Leareth MIGHT feel slightly better about the situation if he were aware that the gods themselves are sometimes ALSO quite inconvenienced by the exact timing with which some long-shot nudges end up working out, and in this case there was a PLAN and its future prospects are now lost in noise.

That looks like a suddenly-available nudge that - probably - results in substantially constraining the source-of-noise for a while? 

THAT IS NOT OBVIOUSLY HELPFUL THERE WAS A PLAN

Well, some elements of the plan may end up being less rather than more complicated. 

(Not one of the higher-probability paths, but, possibly, an interesting one...) 

The small barony of Assadar has seen hard times, in the last generation. (They're a long way from even the provincial capital, which of course means they don't get much attention or help when times are hard.) 

But things are looking up! They've had several years of good harvests, and a new gem-mine turned out to be unexpectedly productive, and of course the Baroness survived her last pregnancy and childbirth, and so did the babe, when that had looked far from a sure thing. No thanks to the Empire's trained Healers - they couldn't get one out in time, even though they sent a message with one of the mages - but the old village midwife did come in time. And later on, once she trusted them enough, she was the one who introduced the Baroness to the priest of the Sky-Father in hiding, and at this point Baron Tavis is definitely inclined to thank the Sky-Father and Earth-Mother for their recent change in fortunes. 

It's all very illegal, of course, and sheltering a priest in your cellar is a lot more illegal than occasionally whispering a prayer, or even keeping a little shrine tucked away in a corner. But the Emperor is very far away, and the Empire has never shown any sign before this of caring about their lives all the way out here. 

The Baron's eldest legitimate son is still too young to be sent to foster at court - his wife's first two were daughters, and their eldest son is only seven. (The Baron figured there would be time to figure something out - bribe the right person, or convince them the boy is simple, or maybe the Sky-Mother will answer his wife's prayers not to be separated from her son and the problem will go away some other way.)

His illegitimate son from shortly before his marriage, almost-14-year-old Dalan, has been noticing the new strange things in his head for a few weeks now.

The usual thing to do would be to go to their house mage, but he would rather tell the Baron first, and - decide what to do. He isn't sure he really wants to be a mage. When he was eight it was one of his top fantasies, because everyone fantasizes about being a powerful mage and fighting in glorious battles for the Empire when they're eight, but - it's more complicated than that, isn't it. Mages are important to the Empire, and being important to the Empire does not feel like a good thing these days. 

So he goes to hide in his chamber, the door barred, before testing whether he can light the tinder in his fireplace by staring at it and thinking about it hard enough. 

(It takes a while to figure out.) 

Leareth's last clear memory is of struggling to stay conscious and trying to emphatically tell Nayoki that they needed to talk to Vanyel - and find out what was happening in general, but communication with Vanyel seemed particularly important - before doing anything irreversible. 

He comes back to awareness in the middle of flailing for control of someone else's body–

...not someone else's body anymore. 

The memory-traces he inherits with a new body are fragmentary, and tend to fade over a few days as he gets his own mind established in its new substrate, but in this case, it's enough to piece together the general outline of his situation. 

It's an awkward situation! For one, he seems to be under a routine compulsion, placed solidly enough that it wasn't automatically dislodged by the turmoil happening underneath it. Not for loyalty to the Empire or Emperor, either, which might actually be easier to work around until he has a chance to get it removed (and it's self-protecting enough that he's certainly not getting it off himself right here and now.) It's for loyalty to the baron, to this household and family, which - there's almost certainly some way to arrange to ask for, and get, instructions from "his" lord that he can interpret far enough to leave,  but it's going to take some finessing. 

Also. There is apparently a priest of the Earth-Father living in the cellar???? He has no reason to think from the bits and pieces of inherited memory that the priest would be inclined to pay the baron's bastard son any attention in the next few days, and the gods don't necessarily have a lot of fine steering power in a situation that's inherently noisy to them because it abruptly contains Leareth, but he is still very unhappy about it. 

Also he's physically thirteen and a half, with a barely-starting-to-awaken mage-gift that was just about adequate to set some kindling on fire. He could probably manage basic wards on this room. He could cast a compulsion on someone else, if he could fit it into the wiggle room he has for "not disloyal to the household and family." He would be hard-pressed to do anything that would matter in a fight, including shielding himself properly. He's definitely not Gating anywhere anytime soon. 

Also, the gods are up to something big and his organization might be about to go to war with Valdemar without him. ...He has no idea how long it's been. His organization might have already decided to invade Valdemar without him. 

(Vanyel -)

It's not a great situation! But at least he's safely ensconced in a room - it even has basic shielding, this baron's house mage isn't completely incompetent - and no one is expecting the former inhabitant of his body to be anywhere before morning. He has time to consolidate his core memories, prepare himself to impersonate "Dalan", and come up with a strategy for what in the world he can say to his "lord father" that will get him something he can twist into permission to get out of the Eastern Empire. And it's not far to the border. Things could definitely be a lot worse.  

This is, of course, why now - or, technically, thirteen minutes from now - happens to be when the Bureau of Cults kicks the door in.

Also of course, the kick is wholly immaterial! Cults sometimes do have unusual resources, and while they usually don't have access to any real mages (or the oft-rumored, rarely seen mental powers of western sorcerers), this is a Baron and he has a house mage, and so this involved a rapid scry followed by Gating into rooms of the house he wasn't in through doors that had nobody in position to target the frame until after the strike team struck, aiming at capturing him, his master the Baron, and the rest of the Baron's family. Bureau mages (their guards covering them) are dropping compulsions on everyone they see, backed by the military mages and soldiers (in full armor) they borrowed from the provincial governor, and as Mage-Director* Gerain strides into the building to brandish his formal writs of search and seizure, he expects resistance to already be over.

(*: Technically 'Mage-provincial-director,' but that's not seven syllables in the Imperial language and so it is being compressed for space.)

Resistance would be incredibly stupid when his body is thirteen, but Leareth's room isn't one of the first targets; Dalan was treated fairly decently for an illegitimate son, even by the Baroness, but he was still bumped to one of the less-desirable attic rooms when the Baron's legitimate children filled up the good bedrooms. He has time to hear a commotion and, while he has no idea what's happening yet - and no magical way of finding out, given that scrying freehand without a focus is too challenging to pull off on the spot with his fledgling Gift, this is frustrating - he can guess that it's not good. And he can't exactly do anything loyal for the Baron if he's caught up in the same mess, so it's not even hard to decide he should, instead, not be. 

Unfortunately the attic room's window is too small even for a thirteen-year-old body to squeeze through, meaning that his options are to hide - which won't work if whatever is happening involves mages with mage-sight - or slip into the hallway and try to find an alternate exit route before he's spotted. Leareth goes with the latter, even though he's not really expecting it to work. 

It doesn't! He gets a few seconds before Ministry of Cults personnel make it into the attic, and unfortunately (they spent a while inside Faun Kar province planning out their strike, instead of more sensibly doing it from the Imperial Capital) the hallway in the attic has Ministry of Cults personnel tearing through it. Even more unfortunately (people with careful knowledge of Imperial geography might note that Faun Kar is the westernmost province of the Empire) they include a mage, provided by the Governor himself as part of his firm belief that a key secret to averting wars and rebellions is to hit hard enough the first time that the other guy can't hit back.

"Stop taking volitional actions" is a really simple compulsion.

...The situation indeed could have been a lot worse, and now it is! 

(It's fairly obvious, after a few seconds of confusion, what's happening and why. Priest in the cellar, and incredibly bad timing. Leareth is almost impressed.) 

Leareth is also longer taking any volitional actions. They are, for the moment, still letting him think - he's not very well shielded, but this is the Empire, and a distant province of it, they almost certainly don't have a Thoughtsenser - and so he really needs to take whatever opportunity they grant him to plan how he can get himself out of the hands of the...he can't remember what the department is actually called, the one that tracks down cultists. 

...He can at least say, if compulsioned to speak honestly, that he definitely doesn't worship the Sky-Father or Earth-Mother and is about as strongly opposed to the gods as anyone can be? Whenever they get around to questioning him, which would, you know, require first giving him the ability to talk. For now he's going to just be here on the floor until they decide to change that. 

They're far too busy compulsioning everyone to stop fleeing and stop resisting for them to ask him questions! It's not as though he looks important enough to know anything. The Bureau troops will just charge past, opening or kicking down the doors of every door in the attic and hitting everyone else they find there with compulsions the way they did Dalan/Leareth. He'll have some time to think before the Bureau is out of combat mode and into interrogation mode, if he wants it.

Right. Plan. 

