing myself as 'professor' anything. Ah, in any event, I have a book I would like to protect from the ravages of time. Is there a spell for that?"

Blink.

"Yes. If you would like it permanent you will need a moderate quantity of diamond dust - about two ounces, five thousand gold - but I can cast it for a two-week span here and now if you tell me where you're from and what you teach and why that jacket has a silk lining but not a fitting enchantment."

"Perfect, deal. I do not have any such quantity of diamond dust to hand but I'm sure I can get it eventually." He produces the Tales from his jacket pocket, and pats it fondly before handing it over. To Eltoora's eye, it is the sort of book that it's really rather odd doesn't already have such an enchantment: elaboratedly illuminated, currently as undamaged as though it was printed yesterday, and written in what appears to be very, very, very old Illuskan. "To answer both your first question and your third, I'm from a city called London, on the island of Britain, where we have, by what I understand of local standards, an extremely advanced textiles industry and extraordinarily little magic. I teach history, due to being an incorrigible optimist who thinks this might someday manage to help anyone not make the same mistakes over again."

Eltoora removes another book from her robe pocket and begins studying it intently. "Such is the lot of the historian," she remarks. "Optimism in spirit, as you can tell by their pessimism in practice. I'll be fifteen minutes preparing the spell. If you've another errand, you may leave the book or bring it back when you're done, as you wish. I can hold my end of a conversation while I prepare, though, so there's no need to flee for fear of boredom."

"Thank you! I'd love to stay and chat. I know this is sort of a large question but what's it like being a wizard? I've never met one."

She smiles into her spellbook. "It's like knowing that with fifteen minutes to prepare, you can do whatever you set your mind to - within certain arbitrary and ridiculous constraints. Like if you learn enough, you can see the way the universe is woven, and how to wriggle your fingers between the fibers to weave it to better suit you. It's like standing on the shoulders of ogres, and knowing that they're standing on giants, and below them dragons - and knowing that some upstart bastard gnome is going to stand on you, and wishing him the very best." She chuckles. "How's that? A large question, a poem instead of an answer."

"Oh, I love that, thank you. What sort of arbitrary and ridiculous constraints?"

"If you wish to kill someone with fire, ice, lightning, acid, sound so intense it liquefies the bones, raw arcane energy, or - for those who specialize in certain magics in which I do not dabble - the siphoning of their very essence, you are in luck. I can do it in dozens of ways, sequentially or all at once, to one great warrior or a hundred conscripts. However, if you wish to weave a set of curtains from a heap of cotton, you had best study well; that magic is of a kind with those that choke armies, or stride continents, or turn men to frogs."

"Wow. Okay. I suppose that if I say 'what, really, why' the answer will be 'for reasons you need an entire DPhil to understand'? - er, that's a roughly decade-sized academic qualification in my culture - "

(Which of course means he has several, but his first three runs through modern academia were Greek literature, astrophysics, and architecture, followed by his current stint in the history department, and he was planning to do economics next, having been having a surprising amount of fun doing finance since the advent of computers. Instead he's now kind of tempted, following Professor Rob's untimely and presumably lethal disappearance, to pick something that will make him less embarrassingly unqualified to share any of the wealth of modern technology in case this ever comes up again. The powered loom is a glory of human achievement and he absolutely does not even a little bit know how to build one.)

" - but sound so intense it liquefies the bones?" Do not say 'what's that feel like', absolutely do not say 'can I try'. "And this is just naturally somehow more straightforward using your magic than - well, okay, now that I'm saying it out loud I do see how it is inherently less complicated to make a man into a puddle than into a frog. Puddle's higher entropy, yeah?"

Eltoora's ears twitch violently.

"After I have finished preparing this spell," she says conversationally, "which should be rather shortly, I am going to put a translation spell on myself and make you say entropy again. Context makes me think I want to know what it means, and I suspect if you try to explain, we will run up against the very limits of our dialects' mutual intelligibility."

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."

??

???

???????

"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?"

"No. No, he's the local head of state."

"Ah. So... you are telling me that this is not just a large amount of money but specifically the kind of large amount of money that under most circumstances you cannot get from anyone except an actual government. Because it is used for very powerful highly-sought-after magic. Alarming. Um, are there other gemstones that have this or is it diamonds specifically?"

Various corundums, for example. Just. You know. Hypothetically.

"Diamonds, specifically, are extremely valuable. Other gemstones can be used in the crafting of magical items, and there are a few spells that use them, but diamonds can fuel resurrection spells, and if sufficiently large, reality-altering magic. Miracles. Those are the diamonds you would sell to Lord Nasher."

"Miracles?" Somewhat distressed wordless wincing noise. "Right. Terrifying. Okay. But just the diamonds. I will not panic about people also desperately wanting to steal all the other sentimental expensive objects I own and having unknown amounts of city-wrecking magic to attempt it with. ... I will try not to panic about it, anyway."

Talking to a blacksmith will probably help. In his experience blacksmiths tend to be relentlessly normal, reassuringly practical types of guy.

"If none of your other possessions are enchanted, I cannot think of any way for them to be as valuable as... that," Jojo ?consoles? him as they arrive at the Shining Knight.

For anyone keeping track at home, the other non-clothing objects Hob has on his person at this time (in addition to the book and the earring, and the handkerchief Jojo currently has) include:

1) A silver cloak pin in the shape of a flower, pinned to his jacket lapel (c. early 1900s; purchased at an estate sale because it looks like Eleanor's favorite one, it isn't actually the same one)

2) An armillary ring, all its markings worn off with age (c. early 1800s, a gift from a friend when he was in the Navy)

3) A quartz-crystal wristwatch with a date and time display which he's trying really hard not to fixate on the inexorable forward-ticking of (c. early 1980s, excitedly purchased at a department store)

4) His rosary, worn under his shirt as a necklace, made of rubies and gold and in Earth terms by far the most expensive thing he owns (c. mid-1700s, commissioned incredibly illegally)

5) A folded-up page of handwritten notes and the accompanying ballpoint pen (c. last week's department meeting)

6) Reading glasses that don't do anything because he's been pretending to have deteriorating vision (c. late 1980s, bought from a costume supply store along with a bunch of things for the student theatre group)

