She waits. Path catches up.

And so does Sadde, preceded by Luca by a bit.

"He's not asking but he wants a rematch."

He said no such thing but that'd be playing right into Sadde's hand.

"Aren't we here for books?"

"Oh it doesn't have to be now."

"Well, remind me at some more convenient time, I guess." Alethiometer books are this way.

Sadde grabs something that resembles the arm part of a lighter-than-normal falconry glove from his (now much emptier) backpack, and Luca perches on it, and they follow her.

"I have a spell for that. - for daemon talons," Isabella mentions. "I could probably make it work for you."

"—ooh. That'd be useful, reducing weight would be great."

"I don't have one to make them lighter - oh, you just mean ditching your sleeve thing, yeah."

"Mmhm!"

They can try to find an alethiometer dictionary, then.

She hands him one.

"...I was going to suggest we check these out to look at them at our leisure but now I kinda want to ask things."

"Library's open till five."

He giggles and Luca hops off his arm onto a table so that Sadde can sit and grab his alethiometer.

Isabella gets her own dictionary and starts asking test/practice questions.

Sadde has no such restraint and his first test is whether the question needs to be spoken aloud or just thought at the alethiometer.

The alethiometer does not respond to the spoken question,

"You're supposed to twiddle the hands to point at whatever you want to say."

"Was trying to figure out whether I could get away with not doing that," he says blandly. "But guess not."

Time to get a test question but just use the hands and symbols without actually knowing what question he's asking. "Can you come up with a simple question and write the symbols down for me and not tell me what it means?"

"...I could do that, but, uh, why."

"Wanna figure out if I need to be thinking the question or something to get it to work."

"Do you want me to look up all the numerical levels for you too or are you trying to fly extra blind?"

"Extra blind, just want to see whether you telling me it and me just following instructions get any useful results at all."

"Do you want me to know the numerical values?"