...It's difficult to come up with a plan when he has so few predictions about how they're going to handle this. He doesn't remember the exact policies for investigations, the policies he was actually involved in setting have probably changed, and this close to the border they might not even be following them very closely. He...still thinks it's better for him, overall, to be in a backwater province like Faun Kar (and he doesn't need to look for reasons it's also better from the gods' point of view, it's probably just what They could get), but it definitely adds a factor of uncertainty. Incompetence might be helpful to an extent, but there's a degree of it that would just make things worse for him as well - though the operation so far seems tightly-run enough...

The main question is whether to use whatever leeway he ends up having - and he's deeply unsure how much that will be - to steer them to be less interested in him, or more. He...can, if he's trying for it, very likely pass as Dalan - give that 9 in 10 odds, because it wouldn't take that much of a shocking coincidence for a skilled interrogator to notice an inconsistency and start digging, and who knows if that's what the gods are steering for here. 

If he pulls that off, he thinks he can more likely than not eventually convince them that Dalan was innocent of godworship and wasn't meaningfully involved in the Baron's actions - since, in fact, he wasn't - but he would only give that, say, 6 in 10 odds, given how Dalan demonstrably did nothing to stop his father, and the investigators are really not going to be biased in his favor. His overall chances, from here, are probably close to 50/50. 

Also, that would take weeks if not months, and it's not even clear if that gets him out of the Empire, as opposed to identified as a mage and placed in a school under suspicious observation and at least the standard compulsions. 

If Leareth doesn't try to pass as Dalan, then...what...he has no idea what happens. It feels like it depends very heavily on who he's talking to. To the extent he has any ability to steer that, he can maybe push to be questioned in depth by someone more senior and (probably) more competent and more aligned with the Empire's goals – he could say that he has intelligence of interest to the Emperor, for example, and be telling the truth. He...isn't sure...if that improves the situation at all. Getting himself transported deeper into the Empire is better from a godinterference perspective, maybe, but definitely worse in terms of how many layers he has to evade to leave again... 

Leareth is also realizing that he's really not in good shape to be handling a stressful interrogation where he's inevitably going to be wildly improvising! He didn't have nearly as long as he'd mentally budgeted for to consolidate core memories, let alone sort through the fragments of his host body's memories before they start to fade. He...is maybe going to focus on that for the next while, actually, on the grounds that he needs more information to pick his strategy and it makes sense to focus on being as mentally intact as possible for it. 

Once they get around to arresting him more formally (which takes a while, they need to make sure), he's going to be Compulsioned to answer questions honestly without withholding information, obey agents of the Emperor, not try to flee or escape, and have all the usual prisoner-compulsions applied. Then he's going to tell them if he's a cultist and where the hidden cultists are, or were when he last knew.

Competent but not at all creative, so far. They could have been a lot more thorough on the not-withholding-information clause, as it is he's still only required to answer the exact questions they're asking without withholding anything directly relevant to that question. 

...Boring at least until he can get a better read on the interrogator, then. He doesn't worship the Sky-Father or Earth-Mother and never has, and he wasn't involved in deciding to hide a priest in the cellar and does not think this was a good idea. Though until now he was under a compulsion of familial loyalty to people who did think it was a good idea for some reason. 

He...knows that the priest was in the cellar? He doesn't know which cultists were "hidden" or where they would hide if they weren't in the manor? They were probably not really hiding since he thinks they didn't expect anyone to be coming to arrest them but he can...try...to name some places where someone could in theory hide...? 

(Leareth's attempts to navigate the compulsions while frantically digging through memory-shards that don't belong to him makes him come across as a somewhat confusing combination of "maybe a bit simple" and "disconcertingly careful with word choice for a child", if anyone is bothering to pay attention to that.) 

The interrogators are really too busy to be creative. They have a lot of people to interrogate and they want to make sure this cult isn't coming back. Name and rank?

...Yeah, while still very disoriented and facing a busy and preoccupied interrogator is not the best time to try high variance strategies. Leareth may end up regretting that if he ends up stuck in a cell for the next week, but that's - probably still better than attempting a high variance strategy badly. And this continues to seem competently done, it'll probably be less than a week and he probably won't be left without the ability to speak. 

He's been practicing holding the mental attitude that "Dalan" is his name - it's fairly usual for him to go by different names in each body, and not unusual to just take on the name of whoever he stole the body from - and can answer that without hesitation. Rank is more or less just a social framework anyway, and the description that gives them accurate anticipations about his resources and allies in this place is what everyone else thinks his rank is, which is "illegitimate son of Baron Tavis, claimed as part of the household but not in the succession." 

Are they going to leave him alone now. 

Nope! They've determined that he is low ranking but not bottom ranking and they're going to throw him in jail (there's a Gate) until someone has time to pay actual attention to him with compulsions not to escape, plot escape, leave, et cetera. A tower cell with a cot and without rats, so not too bad, but not one of the "cells" that is for politically powerful people you need not to unnecessarily antagonize.

... THEN they're going to leave him alone.

It's really not that bad. He would be sleeping in much worse conditions if he had managed to leave immediately and been on the road by now. He does badly need to get some sleep at some point - he has very little sense of what time it is right now, but it's probably late, and he doesn't have an adult's stamina right now. 

He lies down on the cot and pokes at his compulsions. How much leeway have they left him to do things that definitely don't involve escape or plotting escape? There are other reasons he shouldn't practice magic - probably they have wards up, and it seems like they haven't yet identified him as a mage and will probably compulsion him a lot more thoroughly once they catch on to that - but could he? 

The compulsions weren't placed in the belief that he was a mage, and therefore there are compulsions to not destroy property and to not leave and to not break his compulsions, but no compulsions against any particular method of doing these things. If he wants to use magic, he absolutely could.

In that case he's going to spend a while looking around with mage-sight, which both gives him some badly needed practice and calibration with this body's mage-gift (while still being undetectable), and lets him scope out how good their shielding is and what kinds of wards they have. Are they set up to immediately detect it if, for example, he were to practice casting low-power shields? 

(It's also occurred to him that if he does come up with a strategy that involves being interesting, casting some detectable magic on purpose is one route to avoid being forgotten in here for days.) 

It looks like the jail has default wards that will detect if magic is used...

... No, whoever was in charge of enchanting this was sloppy. Only magic that affects the jail, and then a few specific patches to cover Gates and similar. Any heat-spell would be noticed, but shields that don't change detectable features of his cot/walls/windows et cetera won't be until someone with mage-sight takes a look at him.

Well, his goal here isn't to escape or sabotage anything - since he's directly blocked from doing that - just to get a better sense of his current capabilities and start improving his control. Repeatedly casting and dismantling shields on himself, which definitely don't affect the jail infrastructure, would do fine for that goal. 

...He's going to sleep first, though. They might be efficient enough to talk to him first thing tomorrow, and given that no amount of magical practice is going to get him that far when he's so tightly limited on power output and total reserves, he would rather prioritize being well-rested. 

They will not get to him first-thing in the morning! They have a limited supply of trained interrogators and he's Just Too Far Down The List.

Well. He's at least somewhat rested. If they keep being professional about this, they might even feed him. That's - a better starting place than he could have been in, for facing this. 

It would be nice if he also had his head more fully in order, but that's going to be difficult to accomplish without any of his records or even paper to take notes on, and when quite a lot of his moment-to-moment emotional reactions are still affected by the inherited body. Dalan was not a child who was used to feeling trapped in terrifying high-stakes situations where it was very important to stay in control, which - speaks well of his father the Baron, really, though the rest of the whole situation doesn't necessarily - but does mean that Leareth keeps having to override emotional patterns that want him to respond to being stressed by crying. 

They're pretty unlikely to have someone who's good at it scrying the prisoners even intermittently, given the resources they've demonstrated so far. Leareth should still, probably, be assigning some small likelihood that he missed some of their precautions, and someone will burst in as soon as he does any magic. Is he ready for that? 

...Ready enough to make it worth the benefit of being slightly more capable, he thinks, and starts very carefully trying to layer a shield over himself. Against physical attacks, not because he's expecting anyone to hit him but just because it's the simplest variant and will stand out the least against the ambient mage-energies of his body, making it less noticeable if the first person to interrupt him is someone with mage-sight. 

He can definitely get started on that, and will get reasonably far into it before he hears someone stomping up the stairs to his tower cell.

His control seems reasonably intact, once he's a little more used to the sheer lack of raw power. In a technical magical sense, he ought to be capable of casting a compulsion on the interrogator if that seemed useful, though of course it's another question whether he could sneak it past the compulsions placed on him not to plot escape or sabotage. 

- oh, convenient, they're not even trying to sneak up on him. (Presumably because "catching the secret mage in the act of practicing magic" is not even slightly something they know they should be trying to do.) He has time to unweave the shield and reabsorb its meagre energies back into his reserves - and then spends the rest of the time trying to get his heart rate under control, because apparently one of the traits he's inherited with his adolescent body is "easily startled." 