5) Professor Rob's wallet, containing a driving license (claims he was born in 1949), university ID, several hundred £, a shiny new debit card (introduced in England two years ago, he was very excited, but even more useless here than the paper money), a credit card, a London Public Library card, and several business cards with his work address, phone number, and office hours printed on them

He's really rather regretting not having such objects as his current favorite boot knife (hard to wear with oxfords, and also illegal now), or the pager he'd usually have been carrying in corporate finance mode instead of professor mode, or literally any money with actual metal in it, although that last one has fortunately been at least temporarily solved by Aribeth paying him for their quest. Or a gun, really, that'd be a great way to solve medieval fantasy bullshit, but he can't even actually judge himself for that one, it would have instantly shredded his identity if anyone had spotted Professor Rob with such a thing. He'd gotten away with the knife for ages claiming it was a gift from his father who was really into hunting, but nobody has deeply personal nostalgic attachments to their handguns. In any event, none of these objects, of course, are magic - wait. Hm. Does 'blessed' count. He will ask Jojo in a minute.

Anyway. Blacksmith.

"Good morning!" he says to whoever might be in the Shining Knight. "I hear you might be more willing than the temple to sell me my favorite inelegant spiky peasant weapons."

The large green man behind the counter belly-laughs. "Oh, you want summat that ain't pretty? Gave you that look, didn't they. Welcome to the Shining Knight, we got pretty and we got shiny and we got spiky shite that kills people, take your pick."

This is now the third distinct type of green humanoid he's met today. He is beginning to wonder if they are a single species with phases or something. This one's immediately his favorite, though.

Upon being presented with a familiar friendly working-class tone, Hob's accent code-switches hard from posh academic London RP to a smooth rhotic West Country. This may or may not be even slightly detectable to people with whom his dialect is already only barely mutually intelligible, but he's not really doing it on purpose.

He grins. "They sure did, yep. I don't necessarily mind pretty, y'understand, much respect for your craft and all that, but I love me a spiky shit that kills people. Let's see here..." He pokes through the available options cheerfully, narrating as he goes. "That's a little too heavy for me, blade's a little shorter than I like, fucked up my shoulder something awful with one of those one time, that's too tall for me - oh, here we go." Nice curved hook blade, stabby spear-end, backswing spike. Holding it in his hands feels like tromping hungover through the mud with long-dead friends whose faces he doesn't remember anymore, a distant warm cameraderie embedded somewhere deep in his spine. "Yeah, this is the bugger. How much?"

"Nice pick. Fourteen gold; if you want one enchanted like that glaive you've got it's more, but if you hand the glaive back in they'll give you a voucher and I can hash it out with 'em. There's a reason they sent you over to me, we've got ourselves a system. Oh, and if you want it more enchanted I can do you that but it'll take a day or two and some gold and some grist, rubies or dragon's blood or what have you. Or just gold, but it'd be a lot of gold."

"Will do, thanks mate." He agreeably counts fourteen coins out of the pouch Aribeth gave him and is delighted to observe that, yep, he has in fact been issued local currency in actual golden coins. Nostalgic. And they've got little dragons stamped on them! At this point his opinion on the local head of state is trending decidedly positive: the man apparently assigns government funding to practical things like laundry tax breaks and orderly quartermaster voucher systems, and doesn't put his own face on the currency. Gold star, Nasher, even if you're also secretly torturing people in your basement Hob has seen way worse than you. "Speaking of things best delegated away from paladins, you got any good bars around here?"

"Ha! Depends what you want with your ale, really. If It's skin, try the Moonstone Mask, they got dancers and you can go upstairs after if you like more skin than that. If you want some of the best pork pie I've had - and I'm an orc, we know pigs - try the Dragon's Belly. If you want even odds of a brawl so bad some bastard's tooth ends up in your drink, try the Trade of Blades. And, again, I'm an orc." He smiles very wide, highlighting the tusks protruding from his lower jaw, one of which is deeply chipped. "We know brawls." 

"Oh hell yeah, been ages since I had a good bar brawl." It got all culturally-frowned-upon, see. If somebody punches you and you hit him with a chair that's ''''unreasonable'''' ''''escalation'''' and if you start a fight you get kicked out instead of everyone joining in. It's bullshit frankly.

Then he glances at Jojo, who is being very patient.

" ... first I gotta be responsible 'cause of plagues being the worst. Real quick though, relevant to my quest to become even slightly oriented to this fuckin' place, did you just say you're an orc?" Under many circumstances he would qualify this question with a reminder that he is happy to be told to fuck off, but this seems like the type of guy who will cheerfully do that without prompting if he cares to and it would be kind of rude to imply he needs permission. "My home culture has a bunch of stories of those that're, you know, fictional, see, I was not previously aware any existed in real life, d'you know why your species is called that?"

The grin becomes slightly sardonic. "Orc born and raised, more born than raised. Did the stories say we eat bad little boys who don't listen to Mummy? Either way, we're called that 'cause it's easy to yell ORCS! while you're running for your life, or with an axe in your back. Call ourselves nothok."

"Oh, no, you're a metaphor for the trauma of generational war. The behave-yourself stories for kids are mostly about fairies and things under the bed with too many teeth." Bemused hum. "Maybe 'orc' just means 'guy with an axe, subtype we're being racist about it' in fifth century Anglo-Saxon or whatever the hell shared root language is making us be able to have a conversation at all." 

The blacksmith shrugs, a bit more at ease. "Trauma of generational war sounds about right. Not gonna say we don't kill you softskins. Well, not me personally. I just sell shite that kills softskins. And greenskins too. And maybe dragons, if you're good enough with it."

Jojo smiles brightly. "Thank you so much for your help, sir."

"Pike off," the smith says affectionately. "-whoops, forgot the customer voice. Thanks plenty for your custom, gentlemen. Now pike off."

Blacksmiths are such a delightful type of guy. He was so right to guess that he would find this interaction soothing. 

Okay. What is he supposed to be doing now? Orienting, right. He has a general sense of the city layout now, he thinks, sort of. He kind of wants to go get fantastically drunk at the recommended bar brawls tavern but that seems like it would solve at most one of his problems and create as many as several more. "How long are we expecting the calibrating the magic tracker thingy to take?" he asks Jojo. 

