It's an interesting and fruitful gate- research project, too! One that clearly has a lot of potential, given just where he seems to have thrown himself.

The first thing to see is that magic looks weird. It's like little tiny ley-lines are flowing everywhere, filling the air to greater or lesser density below the level of his Mage-Sight, but blocking nothing to his eyes. They pool and grow into stronger ones midair as much as aboveground; he can't sense any nodes, just the constant density of power everywhere in the air. In some directions they become thicker or thinner as they travel; others sink deeper below him. Some of them seem to have - tiny messages - with them? Spells cast on the ley-line, or microline or whatever it is you want to call it, not on any specific object anywhere, and traveling with it?

The second is that it's not just weird, it's slightly hostile. Like it burns, almost, going into him; not in a physical sense, and not in the sense that he can't get used to it, just a steady discomfort Being Here. Here does not like him. He is not part of Here. The air doesn't smell right, not in the way it might smell wrong if he was fleeing into a sewer to escape assassins, or arriving in a new country he'd never been in before, but in the sense in which it might smell wrong if he had somehow managed to end up in the middle of the Pelagirs. 

The third thing to notice is all the physical details, which would probably be the first thing most people notice, but in this case none of them are any sort of direct threat to him, so they go third. He appears to be in a corridor in an enclosed building; the walls in front of and behind him are wood, but the ground beneath him is stone beneath the fur rugs (furs mostly from creatures he does not recognize because they are either Changecreatures or no Velgarthly animal at all), which have been tanned well enough that they aren't rotting but still kind of crudely, especially by Imperial standards. There's some brass panels on the wall with writing, which would no doubt be helpful to him in understanding what is going on if he could read the language, though the little drawings of nonhuman creatures (a nonhuman creature?) scowling at you would probably help. One of them is directly below a thin slat-paneled cabinet on the wall that appears, through gaps in the slats, to be filled with earplugs.

The whole thing smells poorly ventilated and like there are a lot of people living without imperial sewer systems - that is to say, like almost any major building in an urban center outside the Empire.

He can sense minds off in the distance; there are other people in the building, lots of them, though the thick stone below (and apparently above?) him is making it harder to sense the ones that aren't on this floor or very near him. Most of them are slightly odd ungifted humans, but recognizable as ungifted humans, but there's a couple who are probably humans but it's very hard to tell with something that resembles Mage-gift but it's hard to tell, and some of them who are animals or Changecreatures or something along those lines?

...Interesting. 

Is it the other continent? He's never actually been, himself; the maps and explorers' accounts in his records are more detailed than what anyone else still has, back from before the Mage Wars, when crossing the ocean by ship was, if not routine, at least something that brave-or-foolhardy explorers and trade ventures would attempt, with about two in three odds of a successful return trip. But, of course, one of the things he doesn't know - and had hoped to find out - is how hard-hit the other continent was by the Cataclysm.

It's been three-quarters of a millennium, though. He hadn't expected it to still feel this strange. 

- shields, first. He's already wearing half a dozen protective talismans; he should be invisible to anyone else's Thoughtsensing, unless he deliberately opens a Mindspeech conversation with them, and he shouldn't set off most kinds of passive detection-ward unless he casts anything. He's not shielded against Pelagirs wild magic, because he hadn't expected it to come up and it's still not a technique he knows how to put into an artifact; he can tighten his shields and see if that helps at all with the unpleasantness, which hopefully isn't doing him or his Gifts any lasting damage. ...And an air-filtering shield. He doesn't think the air is toxic, just kind of smelly, but on principle. Neither is a particularly energy-intensive spell, and the Gate was unexpectedly draining but he was trying it from a one-sided semi-permanent Gate-threshold he put together in a records cache for this project; he has enough left in reserves for defensive magic, even if he doesn't trust the bizarre not-ley-lines to be safe to draw on. 

Next, orient. He's still holding perfectly still, and may or may not have been noticed yet, depending on whether any of the strange spells hung directly from the tiny ley-lines are detection wards.

