His plan was to break into their basement and get access to his records and piece together more of - well, himself - and of what he's supposed to be doing next, he has dim memories of a secret academy in rural Rethwellan and some sort of infrastructure project in the very far north and maybe other things but it's still so hazy. Reading the notes will help, he always remembers more than it feels like at first. 

It would in fact be really nice to stay here a little while, put back on some of the weight he lost and get his reserves into better shape before he attempts a longer journey, but how is he supposed to explain the existence of a surprisingly extensive 900-year-old library underneath their cellar???

(Do they know it's there??? It would be awfully hard to detect, buried in the rock with the kind of shielding that's hard to spot, but the one who's a mage seems very good at magic -) 

He'll - keep thinking of a way to bring up the cover story less suspiciously than the truth. "- I will stay for a time, if you are willing to have me." 

(She hasn't discovered it yet, or she absolutely would have dug into the place.  This doesn't preclude that she might go looking, though, now that she has even tenuous evidence that there's something to be found...)

"Ophelia will certainly be glad to hear that."

...Whatever is up with this child, he certainly doesn't have a poker face worth a damn right now.  He looks so hopeful, even through what's obviously his calculating face.

"I think I am too."

...He nods, because he's not sure how else one is supposed to respond to that. 

Are they going to...make him go shopping? Why? He won't argue, it's much better than them asking him more suspicious questions, but crowded public places are Bad when he's still this incompetent at shields and situational awareness. 

They are not, in fact, going to make him do this, no.

"But I imagine that you will in fact want to have clothing that actually fits you, and while I'm sure Metis could arrange for measurements to be taken and turned into clothing without your particular input...

"You presumably have preferences, and it is much easier to accommodate them if you share them when they are immediately relevant.  And correct me if I'm wrong, but you may not even be fully aware of what you prefer in terms of - sensory experiences, so you will need to check at some point.

"Am I missing something...

"Ah.  Yes.  The reason you were out here in the middle of nowhere in the first place would be - a factor in planning this impromptu adventure, wouldn't it.

"Or rather, the reason you were alone when you arrived here.

"...You have someone looking for you, don't you, and you don't want to be found.  Because - given the frankly absurd skills you have, you can't not draw notice, for good or for ill, on your own.  Well.  Good news, you're not on your own.  Bad news, we do have our own troubles, not that we - expect them to be acting up...except that we absolutely should so I don't know why I was so certain your presence is a good idea, not that I'm going to lock you up in here or kick you out, either way...Metis!  Prepare the wardline for Shenanigans if you haven't!  There's too much Weirdness happening!"

"I did that when you canceled your appointments!"

Blink. Um??? 

(They're not completely wrong! Though the real story is a lot more complicated and strange than just having ""someone"" after him. Probably it's for the best, that they've quickly jumped to the simpler and incomplete explanation.) 

"If you have your own - problems - and expect to perhaps be attacked in public then I think I would prefer not to go shopping," he says tightly. "I am not going to be very bothered if the clothes do not fit perfectly. ...I do know how to sew." 

"We don't normally expect that.  But yes.  We're not going shopping.  We probably will be going to the city, though, unless you can convince Metis that she can trust you to not blow up the house while we're absent.  I only have the one life to live and I'm not giving up on the people I can help with it."

He doesn't wince but it takes some effort. (He does, slightly, wince internally, it's visible in the gears of his mind.) 

"I have no reason to try to blow up your house but I understand that you do not - know me - and am not expecting you to take me at my word. I...will come with you, if that is what is convenient," even though cities, and attracting attention at all, are both nervewracking when he knows he's still substantially impaired. 