Jojo hums. "She said twelve hours... the Academy was attacked at six bells, though I didn't exactly have a candle to check the minute. And we can't possibly have taken more than half an hour to get to the stables. Call it sunrise tomorrow?"

Nod, nod. "Then probably the thing to do is check back in with the quartermaster for an enchantment voucher," what a phrase to unironically say in a sentence, "and then figure out where I'm supposed to sleep?" 

Return nod. "The voucher should be straightforward. I could probably take care of it on my own, if you want those drinks. And I know the Trade of Blades has rooms above the dining hall, though if you want less... energetic... lodgings, there's a lot of inns in the Core and very few of them are at capacity right now."

Right, because everyone is dying and it is possibly somehow his job to save them. Yeah he very badly needs a drink and a bar fight before bed wouldn't go amiss either. "I would really appreciate that, thank you. You've been enormously helpful." He will thus leave the paperwork situation in Jojo's capable little paws and go see about finding the Trade of Blades. 

Jojo's capable little paws relieve him of his polearms and set off towards the temple with both in tow. (The effect is slightly comical; Jojo is significantly smaller than an adult human. But he bears up under them without seeming too encumbered.)

The Trade of Blades is in the lower portion of the Core, the same section that had the blacksmith; it seems like the more commercial and less Very Important part of the district. It's a decent walk, through some well-maintained streets and a handful of somewhat shady alleys.

In one such alley, a child collides with him at some speed, then tumbles to the cobbles behind him and clings to his leg. "Sir, you - you have to help! They'll kill me, they're going to kill me!"

Ah, well, that is obviously a lie (dude is sizing him up as a pickpocket mark, the signs of which are rather the same on every planet), but Hob has been that desperate for money to feed himself before, he's not judging a child about it. Even or perhaps especially if he is about to learn about yet another species of alien, which he well might be, this doesn't quite look like a human child. 

His tone is sympathetic but somewhat unimpressed. "Who's 'they'?" 

A male orc and a female something-with-pointy-ears, it looks like; the orc is carrying an axe, the woman a pair of knives. They stroll into the alley, breathing and moving like they haven't been chasing that energetically.

"Them," the child yelps, trying to hide more (or possibly just checking for a boot stash). "They said I hadn't - paid my dues -"

     "You haven't," the woman says, sounding utterly bored. "And you've been breaking plenty of other rules besides, haven't you? Guildfather wants you alive; says he's got a lesson to teach you, about how far being cute gets you. But I don't think he'll mind too badly if you try to resist."

Unfortunately for Tomi, Hob has nothing hidden in these boots because he got them brand new like two hours ago.

He is, however, now looking weirdly delighted, for an apparently unarmed man who's just been ambushed by a traditional law-vs-good moral dilemma in an alleyway. It has been so long since he got within spitting distance of organized crime. He's been being all respectable, you see. And here it is just walking around in the street, threatening children, because there is no such thing on this planet as CCTV. Hob has been given a gift. 

"We're violently collecting dues from the street urchins now?" he says, in a tone of mild affront. "Your guildfather hasn't got more fun things to do, like, I dunno, tax fraud?" 

     "He can do lots of stuff," the orc comments.

          The pointy woman balances her dagger on one fingertip, apparently for no better reason than that she can. "You sound like you're going to be exhausting about this. Should we skip to the part where we stab each other?"

The urchin whimpers.

He does still have that knife the quartermaster issued him, tucked into his belt under his jacket, so stabbing each other is indeed on the table. He retrieves it, shrugs, and taps the blade idly against the side of his leg. Sometimes if you are confidently relaxed enough, and also armed, this causes people to realize that actually they do not want this fight after all. 

"I was sort of hoping to do the drinking and the fighting tonight in the other order, but sure, if you want." 

By way of response, Pointy throws her knife at him.

The urchin makes himself scarce as the very sharp blade introduces itself to Hob's flesh, lodging for the moment in his thigh. The orc takes the opportunity to barrel towards him, axe raised high.

Aw, he liked these pants. But hey, bright side, free knife. He removes it from his thigh (*) and tosses it vaguely, hilt-first, in the kid's direction, just in case he has any idea how to use it and the knife lady goes for him while Hob is moderately distracted. 

Then he performs standard strategy #1 for applying knives to guys taller than him with weapons the size of his entire body who understandably believe that they can kill him faster than he can do anything about it: feint like he's about to try to get into stab range directly through the axe path, and then juke sideways and go for the armpit. If he's unlucky that is not an instant kill but if he's really lucky this is one of those guys who has never had to find out what happens if your first shot with the big heavy weapon misses, those tend to lean their whole body forward and down into the swing in a way that leaves their whole back and the back of their head exposed. 

(*) Context note that he's not consciously thinking through right now because this is just habit at this point: Normal people have to care about accelerating blood loss when they do this sort of thing, but adrenaline will usually keep him moving long enough to finish a fight, apply objectively inadequate first aid, lay down for a minute or two to be definitely just taking a breather which involves no being dead whatsoever, and then pretend it was just a minor nonlethal scrape the whole time. It takes Hob's immortal body a while to fix, like, complicated things that are wrong with it, but 'dont worry guys, I found more blood' is apparently not complicated. 

This is totally that kind of guy! His axe actually shatters one of the cobblestones as it comes down, and lodges in the mortar - not irretrievably, but it'll take him a moment to pry it loose. He roars at the pain of the stab, lets go of the axe and tries to swat Hob like a gnat.

The kid dodges the knife's hilt, clearly angling for an escape past Pointy Lady. She sees it coming, and readies for an opportune attack -

and then realizes, too late, that he is absolutely not trying to escape. He flicks out his own blades, curved and well-maintained with a deliberate-looking notch above the hilts. She tries to cut him open, and his knife catches hers in that notch and twists it out of her hand, and the other opens her inner thigh, and the blood doesn't even spray, it's just falling out of her like the contents of an upturned bucket.

A nicer person would probably attempt to stab to disable at this point and start in on the 'have you considered not working for the mob' lecture. Hob is not really a nice person; he ducks the unarmed strike and goes straight for the back-of-the-neck shot. 

Then his peripheral helpfully informs him that the kid is not only competent to use a knife but has his own and just did a fairly impressive murder with them. The child soldier situation on this planet is even more dire than he thought, jeez.

