"You want to supervise?"

"Curious about it if you don't mind? I can make myself busy otherwise."

"Be my guest, just stand over there. Or sit. And you, no flapping," she adds to Luca.

He sits.

And Luca wing-salutes.

And she gets her big bag of sugar and a thurible-like object, which she fills with sugar and starts using to describe shapes on the floor.

He watches it with enraptured interest.

The whole thing takes about an hour; a few times she has to sweep away an inadequate rune.

He's intensely curious about the runes but will not interrupt with presumably-useless questions.

And eventually she sits down and picks up her notebook and reads her verse over again with a couple of words tweaked and the sugar blows everywhere and she's holding the other lost alethiometer.

He claps excitedly.

She bows slightly. "Thank you, thank you."

"Where was that one, do you know?"

"She didn't know where we were," Luca points out.

"I did not! Though it looks like this one may have been underwater." She picks a bit of seaweed off it.

"Functional still?"

"Yup, it spins!"

"Oh good. Two entire functional unused alethiometers in the same room!"

"Well, hopefully not unused for long."

"Hopefully!"

"Have you seen a dictionary for one of these before? We looked through a couple of them and they seem to be... less-than-stellar at communicating things."

"I've gotten them out of the library before. What kind of communication were you hoping for from a dictionary?"

"It would be nice if any given two of them could be expected to agree with each other but typically past the fourth meaning..."

"Oh, I never did actually try comparing them..."

"Yeah, we kinda just noticed that something didn't match a vague memory of ours and when we checked it turns out that the deeper layers of meaning for each symbol are not as well-understood as the shallower ones and are sometimes just speculative so different authors have different things and they get more different the deeper down the meaning rabbit hole you go..."