Can he get a scrying-spell up and a closer look at some of the nearby un-Gifted humans? Can he get any surface thoughts off them? 

Tightening his shields suffices to block out all the local mage-energy, but then it has the problem that he isn't picking up local mage-energy. An air-filtering shield works fine; the world still feels somewhat uncomfortable, not-made-for-him, but much less so once he does these things.

He can absolutely do these things! The people are mostly concerned with their own things, thinking about how they want to get through the day. The nearest un-Gifted human is a woman of a foreign ethnicity, wearing not-very-well made wool clothes cut in a shape that suggests some kind of uniform - which is not really unusual for poor people in areas that don't grow linen or cotton - that are rather too hot for indoors in this weather, of a style unfamiliar to him, which you would really expect if he was on another continent. She's wearing silk slippers, for some reason?

She's mostly thinking about how they want to get through the day. The nearest one is a servant who is supposed to be collecting all the laundry and taking it down to the laundry room to be washed, and she really hopes she doesn't run into this warlock - something like a mage but negatively-aspected? - who's a bully, the pay is great but sometimes she wishes she got a job somewhere quieter and further away from powerful people...

The second-nearest is a man of the same ethnicity, dressed similarly (including the silk slippers) with a song running through his head, instrumental on flute and drums and some kind of vaguely luteish stringed instrument, who is dusting the books in the library and idly reading things, including titles like The Forty-Nine And All Their Weaknesses, Onne Thee Mistries Of Anshent Alkhemy, and The Dying Codex, though his eyes are also paying attention to a plaque that says Warning! One bone will be broken for every page torn!

The third-nearest is standing guard outside the royal armory (wearing leather and horn armor and carrying a spear) and is bored out of his mind and hopes someone comes by he can talk to or something, oh gods he is so bored, his armor is SO HOT.

Some sort of foreign court. That part more or less makes sense to him. It's baffling that you would build a royal court in Pelagirs territory, but - if everywhere on the continent is like this, it's not like they would have a choice. It doesn't seem to be harming the un-Gifted locals.

(Possibly it is harming the mages? Which fits with Pelagirs-like damaged land. In the mage-storms aftermath of the Cataclysm, it was more common for Gifted people to be incapacitated or be unable to use magic reliably, but subtler mental changes could and did happen. Matteir isn't delighted by having to shield tightly enough that it mostly blocks his own mage-sight, but picking up subtle damage that causes mental changes would be worse. He keeps shielding.) 

Quiet notes of confusion: the silk slippers, unexpectedly fancy to be given to servants - unless silk is weirdly easy to produce in this region, but if it were cheap you might expect clothing made from it as well, and either way it seems like there must be a reason and he's not seeing it. The earplugs - magical protection? He suspects 'immunity against Bardic Gift' is - trying to map it over to something more familiar than he has any reason to think this place is - but he's noting it, and preparing to raise a sound-barrier if anything happens to hint at a sound-conveyed magical attack. 

There's no sign that they noticed his Gate landing, which means that either they don't have wards to detect it, or only the local mage(s) get those alarms and they haven't alerted anyone else yet. And might or might not mean he could Gate right back out without being noticed, but that's an awfully big gamble. And he's not sure he could easily reverse the experimental Gate-routing without a threshold to cast from. Spending ten minutes gradually exhausting himself by poking at the search-spell, while he still knows so little about his surroundings, is not exactly appealing. Besides, he came here to explore and learn, and he's not done.

...It's not impossible to detect scrying with mage-gift. (He finds himself quietly wishing he had Farsight, which is undetectable as far as scholars know.) It's less detectable to trained mages than a Thoughtsensing probe, though, and Matteir would prefer to get a better look around before he ventures out of the corridor. 

He would prefer to have a local destination to Gate out to in an emergency, though. Before trying to scry any of the local maybe-Changed mages, he's going to toss a scrying-spell out by about a mile in a random direction. What's there? 

