Leareth looks around the room. "I would prefer to stay here, then." He's had a chance to orient, and discreetly lay down basic magical wards during some moments when Bruce was speaking. Nothing that will actually stop an attack, he hasn't got the power for it, but he'll be warned. 

His reserves are in better shape after food, water, and a couple of hours sitting comfortably. "I can conceal myself with an illusion," he offers. "If you wished to speak later without risking being overheard, I could perhaps cover both of us with a sound-barrier." 

"An illusion is a way better idea than my plan of 'if you hear someone coming upstairs get in the closet'. Being able to talk more later would be good. Would the sound barrier make anything strange happen if I tried to talk to my parents while it was up? If so it should wait until they think I'm asleep."

Leareth agrees. “The sound-barrier will have that result - I might make it one-way, so that you would hear your parents if they addressed you, but you could not answer unless I took it down. I would rather not take it down and replace it repeatedly, so we might as well wait. Please do not sit on your bed if you come in, I will be here but unseen. I shall do more reading and collect my questions.”

He hesitates, but Bruce hasn’t gotten offended yet. “Bruce, if I do overhear a conversation with your parents that seems important, and I do not understand it, would it be all right if I read your mind for context? Or theirs?”

"Reading my mind is fine but please stay out of theirs; if they say something you don't understand you can ask me later. And I apologize in advance if you see anything in mine that you'd rather not." Honestly Leareth reading his mind is so much less worrying than the knowledge that God can see his every sinful thought, because Leareth just wants to learn things and doesn't seem inclined to use any of it against him.

“I do not think,” Leareth says wryly, “that any of your thoughts would surprise or disturb me.” He is 2000 years old, after all. (He doesn’t say that part out loud.)

"That's good I guess." There's a sound from downstairs that Leareth is very unlikely to recognize as a garage door opening."Oh, that's my parents, I had better go downstairs for dinner. I'll see you in an hour or two. Uh, if an emergency happens drop a book on the floor and I'll come up to 'investigate the weird noise'."

Leareth isn't sure what sort of emergency is likely to arise, but he nods, and stretches out on the bed, and casts an illusion over himself so anyone coming in will only see unwrinkled covers. It takes some concentration but it's not really tiring to maintain. 

He starts reading from where he left off. 

Bruce and his parents thank God for their food (chicken breast, baked beans, and broccoli; Bruce takes as little of the former as he can get away with) and start eating. They talk about his day at school (in history they're learning about the destruction of Portland; in biology they're memorizing all the kinds of fish; in phys ed they're playing tennis and he's lousy at it) and their days at work (his father sells used cars and his mother works in a nursing home) and the news (the World Games open next week; a senator got his marriage annulled and reporters are suspicious how good his reasons really were). Bruce says he doesn't want any dessert and has homework to do upstairs (this is a lie; he did it all during classes as usual).

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus talks about the day of judgement and says He will spend three days in the heart of the Earth. He delivers a lot of parables, mostly about how the righteous will be separated from the wicked and the latter thrown in a blazing furnace. He multiplies food and walks on water and heals people. He refused to heal someone's daughter because she's a Canaanite but is persuaded to change his mind about it. He predicts His own death and tells people to give away their possessions and delivers yet more repetitive parables.

Leareth half-listens to the conversation; nothing is confusing-and-urgent enough to push him into reading Bruce's mind. He reads, makes a few notes, and then accidentally falls asleep.

(The illusion doesn't need active concentration to maintain once completed, and stays up.) 

Bruce eventually comes back upstairs. If his arrival doesn't wake Leareth up, he finds his illusorily empty bed unresponsive and the Bible fallen on the floor and deduces what's up, reads at his desk for a while, and falls asleep on a pile of spare bedding on the floor of his closet.

Leareth half-wakes when Bruce is scraping together the bedding-pile, instantly orients – mainly checking for his wards and briefly skimming Bruce's surface thoughts – concludes that the situation is still safe, and drifts off again. He's actually quite exhausted after the ill-fated Gate, though he hadn't wanted to interrupt his initial learning about the situation in order to rest. 

