—a boy!

A boy about her age, looking extremely alarmed to be there and yelping as he falls back on his arse, dropping a curious-looking golden compass onto the floor.

And accompanying the boy is a peregrine falcon, who screams falconly and flaps its wings to drop more gracefully than his human.

"- oops. Uh. Sorry. - do you speak English."

"—yes!" he says. "What happened! Why am I here!" He looks at her and closes his eyes. "Why are you naked I feel like a perv!" He has an accent, but it's not any accent she knows—close to italian but not exact.

"I'm a witch. I was trying to get the alethiometer but apparently you had it. I can, uh, get you back home somehow, I'm sorry."

"Witch. Okay. That's why you're naked." He opens his eyes and—okay, okay, he does take a peek, but you can't blame him for that, can you? She's hot.

Uh, anyway. He stands up and dusts himself—seems like he's missing his left hand's two smallest fingers—then goes for the golden compass thing he dropped. He's wearing outdoorsy clothes—not as in clothes you go to the park in, more like clothes you on an extended camping trip in—and has a very large backpack that seems to stereotypically contain a rolled up camping bed and maybe even a tent.

"Anyway. I don't have much of a home, per se, right now, so here's as good as—actually where is here?"

"Rockland, Maine, United States."

"Wow okay that's far. I was in, uh, New Zealand, I think."

"You think?"

"I'm sure of where I was, I'm not sure whether it counts as actually New Zealand, it was an island over there and it might be part of Australia?"

"How about we introduce?" the peregrine falcon interjects. "I'm Luca, and my human is Sadde. It's a pleasure."

"Isabella Amariah, this is Pathalan. Nice to meet a fellow, uh, alethiometer enthusiast."

Sadde looks down at the compass thing he's holding, then up at Isabella and blinks. "Ah." More blinks. "You have a spell to find alethiometres?!"

"That's how you got here! It dragged you with it!"

"That is so cool—also it would have saved me so much time, like the last two years probably? You have no idea how long I spent looking for this one—it was abandoned and—" It has a dent. He frowns at it and opens it, and sighs in relief when he sees the little thin clock-hand-alike rotating unpredictably to point at the various different symbols.

"How long ago did you nab it?"

"Uh..." He grabs his phone from his pocket—

—but Luca interrupts with "Approximately four minutes ago."

"Wow, timing, huh. I guess it's better that I didn't get it yesterday and leave you with a cold trail."

"It would have been so frustrating—just to be clear you're really okay with the being naked around non-witches, right, I'm not accidentally breaching any social protocol here by not having demurred or whatever?"

"Yes, it's fine. I don't go out like this because it makes people uncomfortable but that's for their sake, not mine. Would you rather I got dressed?"

"I am a twenty-year-old bisexual boy, I have zero objections to your nudity if you don't feel uncomfortable either. ...wait though wouldn't it feel cold to go outside like that? It's winter in this hemisphere isn't it?"

"I would guess that witches have less trouble with that than us," Sadde's daemon comments. He then starts hopping over to the witch's owl-shaped soul and inclines his head.

"That's right," says Pathalan. "Witches don't get cold."

"Oh that would have been really convenient, too. Is there a disadvadvantage to being a witch?"

"I think it's pretty much pure upside."

"Envious as heck."

"Well, we are all women, there's that."

"Wouldn't mind that much, either, when I feel like being a woman I'm stuck in this body, so."

"He's genderfluid," Luca explains to Pathalan. "It means that sometimes he feels more like a girl than a boy."

"Some witches are like that but they're always mostly girl," says Path.

"It follows gender ID? That's pretty interesting. Do small female witch kids notice they're trans boys when they don't get any magic?"

"Yup. It's obvious pretty early. They don't react to moonlight or starlight."

"...react to?"

"We can feel it. If you take a witch baby out at night - well, for one thing she won't shiver, but she'll also get excited about it when it's a clear night and she's out under the stars."

"Pure upside, I see."

"Should we discuss something of more practical import than magic?"

Sadde eyes his soul but doesn't argue, opting instead to shrug slightly.

"Magic has lots of practical import, but what did you have in mind?"

"We've just been teleported to the other side of the world," he says. "And you wanted to find an alethiometer. It seems like these things bear some discussion."

"We still have food," Sadde argues, poking his backpack. "It's not like our current location matters that much."

"I was going to offer to feed you, considering that I did teleport you across the planet. I'm not going to steal your alethiometer, there's another one not accounted for that I can attempt to get."

"Offerings of food are common amongst gods for a reason!" the boy chirps.

"You can do that? Find the other one?"

"Yes? I found this one, it just happened to have a person attached to it - what's this about gods?"

"A joke, never mind," he says, shaking his head. "I think Luca's objection was that your spell might just find this one again."