Does he need to take more combat actions? The kid's not going to try to stab him next, right? He's helping! 

Nah! Kid wipes off his khukuri on Pointy's shirt as she collapses and nods to Hob while he executes his foe.

"How'd you want to divvy up their coinpurses and sundries?" he asks. "Ah, and thanks. M'name's Tomi, Tomi Undergallows. There's some as call me Grin. Me bein' such a fun guy."

"Fascinating to meet you, Tomi. I'm Robert Gadling, Hob to my friends." Shoot, he forgot to tell Jojo that second part, kid's still calling him Robert because he introduced himself while still half inhabiting the persona of Professor Rob. Note to self. Anyway. "Glad to help. I was going to ask if you needed any more help getting out of the, uh, child soldier mafia situation but it seems like actually you have that well in hand. I am ostensibly employed by the government at this time and should not start in on the fencing stolen goods, how's about I'll take like thirty percent but all in coin and you can have the rest?" 

... if Tomi can even lift that axe. Maybe he has some sort of shenanigan for that in the same place he was keeping the fancy knives, Hob is not at this point going to assume. 

"Mm... lemme work out what they got on 'em."

Tomi sifts through the possessions of his erstwhile assailants with practiced efficiency. "That's nice... that's fine... Thumbs'll take that..."

Hob may, just barely, see something sparkle as it slips into Tomi's pocket. "That sounds good, then. I'm looking at fifty gil off the fenceables if I get lucky, they've got... twenty-five, mostly copper, in cash... gah, I hate fractions."

Ah, tiny thieves. They are so predictably a way. "You counting that thing you just palmed, there, friend?" Polite eyebrow-raise. 

"Good eye," Tomi grumbles, retrieving it. It's an emerald, well-cut and relatively clear, maybe a carat or two. "I'll need this bugger evaluated, s'gonna be days before I even know what I'll get for it."

Faint whistle. (Looks to be worth at least a thousand pounds, maybe several, but-)

"Be worth a lot where I'm from but I don't know the local currency and also it recently came to my attention that sometimes shiny rocks are magic. Tell you what, cash now, rest of the loot's yours, and I'm going to trust you to come find me in a couple days with my share of the value of that minus cost of appraisal. Probably can't be bothered to go looking for you if you just run off with it, I won't judge you that much if you do," who among us has not ever promised somebody a lot of money and then skipped town with it, amirite, "but you seem like a smart kid who'd like to have friends, hm?" 

Tomi breaks down into gasping laughter.

"Fuck, shit, I'm sorry - what am I apologizing to you for, I almost got away with - ah, Sheela's tits, you're like if Mask did paladins! You're a smart kid! Alright, scam's over, I'd just feel bad. Come to the Trade with me, I'll buy you a shot of Potted Priest for your leg and we can talk about the stone like grown-ups."

Blink blink blink. 

" .... ah. Why does this place have so many tiny aliens, fuck, I totally did notice you were not human and just assumed your species is generally human-sized, met plenty've pickpocket kids who know their way around a knife. 'Preciate the clarification, I'd've probably immediately gone and offended the next one I met of whatever you are. Sure, I was going there anyway." 

It's going to take him a minute to realize that obviously those other guys knew Tomi isn't a child and were possibly, given this, somewhat more justified in their behavior toward him than this assumption made them look. Honestly only a little, though. Far be it from him to judge any individual happening to step outside the law for reasons, but he's really not a fan of organizations playing the 'you did one (1) crime so now you are permanently stuck on Team Crimes, sucks to be you forever' game. Governments do enough of that on their own. 

"Also, who or what is 'Mask' as a proper noun?" 

"God of Thieves. Couple'a sidelines in murder and spycraft, you know how it goes, but he was a thief first. I'm none too faithful, but that's different from not burning him an offering once in a while, yeah?"

Tomi leads the way out of the alley and through the streets. Those little legs move fast.

Follow follow. "Ah, 'course. Been known to light a candle or two to Saint Jude myself. ...That's my homeland's, ah, god of otherwise lost causes, very popular among folks who are up to things most of 'em frown upon, you know." 

He follows Tomi for several blocks before he realizes that he is not, in fact, pretending to not be in very much pain from his leg injury as he would normally expect to be doing right now. He's actually just not really in a lot of pain, as though it were really a fairly minor cut. That's weird, it felt like a pretty solid stab, normally the sort of thing that potentially kills normal non-immortal humans. This is atypical behavior for his physiology and therefore probably not actually something he is doing. 

"....stupid question, does your, uh, crime organization hand out magic knives of nonlethality or something?" 

"What, mercy daggers? I've seen 'em around, but that pin of hers was pig iron, you can tell by how she threw it at you."

Con...cern...ing...

"Huh.  Well, good, I woulda felt a little bad if she was actively trying to not kill me."

"And I woulda felt bad not picking it up. A mercy dagger'll net you something like six thou, and I've got expenses. Plus it'd mean she was riskier business than she really was, if she had that kind of kit."

Right. It's been a minute since he lived in a world where personal puissance quite so reliably tracked wealth. "Sensible. So I hear the Trade is where to go for a bar fight, you about that sort of thing or just like their drinks?" 

"Well, no, but the fights are 'cause it's where the adventurers hang out. If you're handy with a blade or an axe or a spell, you can sit and wait for somebody to come in who needs the help of someone of that kidney. And you'd expect there to be less of that with the plague leaving corpsepyres on every corner, but actually business is booming. Which means lots of flush heroes lookin' for a place to spend their jink... or, y'know, misplace it." Tomi hop-skips over a puddle with at best mildly restrained glee.

"Ah. Well, I am not myself in the market for a sidekick," seeing as Jojo seems to have enthusiastically assigned himself that job, "and if the bar fight clientele are mostly heroes it's possible I should instead not try to provoke any -- bugger, nevermind, the ship has really quite sailed on passing as a harmless rich academic around here, hasn't it. Guess we'll see if anybody thinks my face looks punchable enough to neglect to keep an eye on you." 

Tomi cackles. "Harmless rich academics, aye, they've all gone mad over breastplates and stabbin' axemen this year... I ain't lookin' for an employer, anyway, I've got a temporary contract drawn up with a couple'a charming ladies and their axeman, we start in on it in the morning."

