- and something is WRONG the magic is twisting in a way it shouldn't and he's falling - 

And then everything is suddenly very still and quiet. 

Technically Carissa is the only person in the room when it happens but inside five seconds there are three other people interposing themselves. Her husband isn't one of them because he's in his demiplane doing negotiations about a permanent Gate with Tian Xia, and she can interrupt that if it's, like, an emergency, but shouldn't if it's a random adventurer whose Plane Shift went off target and who is about to be very embarrassed.

It...doesn't look like that, though? It looks like an underfed kid who is bespelled in some fashion and has been crying, and it actually could be an assassination attempt, if he's a Velgarth mage who's been coerced or forced to Final Strike, but the bodyguards are shaking their head - and if he's not Gifted then it's not an assassination attempt and is probably something else entirely. 

Well, the faster it's cleared up the better -

"Do you need healing."

What???? 

"No," and Masozi lies very still on the floor and tries to look absolutely non-threatening. 

"Does he need healing," she asks the bodyguard who also has Healing-sight.

The bodyguard steps in to touch Masozi's shoulder. 

- he doesn't flinch. It's an incredibly effortful not-flinch. 

"He's not acutely injured. He's - not in great shape, but - mostly just malnourished and a little dehydrated, maybe sleep deprived." 

- nod. "Do you know how you got here?" she asks the kid again. She somehow speaks his native language perfectly, but when she talks to the guards she's speaking something different.

That's really strange. She doesn't look like she's from anywhere where it'd make sense for her to speak Chichewa. 

- also he doesn't KNOW how he got here and it's making his thoughts loop and tangle as the truth potion tries to hold him glued to a reality he doesn't understand. He's panicking again, a little. "Dunno. Magic. Something - wrong - accident -?" 

"What - enchantment are you under -"

Wait - what - why doesn't she know and if she doesn't know how can she tell aaaaaaaaaaaaaah - it's now weirdly hard to answer because his mind is trying to insist that he understand the current situation in order to say true things and not false things about it - 

After fifteen seconds of lying there whimpering slightly, it occurs to him that he's...probably overthinking this? Or - not quite that - trying too hard to impose his understanding? This is an out of context event. He wasn't expecting it. So he shouldn't expect to know anything and that's fine and the truth spell should - let him - say things he does know even though he doesn't know the most critical things...? 

"Truth potion," he forces out. 

"Can someone cancel that."

       "Break Enchantment."

"Right, did that work?"

It seems to have worked! At least, the kid is no longer detectably under any enchantments. 

He still isn't moving. 

Carissa doesn't, really, know what to do about terrified people, but one of the edges that Iomedae is supposed to have is that underfed children don't need to be terrified of her, even if they manage to somehow teleport into a palace and inconvenience a Queen. He is right to think that he's probably dead but he's not, and Good has to be able to milk that for all it's worth because most of the asymmetries, realistically, go the other way. 

She kneels at his side and takes his hand. "You're in Cheliax now. Have you heard of it?"

Masozi flinches and pulls his hand away. 

"...No." 

"Cheliax is ruled by Iomedae and by Abadar, though maybe they are followed by other names, where you are from, and it is a prosperous place, and a safe one, and a lawful one. You can sit up, if you'd like. Where are you from?"

Masozi is struggling to follow half of that, and is not even slightly inclined to believe her on the half that he does understand. 

He sits up, though, because maybe that was actually an instruction/order. "I was born in Malawi." 

Place names don't always translate to the one your country uses. "Is Malawi in the Mwangi Expanse?"

Masozi is not especially up to speed on geography. "I...don't think so? I think it's in the south of Africa. But not South Africa, that's the name of a country where Johannesburg is. Malawi is...north of that?" 

"Can you name other places you know?"

He's so confused. 

"New York? And - Chicago - but I heard that enclave got destroyed." 

"What's the farthest you have been from the village you grew up in?"

"....Two months of walking?" Masozi doesn't know the distance in any other units. 

Well her information is consistent with a really extraordinary range of possibilities from 'he's a random Mwangi villager who landed here by accident' to 'he's a time traveller' to 'someone maliciously manipulated his head and his memories to feed me a story'. 

"Drop the King a note," she says. "I don't really think it's worth him interrupting his meeting but maybe he has some context that'd change that calculation." 

And to the kid, "are there people who use magic, where you're from?"

(The staff can do that.) 

The kid gives her a nervous look. "I - do people use magic here -?" If they don't then he shouldn't say anything else because that will just put them in more danger.