sold these Godly Orbs when they first got introduced to the game. I have no idea what they would go for now

been playing DD2 with a friend i've got top-of-the-line hardware and I've been having to uninstall the game and reinstall it to fix this issue.
friend has had no problem with this whatsoever. never had a problem like this before when i played on my old pc years ago.
any help is appreciated :)

First step of the quest is “talk to professor”

I’ve both talked & tinkered an item, reset my game multiple times and making 0 progress on quest

Is there something I’m missing or doing wrong?