He's sitting up on the cot and at least externally calm by the time the footsteps reach the cell door. 

(He wants his Thoughtsensing back. He will presumably end up missing it for a huge number of reasons, and it wouldn't even necessarily be useful - they might still be careful enough to bother to provide interrogators with shields even against an incredibly rare Gift - but it's just another way for him to feel frustratingly powerless.) 

They have no idea that he is anything other than a fairly low-status prisoner! It's a guard, not even a mage-guard, just someone large enough to wrestle prisoners with a uniform and a stick. "You're to come with me." 

(His compulsions think he should go with this person.)

He will go with the guard, trying to seem composed but still appropriately meek and harmless. 

(It's probably not worth trying anything on the guard's compulsions - it's not obvious how he could justify cutting the man's compulsions as anything other than blatant sabotage, not that it's particularly clear if it would even help. He could in theory try to add a neutral compulsion unrelated to the guard's current duties, just for the information value of whether he can - a top-security top-paranoia installation, if they were being thorough, would block even an assumed non-mage from planning to get someone else's compulsions modified regardless of the intent, which would incidentally block doing it at zero removes, and he doesn't think this place is that careful but isn't sure exactly what all of the compulsions on his mind do - but, either way, it would be hard to pull off casting a compulsion unnoticeably-to-the-guard while distracted walking in a hallway, and there might be mages around to notice. Leareth is tempted but holds back.) 

He's led down the stairs to a room - they aren't shackling his hands, just trusting in the compulsions - where a breakfast pitched to a member of a nobleman's household, a pitcher of what he would guess is watered wine, and a mage are all waiting.

(It's not hard to recognize he's a mage, especially considering how many of Leareth's scholars were from the Empire; he has the neck-cord and breast-badge that mages of Master rank are expected to wear, with the focus-stone and ward-amulets clear. His hair is white and his face is little aged, which could mean anything from twenty to eighty, depending.) 

The guard salutes, goes to stand by the door. "Stay." (That's an order, from the perspective of his compulsions.) "Your name?"

This is not a surprising question and he's ready for it. "Dalan."

The setup is...unexpectedly friendly? Maybe? Not enough that he's inclined to relax at all, but he's curious to see how they're approaching it. Does it seem like he's going to be offered a seat in reach of the food, or is this more "they're setting him up to stare at it hopefully while he gets questioned first"? 

The second. Totally the second.

"You are the acknowledged natural son of the Baron of Assadar?"

Well, it's not like he's desperately hungry. (He is quite thirsty, but doesn't particularly want wine even if it's watered, and he has the discipline to ignore it.)

"Yes." 

He draws a piece of paper out of his pocket.

"Do you worship any gods..." And then he's going to go down the long list of synonyms for this and related questions (like "are you concealing god-worshippers from the empire"), and then ask directly if he's plotting treason against the Empire, and go down the list of synonyms and related questions for that.

It's mostly trivial to answer "no" to all those questions, since he in fact doesn't worship other gods! (And is not currently personally plotting anything that would count under the various synonyms for treason against the Empire, and it would be surprising if his operations in the north involved any of that.)

Navigating it does mean a lot of leaning on his memories as Leareth, and mostly deliberately not poking at the fragments of the boy he killed, which - could be awkward if they decide to dig into any questions of the nature "what were you doing two days ago", but he'll handle that if and when it happens.

(It would also be awkward if they're cross-referencing with any testimony from the rest of the household, if Dalan was in fact an active participant in their family's worship. Leareth is limited in how much he can plan for that, though, and - will see if it comes up.) 

Unfortunately, this mage might be going over everything with polite disinterest, but the checklist was written by someone competent, because the next stage is eight synonyms for "are you a mage," including "have you ever used magic".

....That is not very surprising. There really wouldn't have been a way to get around it by equivocating between Leareth and Dalan in his head, since both of them are/were mages and have used magic, and so that's not something he tried to plan around. Yes, he's a mage. 

(Do any of the questions, or the answer-without-withholding-information compulsion, require him to commit to saying anything about how long he's been a mage? Or are they going to pause everything to re-evaluate the compulsions and precautions on him first?) 

(He's definitely glad he didn't try anything with compulsions on the guard, since obvious followup questions would include what magic he's done and whether he's done any magic while a prisoner. Of course, now he's going to lose the opportunity to try it, but - it was probably predetermined that he wouldn't get any opportunities to try it and accomplish anything -) 

(It is not at all helping to be slightly panicking but his body is anyway.) 

The answer-without-withholding-information compulsion does not require him to say that - "yes" does not count as withholding information.

At that point the mage visibly wakes up, murmurs something through a comms-spell.

"Has your Gift ever been formally tested, and if so, what was the result?"

"...I don't know." 

It's convenient that Leareth doesn't have the slightest recollection off the top of his head of what his measured potential was in previous incarnations in the Empire - or, honestly, what the formal testing consists of and where they draw the categories - since that would be - more awkward - he's not going to think about it too hard. He in fact has no idea what the Dalan's raw potential without...special encouragement...would end up being, and also doesn't know off the top of his head what Leareth's potential would have measured as if formally tested (though "not knowing" that definitely involves some notthinkingaboutit.) But he apparently can't in fact push it as far as an outright no without upsetting the compulsions. 

He blinks. "You don't know if you have ever been formally tested?"

"...I don't know what my result would be." Which is probably going to sound weirdly evasive and aaaah it would be really helpful if he could be calm about this. 

This kid appears to be under a lot of stress! "Answer the question," he says. "There is nothing wrong with mage-gift, whatever your family told you. The Empire is founded on it."

That is absolutely not what Leareth Dalan is stressed about, but he manages to be slightly less tense.

"I - don't - remember being formally tested," he says, which is in fact literally true.

... This is still suspicious but kids are weird. - Then he gets a message and immediately compulsions the kid not to final strike.

Incredibly reasonable and it's a little surprising they didn't do it right away! (Though redundant, in this case, it's covered by the no-sabotage compulsions and plausibly also by the compulsions against leaving, Leareth did not poke at that since there are a number of reasons he wasn't even considering Final Striking.) 

He can tell that the mage is suspicious and is really not sure what to do about it. Either they're going to end up asking the right questions to notice that something is - very strange - or they're not. And of course it's not even clear whether avoiding suspicion accomplishes anything, from his perspective, even if it feels more like being in control. 

Leareth has very little idea what would be helpful to steer toward, and quite a lot of his attention is still going toward just staying calm enough that he can think. He could proactively offer more explanation - like that Dalan hadn't told the Baron about his mage-gift yet - but will instead wait to see what the next questions are. 

Next questions, nothing; the next stage is giving him the Default Mage-Prisoner Compulsions According To The Checklist (which he'd guess is being fed to this guy through a comms-spell, given how surprised he was), which prevent him from using his magic to leave entirely separate from the compulsion not to leave and also prevent him from casting compulsions or altering compulsions or using his magic on anyone but himself or using his magic to interfere with the interrogation or or or...

That's so reasonable of them. It's almost calming, actually, just because displays of competence are abstractly reassuring to his mind even if not directed in a way that's helpful for him specifically. (And it's not like it makes his situation that much worse, given how useless his barely-awakened Gift is.) 

He's holding very still, his expression one that could be parsed either as "composed" or "frozen." 

Right. The mage (looking tired after all this compulsion-work - compulsions are low energy, but there's a lot of them on the Standard Checklist and they're finicky work if you're undertrained) waves Leareth at the food. "Eat, drink as you need." He gives Leareth a superior smile, perhaps intending to be calming. "Someone will be here shortly to speak with you."

Which is informative as to the mage's Gift-potential and training, and thus how seriously they were taking him initially. They're probably going to send a stronger or more trained mage now.

(Leareth is quite curious what sort of conversation is happening right now back at the headquarters that received the onsite mage's communication-spell report. They - probably still believe his answers to earlier questions, he was visibly not doing any magic at the time and it's not like mages are immune to interrogation-compulsions - but even if they currently believe he's not a cultist, they've got to be suspicious about the coincidence of a newly-awakened mage in a household of cultists, and whether it's a godplot of some kind.) 

"Thank you," he says politely, because being polite is free, and - if the compulsions in fact let him - he will get some food. 

There are, if one is governor (civil and military) of Faun Kar province, a number of duties one must fulfill. Different governors vary in how seriously they take them; border defense, information gathering, provincial development, maintenance of law and order, taxation maximization, engaging in graft, cracking down on cults, playing politics by proxy, accumulating clients and actually enjoying your life all trade off against each other, and no governor has more than twenty hours in a day, at most, to divide between all of them.

