Gate! He dispels the alarm immediately - it's not actually hard, it just requires having an intuitive sense of where to look - and Metis does not get whacked a second time by his countermeasures. 

And then the Gate is down, and he should be unscryable here, shielded against Thoughtsensing, shielded from Mindhealing Sight...

He sags to the floor and curls up in a ball and - 

- what. 

Just. What. 

What is happening to him and why. 

That...was a serious of ridiculous coincidences, and all lined up to keep him with these baffling people - the fact that he's in a seven-year-old's body, the location of the records cache, the Mindhealing Sight that meant they already knew most of his deepest secrets. 

Why???? 

The assumption is of course that it's hostile, but - here he is, fed and rested and safely in his records cache! With access to all of his notes, he could probably figure out a short-range Gate within the candlemark, and disappear. 

Should he, in fact, Gate off and disappear and make his way alone back to his fledgling organization? 

It would be the safe thing to do, the paranoid thing to do, but - it's been a lesson hard-learned over centuries, that always taking the path of maximum caution is not the way to win, here. For that he needs to recruit people, and it's been centuries, now, of overriding old, deep-baked instincts that he can only trust what he's personally verified, and sometimes, instead, extending an offer in good faith for someone to work with him, if they seem like the sort of person who might want to. 

Metis and Ophelia seem like very much the sort of people who could be recruited for his, well, project. He could quite badly use a bright and scientific-minded Mindhealer in particular, even, for certain research avenues that have been put off for centuries because that set of criteria is hard to fill. If he had met the two of them under normal circumstances, he would certainly be considering whether to cultivate them. 

He didn't meet them under normal circumstances, though. He met them under insane coincidence circumstances, and the priors are VERY STRONG that this makes it a setup for events to go terribly wrong. 

He doesn't want to Gate away and disappear. 

There are some logistical and tactical difficulties with that plan. It's a long way. He needs a lot longer than a candlemark in a records cache to be meaningfully less impaired. The systems he had begun setting up to allow him to step in and take over as his own "lawfully nominated heir" assumed he would be, like, thirteen. 

But, more fundamentally, he doesn't want to leave because it was nice, being held. Because it's been so hard getting through completely normal challenges, in this body, and - right, there's probably some kind of developmental maturity thing here, and a different set of existing cognitive and emotional habits, it makes sense that being hugged by grownups is much more - associated with comfort and safety - to the brain he took over. 

And it wasn't just that - it's the material help, and the kindness, and the - thoughtfully trying to give him what he needs - the saying reassuring things that actually land, most people are basically incapable of saying things that come across as reassuring to him until they've known him for years, but Ophelia had it down within minutes and he doesn't think it's entirely thanks to the Mindhealing Sight. 

So where does that leave him? 

...Already kind of exhausted again, apparently, after fifteen minutes of hard thinking. Still feeling very disinclined to head out on his own again. Wanting a hug

Also he shouldn't waste any time here having emotions. He...will dig out some of his actual records and start reading notes, though it continues to be the case that this is weirdly harder with a seven-year-old brain. (Easier in some ways. He actually thinks he might be able to jog more of his former memories back to the surface, there's more - mental flexibility - but sustained cognitive effort is much harder.) 

An hour after the initial Gate in, Zaril will be sprawled on his stomach on the floor - on top of a bedroll he dug out - with most of a crate's worth of carefully bound magically-preserved notebooks around him. The one currently open in front of him is written in some kind of incomprehensible cipher. 

...Metis shakes herself awake from the trance she's fallen into as she tries to get a woven ward-sphere to stabilize, as her (clockwork) alarm goes off, in a jarring ringringringringringringring of bells.  What was that one for...

Oh, right.  Check in on the tiny baby archmage under their basement.

...Where was her research on thermal management and 'invisible' spell-efficiency, again?

And then, if she --

"This thought leads directly to important things getting exploded.  Are you sure that's worth it?"

...Yes.  Yes she's sure.

The carefully-implanted thoughtcatcher, concert-work she did with her sister, reloads her context, with a faint feeling of deja-vu --

-- if she works out the same sort of invert spell she did for darkness in levin-bolt form...

She - and he - could harness the levin-crank, or lightning strikes.

Ophelia, meanwhile, has to make arrangements for continuity of care, given that doing her rounds is simply out of the question with her ongoing family emergency.  One day, she could make up.  Perhaps even one week, with effort.  If, as she suspects, she is going to be absent for weeks or months, though...To leave her patients in the lurch would be simply unconscionable.

She finishes dispersing her patient load around the office's therapeutic mesmerists, as the closest available substitutes to herself, and sighs as she reflexively operates the mage-artifact that will deliver her communique to her healing-office's support staff.

