"Right. I will not eat." 

After a minute of thinking, he switches to Mindspeech, it's still a lot easier at this point than hunting for words he just learned. :I can see the magic directly. I...could try to advise you on what changes, when you do experiments?:

If he had his mage-gift working, he might be able to separate out the life-light directly. He doesn't, though, and also that thought is incredibly terrifying and he steers away from it. 

"Ooh! That sounds potentially very useful. There might be a learning curve, our magic can get very weird...hm. Do you think you would be able to glean the meaning of Correspondence symbols by looking at their magic?"

"Worth try?" 

She pulls out a sheet of paper and a pencil and scribbles out a sigil. 

It's definitely magic, as soon as it's drawn. Not dazzlingly bright like Lucy, but there. 

It's...structured? It has some of the same stable, leashed-potential impression that a mage-artifact like his shield talisman does. 

(...His shield-talisman is running really low on stored power and he should tell Lucy about that before he starts panicking about it, but it can wait until after he looks.) 

The structure is very different from anything he's seen before, and doesn't make it instantly obvious what the sigil means, but it does feel like it's meaningful. Like it will start to make more and more sense, the closer he looks. 

:...Change?: he guesses, to Lucy. :No, growth - becoming something else - something brighter, stronger -: 

"Yes, that's right!" she says brightly. "Apotheosis." 

:Oh: There's so much in that word. 

- a lot of it sort of hurts to touch. It would have made sense to him before, when he wasn't...broken. 

Leareth pulls back his mage-sight. 

:I have a problem: he tells Lucy, levelly but with rising tension in the overtones. :I - had a protective shield, but I cannot re-power it on my own and it is going to stop working and I - I - it will make it much harder to feel safe anywhere: 

"Yes, I see how that could be a problem. May I see it?"

Without actually taking the talisman off, Leareth tugs the focus out from under his shirt and shows it to her. 

She picks it up, careful not to tug on the chain. 

Her eyes do something, under mage-sight, changing the way they look at the world. 

She purses her lips thoughtfully. "I think I can work with this...hm. Give me a moment." She releases the mage-focus and goes off to a workbench, where she opens a drawer, pulls out a box of blank lenses and a stylus, and starts scratching Correspondence symbols onto one of the lenses. 

Leareth, abruptly exhausted for no reason, sits down on the floor to wait while she does that. 

One of the scientists offers him a pillow. 

Everything is loud and overwhelming and Leareth flinches back involuntarily when they approach, but manages with another jarring effort to control his reaction and smile. "Thank you." 

"You're welcome." 

Lucy comes back with a lens with several sigils scratched into it and places it in front of the talisman and puts her finger behind it. 

The finger glows. 

The talisman slowly starts refilling. 

Leareth tries to 'read' the sigils with mage-sight. 

The sigils basically have to do with the way Leareth's mage-gift integrates with his brain and tell the light to treat the talisman as a living thing which should have more energy. 

The process is lossy. A lot less energy is going into the talisman than is coming out of her finger.

Leareth points this out to her, with a tone of curiosity, and thanks her. 

And then puts his head down on his knees again, because suddenly being in a room with open space around him and PEOPLE in that space is awful and unbearable, and he doesn't have the energy to do anything more reasonable about this than "pretend that not seeing them anymore is the same as hiding." 

"Oh, I knew that. This wouldn't scale well. But it's doable, I can give off nigh-arbitrary lumens." 

She puts a blanket over his shoulders when he curls up. 

:Thank you. Sorry, I - stuck - happens sometimes...: 

"I've seen way worse," she assures him. 

Leareth spends a while shivering under his blanket and trying to wrangle his mind back into an orientation where standing up and going back to looking at Lucy's work seems like a possible course of action. 

Eventually, he's pretty sure that he could but also that it would hurt. 

:I - think I may be too tired to do more things in public places today without it being very costly: 

"Okay. Do you want to go back to the cot, do you want me to carry you back to the Bazaar." 

OVERWHELM!!! Also his emotions are doing the thing again where communicating any information at all about his preferences - or trying to figure out what his preferences are - feels very dangerous. Maitimo can usually tell when he's running into that problem, and handle it gracefully, but of course he can't realistically expect that of Lucy. 

:I - I am having a hard time with decisions right now: he manages to squeeze out finally. 

"Okay," she says.

She picks him up and carries him to the cot and firmly closes the curtains. Then she puts up some sigils for dark and quiet. It's her current best practices for situations like this.