"Oh, nice. I apologize for implying earlier that you might be bereft of the ability to make friends." It's fascinating how the culture of mercenaries is almost but not quite familiar. It's probably the magic.  

Wobbly so-so hand gesture. "I make friends like anything. But, ah... some people, it has the opposite effect. Knives, axes, so on."

Snort. "Well, yeah. Can't win 'em all. Had a guy actually storm out of a bar on me once because he was so offended by the very concept of friendship, some people are just," vague gesture, "impossible." 

"En't that the truth," Tomi agrees.

The Trade of Blades has a sign above the door. The sign has two actual swords bolted to it, with a stein dangling between them. Tomi makes a completely impossible vertical leap to slap the stein on his way in, ringing it like a bell. A few of the patrons inside clap.

Hob looks.... up. 

He blinks. He looks back down at his new friend, who continues to be like three feet tall. 

...Okay.

"Local tradition?" he says interestedly, instead of asking how the entire fuck, since the answer to the latter is presumably 'magic' and if he gets bogged down asking questions about how magic works again, without Jojo here to remind him he's on something resembling a timetable, he'll never get anything else done. 

"Eh, more just a me thing. Tallfolk teenagers like slappin' doorframes, and I thought it looked like fun when I was a shortarse teenager, and I eventually picked up a Ring of Jumping for unrelated reasons and thought hang on a tic... and it is fun."

"A ring... of... jumping," he repeats, helplessly, because Tomi just said that like it was a normal thing to say and a what. You what. "Uh, understandable? ... how about that drink, before I learn yet more bizarre facts about how physics works here." 

"Sure, sure."

They approach the bar. Tomi leaps a more reasonable distance and lands on a barstool. "Oi, Garve! Humie needs a shot of Potted Priest and a chaser, and get me a Calim Bastard!"

     "Show me the money first, y'little shite," rumbles the large grey woman behind the bar.

"You have no charity in your heart," Tomi complains, fishing out his coinpurse and offering up a few gold dragons.

     She squints at them, bites one gently, and dips it in a bowl of something she keeps under the counter before nodding grimly. "Potted Priest, chaser, Calim Bastard." She produces, first, a clay jar sealed with beeswax; second, a mug of dark ale; and, third, a hollowed-out chunk of succulent which she fills with hot cream and eye-watering liquor before shaking some warming spices on top. Then she lays them out, opening the beeswax with a beltknife.

"Thankee ma'am," Tomi chirps.

New thing to try!! 

Tastes like warmth and home and--

?????? less ???? bleeding ??????

Bewildered glance from healed leg to glass. "Is it supposed to do that?"

Tomi squints over his cactusmug. "S'why I got you one, yeah? Healing potion and whiskey and a lot of honey, that's what goes in a Potted Priest."

Healing potion. Not just an invisible medicinal antibiotic or a gentle painkilling herbal tea but an actual honest to god fast-acting healing potion. Just casually served at a bar, for a friend you just met to buy for you with a mug of perfectly normal-smelling ale. 

"... don't have that at home," he settles on, still staring at the unbroken skin that was a lethal injury ten minutes ago. Or wait. That should have been a lethal injury and unrelatedly (??) wasn't. Do they just have this stuff in the air. 

"Ech. So if you're strong enough to get up when somebody spills half your guts but you don't have a healer handy, you... what, just lie in bed for months wishin' they got you in the neck?" Tomi shivers.

"Well I've never wished anything of the sort but I guess in general yes. We have whole institutions dedicated to the process of spending six months recovering from breaking your ankle or whatever." 

Squint.

"...no, that don't make sense. If you've got institutions for it, they'd have healers in 'em. Where the Hells're you from?"

"'Course they've got healers." This is not the usual nomenclature but it's not like it's unclear. "Every one of 'em'd probably do murder for a gallon of this," he's very cheerfully still drinking it between breaths, "except for how I think they specifically swear an oath of not doing that. Uh, my limited understanding is that somebody is going to have to do a research project to send me home, is how far away I'm from?" 

"When I say healer I mean somebody who brews a gallon of that on her weekends, not some two-copper herbalist. D'you actually know what magic is? 'Cause I've known enough wizards to know I don't know much, but I've known enough normal people to know you know less'n they do."

"Well the lady in the Cloaktower seemed to think I knew things even she didn't, I think she'd've tried to pin me to a corkboard like an interesting bug if she thought Aribeth would let her, but like, also, no? In my dialect magic just means - you don't know how it does that. Used to mean more things but we keep getting better at understanding how things do stuff." Probably whoever the current Constantine is would have lethal opinions on the inadequacy of this definition but he is not qualified to produce a better one. 

Tomi finishes his drink.

"I'm not qualified for this shite," he says wonderingly.

"I am," says a gentleman approximately his height holding a tall glass of iced water, who appears to have levitated his barstool into closer proximity. "My apologies; I overheard some of your conversation, which inspired me to deliberately eavesdrop on the rest."

"...who're you?"

"My name is Boddynock Glinckle," the tiny knobbly man reports. "An arcane practitioner hailing from the isle of Lantan -"

"En't they the ones with the wacky clockwork?" Tomi interrupts. "Thought they didn't like magic."

Mr. Glinckle frowns. "Well, we try not to rely on it. But we don't frown on it, no - and I happen to have an inborn talent, which made it to my comparative advantage to specialize thus."

"Tell me about it, I haven't been qualified for anything I've done in the last--"

Oh. New alien.

Blink blink blink. 

"Erm, sorry if this is horribly rude," he says, when they're done with that bizarre and fascinating exchange, "but I'm so curious now and if you've been eavesdropping in purpose I think I'm entitled to at least one dumb question, are you two the same species?" 

"I am a gnome," says the apparent gnome. "He is a halfling. His people are believed to be a magically influenced offshoot of humanity, whereas mine are either descended from, or were formed from living stone in a fashion similar to, the dwarves. Depending who you ask."

Tomi looks like he's not sure whether to be offended. "Who's goin' around believin' things about the origins of halflings?" he asks suspiciously.

"The Lantanese, mostly. It's not just clockwork."

He was under the impression dwarves were also a type of human. Probably they are a different thing here. Wait did he just say formed from living stone. That sounds like a basically normal kind of creation myth but it's kind of weird in a sentence right next to a claim about evolutionary speciation??