"I don't think it's that my sister doesn't take you at your word that you will not be trying to blow up the house.  It's that she has a lot of things that could go wrong if deliberately meddled with, and subconsciously expects you to go and meddle with them without necessarily knowing what they are or how they work or how to handle them safely, because that's what she'd do, in precisely your situation, if she was bored and alone in a wizard's laboratory - and the house isn't her Work Room, that's over the hill there, but she does a lot of theoretical work here that turns into dangerous practice.  Not anywhere near the scale of the Cataclysm, thank goodness, but...we had to see a Healer, and replace an entire wall, after some of her experiments with only magelights."

Ophelia sighs.  "If you can keep up with her, though, she'll probably teach you whatever she knows out of sheer joy at having found someone who can keep up, so - I ask, as her sister, that you avoid taking advantage of her in that way, at least until we can be trusted with an idea of what you'd do with that knowledge."

She pauses, contemplating something.

"I'm - fairly certain that whatever you're here to do is terribly important, but - you don't have to do it by yourself.  You're - here for a reason, and if we thought it was a horrible reason, you would not still be here.  You risked your life on these wards because you thought that very reason was more important than yourself.  It's probably more important than either of us, too."

The casual mention of the Cataclysm gets a visible flinch, though reasonably well controlled, and a much more obvious ripple of reaction in his mind. Whatever the Cataclysm means, to this small child, it's tied up in - deep agonizing regret, though it isn't quite shaped the usual way that guilt is, and a weariness that really has no business belonging in a young person's head. 

He manages to refocus, though, and then she'll probably teach you whatever she knows out of sheer joy at having found someone who can keep up is painful in an entirely different way, grief and loss and loneliness and confusion... 

- um. He does not, actually, think that they would approve of what he's doing here. Or at least not the context behind it, they might be fine with the records and cache of magic artifacts. Delighted, even. But the reason for it is...no. Not something he can tell these random, generous, kind people who took in a child traveling alone. 

He doesn't actually start crying again but it's a near thing. That was a lot of emotions in quick succession, especially for a brain and set of mental habits which is still in a very real sense that of a seven-year-old, however much most of him has nearly two millennia of practice in emotional regulation. 

...That's...

"...It really is terribly important, isn't it," she breathes out, softly.  Her voice solem and quiet, she continues: "If the worst disaster known to man, a thousand years gone, is, to you, so agonizingly personal.

"What do you need?"

...Actually this is just incredibly overwhelming and he cannot deal with the thing where apparently all of his emotions are incredibly obvious to the Mindhealer and so he's leaking information left and right and he should just LEAVE NOW but he - 

- doesn't want to leave, not yet, not the first place he's experienced in probably-centuries where people were kind to him for no reason at all, and he's NOT safe here but it's so, incredibly, tempting, to feel like maybe he can be... 

Also he can't think with the Mindhealer looking at him and being sympathetic and she has no idea what he's planning, what he's going to do, what he's spent the last seven hundred years desperately looking for a way to avoid. 

"Can I," he says in a small pinched voice, "please, be, alone -" 

"We'll give you some space."  She will in fact leave him alone until lunchtime unless otherwise indicated.

...Perhaps they'll go buy him clothing -- no that's a horrible idea to do when there's this much stuff happening around them.  It'll have to wait.

...The little kid in the other room was probably alive during what?!  She has so many questions!  ...It's not an appropriate time to ask them, and she knows that, but she has them anyway!

...And that might mean that whatever he broke in here for is possibly of critical importance to Not Having Another Cataclysm, so, she'll be in her Work Room, trying to figure out if she can find secret underground passages by measuring the force exerted upon a weather-barrier that filters only air.  Well, the inert portion of air.  Too much of everything else occurs in rocks, she thinks.

There is totally something down there! 

It's underneath their cellar. Quite a ways underneath. There isn't any kind of noticeable hatch or trapdoor, and there any air for a while, either; there must be some kind of passage, but it's entirely filled in, and if the stones filling it are moveable, they're perfectly fitted and the cracks between them are impossible to detect via this method. 