(It is forbidden to govern the province where you were born, an ancient law that is ninety percent irrelevant today because everyone of any meaningful importance in the Empire is a student at the Hall of Learning, where Cendas molds them into being the Correct People to administer the Empire, wherever they happen to be from - barbarian chieftains' daughters, mage-gifted peasants, provincial nobles, all of them the people who are going to get the chance to rule, if they have the wit to seize it.)

Count Janos of Avannar, Imperial Kinsman of the third degree, has not done tremendously well in the eternal feud for power. You'd rather think he would, given his talents, but not only did he paint a target on his back long before he learned to ever not try to be the best at things, but he really spends astonishingly little time engaging in graft and playing politics by proxy. Instead he has treated his exile to the poor western province of Faun Kar as a chance to improve the Empire's western defenses, build up the provincial economy, and make His Imperial Majesty go "huh, I haven't heard of anything bad happening in Faun Kar province since Janos took over, maybe he should get whatever the current loudest province is." You can go very far, being the person who the Emperor thinks about whenever a province is too noisy and he would like it to be quiet.

A month ago he got the opportunity to earn a favor and build up his resources, when his agents inside the secret illegal cult reported that one of the provincial barons happened to be a cultist. Since this is Faun Kar, it wasn't a surprise that someone was doing it, but knowing who was useful - and Janos is good enough at the political game to know who in the Bureau of Cults is looking for a big case, high ranking enough for independent activity, low ranking enough that a baron is a big case, and repays favors. His spies sent more reports about the doings of the priests, his schoolmate came through the canal-gate with an "elite team of investigators," Janos presented his files, and they spent their time scouting out the situation, got all their pieces into position, and struck.

A simple investigation. A simple execution. Nothing wrong with it. 

"So why is every hair on the back of my neck telling me something's horribly wrong and we're all about to be murdered in our beds?"

"Because you're still alive?"

"Things go well with no problems perfectly often."

"Mmm."

Mmm.

"Do you know what I think it is?"

"I do not."

"You weren't in the room. You didn't have to quash it almost failing sixteen times. Someone else was the person handling it, and you have a chronic disability to believe that anyone else is ever competent."

"Almost anyone else."

"So do you thus conclude that Gerain should be on the short list?"

"Absolutely not."

"Then what do you conclude, o master of strategy?"

"That something is immediately about to go critically wrong, or just has, Gerain is trying to conceal it from me so he doesn't owe me an even bigger faovr, and the entire top of one of my spare forts is about to be blown sky-high."

"I'll have a word with him, shall I?"

"Do."

He spun up the comms-spell.

"This is provincial proconsul Seiran Sertross. Is the Director available?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Excuse me, the governor was wondering - "

"He says everything is under control? A kid turned out to have mage-gift nobody knew about, but they put the standard compulsions on him and he hasn't Final Struck yet."

"I see."

This is not a problem that requires Janos to shoulder them aside and take direct command himself.

"The standard compulsions for Mage-gifts?"

Janos is a Mindspeaker and, though three people alive know it, Farseer.

"You think -"

"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?"

"I'm afraid you're going to have to be more specific."

"The kid."

(Seiran, what?)

(I've got nothing.)

"The one with mage-gift?"

"The one who says he's immortal. What are you playing at?"

"I'm simply trying to serve the Empire as best I can."

(Seiran?)

(Still the nothing.)

"He said 'my body is thirteen' under truth-compulsions. The case'll hold without him, do you want him back?" 

"I'd appreciate that, yes. Good immortals are hard to find, don't you think?"

"You owe me."

"We owe each other."

"Well, when you're right, you're right."

"Yes, yes, how am I right?"

"That's your department! Mine is just to keep you un-murdered."

"Gerain's plotting to murder me and this is a ploy to gatestrike me and frame cultists?"

"It's more likely than the obvious other explanations! 'Someone cut his compulsions and Gerain didn't tell me, either because he wants me dead or because he somehow failed to notice' is really much more likely than anything to do with real immortals, beating compulsions, or extremely situational coincidental insanity."

"I'll make sure the no-final-striking compulsions are active before he's brought over."

"Thanks."

Only a few hours later, another junior mage will arrive at Leareth's tower-cell, look him over, and then stack some totally redundant and unnecessary compulsions against murdering people, final striking, or destroying property. "You are to come with me."

So this is being escalated. (And it looks like someone gave orders to be maximally paranoid, whether or not it's going to...do much...in this particular instance.) That's - well, it's not a good thing, he won't be able to judge if this is better or worse than having passed the interrogations without any suspicion until he meets the person whose attention this is being escalated to, but it's - at least probably not the terrifying negative update that it feels like on an emotional level. The situation is bad but he already knew that. 

"All right." He nods and, assuming the compulsions let him, gets up to follow the junior mage. 

The mage will lead him to the tower's Gate-room, where 

an Adept is waiting.

"Hello." He nods equally politely to Leareth and the mage.

"Proconsul." He bows slightly.

Leareth wishes he could remember exactly how that title is used, not that his memory of how things worked in Jacona a few centuries ago would necessarily even help here; he can guess that it's not a role affiliated with the Ministry of Cults, which is probably a good thing, but he's not even sure of that. He wishes he had Thoughtsensing - not that it would get him anywhere right now, the Adept is presumably shielded, but he might at least be able to read a servant's mind at some future point and make inferences off their reactions to the people involved. He wishes it was easier to stop being pointlessly distressed, it's not like it's helping. 

He bows to the Adept as well, and waits. 

The mage leaves.

"- You're almost certainly not in trouble," he says as soon as the mage is out of earshot. "If you don't have a magic secret for beating compulsions, 'being immortal' isn't a crime and you aren't part of any illegal cults, and if you do have a magical secret for beating compulsions we are far too curious to punish you instead of asking you how."

Leareth was really not expecting that response! He doesn't understand what this Adept thinks he has to gain from being reassuring to a random child being held prisoner - and it's differently confusing if they're taking the claim of immortality seriously rather than assuming the most likely case is that he's insane, someone who's really immortal is in much less need of reassurance than if he were really just thirteen-year-old Dalan. It's not something he expects of the Empire for people in power to be thoughtful and compassionate just because they want to. ...It's probably a good sign, it's just that it's more confusing than reassuring. 

Also it's not as though not having done anything illegal means that they're going to let him leave the Empire. 

He nods without saying anything. 

It's not so much that they're taking the claim of immortality seriously as it is that if he's mad then he's also not in trouble.

Seiran will fix his compulsions so they're minimally disruptive (but still keep him from murdering anyone, breaking out, lying to people asking him questions, et cetera), open a mid-range Gate, and through this Gate take Leareth to a mildly comfier room. (If he is insane, they aren't blowing budget on it - just some time.)

"Feel free to take a moment."

Still surprisingly considerate and thoughtful in a confusing way! 

Leareth wishes he had any idea where they are, geographically, but it's not like it would be very informative even if he saw a map. It's not even clearly relevant to anything, he just feels disoriented and hates it. Staring at the shielding on the walls with mage-sight helps, a little. 

He's not going to be in control of the situation, that's unrealistic to aim or hope for, but he can at least try to steer at all. Leareth takes a deep breath. 

"- I have information that I predict you would find valuable, and - goals that overlap at least somewhat with the Empire's, particularly when it comes to gods." What kind of reaction does that get? 

(Externally, he doesn't so much look calmer as more deliberately controlled. He's holding himself very still in an unchildlike way.) 

Seiran is very good at not giving away important information when people say weird things!

"I'll let Avannar know." This is not particularly evidence that the kid isn't mad, but his body language at least suggests it. "Do you need water, food, the privy, anything..." There's definitely been some time to run around in circles since the last time he was interviewed.

"Not urgently." Leareth is wishing desperately that he had any idea who Avannar is. ...Well, it probably won't make anything worse to just ask. "Who is Avannar, if you do not mind saying? And - where are we -?"

(Leareth would normally have more of a guess at least of how far they've come, but he isn't currently calibrated enough on this body's mage-sight to be able to judge Gate-distance at a glance. The Adept didn't seem tired, which is some evidence they didn't Gate all the way to Jacona in one go, but they teach more efficient Gate-techniques in the Empire...) 

"The Count of Avannar is the imperial official overseeing your case, and we're in his mansion.*"

(*: A poor translation because there isn't a good one; think "governor's mansion". The chief rival choice for translation was "headquarters.")

...Leareth has no idea if that's good news, of course, which is probably what he should have expected, he's sufficiently disoriented here that it's hard to put new information in context enough for it to help.

He nods politely, though. "Thank you." He does appreciate that the Adept is trying to be helpful. It's confusing, but it makes it slightly easier to ignore the impossible-to-accomplish visceral desire to be alone in a records cache instead of trapped here. He...is still maybe not going to attempt any more deliberate steering until he has more of a sense of what their default plan is. 

He'll nod at the thanks, then say, "I'll be back shortly" and give him a few minutes to recover.

