"How you're deciding where to look. Especially if it's with magic, I barely know how anybody works except for Kiri."
"Yeah, but if I have clarifying questions you usually can't answer them about anybody except you, and I can't get demos from anybody except you most of the time. Maybe Patience will, when it's her, if it's her, she knows me."
"Hmm," she says. "I have never had much success explaining what I do in detail, even before magic was involved."
"Well, I follow Kiri okay when she talks about hers as long as I don't go down too far into details."
She walks a short distance away from the carriage, to stand in a more open area, and closes her eyes and goes very still except for deep regular breaths.
"I now understand how the winds behave in this town," she says, "and where to walk so that I might catch a trace of the breath of an elementally blessed person if one has been here recently, without having to comb every street. I will make arrangements for the carriage and then begin."
"I think you've got better range than I do. Although admittedly I've never tried sensing distant heat while completely surrounded with fire, so you have the advantage of me there."
She makes arrangements for the carriage, and comes back, and begins leading the twins along what is presumably her planned route.
They follow, taking in the scenery as long as they aren't responsible for deriving clues from it.
"So what exactly is the thing you do that you did before you became prime?" inquires Aleko. "Which from context somehow has something to do with finding missing Serlasts?"
Then she says, "I find things out."
"A wide variety, and mainly by finding out other things and then applying that knowledge. Like what I did to find out that there were missing Serlasts in Malinqua. Or how I knew that I was prime almost immediately, without doing anything strictly magical - it changed the way my senses fit together, and I was an elay Dochenza who could suddenly taste the wind and there was nothing else it could have been."
She ponders phrasings for a few more steps.
"...Looking through a telescope makes distant things seem close enough to touch, with all attendant detail. Breathing as prime does something very similar. I know what the wind has touched, and often when and where, almost as though I had seen it or touched it myself."
"Yeah, sounds it. And without Kiri's little ethics problem."
"It's not that little," murmurs Kiri, sidestepping a pedestrian with practiced resignation.