But below that, there are - not detectable shields, there's nothing there to mage-sight, but she wouldn't necessarily be able to detect discreet shields, since mage-sight doesn't work very well through ten feet of rock. And something is in the way. 

...huh.

She checks this once, twice, thrice, that there is something she cannot move a spell into - maps out what she reasonably can of the boundaries - 

Her next step is to - first, Fetch a tiny bit of stone to the surface, from right next to the barrier, then - open a Gate in the hole she made, because, really, how was this kid planning on getting in there, digging?  She doesn't think so!  But she doesn't actually know what's down there, where.  Opening a Gate into a solid object would suck.  So she's being careful, preparing a small niche through which to spy, and also doing it through a buffering artifact so the backlash doesn't hit her if the wards bite.  Also because Gates are pretty fucking hard to hold in your head all at once.

And with a Gate up close, she can actually see the barrier with mage-sight! 

It's not a technique she's ever seen before. It's neither a single sheet, nor interlocking panels like hers; it almost looks woven, or maybe more like some very intricate multilayered-in-three-dimensions macrame pattern, but entirely made of a single unbroken thread. 

- and woven through that single-yarn shield, which seems to be generically against magic, are more detailed wards. The room is going to also be warded against many spells that route partially through the Void, like variant shield-piercing scrying or the special variants on the standard communication-spell. It is inconveniently warded against Fetching. 

It's probably not warded against Gates, if only because this is nearly impossible even in theory and straightforwardly impossible in practice. 

She can see some of the barrier's surface, but cannot see through the barrier; one of the things it blocks is mage-sight, and plausibly there are even more wards and shields tucked in layers behind it. 

...It's so beautiful.

Also terrifying.

But mostly just...

Beautiful.

...

"I think I found his thing.  Do you - no, he won't want us to see."

"...Do you think it would be a good idea to check what's in there anyway."

"...That really depends upon which definition we're using for good."

She sighs.  "I hate this part."

...She thought that the risk of not being a good enough wardbreaker to survive boobytraps a thousand-year-old wizard defuses in their sleep would be - a sufficient weight on the scales to make this Not Her Problem.

Unfortunately, she's too good at arguing with herself, and she can still make really tiny Gates.

And if the peephole Gate gets blasted...well, if it's not being blasted hard enough to kill her on the surface, she thinks she can probably survive.

...She's going to get her spare Gate-buffering artifacts out first, though.

There's a three second delay, during which she can get a peek at - not very much, actually, unless she's able to quickly cast a mage-light through the Gate, in which case she'll see smooth-finished stone walls, a perfect cube of a room, with (magically shielded) crates stacked four and five deep against two and a half walls - the remaining exposed wall has an embossed threshold that might be intended for Gates) and floor-to-ceiling shelving against the fourth, filled with a mix of books and smaller boxes and miscellaneous artifacts. 

- and then the wards bite, though it could be a lot worse, the total power output is moderate. The levinbolts that come at her tiny Gate from a dozen directions manage to hit it directly, though, which speaks to a very high level of complexity and skill in the set-spell, to build in a mage-sight sensor and responsiveness. 

Yeah, she already had the light ready to go.

"...Oww.  Those are - very good wards.  ...We should probably tell him we've - found his supplies, if he wants them."

"...I hope, against my instincts, that it will feel like less of a - violation - than I think he will experience, in knowing that we know - so much more than he wanted known.  But - he should know."

...It's been long enough that it would, at least, be reasonable to have lunch.

"...Bring him lunch.  Bring up the subject only after you've given him the food and he is eating.  Talk about the interesting magic.  I - think he will think more kindly of you, for this - be less likely to panic and run - though...there is so much pain, still, from - a wound he has forgotten.  And so much of my conversation with him picked at the scabs that I'm not sure his heart's not bleeding from it."

...Metaphorically.  Not literally.

"...Be careful.  But - moreso, be kind."  Normally, that last portion would go unspoken, because - they both do try.

Nothing's normal, now.