".... Right. Erm. Robert Gadling, pleased to meet you I think. What d'you suppose magic is, then?" 

"That is an excellent question. I can give you any of several answers, individually or sequentially, and I will probably do it sequentially, because it is so rare that one has a captive audience to listen to one's explanation of a fundamental law of reality."

He conjures up a translucent illusory slate behind his head, along with a translucent illusory piece of chalk. "The answer given by a peasant might match your own, in some ways: magic is when someone does something impossible. This is an appealingly straightforward definition; unfortunately, it holds up poorly to scrutiny. As a facile example, according to all laws of mechanical aviation known to the gnomish people, there is no way a dragon should be able to fly without magic. Empirically, however, they do. Put a dragon in an anti-magic field, and it will fly, even though its wings should not be able to lift its towering bulk off the ground. Dragons do not care what we think should be possible, and neither does magic."

The slate gains the note Magic is not possible, but not all impossible things are magic.

"There is also the swordsman's definition: Magic is what my party's wizard and cleric do. Each day, a wizard can hang a given number of spellforms within the structure of his own mind, complete but for the final touch, and throughout the day, as the need arises, he finishes one and casts it out into the world. Each consumes reserves of arcane, physical, and mental energy such that until he has slept a full eight hours - or, in an elf's case, meditated for four - no more spellforms can be constructed after his allotment has been met. In the case of a cleric, this process is mimicked by connection to the wellspring of her god, which imparts spells all at once, to be cast as needed - at dawn, for holy gods, or dusk, for unholy, or an idiosyncratic choice of those thresholds for the morally neutral. This definition is philosophically uninteresting, but I believe it may be the most relevant to your personal understanding."

Note: Magic is discrete.

"The Illuskan, Imaskari, and Netherese definitions vary only -"

Tomi slaps a hand over the gnome's mouth. "Nah, nah-ah-ah. I've worked with enough wizards - if you mention Illusk, Imaskar, and Netheril in the same sentence, stop talkin' until you remember you're talkin' to people, not yourself."

Boddynock frowns. Around Tomi's hand, he manages to enunciate "M-- --p--l--g----s."

Tomi has every right to be obviously correct that Hob should not possibly have heard of any of those places but in fact he has literally today read several books that frequently said things like in the geographic region once controlled by the Imaskari Empire and somewhat north of the borders originally established by the Netherese city state that it was once a colony of and so forth. And then immediately went and talked to Eltoora Sharptyl. 

"S'alright, that bit made sense. Actually wondering more about the part where you mentioned elves? Who only need four hours of sleep a night? And haven't been murdered to the last by frothingly envious neighbors?" The books had mentioned the definitely still extant polities therecomposed, but not this particular detail of their physiology. "Otherwise that sounds... reasonable? Probably wizards back home also have a limited number of magic calories they can spend a day, and stands to reason if you have a lot of wizards you'd get better at quantifying the limits." 

He's now imagining Jack Constantine carefully recording his magic calorie expenditures in a pocket logbook like seventeenth century MyFitnessPal and this is extremely funny, especially now he's finished his magic drink and is working on the ale. 

Boddynock carefully removes Tomi's hand from his face. "Elves are among the communal races. They are biologically incapable of sleep as we understand it, but require four hours of a meditative state known as the 'trance' if they wish to cast spells, during which they are aware of their surroundings but cannot take physical action without disrupting their trance and ruining the effects. I do not envy them this; they are psychologically suited to sitting perfectly still for four hours of full consciousness, whereas I would go insane. Am I correct in assuming that back home, your wizards are... not a major fixture of society? There are, perhaps, a few towers dotting the countryside where they conduct their magical research, and occasionally a clash between two magi will rain brimstone over a city... but, usually, you get by through other means?"

Well, you know, brimstone, kryptonite lasers, exploding confetti, very small radioactive mice... 

"Yeah, you've about got it. Couple big famous examples, not so much with the friendly neighborhood laundry wizards. Our, ah, clockworks and the like have gotten very advanced to fill most of the gaps, although embarrassingly I am quite unqualified to explain basically anything on the topic. So-" he contemplates Boddyknock's entire lecture, which he did get most of although wow that was a lot of unfamiliar words very fast, "you said holy and unholy like those are distinct observable qualities things can have? That's also true at home but I get the sense the divine heirarchy situation is a bit different and I assume if I asked the religious folks they would say stuff about the inherent moral nature of whatever and not tell me anything about how it works." And possibly even the ones who might in fact know how it works would refuse to tell him but he's not going to bring this up when neither Tomi nor Boddyknock has thus far said anything about his evil (unholy?) aura.

(He's not sure this isn't because they just don't care, but it's tentatively extremely reassuring news if it's that they actually can't see it and it's just Aribeth and... some unknown subset of her people but not actually all adults. The quartermaster could see it too, so it's not just Aribeth. But supposedly Aribeth's divine power is because she is a paladin, and Jojo is that too and he doesn't seem to have been able to. It's probably not that it's a racial trait of elves or Sharptyl would also have noticed - well, actually she might just have been distracted by everything else about him, maybe it's elves. Or maybe with so much magic lying around it's that the power is located somehow in the political office, Aribeth can detect evil because she's the Seneschal, and the quartermaster is... her deputy...?? That seems less likely than him being some amount elf, Hob is tentatively guessing it's that.) 

"This is a known tendency of clerics," Boddynock says drily. "Holy deities, such as Tyr the Evenhanded, Ilmater the Broken, or Chauntea the Earthmother, are... generally prosocial. They may disagree on the ideal means of making the world a better place for the most people, or even the definition of better, but they agree that this is the thing to strive for. Not coincidentally, many of the most comprehensible gods, especially those who ascended to their rank, are holy - or Good, as one may put it. Evil, or unholy, deities, are less likely to be the same fundamental kind of entity as mortals, because they terminally value something inimical to us. A man may steal to feed himself, and kill if caught -"

Tomi looks very innocent.

" - but it is a very rare man who believes, in his heart of hearts, that murder is the apex of beauty, that the world would be incomplete without it. This opinion is less rare in unholy gods and their servants. And, as far as the perceptible auras of mortals, they are based on the alignment of a mortal to the poles of Good, Evil, Law, or Chaos, less philosophically than consequentially. One who wishes Toril to be as Celestia will not find himself there, if his method involves flaying orphans."

