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He falls into a chair with a creak of aged leather and the clink of buckles against wood, this hobo in leather and wool and too many years.

He'll order tea in a minute.

First he's going to enjoy being somewhere Dave isn't. Somewhere Horvath isn't.

He imagined this all being... easier. Or at least more straight forward. And involving fewer duels in bathrooms.

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"More than I can remember, or care to." There are so many he'd like to forget, to erase the scars from. Sometimes he wonders if Veronica will recognize him if he does ever reach his goal.

"A little different than personal development," Autor says quietly, inclining his head. "Are your rings magical? Mine is."

"On the whole, no." He has nine rings - only one of those is magical. That means the vast majority of his rings have no magical properties whatsoever.

"On the whole? What magic do they possess?" he asks before thinking about it. "Mine is a poison immunity."

"They possess no magic at all." His ring, the one that he needs, that isn't camouflage, is only a conduit. Give this ring to someone without potential, and nothing at all will happen.

Autor cocks his head. He could ask if he has a focus, like Sunshine's, but he has no evidence to make such an assertion. They're not even from the same world.

Still, he gets the feeling that she's the key to unlocking this Pandora's box.

"Do you own any magical artifacts? I have a flying carpet."

"Some might say I am a magical artifact." Balthazar admits with a bit of a giggle.

Autor's startled right into a cackle. "Oh, nooo," he says, shaking his head. "But you don't look a day over forty-six."

He wants to ask why he's stopped aging there, but then he'd have to explain why he himself did, and that's too close to home. Autor is irrationally annoyed that he's giving away so much when Balthazar hasn't been.

"My my, flattery will get you everywhere, young man." Balthazar's voice abruptly drops into an outrageous drawl, and he flutters his eyelashes at Autor.

Autor flails. A little. No more than he has to, but certainly not less.

"I hope you're teasing me," he rasps, cheeks burning. "You are teasing me, right? Because if you're not, then, um, you're a very nice magical artifact, but we probably have irreconcilable differences!"

Balthazar snorts into his tea.

"What would you say if I wasn't teasing?" He asks, chuckling. Honestly, the kid's hilarious. Way too nosy for his own good, but hilarious.

"Well, um," Autor says, fiddling with his glasses and glancing to his shoes. He gulps. "First, I'd wonder why you were attracted to me at all, and then I'd see if the age were a factor, which it might be?"

There goes the flailing again. "And then I'd probably say something along the lines of, 'I'm very sorry, but I am not attracted to you in that manner, but I'm pretty sure we could be friends if we really, really wanted to', and hopefully it wouldn't hurt either party to be so."

Now he's openly snickering, because honestly, that's beautifully ridiculous.

"Well, at least you have time to work on that."

"Work on that?" Autor says, startled out of his flail. "What's wrong with it?"

"Generally, when politely declining someone's romantic advances, it is not wise to start with the insinuation that someone might be attracted to children." Balthazar points out, highly amused. "Generally. Who knows, it might go over well in some places."

"Oh, Shiva wept and double Carthaginian hell," Autor exclaims, his blush firing up anew. "No, I meant if the age would be a complicating factor in any relationship that we might have, and--hey, I am not a child, okay? You are... This is... This is terrible."

"Well, not by my time's standards, but in the time I'm living now, you certainly are." Balthazar points out cheerfully. "Of course, in my time, you would have had a pile of children already, so either way you're in trouble."

"What? What? I-I'm not old enough to think about having children," Autor gasps. "I'd be an awful parent." Time spent playing dragon adventures with two-year-olds notwithstanding.

The urge to satisfy his curiosity starts itching. "What time would that be?" he asks, all flailing nearly evaporated. Nearly.

"You have heard of King Arthur?" Balthazar asks idly. He remembers the king... sadly, he remembers very little of what he's sure historians would call the glory days. There was so much deception and death at the end that whatever was good about it has mostly disappeared over time.

Autor straightens up. "Yes, of course," he says. "Do you mean to say that you lived during his time--and that he was more than a myth?"

"Of course he was more than a myth - do you honestly believe a myth could leave such a resounding impact?" Balthazar snorts disbelievingly.

"Well, no," Autor says, suitably chastened. "That makes sense. Were you one of his wizards? You're not Merlin, are you?"

"No, and no, emphatically." Thank you, he has much more class than his master. And his master had a bit of a twisted sense of humor. And no fashion sense whatsoever.

And as for the original question... his master may have been a master manipulator and one hell of an ass for not warning him that the Prime Merlinian wasn't going to come for over a thousand years, but at least he was worlds more moral than anyone of the Pendragon line.

Autor senses a disturbance in the Force. Balthazar seems to be... a little annoyed, the boy notices, and so he decides to avoid the subject of wizards and Merlin all together.

"Still, King Arthur's time! Where heroes and legends abound, and apparently everyone had a litter of children by the time they were seventeen," the boy says. "Thank you for telling me. You didn't have to."

Balthazar shrugs, sipping his tea.

"Well, you had to have kids as soon as possible, seeing as you were bound to be dead of something or other by your mid-thirties." Plague, famine, war... all very present realities in his original where and when.