An invisible hand grabs one of the letters mid-incineration and—no, it's not grabbing the letter, it's grabbing the fire, pulling it out of the air and throwing it violently at the floor.

The fire collides with the floor in a brilliant cascade of blue and orange, dissipating harmlessly without damage to the floor. Looking up from opening her latest letter, the woman blinks confusedly at the ghostly hand that seems to still be on fire. She twitches a finger, and the fire becomes - not hot. It still gives off light and sticks to the hand and otherwise acts like fire, but it doesn't burn.

"... Hello?"

The ghostly hand shakes itself, and then the ghostly person attempts to scrape the fire off the one hand with the other. It doesn't work very well. Now there are two ghostly hands haloed in patchy blue flame.

"Sorry, let me just -" finger twitch, and then the fire goes out. "There. Sorry about that."

"Can you hear and understand me? Ah - if you can't talk -" Finger twitch, and a little globe of harmless blue fire appears in the air. "- please toss that into the air and catch it if you can understand me? It won't stick to you this time. Or burn you."

Invisible person grabs fireball and tries to - crush it?

It squishes and goes out.

"... Okay. I can stop with the fire, if you'd rather?"

There might be a tiny, faint hint of sound from the phantom. Or not. It's hard to tell.

"I - I'm sorry, I'm having trouble hearing you, hold on -" She waves a hand, and the background noise falls away. "- there, that should help?"

—maybe slightly louder now?

It sounds like someone screaming. Very far away and possibly underwater, but as loud as they can manage with every ounce of effort available.

She winces. She amplifies the amplification more, she will get this to a reasonable volume so she can hear the someone. The letters clear themselves out of her way and into a neat stack for later; a large tome appears in their place. She begins flipping through it.

"Okay - okay, it'll be all right. I'll do whatever I can to help you."

The amplification really isn't helping nearly as much as it should. But she can still more or less hear the distant screams trail off into half-stifled sobbing.

That doesn't make sense. But she's a wizard, things not making sense means she's coming at it from the wrong angle, not that there isn't an intrinsic order to the universe - she frowns and switches tactics, what if she amplified her own sense of hearing, instead of the room?

"It's okay, it's okay, I'm here, I'll help, you're in the right place," she murmurs.

Now she can hear him properly. And all of the sitting on her floor and crying that he is doing.

That's interesting. She relaxes the other amplification. Something to do with senses...? No, no, he could interact with the fire, is he connected to her?

"'Scuse me kitty," she says, shooing the cat out of her lap. This feat accomplished, she and her book can go onto the floor next to the invisible (intangible?) crying person. "I - do you - can I touch you...?"

She reaches hesitantly out with a hand towards the empty, crying air.

Yep, there's a person there. Her hand finds his - shoulder? maybe? - and he leans into the touch, shivering.

"It's going to be okay," she repeats, leaving the book abandoned on the floor in favor of scootching towards him so she can carefully hold him. He very clearly needs it.

He curls up and leans on her. Yep, that was his shoulder. And now here is the rest of him. ...tangible to her and only to her.

... And therefore right through her clothes. Skin to skin. That's - sure a thing -

- No, nope, she hereby is deciding not to give a fuck. It's a bit embarrassing, and more intimate than she'd like, but whatever. He clearly needs hugs, she's going to give them to him.

"I'm here." She holds him accordingly.

He seems to be too busy crying on her to say anything awkward, at least. Or in fact to say anything at all.

Snuggle, snuggle. She rubs his back in soothing little circles. She resolutely does not pay attention to the awkward thing. Instead, she floats over her book, angles it so that she can look through it without letting go of him, and turns its pages with magic. While snuggling him. Snuggling him is very important. He can cry on her as long as he likes.

He may end up crying on her for quite a long while, then.

That's all right. She's not going anywhere.

She looks through her index book for which of her books she'll need to skim to figure out what the hell is going on. She retrieves and reads through the candidates listed in the index book, and - no, not an air elemental, no, not this outdated curse, no, not an obscure form of invisibility -

If she couldn't just as easily put all of her books back she'd be slowly accruing a very indicative book stack of failure. As it is, she just - runs out of books to summon from her library. None of them have anything to offer to enlighten her on the subject. None of her information gathering spells tell her anything about him. Even the really, really thorough ones. Even the really thorough, really obscure ones. She has no idea what the hell is going on with him. Nothing from her magical library that she's built over centuries knows what the hell is going on with him. She systematically chews through all of her immediately available ways of figuring out what the hell, and even with all of her magical power, she gets nowhere closer to figuring him out. She - just - has nothing at all to work with, here.

Well, all right. She's ever been at square one before. She'll send some letters asking for second opinions from other wizards. Later. She'll do that later. Right now she'll just put the books away, conjure a large set of pillows for them to snuggle on, put on soothing music, and snuggle him. This she can do.

Her mystery guest is weepy and snuggly and untalkative.

He seems to appreciate the cuddles, though. Or at least that's a very plausible interpretation of the way he curls up and nestles in her arms and very very gradually stops crying quite so much.