"I would love to see more of your magic! As far as mine, I haven't shown you Shield, Unseen Servant, Alter Self, Darkvision, Detect Thoughts, Fly, or Nondetection. That last one isn't as cool as it sounds; it only hides you from other magic instead of making you invisible."

"You have the ability to read thoughts?" Leareth is intrigued. "I would like to see you demonstrate that, and in particular, whether my shields are proof against it. I can show you..." He thinks for a moment. "I could scry a view of your bedroom. That is a good example of a moderate-power spell." 

"That's cool, that you can scry. If you can scry yourself I can see if Nondetection blocks it. But we can try Detect Thoughts first if you want. Uh, let me know when your shield is ready?"

"I am always shielding, generally speaking." He closes his eyes, takes a breath. "There, I have reinforced it to full power. Go on." Unfortunately, shielding fully does mean that he can't watch with mage-sight. 

"Reveal the thoughts of those around me," Bruce incants, and turns his attention to Leareth.

With an unshielded target, he would get an immediate sense of "there's a person there", and then, when he looked a bit closer, immediate surface thoughts. The former is useful for sneaking out after curfew. He's done the latter only once before, on Larry from his gaming group, with Larry concentrating really hard on the concept of pink elephants.

"Huh. I can tell you're there, but I can't get anything off you. Possibly because it doesn't work on people from other worlds but more likely because your shields are good."

"...There is the obvious test, then." Leareth takes in a slow breath, lets it out, and – very unchararistically, and with some discomfort – drops his mental shields. (He keeps his basic shielding against magical and physical attacks up, because he's not stupid.)

He doesn't try particularly hard to control his thoughts. Mostly he's thinking through the possible use cases of a spell to sense nearby people, that isn't tiring for Bruce and can be cast with a gesture and a word. Bruce could be trained up to be an incredible spy, especially if any of his spells include invisibility...

And now Bruce can see Leareth's surface thoughts. It's as fascinating and unnerving as it was the last time, having another mind right there, having thoughts in his head that aren't his. Maybe even more so--Leareth thinks faster. The idea that he could learn to be a spy is exciting, though he expects that spying requires a lot of skills Bruce wouldn't even think to list and which he may or may not have the potential to get any good at.

He drops the read after a couple seconds and says, "That let me see your surface thoughts. Theoretically I could try to look deeper, but I've never tried it. I've stopped now; I don't know if you can tell."

"Very good." Leareth immediately raises his shields. (He dislikes being unshielded; it feels naked.) "I can sense that you are no longer casting – that spell requires a minor but ongoing flow from its source, rather than a single point of access. Since I was paying very careful attention, I did feel something, but if I were not participating in this experiment, I would not have recognized it as a mental probe and might not have noticed at all. I suspect that a deeper look would be quite noticeable, however. It is in my world." 

He frowns. "I ought perhaps demonstrate a deeper mental probe for you, so that you will know the feeling of it. Hmm, I wonder if you could learn to hold mental shields? Or if your demon acquaintance has a spell for it – though, I am not sure if you can be casting more than one spell at once, in this system. Have you tried that?" 

"I can do two at once, but I need to be concentrating on both of them and it's easy to drop one. Learning to shield and to recognize a mental probe would be good. Uh, ready when you are, I guess." He tries to pay attention to his own mind and watch for anything unusual.

Leareth reaches out. He wants to know... For the purposes of the experiment, he would like to know Bruce's opinion of him, and he floats that prompt, not quite at the level of verbal Mindspeech, and then dives deeper into the fast-moving current that is Bruce's surface mind. 

Leareth is smart, and extremely brave, and his magic is totally awesome, and overall he's the most interesting and reasonable adult Bruce has met in person and he wants to learn as much from him as possible.

He notices the direction of his thoughts turning and looks up. "Did you just do the thing? I think I noticed it."

"Very good." Leareth is smiling. "I think you do not have the means to notice it directly, as I would, since you are less aware of the 'surfaces' of your mind than a Gifted Thoughtsenser would be. However, a deeper probe, in order to be useful, generally will involved nudging your thoughts in a particular direction, which it seems you are enough in touch with your mind's usual patterns to remark on." 

He thinks for a moment. "I am not sure if I will be able to teach you the standard method for shielding; I know of a method that can be taught to un-Gifted people, but it requires extensive practice and control of the mind. Have you done meditation?" Pause. "Perhaps a simpler method is to see if this Nondetection spell can works for this purpose." 

"I haven't, no. Let's try Nondetection first." He casts it.

"Fascinating. No, I cannot sense your thoughts now." He closes his eyes. "In fact, if I am not looking at you, and relying on Thoughtsensing alone, I would be unable to tell that there is another person in this room. Just a moment." 

Leareth gathers his power, and pushes, the same way he would if forcing his way through the shields of a much weaker mage. At first, nothing, but he's got some power to spare after the Mage Hand experiment, so he pours in more–

And the spell shatters, and there's Bruce's mind again, full of startlement at the novel (and moderately painful) sensation of magic exploding in his metaphorical hands.

...And some of the collapsing spell springs back on Leareth as well, just as his reserved mage-energy runs dry. He staggers, instinctively reaches for nearby ambient magic, finds none, and then sits down on the floor rather suddenly. 

"Ow--Shit, are you okay? I've never had a spell explode like that before!"

"I imagine...no one...has tried to break one before." Leareth is out of breath. And dizzy. And, ow. He slowly brings both hands to his head. "Tired. Breaking that...took some doing." He's wondering if the magic of Bruce's world behaves differently, because his shields seem not to have done much against it – maybe more to the point, it drained enough of his reserves just getting through that he didn't have much to reinforce his shields with. 

"Do you want, like, an aspirin or something? Uh, it's a painkiller."

"...Would appreciate it." Leareth is feeling steadier, but not enough that he especially wants to stand up. "Are you hurt? If not, it would also help if you might cast a few more of the Mage Hands so that I can use the energy. I suspect my magic is operating at something of a disadvantage, when it comes to breaking your magic – it is doable, but there is loss of efficiency." 

"I'm okay. Could use an aspirin myself, though. But I can do a couple of Mage Hand first." He starts casting it; two is the most he can keep up at once but if Leareth is eating them as fast as Bruce is casting them that adds up to a pretty decent throughput.

Leareth consumes about a dozen and then lifts a hand. "All right, all right. Enough." The headache is still there, but his body hums with energy. He hops easily to his feet. "Go, take care of your headache as well." He rubs his neck. "...I would appreciate a glass of water, and perhaps something to eat. Probably I ought stay down here to avoid notice?" 

"Yeah, staying down here's a good plan. Back in a minute." He pops upstairs and returns with water and aspirin and bread and cheese for both of them.

Leareth looks at the small pill with some dubiousness, it resembles a pebble much more than any kind of medicine he's seen, but swallows it and then munches on the food while he goes through his notebook and reviews his taped-together diagram. It's...reasonably tasty. The cheese, although odd and definitely oddly coloured, is still recognizably cheese. 

"On your end, I think that we still plan to review Shield, Unseen Servant, Alter Self, Darkvision, and Fly," he says when he's done. "I would be glad to demonstrate scrying first if your head is still bothering you, however." 

"We can do more magic now; I think you got whacked worse than I did." Shield is ideally going to involve Leareth trying to get through the shield, so, "Alter Self is neat. I can change my appearance, or give myself gills and breathe underwater, or grow horns if I wanted horns. It wears off after an hour." Now that the idea is in his head, it occurs to him that this would be another really useful spell for a spy.