"I'll let him know."

Leareth is now so thoroughly compulsioned, which is, actually, bothering him once he's left to wait. More because the compulsions are visible to mage-sight (which he's not at this point banned from using, and has fully open at all times) than because they're obtrusive in his thoughts given how little he's trying to do any of the banned actions. He's blocked from Gating - there must have been at least one case in the Empire's history where a mage managed to Gate despite being compulsioned not to use magic for the purpose of escape, for all he knows he added that item to the checklist - and this is bizarrely upsetting, mostly because it's a reminder that he couldn't Gate anywhere anyway.

Dwelling on being trapped is not helping but it's taking much more ongoing effort than it usually would to avoid doing it anyway. 

Right. He should plan for the obvious questions they might ask him, so that he can at least be prepared to give the less-suspicious answer in cases where his wiggle room is based on how he's framing it in his thoughts. The first time he used magic was...he can say "last night", he thinks. It's the first time he used magic with this Gift, he didn't bother trying to dig in the bits of lingering Dalan-memories for that information and it's gone now, but he does think that no one else in the household would know to contradict him. If they ask what magic he's done, he can say "fire" and "shields" which shouldn't be terribly suspicious... 

He really doesn't have any appetite but he should try to eat something anyway while they're giving him a chance. 

A more senior-looking mage will arrive!

"Dalan?"

He will look attentive and only kind of frozen to the spot! "Mmm?" 

"Do you have any other supernatural abilities, other than Mage-Gift?" he asks. 

The unexpected wording comes very close to being a serious problem, because 'abilities' is more general than Gifts and Leareth has...a lot...of them. 'Like mage-gift' helps - he's able to lay it out in his mind so that it would obviously be a pointlessly confusing answer to say "immortality", since that implies he's immortal in the same way that someone might be mage-gifted, innately, as opposed to his immortality being a spell like shields on a house - you wouldn't say you had the supernatural ability of 'shields on your house', that would be absurd - 

...He's also not actually sure if the body has any other unawakened potential Gifts, checking for Gifts in potential even on himself is nontrivial with a recently awakened mage-gift that he just inherited. 

"...Not that I know of," he says, after a noticeable pause. 

... Well, that's weird. And he just got bothered by Janos, too...

(Gerain does not like Janos. People who are always right are at least as annoying as people who are never right, because you can't feel smugly superior to them.)

"What was the other answer you almost gave?"

They are being COMPETENT and REASONABLE and this is incredibly inconvenient! 

(Leareth is actually not panicking, mostly, he's too focused.) 

"I don't know if there are Gifts that aren't awakened yet," he says, that is in fact something he thought and didn't say - 

.....aaaaaaaaaaand he is compulsioned against "leaving things out" and cannot, apparently, stop there. 

"If there was a spell to make me immortal then it wouldn't count because that isn't like mage-gift." Phrasing it as an "if" was as far as he could push it, apparently. It's a sufficiently bizarre thing to say that maybe they'll initially just hear it as a child's bizarre daydream, but this interrogator is paying full attention, they're not going to just leave it there. 

What. 

How does Janos know these things.

"Is there such a spell?" he asks, because he's never heard of any such thing but emperor.

"...It was possible to cast such a spell once but not to replicate it," which is an EVEN MORE BIZARRE thing to say isn't it.

Leareth is now trying to think of a way to say 'and I suggest you escalate this to your superiors' that doesn't just make it sound even more suspicious, because at this point he's pretty sure there isn't a graceful way out of this and it's time to instead try the high variance method.  

So, someone has figured out a way around compulsions.

Why this kid. This is bullshit. What is Janos planning. Why is he stuck in it. He is going to yell at Avannar* so much.

"Do you have any other Gifts that have awakened." 

(*: Janos.)

The problem is that he's not at all sure he wants the attention of this mage's direct superiors. There - are very likely people in the Empire who he could sit down with and tell the right facts about who he is and have it - go non-disastrously - but he doesn't know if any of those people are specifically in the Ministry of Cults. And he doesn't want to push them to escalate too hard; getting the Emperor's direct attention, for example, feels...less likely to result in being able to leave at the end of it, however it goes...

- huh. Leareth can't tell if this is a 'moving on with the checklist for now while superiors are consulted' moment, or more of a dismissal than that. They might be interpreting it as the compulsions not working, or that he has a way around them. ...Or that he's insane. In their position he would be very confused. 

At least the answer is easy. "No." Though if they ask him in a range of different ways - 'have you ever used Mindspeech', for example - he's going to be in trouble. 

He should follow the checklist but "- How old are you."

Leareth was distracted trying to think how to field questions about using other Gifts in the past, and mulling on whether there's any useful way to tell this person - who has got to be confused and suspicious - something like "this is over your head and you should hand it over to the most competent person you know". He was NOT expecting that question. 

"- My body is thirteen." Possibly that's a worse answer than 'eighteen hundred and something' in terms of suspiciousness, actually, but it's what he said.  

JANOS.

All right, back to the checklist. There's rules for prisoners, even if this prisoner is WAY ABOVE HIS PAY GRADE, JANOS.

"Do you have -" any of the following specifically named Gifts. (Half of them either don't exist or are synonyms for Gifts already listed.)

He does not have any of those Gifts! 

At this point he should probably go over... asking this kid lots of questions about his father... but let's be honest whether this is "we figured out how to beat the compulsions," "this kid is crazy and it is a TOTAL COINCIDENCE that Janos warned me at the last minute," or "some bullshit immortality ???" he does not actually... want... to ask this kid lots of questions about his father.

Still, it's his job, and he is under compulsions to do his job.

"All right," he says. "Tell me about the cult." When this runs out he'll start asking probing questions about the ceremonies and which people participated in them, since this is HIS ACTUAL JOB, JANOS, THANKS FOR MAKING IT HARDER. He can compare and contrast and see if the kid is lying about anything obvious, at least.

...The kid stays pretty composed for this, but is answering "I don't know" to perhaps a suspicious number of the questions.

(Leareth does not have enough context from bits and pieces of Dalan's memories to answer everything he's being asked, and the compulsions won't let him just fill in the gaps with plausible guesses. Hopefully he just comes across as either very oblivious or excluded from many family activities due to his birth status. And at least he suspects that the mage questioning him is looking forward to this being over as badly as he is.) 

No, he comes across as really weird, not as very oblivious. Something to do with the CONFESSION OF IMMORTALITY. Gerain will ask for a guard to escort him back to his room and then he will go YELL AT JANOS.

"All right, the kid's very impressive. What's the game this time, Janos?"