Leareth has no idea how long they're planning to leave him here, which makes it hard to use the time for recovery!

He'll sit down and - try to think through how to give as clear an explanation as possible, if it turns out their approach is just to sit him down and ask him to explain. Clearly they have enough leverage here to drag everything out of him one way or another - well, everything he remembers, it's perhaps actually convenient how much detail he's missing on the operational aspects of his plan to invade Valdemar - but they might give him some leeway to decide how to explain and in what order, which he clearly shouldn't waste. (Though it's hard to focus on planning for the best case scenario while also trying to be emotionally prepared for the kind of interrogation where they keep him maximally off-balance the entire time...) 

...He could also just decide to explain badly on purpose, if for some reason he wants them to conclude that he's insane. He...probably doesn't want that...? It only feels tempting because it might be a way to end up with less attention-from-powerful-people directed at him while he's in an especially powerless position, but it doesn't get him out of the Empire - eventually he'll have an opportunity, but not now, maybe not for months or years - and, right now, he needs to focus on that...

After a few minutes he'll be taken to another room. It's not an interrogation cell, it's wholly comfortable, with a couch and two chairs and a third behind a desk, and watered wine.

Sitting behind the desk is a white-haired man of unknown age, very shielded. He's clearly some kind of Imperial official, and almost certainly an Adept. "Dalan? Please sit down."

So they're playing nice, at least to start out. Is that...good? It's maybe a sign that they're going to be polite about the questioning, which means more of a chance to steer, but it's bizarrely hard to feel even slightly reassured by that.

Why - it's - just that steering for "being believed and taken seriously" does not necessarily accomplish the thing he wants here. And might instead result in, for example, ending up under even tighter compulsions while they force him to try to set up immortality for the Emperor. Or something. Leareth can't remember any facts whatsoever about the current Emperor and he hates this. 

It would be - safer, probably, and certainly more predictable - to focus on giving away as little as he can, keeping his full capabilities to himself, if he steers for being underestimated then they're more likely to leave him an opening later. It goes against all of his instincts, to be upfront and offer more than he has to with someone who is probably his enemy, if not inherently then at least because of his own compulsions of loyalty to the Emperor. 

It went against his instincts with Vanyel, too.

...He sits down. 

"I am guessing you would like an explanation," he says levelly. "I think it will go fastest if you allow me to explain in order." He can probably manage to do that coherently. The internal screaming isn't that loud. 

"That seems logical." He's under compulsions to not lie, right? Right. Let's hear the narrative.

(Janos is desperately curious. Half of him expects this to be - a diversion? A decoy? Something to keep him busy, while the boy is in fact insane? And most of the other half is expecting disappointment, but there's - he wants to know what is in fact happening.)

Seiran is also curious, but less so. Janos knows what he's doing.

Leareth takes a deep breath. 

"It is true that my name is Dalan and my body is thirteen years old, but - that has only been true since yesterday. I was originally born before the Cataclysm; my soul is nearly two thousand years old and I have had many names. My immortality contingency means that, while my body can be killed, my soul will be preserved in the Void-between-Gates until it can return and claim the body of one of my - my first incarnation's - mage-gifted blood descendants, the first time they use a fire spell. ...The spell itself is not replicable, I am fairly sure I tried extensively, it seems the gods were opposed to it. And to my work in general. Also it has the disadvantage of killing children, obviously."  

Another breath. "I know I was involved in founding the Empire. I am going to be at a disadvantage in proving it - the immortality spell has several other disadvantages and one of them is that I imperfectly retain memories between different bodies - but I do keep much of my skill with magic, and I invented many of the techniques used in the Empire." Not that he can demonstrate that right now, for multiple reasons including 'compulsions' and his mage-gift being barely there. "I - moved on, centuries ago, to - work more directly against the gods. But I suspect we have many goals in common." 

Aaaaaaaaaaah internal screaming What kind of reaction is this getting, so far? 

Seiran is behind him, so Leareth can't see his face.

Avannar looks calm. 

"That sounds improbable," he says. "In particular, most of it seems unfalsifiable. Your void-anchoring spell can only be tested by death, so we couldn't test it even if you could replicate it, and if your memories are poor after eight hundred years, we can't determine how well your past life's memories line up with verifiable events, nor, say, compare your exegesis of classical texts with those of reputed scholars. Possibly you could distinguish between real and fraudulent works, written in the classical style? But that would be very easy to get past with a knack for words, which most likely you have..."

He should be able to find a records cache if they're willing to give him access to local maps, but that's - an awful lot to give away, he won't have any control of what they do with it once he gives them access - the really sensitive records will be in cipher but he can't be sure that the full resources of the Empire couldn't find a way around that, if they were taking it seriously - he doesn't know how likely it is that this man will take it seriously even to the extent of Gating to a shortlist of a few places he can identify on maps as probable records caches... 

He convinced Vanyel but he doesn't remember how, there are maybe a dozen Foresight dream conversations he remembers clearly but mostly from much, much later... 

He probably does remember more about his past in the Empire than it currently feels like, it's just that he comes back without handles to a lot of his memories, the process of reviewing his records often prompts him to remember facts, if not the episodic memories themselves...

"It is difficult to prove from my current position," he says, agreeably enough. "I think the gods intended - well, I am not sure how precisely They could steer any of this, but I think the entire point was for me to be - stuck. ...I suspect I can more easily demonstrate that I know things a that a young noble's bastard with a newly-awakened Gift ought to have no way of knowing, and then you can decide if it is worth your while to try to verify the more specific claims? I can cast complex conditional compulsions, which I think is still an advanced curriculum item here? But it would be understandable if you did not want to loosen my compulsions to let me do that." I could -" what else can he cast with his absurdly weak current Gift, "- I could lay shielding against Farsight or Fetching or other very rare mind-gifts, though not very quickly and I would be exhausted. I should be able to write out the standard spell notation for a number of secret spells, and cast any that have sufficiently low power requirements, if you preferred to come up with tests yourself." 

You can build new shields against Farsight?

(Janos is very practiced in not flinching when someone brings up Farsight.)

Well, that's a thing to bring up.

"Possibly you can," he says. Reducing the odds of insanity as opposed to other possibilities is certainly useful. "I do not think that allowing you to lay compulsions is a useful program under the present circumstances," and fraud!Dalan knows this and mad!Dalan probably does too, accurate!Dalan might not, but it's a very obvious fraud to bring up. "Writing a number of spells you could not plausibly know would be a useful way to eliminate a number of the possibilities, I think." Specifically the ones where he is neither lying through compulsions, nor telling the truth. Janos has full Imperial Adept training, and that's something he can check.

Nod. "Will you find it more convincing if you give me a list of spells that would normally only be taught to highly trained Adepts in sensitive positions? ...I might not always know the exact versions currently in use, but I will probably know a version for at least eight in ten of them." Or be able to reconstruct a workable spell on the spot, at least, his procedural memory and intuitions for magic are one of the areas of his mind he trusts the most right now. And it sounds pleasantly soothing to focus on magical theory for a while right now.

"I would find it most convincing if you reconstructed them without being told which ones I already know." If this is an elaborate plot by the kid to get several hours in the governor's mansion alone to write it has just succeeded.

Well, he certainly wouldn't have come all this way just for an opportunity to sit alone and write in a random Imperial official's mansion, and in fact would enormously prefer to be almost anywhere else. BUT, given that this is where he is, several hours alone to think while writing out notation is definitely a bonus. 

Without a list to go on, Leareth is going to be guessing wildly at which spells are at what secrecy level. ...Which, he realizes a few minutes in, might be part of the Adept's intention, possibly not on a conscious level - his compulsions to serve the Emperor might have objections to scheming to learn spells he's not cleared for - but the fact that he's presumably still unsure if Leareth is insane or lying will buy him some wiggle room to pick a protocol that would advantage him if Leareth isn't lying. 

He'll write down the scrying-spell variant that can target a known artifact signature rather than just a location - that might not be that secret, but it's certainly advanced. He can write down a different scrying-spell variant that gets around (what he thinks is still) the standard anti-scrying shield technique used in the Empire, that one must be fairly secret. He writes down a variant of the communication-spell that he thinks was at one point used only in the Emperor's guard. He writes down the specifications for a passive ward setup that detects whether someone passing through a doorway is under compulsions; it's not that sensitive to which compulsions, there's a limit to how much intelligence you can build into a set-spell even with an elaborate focus, but it would alarm if someone's compulsions had been cut. Leareth actually has no idea if that one is either still in use or particularly secret, but it's certainly obscure and complicated.  

Oh, and he remembers enough pieces of how the authorization-key system works on canal-Gates to reconstruct the specs for that, too. He could probably write down the full design, he's done a lot of work with permanent Gates and everything fits together intuitively to him, but that would take, like, six hours, and bigger sheets of paper. 

