The girl who is not Ruava looks at him.

The whatever-it-is... is convertible. It doesn't make all that much mana by itself. Maybe another telepathy spell's worth.

So he converts it!

"I'm done, I think."

"Good. Thank you."

Ruava smiles at him. It is definitely a Ruava smile. It's very - very.

He beams! Gosh she is so pretty.

"I turned it into arcanist mana, to get something useful out of it."

She giggles. "That's amazing."

He keeps a metaphorical eye on her to make sure the thing won't return or anything, but continues grinning. "So! What now?"

"I don't even know. I'm - I never thought I'd be rid of that."

He giggles, too, then. "Glad I could help." And his stomach grumbles. "...I think it might be time to eat."

"Sounds good to me!"

"Okay, I got stuff, here, hold on—" He gets up, dusts himself, and walks over to a little corner near the wall he'd been staring at where he has a backpack. He brings the backpack with him and opens it. The inside is—definitely larger than the outside. "Food preferences? Not that I'd expect us to have similar cuisine, but."

"Oh, let's see what you've got, I'm not picky."

So he grabs a little container with lamb inside it—still warm, apparently. He has some vegetables, and some bread, and cheese. He spreads them out on a towel between them.

Food! Yay!

Food indeed!

"So I found this wall completely accidentally," he says, making small talk. "One of the more common and accessible political structures on the continent is a Guild, and there's one dedicated to finding old ruins and magical stuff, and we usually do lots of research and exchange knowledge, but I just somehow happened to stumble upon this while flying."

"Fun!"

"It is! I really like magic. It's—not very, ah, socially useful, but I sorta use my findings and cheat with metamancy to get money and some social capital that—" Pause. "I never did tell you about the little problem with the plan of me personally being involved in convincing everyone metas are not evil, did I."

"Besides you being a metamancer?"

"Yeah, besides that. This will need an aside into political organisation."

"Okay."

"So... there are three kingdoms, right, each one linked to a god. And the laws of succession have it that the rulers must always be mages. There's some complicated stuff involving the royal families and marriages, and also lots of people pretend they're a given kind of mage, but of course that's punishable by death. Anyway, my father's king of Laokab, he's really an enchanter, and I'm really not, and it. Got out. So I'm officially, ah, wanted, for treason. Because my mother found out about it and hid it and I also hid it when I was old enough for that to make sense."

"That's fucked up."

"It really, really is. There are actually some horror stories I hear every now and then whenever some disaster strikes that 'Laokab's wayward prince' must be behind it. Because I'm a metamancer, see, and I fled instead of meekly accepting that I should spend a life in penitence or something, so I must be up to no good."

"Yeah, let's fix that."

"I'm all for that idea. Way I've been going about that is, like I said, getting money and social capital as—well, this is not my face, or not my original face at any rate, I changed it a while ago—so as this person who is definitely not the prince. And in the meantime looking for this one group that's rumoured to want to do just that. Don't have much of a plan yet, per se, though."