Pasture. Looks like some local breed of sheep is the main animal being pastured there? His scrying spell is far enough above eye level that he can see that there's woods if you go far enough away from him and farms clinging to a river that passes through a small, ugly city, in his direction. The city is built around a big stone castle, which he would guess he is currently inside.

(Nobody seems to notice the scrying spell.)

It doesn't look Pelagirs-y. You can't farm in the Pelagirs. You could farm a little on the non-Pelagirs rest of the continent even as it was ravaged by the ongoing mage storms after the Cataclysm, but - not well, not enough to support a royal court. And keeping herds of livestock was generally pretty ill-advised, when they might wander into a Changecircle and turn into something else. 

- well, notice his confusion. Whatever is going on here, it's not exactly what he's tempted to round it off to. You couldn't hang set-spells on ley-lines in the aftermath of the mage storms, either. He's missing some key context that would make sense of any of this. 

Which actually makes him more inclined to stay, even at some risk to himself. That's the entire thing he wanted, right, the whole reason he spent most of the last six months on obscure Gate-research.

(He hadn't really expected it to work.) 

(He's not, himself, risking anything permanent. Just the life of another innocent teenager somewhere in Velgarth.) 

He'll hop his scrying-spell over to the woods, just to grab an exact emergency Gate-location - faster and less draining than a blind Gate off a bearing - and check that it's not full of dangerous Changecreatures or something. And check for magic, he can do that through the scrying-spell even with his personal shields fully up, and the layer of indirection, the spell running through his focus-stone, makes it a little bit safer. 

A quick scan of the woods from above confirms there are totally Changecreatures, or something that looks kinda like them. Weird monsters - a pretty wide variety - with horrifying claws and fangs and natural armor and green veins. There's not a lot of them, most random points in the woods do not have Changecreatures in them, but Changecreatures there are.

Inconvenient. He can't even scout a specific Changecreature-free location, Changecreatures move. Also now he's confused all over again about how it's sustainable to farm livestock here, you would think they would be rapidly picked off. He did notice that the pastures are fenced and the woods cleared for some distance on the other side of the fencing, but it still seems like it would have to be marginal land for farming and herding. 

Maybe they just don't have any better alternatives. That's...an unhappy thought. 

Well, he'll pick a random point that doesn't currently contain a Changecreature and is in a small clearing with slightly better visibility. He's well shielded and can probably hold off one or two Changecreatures without dangerously exhausting himself. 

Time to try scrying one of the weird mage-gifted locals. He aims the scry-point well above the closest mind-presence, at what he estimates should be ceiling height. 

The weird mage-gifted local is currently hurrying up to see King Thrice-Born, carrying a coffer full of the cool stuff he found scouting out old ruins - a couple of flunkies are lugging an even larger chest behind him. He has fancier clothes than everyone else, with lots of color-coordinated soft and well-tanned furs, and a hat decorated with the horns of a particularly nasty thing. He also has faintly green veins, like the Changecreatures. He killed all sorts of big scary creatures and he ordered some of them to stand down and they did, because he's a WARLOCK, and that makes him tough and cool and BADASS, and he can throw fireballs -

Reading his mind closely, Matteir can see that he is - twitchy? Excitable? in a way that not a lot of mages who make it to adulthood are, back in Velgarth.

He, and his servants, are wearing silk slippers like everyone else here.

Oh, and he notices the scrying sensor. Someone's doing something really weird with magic. He pauses to look closer - 

(The flunkies stop abruptly, almost jostling him, and he slaps the nearest one almost hard enough to make him lose his grip on the chest; he staggers, but his partner bears the load for the few seconds required for him to rise and murmur "I'm so sorry, sir." The warlock has more important things to pay attention to, specifically, Matteir's scrying-sensor.)

That's inconvenient. 

Matteir pulls the spell back and unravels it immediately. He got a look, and it's not worth giving the man an opening to try to trace the spell back to him. 