- after some consideration, he doesn't include the technique for shields that block Gating into, for example, the Emperor's suite. He's not actually sure if anyone alive in the Empire would still remember how to cast those - he has some vague recollection that a lot was lost in some turbulent historical periods after he left - but if they do, then it's probably known to about five people, and it might well count as treason for anyone other than those five people to know it. He's - not ruling out that wedging this particular Imperial official into treason-by-knowing-the-wrong-secret might end up being a way to accomplish his goals here, but he would rather not do it by accident. 

Just that much is going to take him at least three hours. Does the Adept actually leave him to it for that long? 

(If anyone is watching him, or scrying from another room, he looks very focused and actually a lot calmer than before. He's getting thirstier and increasingly in need of using the privy, but if left alone he plans to ignore that until he's done.) 

The official in question will have him escorted back to his room, provided with pen and ink and paper, and, yes, will then give him three hours. (Three hours of being quietly spied on, obviously, but still three hours.) There's watered wine if he needs it and a privy down the hall, though he'll have to have an escort for that, but if he doesn't ask they won't bother.

And then - 

"I find myself oddly confident he'll have written ten classified spells when I check in on him."

"Impossible. You already have checked up on him."

"Not much.

- He doesn't act like a child. It's not easy to explain by a clever trick... that I've thought of."

"... Such as?"

"Say he doesn't speak Jakonan and is repeating the phonetic pronunciation of every word his handler feeds him. His handler needs to be communicating with him in a way I can't detect, but that's not hard, I'm not a Thoughtsenser." And the Empire is short on them. "But then he'd move like a foreign child, and he doesn't. He's careful."

He nods.

"Even if we only assume he has a way to undetectably de-compulsion himself, this doesn't justify him knowing a wide variety of secret spells. By this point we are proposing both that he has some way of superceding all of our compulsions that we never noticed, and that he has access to vast troves of hidden magic - and the magic could justify the compulsion-beating, but not the other way around, and there aren't any foreigners with that level of magic, which means that if he's lying by that theory that requires either means an imperial plot, for what reason we have not the faintest notion, or some mystery force just as implausible as an immortal who helped found the Empire."

"You really just want to meet someone who knew Arvad, don't you."

"Just is an overstatement."

"Because of the sheer scientific value of having an immortal?"

"Scientific, historical - we may be able to make the Emperor immortal if the Empire can rediscover it -" (even if he doesn't want to) "- and what we can learn from him, if he remembers the past. The Empire isn't what it used to be, and if he can help rebuild it... I need to take the chance. It won't work, but I need to take it anyway."

"I understand." And at the next coded hint he's going to have to have a very careful conversation with an off-the-books mage he knows, because he and Janos both know what their priority compulsions are.

It's actually hard to think of ten distinct classified spells on the spot. And Leareth's hand is cramping badly; apparently Dalan spent less time writing than he's used to. He ends up padding the number by adding a few more obscure variants on the scrying-wards and communication-spell, which lets him reference blocks of earlier notation rather than write everything out again from scratch. 

(The side advantage of working on this is that trying to remember magic as it was used in the Empire does eventually prompt some other memories to the surface. They're not incredibly in order, but he can probably say some coherent things about Arvad's life and work. And there's no reason to expect the things he happens to be able to call to memory to be the same as what's written down in the most popular histories; if he's lucky, some of it will be verifiable by an Imperial official with connections in the capital, but definitely not something a thirteen-year-old could plausibly have learned via a provincial baron's library.) 

By the time he's finished, Leareth is very thirsty and badly has to use the privy. He gets up and knocks on the door of them room they left him in; presumably someone is guarding it, and probably he's being scried as well? 

There is indeed someone guarding it! And he is absolutely being scried, though if he's not currently using an anti-scrying spell it may be difficult for him to be confident of that.

Leareth is absolutely not using an anti-scrying spell right now! He hasn't even checked if the compulsions would let him, since the main blocker is that it would take about three times as much power as he can easily channel right now. (He hates the period of time he has to spend with a partially-awakened Gift. It's additionally distressing to be a prisoner under compulsions, of course, but honestly he would be pretty miserable about it even if he had successfully left and were traveling on his own right now.) 

Anyway, all he wants to do is get someone's attention so he can tell them to tell the Imperial official that he's finished writing things down. ....And ask if he could use the privy. 

Of course he can. The privy is available, and they will even leave him alone in it, since observing him with their eyes isn't necessary.

Being probably-scried while in the privy doesn't even register as a concern for Leareth, next to all the things actually bothering him about being a prisoner. He will do his business efficiently, and then...probably the Imperial official is going to want to actually read and check his spell-notation or something? He'll follow the guard's lead for where he's supposed to be and what he's supposed to be doing next. 

Janos is looking over Dalan's notes, and - 

"... Well."

" - Sorry, I don't have a sane explanation either." He hasn't been reading the notes, he's been keeping an eye out for assassins, which is his job, but Janos has been bouncing enough to him to follow a good deal of it.

"The sane explanation is that His Imperial Majesty has a secret spell for bypassing compulsions and a dozen other secret spells and a really well-trained child infiltrator -" or just very small person with a magically-aided resemblance to such "- and this is an elaborate loyalty test."

"Sounds plausible."

"I don't know why he's letting us know he has a way to bypass compulsions, but that's a question of psychology, not - possibility." His Imperial Majesty isn't some kind of sadist who likes torturing people before disposing of them, if he wants Janos dead he can just summon him to the palace and have him executed, and Janos doesn't understand why he'd entrust him (him and Seiran) with a secret like this if there was any way they'd live, but, again, psychology.

... The thing is, if this is a loyalty test, the thing that best serves the Emperor is to do the maximally loyal thing, and the thing that serves the Empire is to the thing that won't get him executed.

And if this isn't a loyalty test, and the Emperor will believe that Dalan is real, the correct thing is -

- The correct thing is probably to find out more, and then to tell the Emperor about immortality immediately, but the more they can spend his time instead of the Emperor's time, the better.

Which, of course, might get him killed if it, again, is a loyalty test.

Janos does not like politics, but it's not like there's anything else out there.

Well, you could just be the loyal flunky to someone who has to do politics.

The curse of being the best, yes.

The governor will want to see Dalan again!

Leareth is much more impaired than he would prefer to be for navigating this! He's tired, because apparently pushing a brain that recently belonged to a random thirteen-year-old through "remembering" (and significantly re-deriving) the Imperial notation for ten complex spells is a lot to ask right now. He - should be thinking further ahead - 

- the wait wasn't that long. Long enough for a well-trained Adept already familiar with the standard non-secret repertoire of spells to skim his notes, but probably not long enough to, for example, Gate anyone else in to consult with them. If he judged this right, they're now going to be a lot readier to take this seriously, but - still, probably, considering a lot of hypotheses other than the one where everything he's said so far is true.

From a straightforward perspective, he should - try to focus on giving them information that makes it seem less likely he's lying about some or all of the situation? But he also needs to take into account that an Imperial Adept and important provincial official will be under compulsions of his own, and Leareth doesn't want to accidentally wedge him into...some course of action that wouldn't benefit either of their goals here. Unfortunately, thinking about how to prioritize two different goals like that is already almost more than he can manage right now. 

He will cooperatively follow the guard back for further questioning, trying not to look too visibly exhausted. 

The child-imposter-immortal is tired, or pretending very plausibly to be tired.

"You have convinced me you have access to classified imperial spells the thirteen-year-old son of a minor baron absolutely could not know," says Janos. "Tell me your story, and I'll see if I believe it."

It would be easier to start by saying things he's now pieced together in his head about his past in the Empire, but - the problem is that it's basically not verifiable (and also if he tries to imagine hearing it, it mostly sounds too absurd and, well, something-from-a-tale-or-ballad, to be true, which - probably they aren't still entertaining that he's just insane, given the spells, but it seems better to give more evidence against that before saying things that sound deeply implausible.)  

Which means he should prooobably just take the leap and say the part that feels like an unreasonably terrifying point of no return. But - better to have it like this, probably, while he has some control of the conversation. And, just like with Vanyel, he's certainly not going to be able to get anywhere without revealing his hand a lot more than feels comfortable. (Though in that years-long dance with Vanyel, at least he had time to think between their conversations, and wasn't exhausted and disoriented and nearly helpless in a child's body...)

He takes a deep breath.

"I keep records caches to return to when I incarnate in a new body, so that I can orient and resupply with talismans and such, and there is very likely one within a hundred miles of here. I cannot rely on remembering their exact locations, so I choose places that would be...very characteristic of me...and generally I can find one within a few weeks. Faster if I had access to maps and Gate-capable Adepts. I am not sure it would be enough to fully confirm everything I am claiming, but - I do think I made some sort of plan for how to prove my immortality to a skeptical audience, in case that were ever relevant, and I could look up what it was." 

