"Well, all right," she acknowledges, "but do you have any other way to find out?"

"I could metaphorically stare at you for a few hours?"

"Okay."

"That'd probably be terribly boring for you, though. I suppose I could tell you what I'm seeing and looking for? But I'm not sure I can translate it well to language, I've never tried."

"Try!"

"Okay!"

So he squints, turning all his attention to the mostly-neglected magic sense.

Her magic is in four-ish clusters. One cluster is attached to the light manipulation and contains the healing. Two and a half clusters are attached to the water manipulation - two of them are more obvious, but there's another one sort of tucked in between them. Parts of all the clusters seem almost... unformed, like it's not just a matter of not having discovered their powers yet but of their powers actually not being defined.

If he squints at it enough, all the clusters seem to sort of spring from a common root, a bit of magic that does nothing but tie the rest together.

...and then there's that other thing, unrelated to all the rest, very self-contained, definitely not belonging to the category of powers-that-she-has.

"So there are—clusters? Bits? Blobs? Clouds? Something like that. There's one bit which was the one that was—moving?—while you were doing the light manipulation, I think... There are a couple of other bits—I'm having trouble telling whether they're separate or together but they're definitely—bigger? not exactly bigger but have more parts—than the part that touched the Light magic, so that's... probably the Water part. There's one other part that's, like... linking those together? I think? It's connecting them, anyway, somehow. I don't think it moved when you did magic but I wasn't paying attention to it then, hadn't even seen it there. And..."

Okay what is that other thing?

Ruava listens thoughtfully to this explanation.

The other thing is... ominous. Ominous is what it is. It has roots reaching into her magic, and into - her brain, maybe, or maybe just her nervous system, something in that area - and there's something there that looks like it's meant to attach to a person, except it's currently tucked away where no one can reach it. Except him. He can reach it.

When he trails off, she—

—looks at him intently for just a moment—

—and then says, "And what?"

"Creepy," is the word he chooses. "There's a really creepy thing there. It's like it's—connected to your brain, or something."

"Please don't touch it."

"I'm not touching anything until I understand what it is—and I guess I'm not touching this one even when I do. Or should I also not understand it? Do you know what it is?"

"It's - not good."

"It doesn't look good. You don't need to tell me if you don't want to, I can restrain my curiosity and probably can just look at everything else without that—it doesn't look integrated."

"The person who made us was - not good. She didn't want us using our magic or - getting away. So she made - that. It. Stops us. Stops us from using magic, stops us from moving, stops us from seeing or hearing or feeling, any of those that she wants, for as long as she wants."

"Holy shit were you running away from them—good on you for doing that, I kinda wanna go where you're from and kick their arse—I bet I could get that off you."

"She let go of it for a moment. I got us away. Now it's - safe, unless someone picks it up again. And normally no one could do that but I think a metamancer could."

"Yyyeah, a metamancer probably could." He frowns.

"I would like it gone."

"I can make it be gone. Might take a while, but I can."

"Thank you."

"What else can you tell me about it?"

"It's Wood magic. Anyone could use it, if they had the connection - she was going to give it to someone else so he could borrow us, that's why she detached it from herself. But only one person can have it at a time and since I got away before she passed it on, I have it now. I could pass it to someone else but I am not going to do that."