"Eurgh, I should hope that's rare. Murder is the apex of beauty, fuck right off, it's the worst thing in the world." (He says this with absolute sincerity and no apparent dissonance regarding the fact that he personally committed a murder like twenty minutes ago.) "Right, so when you say consequentially.... this fellow Ilmater, say, he's holy because he consistently tries to do good and succeeds, or is the 'and succeeds' part only necessary if you're mortal?" Does he count as mortal. "Does that do something or is it just-- like having ultraviolet stripes?"   

"Ilmater is holy because Ilmater is holy; barring absolute catastrophe, he will remain thus as long as he exists, which may be forever. His followers are good because they try to do good; succeeding is, of course, better. I am told that I have an axiomatic but not a holy aura, and were I particularly inclined to change this, I would not begin with desperate acts of heroism, but rather, with a measured and considered series of charitable acts. And, no, alignment means little to the majority of the population - paladins et cetera excluded - until they near death, as it can determine one's placement in the afterlives."

"Ah." 

Next comment delayed slightly by staring into space contemplating his deeply complicated relationship with the concept of divinities being immune to the consequences of their actions unless they are specifically the Devil. 

"And the paladins are paladins, right. You're not inclined to try to get a holy approved-ethics soul stamp? Why not? I'd think most people would, if they knew it was possible, not want to go to Hell. Not judging, you understand, just curious." 

"I am certainly not going to Hell," Boddynock sniffs. "But, mm. As a fairly devout worshipper of Garl Glittergold, it is unlikely the question would even come up unless I offended him so direly as to be denied his divine realm after my passing; a god's claim can reach across one aligned border, or two in extremis. And even if I were sorted manually, as it were, the Seven Heavens of Celestia have always seemed very... intense. I am fonder of the Peaceable Kingdoms of Arcadia, which are more on the axiomatic than holy side of the scale."

The what. 

"...the what?" 

"Seven Heavens? Peaceable Kingdoms? They're two of the seventeen Outer Planes of the Great Wheel, which contain the divine realms of the gods and the more general afterlives for more casual worshippers. Would you like me to list them, because I doubt it will help, but I certainly can."

"The seven Heavens I am familiar with. Never heard of there being more than those and the nine Hells, though, as far as afterlives? My first guess for counting seventeen would have been those sixteen and Limbo and now I am curious what the rest could possibly be, yeah. Faerieland? Valhalla? I feel like if you start counting all of those sorts of thing you end up with rather more than seventeen. I probably couldn't list them all myself, every time I talk to an occultist I learn of yet another place that only sort of exists." 
 

Boddynock conjures up an illusion of a sphere with a broad accretion-disc around it. The arrangement spins for a moment, then he zooms in on the sphere and cuts it in half, revealing two distinct layers. "We are here," he says, un-bisecting the central sphere, which is Space. "Not literally in the middle, but: everything you can get to by walking, flying, or teleportation is in this part, so it doesn't matter much. We call it the Prime Material. It is coterminous with the Shadow Plane, which has little enough impact on you and your activities that you may happily pretend it does not exist."

Outside this sphere, there is a shimmering veil. "The Ethereal Plane. Also irrelevant to your interests." Outside that sphere, there's a chaotic whirl of elements, which he re-forms and expands; one pole is light, the other dark; in between, the four classical elements battle for dominance, with patches of ice or black glass or steam forming and melting away. "The Inner Planes. Air, Earth, Water, Fire, Positive and Negative energy, and the paraelemental and quasielemental planes developed therefrom. I am merely providing basic context, you understand. These, too, are irrelevant."

Then he vanishes the sphere of Material-Ethereal-Inner, returning to the disc and revealing a spire in its center that should definitely have come out the top of the sphere. "These are the Outer Planes. -this is, of course, a three-dimensional representation of a concept inexpressible in any number of dimensions comprehensible to the unaugmented humanoid mind. The Great Wheel does not look like this. Anyway."

He taps the spire. "This is the great tower-city of Sigil. It is not, technically, an outer plane, for reasons that amount to it isn't. It has a population of two point five billion. It is ruled by the Lady of Pain, on whom I shall say no more except that she maintains strict neutrality on very nearly everything." The disc. "These are the Outlands, which are, equally technically, an outer plane. They contain the divine realms of the neutral gods, and the afterlives of those with no character to speak of."

Then, he stands the disc on its side like a clock face. Starting at nine-o'clock and going clockwise:

"The Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. Perfect Order. A place for everything, everything in its place, a vast clockwork rotating endlessly in self-admiration."

"The Peacable Kingdoms of Arcadia. Order tinged with Good. Fields of perfect flowers each alike, and orchards of unblemished fruit in forever-sunset."

"The Seven Heavens of Mount Celestia. Axiomatic Good. A constant pursuit of perfection, the literal ascent of the infinite mountain parallelling the ceaseless process of improving the world."

"The Twin Paradises of Bytopia. Good, informed by Law. Rich land and untainted wilderness, demanding persistence and hard work but rewarding it amply."

"The Blessed Fields of Elysium. Unalloyed Good. Alabaster halls and twilit forests, all-loving, all-redeeming, welcoming love and beauty in all their forms."

"The Happy Hunting Grounds of the Beastlands. Good, approaching Chaos. A great jungle where the beasts are wiser than any man; benevolent, but loving best those who need to be free."

"The Olympian Glades of Arborea. Chaotic Good. A storyland of unrivaled passions and indulgence."

"The Heroic Domains of Ysgard. Chaos, with a holy patina. A land of glorious battle and revelry, never lacking a good cause to fight for."

"The Ever-Shifting Madness of Limbo. Chaos and nothing but. Incomprehensible phantasmagoria, from which anything can be wrought, in which nothing can last longer than a breath."

"The Windswept Depths of Pandemonium. Chaos, a shade darker. Iron sand, shrieking winds and clashing steel, amplified into all-consuming madness."

"The Infinite Pit of the Abyss. Chaotic Evil. A vile font, no two layers alike, spewing demons without number into its own meat-grinder battles and over whatever else it can reach."