(He doesn't like the green veins. He didn't have a chance to try to sense for subtle magics, but it implies some...concerning...things.) 

A mild note of confusion that his scrying spell was detected at all? It's not a lot of power, and the complex part of the spell is happening where he is, not at its destination. Matteir knows the technique to recognize the visible far end of a scrying-spell as that and not just a random eddy in the background currents of ambient mage-energy, but he has to know to look for it, and also the ambient currents of mage-energy are a lot...busier...here. Maybe there are some kind of scry-detection wards, ones that he failed to sense through the dense tangle of tiny ley-lines? Or maybe it's something weirder than that. He has a suspicion it's something weirder than that. 

In any case, the local mage isn't shielding at all against Thoughtsensing, and his surface thoughts are loud. Even from this distance, Matteir can get a pretty detailed read without any active probing at all. 

He stays where he is. Does the local mage keep investigating once the weird magic is gone? 

He spends a few moments casting spells - defensive ones, by his mind, Words of Power unspoken but humming, but none of his spells stop Thoughtsensing; when he casts the local ley-lines are drawn to him and momentarily depleted of power, before renewing themselves from the surrounding environment - but, having cast and not been attacked by anyone jumping out at him, he just shrugs and keeps going, the two people hauling the bigger chest coming behind him. He'll tell King Thrice-Born about it. Could've been nothing, after all, or something the King was doing himself. The King knows more about magic than him because the King knows more about magic than anyone.

...Intriguing. 

Matteir stays where he is. His Thoughtsensing range extends to several miles if he knows what he's looking for; he should be able to follow the mage with Thoughsensing, and hopefully learn more about the King that way, while staying unseen in his hallway. He doesn't yet feel oriented enough to want to venture out and reveal himself to the locals.

He can track everyone close to him with passive Thoughtsensing, just in case one of the servants nearby decides to come through this hallway. (In which case he's not exactly sure what he would do - his options include talking to them, putting compulsions on them, Gating out to the woods, or just darting ahead and hoping to find a place to hide. But hopefully he can get answers in the next couple of minutes, and make a more principled decision of how to approach this place.) 

The mage is going to head up a couple floors, which strains but doesn't break Matteir's Thoughtsensing link, pass a sign on the walls that he notices that says "Safety tip: Do not interrupt King Thrice-Born while he is working!" paying enough attention that it shows up in his thoughts but not much else, enter a room, read the sign on the inner door that says "King Thrice-Born is IN his workshop, do not enter" with mounting frustration, snarl at King Thrice-Born's secretary and then (with mounting self-preservation) turn to one of the flunkies carrying the bigger box and say "You blundering fool, you made me late!" The blundering fool will mutter abject apologies that the mage will not pay attention to in the slightest, and the mage will turn to the secretary "- Tell the king I have returned with his treasures," and storm off, smacking the blundering fool as he goes hard enough to make him drop his end of the bigger box.

This time the other mage does not catch it and it drops an inch onto the ground with a THUD that is (to the mage) very loud, and the mage will be interrupted in his storming off for just long enough to pause in the frozen, terrified rage of someone who knows that he is going to suffer a horrible fate he does not deserve at all -

The door slams open. It is solid oak, reinforced with iron plates on both sides, and these plates are dented on both sides, one by the Thrice-Born King slamming it open and once by it hitting the solid stone wall (reinforced with an iron plate and then covered with cheap furs for shock absorption) on the other side.

The man who strides through with inhuman speed is not wearing a particularly regal regalia, but what look like a working man's trousers and tunic, undyed wool at least on the outside; he carries no weapons, but is surrounded by a constant haze of spells that curve all the tiny ley-lines within dozens of yards into him, draining everything they bring to cast a thousand wards and a thousand enhancements. 

