"Do people ever do this with somebody else holding their daemon for them? Someone who'd be generally allowed. I wonder if it would help."
"People usually never do this at all, except witches, who are in our early teens at the time," says Amariah. "I've never heard of it. It might help. It might even help a lot. I don't know."
"It might help," he concludes. "It says it - won't make the bad part better, but it'll be a good part where there usually isn't one."
"I'll go, then, if Sherlock will stand somewhere not in the afterlife and hold my duck thing for me," says Shell Bell. "If you want an extra Bell along."
"I thought this thing was supposed to generate objective truth," complains Cam. "What does it need precedent for?"
"But if Grace were an ordinary notebook," argues Cam, "it wouldn't interact with a daemon at all, and you'd know that. She's not ordinary notebook. Can I conclude that she would interact with a daemon?"
"...Is this the part where I point out that it's calling your notebook 'Paper Daemon'?" says Kas.
"I could fly!" exclaims Grace.
"If it works that way! It might not work that way. Also then how would I write in you? Or read you?"
"You could wish for me to be able to turn back into a notebook," she says reasonably.
"...Alethiometer, if Grace turns into a hawk, can I safely wish for her to turn back into a notebook?"
"If Amariah wished for Path to be able to turn into a notebook could she do it?" Cam tries.
"I wonder if I could be a notebook," muses Petaal. "Not that there's any reason for me to be."
"I'd consider it proof of concept," Cam remarks mildly. "Right now Grace can be as far away from me as we want - if I set her down somewhere, move a hundred yards and change away, and then she turns into a hawk-daemon, do I get to have the separation over with instantly?"
"Yes," says Kas. "But it's noncommittal about whether or not Grace is going to turn into a hawk-daemon."
"I wonder if I can make a conditional reversal of my anti-daemon wish. Alethiometer, can I do that?"
"Awesome. So I'll go if Grace gets to be my daemon, and otherwise I think I'm gonna have to pass."
"The afterlife doesn't work the same way as other places," he reads. "Meaning: not all of it, but not none of it, or it would've just said so."
"Magic that depends on how things are outside of the afterlife will not work in the afterlife," says the alethiometer.