...Offering the kid a hug clearly won't help at all but Ramel still wants to. 

:He's - you should be gentle with him: he tells Carissa instead. :He's clearly had a bad time: 

She has noticed this! She is not sure she's ever met anyone who hasn't had a bad time so she is somewhat less sympathetic than she probably ought to be but she's trying quite hard to not look like she'll bite since that will not help her get her questions answered. " - where do people in your world go when they die?"

"What?" That question makes no sense. "Dying isn't going somewhere, it's just - dying." 

"Do you know if that's what other people think too?"

"- Some people think that God takes you somewhere but I don't think that's true, I don't think magic works that way." 

"Where does God supposedly take people?"

Shrug. "I don't know. Someplace. ...I think people might say there's two different places, sometimes? For good people and bad people." 

"Okay. Does God do - miracles, or appoint followers, or do other things that would help with understanding Them and what they want?"

"I don't know. I - think maybe some people think God does miracles but only a really long time ago." 

"Huh." Convenient, less intervention is easier to work around. But hopefully there's an afterlife because otherwise what a catastrophe. "So children go to school because otherwise they usually die to mals? Has it always been that way?"

"I think there weren't as many mals a long time ago and then it got worse." 

"Do you know if the people in charge want help, with the mal problem."

"- Probably? But they - get scared, if they think someone's powerful and isn't doing predictable things. And I don't know any of the rules so I can't tell you what to do to not scare them." 

"You're very young, that is not your job, it's our job. Do you know specific things that scare them, though?"

"If you do maleficing. That scares people. But you shouldn't anyway because it makes you crazy." 

"If you do what?"

"S'when you get mana from other things that're alive. Except not bugs, that doesn't count for some reason, people just call it 'cheating'. And it's not called mana, it's called malia instead. If you get malia from rats and stuff, it - hurts, and it's bad for you and gives you brain damage, and...also it's maybe addictive and maybe stops you from using your own mana ever again? And then sometimes maleficers start murdering people for their malia. So - if you do maleficing, even if you just use animals, the big enclaves get mad and want to kill you." 

Is that why people were mad at him? she sends at Ramel. 

"I see. Are the people from your world going to be looking for you?"

:....Yes. He was - shit - he might've been on trial for a suspected murder, right before whatever just happened to land him here? I think that's why he was under an enchantment: 

Pause.

:...To be clear I - don't think he did the specific murder they were accusing him of? But he's not exactly being obliging in laying it out neatly in his thoughts, and he's definitely done - the thing he described. Do we want to ask him directly and get a confirmation now: 

Shiver. "I don't know. Maybe." New York or Shanghai might both look for him, for thoroughly different reasons. 

"Were you in trouble, in your world, for using malia? For hurting people?"

"....I used malia. But only rats and only because I would've died otherwise and I promised I wouldn't do it ever again!" 

He starts crying again. Tries very hard to do this silently and non-disruptively. 

:- He's telling the truth about all of that. He - I don't think he knew about the risks of it that he just told us. It sounds like he only found out a few days ago, at this 'school': 

"When Cheliax first came to be ruled by Iomedae and by Aroden, I thought they would want to kill me, because they were Good, and I had done bad things, and I thought that Good was about killing people who do bad things. But it turned out all right because actually Good is about making things better."

Masozi has NOT had good recent experiences when it comes to 'believing reassuring things that people tell him'. He is extremely dubious of this claim! Lan Xichen said it would be okay, when Masozi confessed having gotten into a fight with the New York enclave, and then it was NOT okay and there's maybe going to be a war about it.

He doesn't think that they're going to kill him right now, but mostly that's just because he's their only source of information on another world.