"The Torturous Depths of Carceri. Evil, touched by Chaos. A trillion trillion little realms, one for each evil that can be named and a thousand more for the ones that cannot."

"The Gray Waste of Hades. Purest Evil. An endless, ashen expanse of self-perpetuating ruin, sucking all that is good and joyous from those within."

"The Bleak Eternity of Gehenna. Evil, bound by Law. Unclimbable slopes of ash and molten stone, tormenting its victims with the futile hope of ascent and stability."

"The Nine Hells of Baator. Axiomatic Evil. The homes of the devils, who delight more than anything in treachery and in perverting institutions and individuals against themselves and those they love."

"And the Endless Battlefield of Acheron. Order of the worst kind. An endless puzzle-trap, acting according to an inscrutable pattern to mangle and ruin all upon its face without ever breaking its own rules."

He dismisses the illusion and takes a sip of his ice water.

"That's. ... Huh." He tilts his head thoughtfully at the wheel as Boddyknock goes around it naming points. Quite a few of those sound familiar - he's heard of there being an Asgard, and Mount Celestia could be Olympus by another name... or maybe the Olympian Glades are that... and he already mentioned Limbo himself, and he's heard people claim that Hades and Hell are importantly distinct... "I think usually, when scientists very excitedly tell everyone that they've figured out a grand model of cosmology that perfectly explains everything, it eventually turns out that something more complicated is going on, but that is a very elegant grand model, thanks for the lecture. You come up with that, or it's popular in Lantan, or if I asked Eltoora Sharptyl whether it was true she'd look at me like I just asked her if the planet was flat?" 

"She'd look at you like you were cruelly demanding she talk about elementary laws of reality instead of spell development or the Netherese sewer system, assuming we are referring to the same Eltoora. But if you cornered her, she would agree with the model. And lambast me for neglecting to mention the Astral Plane, which backs the entire system. ...speaking of the Astral, she could probably take you to at least a few of the listed planes, she's powerful enough, though I'm not sure how that would interact with the quarantine. Perhaps better to stick with scrying."

"I have no idea if quarantines meaningfully apply to parallel planes with none of the same species in them. Really I should think the more relevant question is is she powerful enough to go to very distant places in the Material Plane, right, and somehow you hear all the time of hedge wizards managing to accidentally-or-on-purpose open portals to Hell and I've never met one that'd been to Mars. ... that is, the next nearest planet in the solar system my home planet lives in, and nowhere near this one as far as I know. Which incidentally is why I am coming into this conversation very confused about your entire everything." 

"She can make it across the planet, with the same expenditure of resources she would use to reach another plane; clerics find the latter much simpler, but as a rule cannot teleport. Interplanetary teleportation is stymied by the fact that instantaneous travel between multiple gravity wells introduces exponential complexity to one's coordinate system — which, if it can be compensated for at all, has not been done so in my earshot."

Oh, this would be a great time to know how to build a modern computer. These people would probably kill for Mathematica. He is not going to say the word computer to Boddynock, though, that seems like how to not end up going to bed at a remotely reasonable time. 

"There's some species that have faster-than-light signalling and transit at home but mine is not among them so I don't know how they do it. I kind of suspect they might just be tanking 'this would simply kill a human person'. Er, or a nonhuman person, as the case may be." 

Blink.

"Faster than... hm. When is Eltoora's appointment to interrogate you about your world's knowledge?"

"Eleven days in the future from early afternoon today unless I find time for it sooner. ... abruptly realizing I have no idea what day of the week it is now or how your calendar works." 

"...it's the fifteenth of Uktar. I don't know what a week is, but a tenday and one from today will be the twenty-sixth."

Boddynock conjures an illusion of a calendar-wheel.

"If she has an appointment already, then I do not need to make one myself; I will simply arrange to be present at hers. Which means I do not need to interrogate you on the fact that light has a speed."

"Ah. Yeah. Three times ten to the eighth meters per second per second, inexactly, enforced by the Speedforce Wall. If you have instantaneous teleportation you might be outside its zone of control or something, I'm also not sure how far from home I am." He examines the calendar wheel thoughtfully, and adds, "... our winter solstice was about a month ago, which probably puts a floor on it if not much of a ceiling. What's the Feast of the Moon?" 

"It's one of the intercalary feast days. Remembrance of the dead. People gather to tell stories of those they've lost, recent and ancient, and eat silvercakes."

He takes a pensive sip of his water.

"This year's will be... busy."

"Oh, I love those." Hob spins his armillary ring idly with his thumb. "Hurts but in a good way, usually. Times like this, not so much, though, yeah. That'll be--" squint-- "how many days do your months have?" 

"Thirty."

Ah. Fifteen days is probably not enough time to fix an entire magic plague although it might be enough to find the snake lady and publically have gotten started fixing it, which would at least 80/20 the making it less breathtakingly tragic to have a day of the dead festival in a biblically doomed city. Like that would just be some Greek tragedy level unnecessary. 

Wait. 

Blink, count- "Your year is the same as ours. You even have-- shieldmeet, we call them leap days. That's... that should be really unlikely, shouldn't it." 

"...yes, that's bewildering. Do you also lose Shieldmeet at the century turns?"

"Yes, we started doing that about five hundred years ago when someone noticed the calendar was drifting out of step with the solstices."

(This was highly relevant to his life at the time and his resulting fervently sincere opposition to the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in the early 1580s was probably loadbearing to convincing everyone else at court that he was definitely for sure not secretly Catholic.) 

Boddynock shakes his head. "Someone is clearly playing silly buggers... to use the academic parlance."

"A-yep. I hear there's a bunch of alternate Earths - that's my planet, Earth, yes I am aware the name is hilariously uncreative, we used to think there weren't any others you see - but I think they usually also have the same continents and this one doesn't." 

"Continents have been known to change..." Star globe illusion, turning through the seasons. "Do you know your constellations?"

They are in no way similar. This is pretty much immediately obvious, because Toril's constellations are, in many cases, ridiculously neat. There's a perfect circle of bright blue stars, labeled Mystra's Crown, that stay in one place the whole year at the celestial north pole. There's also an enormous prismatic nebula, visible to the naked eye for about a quarter of the year.

"It's been a minute since I was a sailor but wow no those are not the same as ours. Why are they like that?" 

"I dearly hope that you understand how little I can answer that question."