He is clearly not human. Blatantly not human. Possibly some kind of mutated human, possibly not; his forehead is ridged with bony plates (curved as helmets are curved to deflect arrows), plates come down from his cheekbones to cover his cheeks like a helmet's wings, and what can be seen of his skin is covered with a bone exoskeleton except on the palms of his hands. His feet are armored down to his toes, their soles with a gripping pattern that clings like a frog's for a moment before lifting.

His veins are green.

And he is moving much faster than any normal human as he picks the warlock up by the neck and slams into him into the (wooden) wall behind him hard enough that the wood cracks. (The neck doesn't.)

"I am attempting, Vorn, to carry out work. Important work. Work that may bring about the salvation of every person in this accursed ruin. Works that may save you, you personally, from madness and death."

(Vorn is absolutely terrified and is casting spells to heal himself and strengthen his toughness and not die, with what magic is in him and what magic gets through the spells that attempt to siphon it all to Thrice-Born.)

"Yet for some unknown reason, you seem to believe that, because you are offended at a servant, I should be disturbed, even though any disturbance may mean the loss of vital experiments or the destruction of my laboratories. Every one of you single-lived savages should be desperately praying to every god you know that I finish swiftly. Yet instead you delay me." The grip tightens further.

"Clearly neither altruism nor rationality nor even the desire for survival moves you. Perhaps you have grown too old to be of use, hmm?"

(What Vorn is thinking is that he is about to get his ass kicked, and then that this is horrible and he expects to die and he doesn't want to die, though all these reports about what his boss look like are definitely appearing in his sense information he's not really focusing on them. He's paying attention to what the king says, but only so he can babble the appropriate apologies when he survives.

He is also ABSOLUTELY FURIOUS that anyone DARES to talk to him like this, but he has a lot of experience trying to keep that in check so it doesn't show so he doesn't get murdered for daring to be angry at his boss.)

.....This is concerning on so very many levels. 

Matteir doesn't have a scry up, and certainly isn't about to risk one. In terms of the room and the King's appearance, he catches only the fragments he can glimpse through the eyes of the mage ('Vorn'?) who continues to be totally unshielded, even while under attack - and who has a variant of mage-sight, one that does seem to pick up his surroundings differently from what Matteir would perceive directly if he were willing to risk a scry with mage-sight open. 

He's....very confused. That's the main thing that he's noticing. Why are these people so spectacularly angry in response to the slightest provocation? ...Actually, that particular element is one he remembers, or, well, doesn't remember but knows from his written accounts of the period shortly after the Mage Wars. 

That doesn't explain the bone exoskeleton or the inhuman speed. Changecreatures sometimes have both, but - he would expect a human Changed to that extent would be even less...sane...than this.

They...have problems. That much is clear. Problems that they're trying to address, in their own clumsy way - the warning signs, he remembers seeing those and not understanding, and maybe he understands better now - and the "Thrice-Born King" (another flicker of confusion, curiosity) who is at least claiming to be motivated by fixing - this, or some elements of it - and just...unable to control himself, apparently? 

Matteir doesn't move. (He tightens his specialized shield against the Pelagirs wild-mage-energies, which isn't exactly what's going on here but it did seem to be helping, and it doesn't impede Thoughtsensing.) He checks his immediate surroundings again; if anyone is about to walk in on him, handling that is a higher priority than whatever is going on several floors away.

But if it's safe to, he's going to try to pick up the thoughts of the Thrice-Born King as well. The Thrice-Born King doesn't seemed to have noticed his passive Thoughtsensing read on 'Vorn', and also seems very distracted right now. 

The King's thoughts are around 99% berserk rage and 1% a tiny voice attempting to steer that into a comparatively productive direction, such as 'monologuing' instead of 'murdering everyone in the building!' It's kind of impressive the extent to which, given that he is completely filled with berserk rage, he is not going around murdering people who were totally unrelated to the event just because they're there.

... He does not, really, seem to have a normal human mind? Probably a Mindhealer would get a much better read, but he seems to - not care about anyone at all except himself? With 'save the world' more of a ticking score counter than an emotional desire for anyone else to be all right.

