Herb Becomes a Vehicle for Back Story

The first thing to be done with any job that came his way was to organize a team. Herb avoided most of the work in this process by always using the same people. Many would argue that different people had different expertise and therefore you should pick and choose specific team members best suited to each particular job. Herb found that sort of reasoning borderline treason. Partially because it removed the trust and understanding that developed with people who worked together frequently and had relied on each other often. But mostly because he was lazy. His associates (some of them were probably in the realm of "friends," but Herb was always nervous about that term) were good at what they did. Maybe not the best, but they were proven, and he knew what they could do and how to get the most effect out of them. He didn't want to get to know other people; more to the point, he didn't want to negotiate arrangements with new people or learn if they could be trusted.
Herb was all about minimizing the effort needed to get a huge pile of coin.
The people Herb usually worked with weren't very demanding, in terms of supervision required, knowing details, or wanting money. His process was typically just to split any loot found evenly among the group. Typically he got to keep the entire fee because the others either didn't think to ask or were just happy that they got so much work. If it became an issue he just put it into the pot and took an extra half share for finding the job and organizing the expedition.
There was a lot to do before tonight.
The Adventurer's University of Caldonia was legendary throughout the world. Everyone everywhere who wanted to do more with their lives than trade or farming or administration applied to be accepted at AUC. Few were accepted. Common belief was there were around 10,000 students, studying everything from alchemy to bardic inspiration. There was a multiplicity of departments, schools, and colleges under the university's banner. Enough so that Herb wondered how they could run so many different majors and keep the classes full, even with thousands of students. Magical girls, golem control, fighting, summoning, princesses, piracy, theoretical forging, theoretical artificing, practical artificing, elemental magic (which had between four and 118 subdivisions, depending on the current claptrap about how many elements there were), barbarian culture and behavior, realm traveling, psychic combat, psychic negotiation, psychic isolationism. Herb might have made a couple of them up, but most of those were actual courses of study.
More importantly, it was well known in the acquisitions industry that no one had every broken into a high security area of AUC, gotten their target, and gotten out. There was one story of a guy that got in and out, but never reached his goal. And he died three weeks later under mysterious circumstances. "Mysterious" in this case being that somehow he stumbled into 23 poison tipped arrows and was then incinerated in a fireball. No one investigated past that. The lore surrounding the tricks, traps and guardians at AUC, especially around their artifact and library vaults, was vast and arcane. It was easiest not to even consider this. But here, he was, having already accepted an advance, planning to do it all the same.
The Jewel of Eae-Nirin was a centerpiece of the AUC Museum of Mindbending Ultimate Artifacts. The legends and superstitions surrounding the Jewel of Eae-Nirin was as confusing as it's name. Herb had no idea who or what Eae-Nirin was, or what the syllables meant or even what language they were related to. The Jewel however, popped up every few hundred years in ancient history. Empires were formed in association with it. Demons were banished or destroyed by its possessors. Armies were laid waste in its presence. Like all good folk stories, though, it was vague what the jewel actually was or did. The owner of the Jewel could do marvelous feats, but how it enabled this or what it did exactly was never the same from story to story, if they mentioned it doing anything at all, which they usually didn't. Herb, and all but the most superstitious or gullible of children, thought of Eae-Nirin's Jewel as some kind of metaphor for whatever character trait the storyteller was trying to emphasize. It honestly hadn't occurred to Herb to consider it might be an actual thing more than a fancy piece of carved gem.
But if there was anyone who might know more about AUC procedures and security, or even about the jewel, it was Herb's friend Haxen.
To clarify, that was among the people Herb could get to tell him anything without requiring payment or making him do his own research. There were probably a lot of other people who could say useful things about either subject. But for some reason people didn't trust Herb, and Herb didn't want to do more work than necessary.
Haxen claimed to have been on the faculty of AUC in the distant past. Herb found this unlikely, as he had known Haxen since they were teenagers just a decade or so past. But you never could tell with wizards. Especially crazy ones. And Haxen was an absolute nutter. His current claim was that he was 116 years old. Herb allowed this was theoretically possible, but wasn't sure how it could be, really, given his acquaintance with the man.
When Haxen gave you information, you had to sort through it. But Herb had gotten a pretty good instinct for what was reliable and what was wind out of a sprite's buttocks. He was certain he could parse it this time.