He lands in a pool of water. 

The surface is barely disturbed by his sudden entry; a small ripple forms, but not a single drop splashes out onto the floor around the water-filled depression. The pool is deep, the distance from the floor to the surface is roughly twice as deep as he is tall. He slips down to the bottom quickly, slowing as he reaches it such that the impact is as light as a feather. The water feels oddly... smooth, but it's just as easy to move in as any other body of water he might have swam in before. 

Once he surfaces, he'll first note the enormous ring which rises from the center of the pool, made of a violet-black metal. Or possibly just a black metal, it's hard to tell in the bright pale violet light being radiated by an object he can barely make out on the other side of the ring. 

The light tints every surface in the room a shade of purple, from the smooth stone walls to the mosaic spiralling out across the floor. The water itself seems even more purple than the light is, adding another mark to the tally suggesting it might not, in fact, merely be water. 

It's possible that he would be wise to get out of it. 

Given that the first thing he notices is he now needs to breathe that's the first thing he does.

He climbs out, takes stock - he doesn't have his rings, he can't contact anyone telepathically, he has none of his powers - he can feel his spells clicking into place in his mind, and he uses a cantrip to detect magic, trying to mostly determine what here is possibly dangerous (and if he can safely use another cantrip to get the water off).

The maybe-water isn't dangerous! Or at least not in this state. It is, however, magic. Very magic, maybe just magic? Is it even water? It's acting somewhat water-like, but it sure is very magic.

Still, it's water enough that he can dry himself off if he wants, assuming he wants to risk magicking unknown magic. 

The giant ring isn't taking any questions at the moment, but it's also not doing anything else, so there's that. Any spell directed at it will slide off onto the "water". That being the case, who can say whether or not the ring is magic?

Farther away, the glowing object is extremely magic! Though all it's doing right now is glowing.

The walls, floor and ceiling of the room itself are not magic, but there are veins of magic running just beneath them, large ones all leading to the pool and the ring. 

...He is going to touch absolutely nothing here. He hopes the magic-water-like-material isn't dangerous because casting magic at unknown things is usually more dangerous than touching unknown things.

He'll start walking, avoiding the magic places, and looking for a way out.

If he's paying attention he can step over the veins of magic in the floor, if he chooses, they're thin enough for that. 

There's an enormous set of stone doors at the far end of the room, past the glowing object. There's no way any lone power-less person could move them by hand. A vein of magic runs through the walls to meet each door, suggesting that moving them requires yet more magic. 

Ugh. He settles in to study them, flipping through different variants on detects.

So much magic! His detection spells will reveal more along this line, and also that the veins leading to the doors are composed specifically of Water Magic.

Meanwhile, the 'water' in the pool behind him is some other, more esoteric type of magic. There's none of it on him anymore, though; while he was looking at the doors the 'water' soaking him through has become actual water, and some of it appears to have vanished altogether. Spooky.  

If he stares at the pool for a bit he might be able to identify it as some kind of... space magic? With a bit more of the omnipresent water magic laced into it. 

The glowing object is also producing that 'space' magic. To some detection spells it will seem to pulse slowly, like a heartbeat. 

...He's going to position himself well away from that, keeping an eye on it while examining the door.

Before he can get much examining in, the veins leading to the door start doing something new and interesting. A small influx of yet more water magic enters the veins from either side of the door, thickening them and flowing into the doors themselves. It leaks into a set of formerly empty veins, curling around in a number of circles, before making its way back out and vanishing deeper into the walls. 

As this happens, the doors silently swing open. 

Erin has been exploring the lower levels again.

Lady Helen had shown them to her in the last year, when it became clear that Erin would be inheriting the Gauntlet of the Healer within the next year, and all its wielder's responsibilities along with it. She is supposed to check the locked levels every month to make sure no one has broken in. 

She's already been down here a few times this month, and despite the fluttering of her maids about the state of her robes and the councillors about her safety (how can she be anything but safe within the Sanctuary?), she can't really help coming back. It's the only part of the city that no one else can get to, so it's the only place she can be alone. 

The Gauntlet gently nudges her.

Well. She should be the only one who can get to it. The presence in one of the sealed rooms suggests differently. 

The intruder seems to be a human male in good health. He's through the big doors at the end of the first level, in the room with the ring and the sleeping Rod and the pool of mana. 

How could he have gotten in there? She wonders. 

Intent on finding out, she marches up to the doors, lifts her (oversized) Gauntleted hand, and wills the doors open. Her connection to the city does everything else, and the doors begin to swing open without a sound. 