Leareth pauses for breath, and to try to gauge how the Imperial official is reacting. He deeply hates how unsure he is about whether any of that was an irretrievable miscalculation to say. 

He nods slowly. None of it is implausible; dangerous, of course, but if he was an immortal who came back under dangerous circumstances, he'd want to have secure caches. "You need to have Gate-capable adepts working under you, or you need to provide them with cache locations?" There is an obvious correct answer and an obvious Pushing The People Who Are Asking You Questions answer, but nonetheless...

"...I mean, I assume I usually do not do have Gate-capable Adepts whose help I can count on at all? And need to -" what even would have been his default plan, here, "- run away and sleep rough, and buy or steal maps until I can guess where the closest one is and travel there on foot – and by the point I arrive I would have been pushing my Gift hard enough that I could manage a Gate at all if the distance were literally ten yards so I could get in, I am not sure they are accessible from the outside at all without Gating. I was assuming you would not want to wait for weeks, and I am also in - more of a hurry than usual, for reasons I can get into later - and so if you have maps, and are willing to invest your Adepts' time, I think I could give you a spot on a map and some pointers for what your people should look for." 

Leareth haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaates this, the giving-up-control and how all-or-nothing it is which secrets he's handing over, and he's not entirely managing to conceal it. 

He nods. "We can manage that." Obviously giving him maps is a slight risk, given how ambiguously a prisoner he is, but it's not as though maps of the province are classified. "Is there anything you need now?"

(Leareth personally does not feel like it's at all ambiguous that he's a prisoner. And it's not like he could do anything with maps, though he supposes in the hypothetical where he did have a way around compulsions, he might have more options which he's not bothering to try to think of because he does not, in fact, have a way around the compulsions even though he would REALLY LIKE TO.) 

"I could do with water to drink. Otherwise, no." 

Oh no, he's not ambiguously between "a prisoner" and "free," he's ambiguous between "a prisoner" and "a conscript." The Eastern Empire never really bought the idea of individual rights, not when the greater good was so shiny.

"We'll get you water." And once it's been long enough food. And Janos can start putting maps and Adepts together, to have the maps delivered to Dalan once they've got him.

(Which both amount to "prisoner" from Leareth's perspective, because either way he desperately needs to get back to the north before things explode even further in Valdemar, and he can't leave. ...He's not thinking much about whether and how his people are likely to be looking for him, since he would rather that thread not be pulled out of his head if they switch to more coercive questioning later, but he doesn't need to think about it much to know that it's not something he could count on happening soon. He could be anywhere in the world.) 

He drinks his water and waits. 

And then they will bring him maps! He's in Faun Kar province, right at the western end of the Empire next to Hardorn, and while his Compulsions not to leave prevent him from crossing the border, they're pretty close to being the only thing that does.

(He NOTICED. It's FRUSTRATING. ....Being frustrated won't help and he tries to stop that. The stopping-that is not working as an atomic mental motion, which he thinks it normally would, but he can at least mostly set it aside with some effort.) 

The provincial borders have been redrawn since he was last operating here, maybe several times, which makes the maps feel weirdly disorienting. Leareth doesn't remember clearly what he expects to see, just that this is somehow not it.

Are there any old observatories within a hundred-mile radius, that would be the obvious one– correction, within a hundred miles but definitely not in Hardorn, it feels awkward to ask the Imperial official to send his Adepts Gating into another country. He'll also look for old mines (steel mines feel most plausible, gem-mines not so much), or abandoned schools, or even just any feature of the landscape that feels like it would have stood out memorably to his past self. And pays attention to vague feelings of half-familiarity, of course, but he can't reliably count on even having that. 

...No observatories or at least none labeled clearly as such, but there's an old, presumably now abandoned marble quarry at the place where two river tributaries join, maybe six or seven miles upstream of a town informatively called Three Mills with a nearby provincial mage-school. He doesn't think he would have put a site in or near the town itself, too heavily-frequented, but the quarry would have supplied a lot of the town and school's construction, and it - feels right. 

He can point it out to someone rather than drawing directly on the Imperial official's good maps.

Also he knows that he uses a shielding set-spell that he's fairly sure no one else in the world knows, that blocks even the Imperial variants on the communication-spell (though he assumes he knows, or once knew, one that can get through at least in the outward direction). He's not going to write the entire thing down, for one that would take hours and he doesn't think it could be used as a scrying-target anyway, but he'll write down a notation-block. Once they get close, he thinks it should be noticeable from the ground surface to a skilled Adept who knows exactly what to be looking for, since he would have to be able to find it. 

...There are almost certainly wards that bite and he doesn't remember what they are in enough detail to leave any instructions for that, he thinks he must rely on pure procedural memory and instincts to know what to deactivate first. But a trained Adept with Imperial-quality shield-talismans would probably be all right? 

The Imperials are going to take his notes, thank him, their servants are of course going to make sure he's fed and watered, and the Imperial battle-adepts are going to start prepping defenses for an assault into a defended area. They'll see about getting close so they can scry, establish a forward base camp near Three Mills - 

(They will not Farsee into the camp. That's not a card you play if you want it to stay secret.)

- and finish preparations for the strike. The plan is to try to scry for the distinctive signature, then Gate someone expendable in loaded up with wards -

Seiran volunteers!

- expendable in. Then the serious adepts, also heavily warded, can follow and build up a properly combined shield and start disassembling the traps.

How well does this go?

There's in fact an underground, sealed, very thoroughly shielded and warded room, where the very thorough shielding includes the particular weird shield-variant that "Dalan" wrote out them. 

There are absolutely defenses. The expendable mage's talismans are going to take heavy damage and the mage themselves will end up stunned and caught by a paralysis-spell, but nothing that gets through the shields is actually lethal.  

(There are also alarms. If this had been one of Leareth's more often-frequented locations in the north or in Rethwellan and a potential fallback to Gate to if he were injured in a fight, or been at higher risk of being stumbled upon by accident, or even just if it had been a bigger cache with more in the way of irreplaceable artifacts stored there, it might have been included in the network of obfuscated locations that he has people in his organization set up to watch. Leareth has hundreds of caches of this size and approximate importance, though, and setting up wards that will warn him personally is much cheaper than including an additional site in the bonus surveillance system. A week ago, an alarm would have gone to Leareth. The wards aren't keyed to him in his current body, though, and in any case it's not like he would be learning anything new or be able to do anything about it if he did get a warning that his records cache is being invaded by Imperial Adepts.) 

The traps are very well laid and an enormous pain to disassemble, but even Leareth's best work is subject to power-storage limitations, and once the traps have been discharged once on the expendable mage, the rest can get in under a shield without injury and have time to work on the problem. 

The room is quite small and contains a single crate of extremely high-quality shield-talismans. The remaining crates are full of preservation-spelled paper records. 

Do the shield talismans possess insights not known to the Imperial army, or are they just very well-made?

Time to read the papers!

Most of the shield-talismans aren't fundamentally new uses of magic, though a lot of the designs are different from the Imperial standard; the talisman against Thoughtsensing, in particular, is made pretty differently. There are a number of talismans that are probably meant to go together and trade narrowness of effect for efficiency – a person wearing the full set would be shielded against a wider range of possible magical attacks and not-exactly-attacks than the Empire's standard artifacts allow, and for a much longer duration before the power reservoirs ran down. (This is generally not the tradeoff the Empire picks in their artifact designs; they have a lot of mages, but not enough artifact-making specialists to provide everyone important with a full dozen talismans.) 

There's a talisman that would make a person invisible to scrying. There's one that would make them, or rather their magical signature or mind, not a valid Gate search-target (for the tiny fraction of Adepts skilled enough to aim a Gate search-spell at a person they've met before.) 

Very few of the records are in the Imperial language! Most are in cipher, or rather half a dozen different ciphers. Some of the very oldest records are in archaic Tantaran or archaic Kaled'a'in. Some of the books that aren't about Leareth's life per se, and are just works that he wrote as a scholar in other lifetimes under other names, are in whatever language was the local scholar's tongue at the time. Mostly that means Rethwellani. 

The talismans take some time to puzzle out, but when they do the Adepts are generally shocked and puzzled. This suggests -

"Not a person," one of them explains to the governor, "but a tradition, different from our own and significantly more sophisticated than the work of any of the known barbarian mage-traditions."

And the ciphers will take some time to break... and this doesn't even get into the question of the gate-search target, which took Janos's top people quite some time to identify because most of them didn't know what the thing it was supposed to be blocking was. (Janos would have had less trouble than them learning that, though he is of course shamefully undertrained by the standards of first-rate imperial Adepts, because he at least knows what the top tier can do even when he has trouble with it himself, but there's only one of Janos and he has a province to govern.)