Realistically, she's pretty sure that everyone she works with knows that a "family emergency" is, coming from her, code for - as Metis would put it - "some absolutely fucking batshit bullshit is happening, again," but it's still true enough that she's playing by the rules she made about unexpected leave.

The hourglass she's meditating upon drips the last grains of sand into its lower bulb, and her primary locus of conscious awareness shifts once more from the inside of her office to the world around her.

Metis's usual alarm to not forget things is ringing again; good.  She still wants to be present for the check-in, though.  Zaril is...still fragile.  She would be too, in his position.  There's just too much going on, and all of it far outside the bounds of probability.

Well, no, there's always the chance that this did truly happen by chance...but that's much more unlikely than there being meddling afoot.

There barely needs to be a look passed between the sisters before they pass through a Gate to Metis's secondary Work Room - not the one she uses for working with chemicals, though they do share a wall - prior to opening the Gate to check on Zaril.  He'll appreciate the security; they'll appreciate the lack of volatiles.

And it is Ophelia that speaks through the small Gate that ultimately opens, crouched down, her voice soft, but sure.  "Hello Zaril; it's been an hour, and we're checking in on you like we planned.  Are you holding up alright?  Is there anything you need?  Metis has been looking through her research, and she's found something she thinks is promising for your project, if you'd like to hear about that right now."

He sits up. "I have a great deal more reading to do, but - I would be curious to hear what Metis has found, I think. ...And I have some documents I would be willing to share that you mind find interesting." 

He will scramble up and then try to haul over a crate of books that's nearly as big as he is. 

"We could probably help with that, if you'd like.  Would you prefer meeting up here, or...?"

"I would prefer that." He isn't feeling totally ready to just...invite them all to sit around in his private records cache, even if it is under their house and Metis can demonstrably Gate in whenever she likes. 

...He will accept help with his crate. Books are heavy and a couple of weeks of near-starvation, on top of being seven, wasn't exactly good for his muscle strength. 

Metis will --

-- be halted by Ophelia before she goes through the Gate to help with the crate of books.  Ophelia will help with the books, instead.

...She pouts a bit at this because she really wants to see inside the ancient wizard's secret lair, but that's probably exactly why Ophelia shifted the books instead of her, being as she normally prefers to avoid dirtying her hands.

And Ophelia will give Metis a Look as she's pouted at.  Respect his boundaries, sister, you are excited to find out more but he is terrified of us and for good reason.

Perhaps not terrified, but regardless, he needs to have space that's for himself, which is why she will not let her sister violate it.

...Okay, yeah, that's fair.  She wouldn't be very keen on letting a relative unknown into her volatile Work Room either on this short notice.

The - lack of exchange, really, passes in most of a blink, and the moving of the books not that much more; Metis eagerly takes custody of the crate once the Gate's down.  "Alright, who's going first?  Do you have a preference about that?  Because I want to tell you what I have here, but I also want to see what you think worth sharing, because - your ward scheme is a work of art, you know?"

The crate is full of books that mostly look very old. (He figured that treatises he wrote on magical research a thousand to fifteen hundred years ago, and on the other side of the continent, were mostly not going to be incredibly sensitive, or risk revealing capabilities he doesn't want the allies of the gods to learn of.) 

"I do not really have a good order to show you, this is just - a very wide range of magic that I need to review anyway and I am not sure how much of it is known here. I am curious about your thing?" 

"Well - I imagine you remember the way things went darker than usual, when you broke in?

"That was a standard light spell, turned inside-out.  Except that it doesn't take as much power as the equivalent magelight should!  And I don't think you can scale that wide enough to become magepower-positive, so really it was just a curiosity, and I try not to explode myself or risk being exploded, most of the time, but - you could get power density worth harvesting if you can invert levin-bolts, and I have a mechanical way to generate the levin - not to mention harvesting lightning."

"You have a mechanical way? Does it scale past static sparks?" 

- he narrows his eyes. "How many times did it explode when you were testing it?" Because the gods would not like that. He's not actually 100% sure if he ever followed that route of research himself, but he probably explored it a little, and stopped because it really sounds like the kind of thing that would take a lot of work to get as far as anything really useful, and in the interim there would be explosions.  

"As long as you can spin a wheel very fast or with sufficient force, yes, it very much does.  Even hand-powered.  I tried chemicals, but those tended to have containment failures at statistically implausible rates, so I - well.  Started aggressively isolating things that could change from the experiment, and ended up with what I'm calling a levin-crank.  And the math works out, if you try to scale it up, though I haven't thought it worthwhile."