He steps back. Spreads his hands, fingers and palms clearly visible so she'd get warning if he starts a spell.

With the doors open, she gets a good look at the room and its occupants. She blinks at his pose, noting that he's not armed and doesn't appear to be gathering mana at any point she can see, then glances over at the Rod. Which he hasn't taken. 

...Honestly she's not sure what reason a person would have for being in this room if they weren't after the Rod of the Fourth Gate. Especially if they'd gone to all the effort of entering her wards without her notice. How?

Actually that's a good question to start with. 

"How did you get in here?" She asks, her tone a little sharper than her tutors would have liked. 

There's no way she can disarm herself without taking the Gauntlet off, which she's not going to do, but she does face her hand towards herself, the way she would if she was doing self-healing. 

"I was practicing a basic plane shift spell. It misfired."

Most of those words make sense. Plane-shift, though? She might have heard something like those words somewhere at some point, but it's definitely not anything anyone thought she needed to know. It does sound spacetimey, though. 

She steps closer, so she's standing in the doorway, and glances over at the Rod again, "Did you come for the Rod, then?" She asks. She frowns, "You can't have it. It's supposed to stay sleeping." 

"I didn't. Being here was an accident."

"An accident?" She reapeats, incredulous. She crosses her arms, taking care so that she doesn't hit her chin with the Gauntlet (no, she definitely isn't careful because it's happened before, what are you suggesting?), "I didn't notice you coming into the city," she tells him, "That doesn't happen by accident!" 

"I think this isn't my home planet at all," he says. "A plane is a world, it's - all the places with the same rules."

She scrunches up her nose. A different world? But lots of places have different rules. 

She shakes her head, repeating that thought out loud, "The Empire has lots of rules we don't?" She suggests, uncertainly, "But... I've never heard of other worlds." 

"Rules like which direction things fall in. But maybe our worlds are very different." He shakes his head. "I can maybe prove it, though I'd be reluctant to use any of my magic around this much magic..."

"Why?" She asks, confused, "It's not doing anything. The Rod can't do anything without a wielder and the pool won't do anything, it's mine." All the water in the city is hers and the Gauntlet's, especially the veins in the walls and floors. The Healer can see everything in Sanctuary - and it always tells her if there's someone or something where they shouldn't be. That's why she knows he shouldn't have been able to get in the ring room without her noticing. 

The detection spells he was using when the door opened will have revealed that the Gauntlet gives off it's own glow. It's not visible without it, like the violet light the Rod is giving off further into the room, but a detect magic spell will be able to tell that it is radiating Water and Life magic in all directions. Where the magic hits the surfaces around the girl, it's absorbed into them, flowing into the veins. If he looked at the pool at this point he'd notice that the liquid mana in it, formerly perhaps 1 part Water magic, 9 parts Space magic, is quickly reaching a ratio of 1:1, the Gauntlet working to prove her words true. 

Whether he wants to risk unintended magic interactions on the word of a 13 year old is up to him. 

"Magics don't always work together safely. Mine is different than the local, and it's - a good rule not to do stuff like that without safeguards."

She frowns, glancing over at the pool and Artefact once more, then back to him, "Well..." she draws out, "We could go somewhere else if you want?" 

She's decided that he's probably not a thief at this point. And anyway, there's a reason she doesn't have bodyguards. If she doesn't have the reaction time to protect herself, the city will do it for her. She steps back out into the hall and beckons him forward. 

The surfaces of the hall are made of the same material as the ones in the room, with a different pattern spilling out over the stone floor. On either side of the hall runs a trough filled with water, sparkling in the low, pale blue lights set into the ceiling. 

The veins continue here, under the water troughs and in the walls and ceilings, but the floor is clear, so far as he can see. The Gauntlet is still radiating magic, though, and with the doors still open the Rod's magic spills out of the ring room.

He deactivates his detect spells so he doesn't get a headache, and follows her. "That'd be good."

She leads him out of the room, turning back briefly to watch the doors close, and then down the hall. At the other end is large open doorway, leading into a farily large room with no other exits. There is a small pool of water (real, actual water) in the center of it. She leads him in and then turns to the wall next to the opening, where there is a series of discs made of the same black metal as the ring. She waits for him to enter and then reaches out a thread of water magic to one of the discs. 

As a door makes its way out of the wall in perfect silence, she looks up at him, "The room moves," she tells him, "We're on one of the lower levels so we have to take the lift up. It'll let us out again when we get to the right floor." She's had to reassure people of that before - lots of refugees get nervous when the doors in the lifts seem to close them in. 

An elevator, then. A very nice one. "I've been in similar."