"Any excuse?"

(It is semiconscious that he is deliberately not letting Vorn breathe enough to talk because then he would say something annoying and Karivas - apparently his name is Karivas - would go so totally berserk he would kill everyone in the building.) He will hold Vorn there for several long moments of gasping, and enough time for the berserk rage to dwindle slightly, and then - 

"BEGONE!" 

And he will throw Vorn at the floor hard enough to kill a normal person and storm back to his laboratory, one corner of his attention on the specific question of whether Vorn will leap at his back or not, because if so, Vorn's just going to die immediately.

This world - 

(because he's now, and this is a little surprising even to himself, leaning toward thinking this is a different world from the one he knows - which is absurd, but the Gate he raised didn't feel exactly like a Gate to the other continent - didn't feel like anything he recognized - and magic doesn't work this way in Velgarth)

- this world, which might or might not be the other continent on Velgarth, is really terrible. That's his main conclusion here. 

But there's something Matteir recognizes, in those few brief fragments. Someone trying to do the best they can, under awful circumstances, and - his own awful circumstances were differently awful, and he's not a Mindhealer - and doesn't even know any specific Mindhealers he would trust with this - but he thinks this is a person who - would want to be able to work with him. Maybe. 

And he's looking for new opportunities, isn't he. New levers, or new places to stand on. 

He's not going to move, just yet, because the Thrice-Born King is clearly someone who needs to be approached cautiously. But he might try to intervene in some other way, if it looks like Vorn is inclined to leap at the King's back and die immediately. He hasn't been here for long but he would prefer not that. 

No, Vorn is going to sneak off and abandon his flunkies and go lick his wounds and nurse his resentment somewhere else. He might get drunk. Getting drunk would make him feel better, now that he's thinking about it.

Karel is going to go punch a specially reinforced punching bag until he cools down, and then he's going to go back to looking at his eight ceramic (he doesn't have glassblowers) mugs of near-identical solution for what WAS SUPPOSED TO BE (a brief flare up of the rage) a specific, carefully-measured amount of time but fortunately hasn't quite gone over, and then he is going to go back to his alchemy experiments, trying to immerse himself in them as much as possible.

This place is tragic and horrifying and he wants to help.

(In an earlier life, Matteir might have cared mostly about the resources on offer, and how he could take those and use them for his current projects and plans. But - he's not in that position, right now. He's spent the last twenty years unmoored from any specific plan or goal, and - he doesn't, actually, have to want to help only on the condition that he can make a trade and take their power back to Velgarth. ...He's not sure what the difference there is, exactly, other than how he's not under loyalty compulsions to the Empire anymore. But he does think there's a difference not explained by that.) 

He wants to talk to the King– to Karivas. That definitely isn't going to go well unless he approaches it carefully, and with way more local context than he has right now. 

He drops the Thoughtsensing-links to Vorn and the King, and focuses again on his immediate surroundings. Are either of the servants whose minds he read before still there? Are there others? 

Yep! Nobody's passed through his specific corridor yet, but that will probably happen at some point.

The nearest servant to him is a woman hurrying off to the kitchens worrying about her kid, her sister's babysitting but her sister's not really responsible, Marc will be fine and she knows what to do but she still worries, this's got great wages but it's not really safe -

He's not particularly expecting this to go well, but - he clearly needs to do something, and the risk here shouldn't be too high.

He reaches out with Mindspeech, very gently. Gently enough that she might not notice it wasn't just her own thoughts, if she were unused to Mindspeech and weren't paying attention. (She probably will notice, but if she reacts with panic or hostility to a Mindtouch, then - that's information, too.)

:Come over here: he sends. :To this hallway.: 

Ahhhh! She is definitely afraid!

Also, this is probably something a warlock or the King is saying and warlocks can all kill her she isn't important for anyone enough to care, so she will obey because the alternative is a horrible death.