He wakes just before dawn, feeling refreshed and with his magical reserves about as recovered as they're going to get, here in the world with no magic. Nothing else is moving, so he dispels the illusion, summons a tiny mage-light, and keeps reading while he waits for Bruce to wake up. 

Today's a Saturday, so instead of being woken by his alarm clock Bruce is woken by the sunlight reaching the floor. It takes him a moment to orient and remember why he's in a blanket-nest, but then he stands up (a process complicated somewhat by his excessive amount of teenage-boy elbows and knees) and says, "Good morning. Feeling better today?"

Leareth is sitting on the bed with his back against the wall. He’s already cast a sound-barrier around them. “Yes, thank you. I am quite hungry, if you were planning to break your fast soon.” Teenage boys are generally hungry in the morning, he thinks.

He glances around apologetically. “I hope your parents are not in the habit of checking while you sleep. I am not sure my wards would detect activity inside the house, and they might have questions as to why you were sleeping in your closet. In any case. I do have some further questions.”

"If they've started coming in my room while I'm asleep that would be new and also weird, but next time I'll remember to lock the door. How about I grab us both some food and you can ask me more questions while we eat?"

Leareth nods his agreement. He will keep reading while Bruce goes down to get food. 

Bruce returns with wheat cereal in milk and blueberries for both of them. "So, what are your questions?"

Leareth has a list.

"I am very curious about the mechanics of magic in your world," he says, "though I am aware you may not know the answer here. In my world, walking on water would be trivial for a mage, and Healing can be done easily by a Gifted Healer – and replicated by a mage with advanced skill and research. Creating food from nothing, however, is as far as I know not possible – the food could perhaps be Fetched in from elsewhere, that is the only workaround I can think of. Is producing food a common miracle here?"

He starts working on the bowl of mysterious food, without paying too much attention to what it is, while he waits for Bruce to answer. 

"It sounds like your magic is a completely different thing from micracles. Miracles aren't easier or harder; it's just God in His infinite power doing things. Feeding large crowds from a small initial supply of food is one of the more frequent ones, though not as common as healings." He looks like he's struggling with whether to admit something for a moment, then adds, "Though one of my many sins is that sometimes I'm not sure whether God is actually omnipotent or just very powerful."

"The gods of my world are certainly not omnipotent," Leareth says. "Perhaps your world is different." He resists the urge to read Bruce's surface thoughts out of curiosity; this isn't important enough to invade the boy's privacy. 

He makes a note, and moves down his list. "It seems I am missing some context about 'Canaanites', and why your literal God incarnated in human form would be bigoted against them. Did their people do something very bad?" 

"Hm?" He checks the relevant passage. "Oh, I think that's just that he's meant to be the Messiah for the Jews first and foremost and was prioritizing them over everyone else. Jews are God's chosen people; most of the earlier parts of the Bible are about them. But salvation is available to everyone."

Leareth makes a note, but he isn't less confused. He leaves it alone for now. "I am curious about this 'Day of Judgement' but I suspect it will be covered before the end," he says, looking at the chunk of pages remaining. "What is the 'blazing furnace' a metaphor for?" 

"Uh, that's Hell. It's not a very metaphorical metaphor. Just, lots of fire. And there's more on the Day of Judgement in Revelation, but that's several sections ahead of where you are now."

"...I suspected it was not." Leareth has been trying to hold off on his final judgment about Bruce's God, but he is...concerned...about Hell. "I think that is most of my questions for now. I ought to finish this." 

"Okay. I'll write down some questions while you do that."

Jesus prophesies confusingly about the end times, and says that however you treat the poor it is as though you treated Him that way.

Jesus is betrayed, and crucified, and dies, talking alternately about how this is inevitable and how He's having a pretty awful time of it. He stays dead for three days, then comes back to life and vanishes out of His grave and tells His faithful to convert all the nations, and that's the end of that section.