"He's real."

"You don't still think -"

"It's theoretically possible but tremendously unlikely, and if it is we're going to know it is very soon." Because the Emperor will land on them like a ton of bricks shortly, before they decrypt the ciphers, because making a sufficiently vast quantity of ciphered material that was coherent with the rest of it would be out of the Emperor's budget. "I've written a report to the Emperor, Gated a copy it to Morthan -" one of their classmates who Janos trusts to forward it if he mysteriously disappears "- and he'll send it on in a week if I haven't cancelled it. This matters, and His Imperial Majesty needs to be informed, but at the point where an entirely separate magical tradition that isn't centuries behind us exists, that is something that we cannot simply fake."

He sighs. "That's the thing about it. We're the best. Nobody but us could fake this, and I frankly don't think we could fake this. So -"

... Seiran is inclined to trust Janos, because he basically trusts Janos. But.

He's not sure the Emperor ought to get his hands on an immortal he's just going to stop thinking about that or anything related to that.

Janos will do what best serves the Emperor and the Empire. It is, fundamentally, what he is.

They leave him alone for a long time. Someone is guarding the door, and they bring him food when he asks for it, but it seems like the Imperial official doesn't intend to continue questioning him until after they follow up on his information. 

Leareth tries to use the time to think. It still mostly feels like he's in too much of an information void to think productively or make more than the sketchiest plans, but it would be stupid to waste the time entirely. 

They're letting him do a lot of steering. And - treating him fairly respectfully, compared to how they could be playing it; there's been a minimum of veiled threats, let alone seriously impairing compulsions. Which, whatever else it means, would seem to imply that they expect to get more of what they want if he's more in control and incentivized to cooperate? 

They're definitely not acting on maximal paranoia, even though they must be worried that this is someone's plot; the Empire he knew wasn't a place where anyone could afford not to worry about that. That's - got to be taking a risk, from their point of view? 

They probably don't want the Emperor's close attention. In most time periods, for most Emperors and most provincial officials, the Emperor's attention would not have been in their interest. And Leareth is fairly sure his chances are better dealing with them than if they send him to Jacona. They're still going to be under compulsions of loyalty to the Emperor's person, which makes it inconvenient that Leareth remembers approximately nothing about the current Emperor. That's something to navigate. 

What does he want, from this starting position? 

Access to the ciphered records that they're hopefully in the process of retrieving would be nice. He probably has notes on how to contact his organization. ...He probably can't follow them himself, even if he can sneak it around the compulsions, his mage-gift is too limited right now to do most things. Which means he needs to angle for them to do it for him. Ideally by convincing them it's in their interest - trying to trick them is risky and also he...would rather not, if he has an alternative, when they're fundamentally approaching this cooperatively. 

...Should he tell them the truth about what he's working on? He won't have a choice if they ask directly, but it seems not that likely they will. He - probably wants a better read on the Imperial official before he decides how to present it, at least, but he should be trying to lay the groundwork... 

There is some amount of thinking-in-circles happening, not helped by the lack of paper to write on. (He could theoretically ask for pen and paper, but he's almost certainly being watched via scry, and writing in cipher feels like it would take more mental effort than he has the energy for right now.) He...will allow himself a short nap, maybe, if they're still leaving him alone for it. Everything else will have better odds of going well if he's less exhausted. 

Well, while Leareth is napping, the people Janos has put on codebreaking wish to report that breaking the codes will take a while.

Unfortunately Janos is not personally a codebreaker and also has a day job.

Could the Emperor have subverted them to report this? Of course. He's the Emperor.

Time to talk to the immortal/actor again, then.

Once Dalan wakes up, Avannar will want to talk to him again!

(They're trying to avoid using terms like "governor". Calling him "Janos" will hurt his interests because it makes him sound like a mortal man and calling him "military and civil governor" will tell the prisoner just what he's dealing with. Best not to leak.)

Leareth has noticed that they're avoiding telling him anything very informative about who the Imperial official who's been talking to him actually is! He could probably narrow it down a lot better if he could remember things, not that he's very sure what he would do with that information.

He is of course available and willing to meet with "Avannar" again. And will try to gauge from the man's face, when he walks in, whether they did in fact successfully find a records cache at the specified location, and if so how he's taking it. 

Janos is good at hiding his facial expressions, that being a key survival skill in the Eastern Empire, but emotional control has always been one of his weaknesses and it's not that difficult to conclude that he's taking Leareth very seriously indeed.

"We've located your cache, and are interested in hearing you make your case."

(Janos is still considering both the 'spy' and 'immortal' hypotheses. Both of them are tremendously unlikely, but he hasn't thought of a third, and so he's - balancing the possibilities.)

(Either way, the kid is good. His intuition says he's more maneuvering than trying to deceive him, and his intuition is usually good, but...)

Leareth nods. ...Doesn't ask if anyone was injured in the process, it's sort of a fraught question to ask and he thinks it's not necessarily in the Imperial official's interests to answer it, whether the answer is 'yes' or 'no'. 

"I have been working on a very long term project. I believe that if I succeed, it would indirectly help the Empire's interests enormously, by solving the opposition you face from the gods. This - is a particularly delicate time to be out of touch, which leaves me suspicious that there was a godplot to make it difficult for me to leave the Empire, giving Them an opportunity to steer events without my interference. Obviously what I want is to return to my previous work as quickly as possible; my main operations are far north and west of here, past Hardorn. My immediate aim is to convey to you that letting me leave will not harm your interests or the interests of the Emperor and Empire. As far as I know, my previous work did not involve any political plots internal to the Empire, and certainly I had no way of knowing that I would die at the time I did - I was taking many precautions against it, it was implausible bad luck - or that I would come back in this particular body." 

He takes a deep breath. 

"I will be able to answer more of your questions with access to my records. Most of them will be in cipher. I would be willing to trade access to some of the documents for showing your people how to decode them." 

Janos does not respect the gods enough to hate them. He's certainly aware that gods exist, and of course they order their cultists to oppose the Empire, but the Empire has bigger problems than gods, like civil wars and barbarian rebellions and political corruption. He can understand and respect the sort of man who devotes his life to opposing the gods, in the same way as he can understand the sort of man who devotes his life to fixing the clogs in the Jaconan sewer system, but he's really not one of them.

(He has not yet noticed the felt but unconscious confusion about why an immortal would devote himself to this task, possibly because of the limited extent to which he buys the premise inherent to the world Dalan claims he lives in now.)

He feels some sympathy for Dalan, though years of experience in the Empire has partially quenched it. It's obviously unfortunate that people who want to serve as allies and trade partners to the Empire instead get conscripted into the army or the mage-corps; also, it's a necessity for building a functional civilization. He can believe (especially with Compulsions and his instincts backing them up) the kid is attempting to negotiate with him fairly...

... But, equally, he isn't the one in charge here. The Emperor is. He is merely the Emperor's delegate. If this situation is a test... he still thinks "I am trying to learn as much as I can before passing it on" is reasonable. And if it is real... 

"An interesting offer." The records are enchanted so that the paper holds up after a rest of centuries. Are they also enchanted so they have traps that will cut the boy's compulsions or Gate him halfway across the country? Depends on how good the person laying the spells was. And when faced with the option to test your strength against an enemy's - "We can provide you with copies of the records under these terms."

Don't take it.

(You absolutely cannot hide a set-spell to raise a Gate, or even just the search-spell to link up to an existing permanent Gate-terminus, on a piece of paper, let alone expect to conceal it under the signature of a preservation-spell. The amount of stored power called for would be glaringly obvious. But you could, maybe, hide a trap-spell to snip compulsions. Leareth has no idea whether or not his past self actually did that, or whether any compulsion-cutting traps are local to the cache room that they almost certainly won't let him access directly, but he can respect the paranoia.) 

Copies are fine. Since copying is presumably time-consuming, they could prioritize the first pages of a number of documents, so he can quickly figure out what records are where and which ones it makes sense to prioritize looking at. (He's not delighted about also giving them that information, but it doesn't seem like he has much of a choice.) 

He doesn't see how this is a trap and is perfectly happy to do that. (Copying is time-consuming in man-hours, but the work can be done by many men in parallel, and Janos's scribes don't need to be cleared if they can't read the code they're decrypting.)

Leareth will wait. He's happy to answer questions, if the Imperial official has any, but he's not going to try to jump ahead further in his explanation and make more implausible claims before he can provide evidence for them. 

"Then we'll take care of that." He raises an eyebrow. "I am curious, though. It's been eighteen hundred years since the Cataclysm, correct?" He'll wait for a nod. "What's the chief thing we're missing, that we had back then?" He thinks this is one of these questions that is both very interesting if you ask an immortal and if you ask an absurdly elaborate fake the Emperor made to test your loyalty.