"I would rework the spell, obviously. I did try to aim for a specific one. I was not intending to steal from the Louvre."

Sadde makes a face at that.

"He thinks it's a waste," Luca murmurs to Isabella's daemon, "that such a useful artefact would be stored in a museum to never be used."

"I'm not saying I wouldn't dream of stealing from the Louvre if they had the only one in existence, but as long as they don't..."

"Yeah, like, there's a reason I chose the trek to tiny island in the south hemisphere instead of trying to brave the museum and it's only eighty percent about how I would probably be arrested for that."

"Only eighty percent, huh?"

"Yep! There's also the part where Stealing Is Wrong," he explains, and she can practically hear the capitals. "And also it genuinely did seem in fact easier to go on a trek."

"And you succeeded. Congratulations." Applause.

"Thank you, thank you," he says, bowing—and then decides to get rid of the backpack and put it on the ground, to only mild protest of the bird of prey that has to shuffle out of the way when it tips and falls over. "My objection that multiple people actually using them is definitively better than one of them being stuck in a museum and another in an old dude's house and then there are two lost ones, that one stands."

"Old dude doesn't use it?"

"Seems he just keeps it for show inside his glass cupboard but I suppose he might use it every night when no one's looking."

"How'd you get a look in?"

"That would be telling," he says, tapping the side of his nose with his index finger.

"We should probably actually not tell," Luca clarifies the tone.

"If you say so." She gets up and grabs her cloud pine and starts sweeping up sugar.

"Want some help with that?"

"Have you got a broom, because my teacher isn't going to lend you hers."

"Alas, forgot to bring mine."

"Then I don't see how you're going to help." She sweeps.

He shrugs and doesn't insist. Instead he will....... try to not be too obviously appreciative of the view.

She sweeps up all the sugar into a dustpan and dumps it out the window. "Hungry?" she asks.

"I could eat," he agrees easily.

"Although now that we are on the other side of the world our schedule will probably be very strange."

"You'll wanna stay up another four or so hours to match a reasonable local schedule."

"We should be fine, then."

"What-all do you eat? We have mostly meat and veggies in the house but I can get into several restaurants if you're a vegetarian who never outgrew hating broccoli."

"No strong food preferences, I can have whatever."

"Turkey and broccoli it is, then."

"Sounds good to me."

She roasts turkey legs and broccoli crowns. "You said your name was 'Sadde'?"

"Yeah, and Luca," he repeats, gesturing in the falcon's direction.

"Yes, but Luca sounds like a pretty normal name to me. Where are you from, is it a New Zealand name I don't know about because I've never been to New Zealand?"

"No, no. We're from Italy" or an equivalent location "but my mother made my name up. Never got around to asking her why while she was still alive."

"Oh - I'm sorry."

He shrugs. "Thanks, but I'm fine."

"It's been many years."

"Okay. What-all were you thinking you'd do with your alethiometer?"

"Well, maybe I'm not as over it as I said it was. I want to get my mother's killer to justice."

"But we still need to learn to read it."

"They make dictionaries. They're not great, though. Please don't stab the wrong guy because you assumed cherub-alpha-and-omega-beehive meant Mortimer Q. Snodgrass of Cherry Tree Lane."

Sadde laughs. "I'll be careful. I hear alethiometers tend to be more opaque than that."

"How about you?"

"Spell development!"

"...oooh, that does sound useful. Is it particularly amenable to factual discoveries?"

"What do you mean?"

"Like, the alethiometer answers objective questions about objective facts, right, are there some of those that would make spell development better or easier or more efficient or whatever?"

"...'will this work?'"

"Oh, there's a trial-and-error aspect to it, got it."

"Little stuff I can usually be confident of on the first try, especially pure verse, but potions development is a mess, and there could be stuff so complicated witches will not stumble on it."

"Well the stuff that's that complicated would probably need more than 'will this work'."

"'Stumble on it'?"

"Yeah, I'm optimistic that I can learn to read it well enough to get better than indications that I'm already on the right track. Uh, there might be some exotic herb we've never cultivated that does stuff that we wouldn't naturally think of or realize what it does, something like that?"

"Specific herbs do specific things within spells?"

"...yes?"

"It's just hard to picture what-all the specific moving parts of an alethiometer-finding spell would be. Moving...? Truth device.......?"

"...that was a runes spell. You saw all the sugar, right? Sugar is not an herb."

"Do runes work differently? Does it have to be sugar?"

"I hope you realise that no matter how much magic you learn you will not actually be able to use it."

"Sure, sure, but still."

"In this case it worked best for it to be sugar. Runes work differently from herbs though they both share the 'combining stuff that has individual meanings into a whole' aspect."

"Can a non-witch learn enough to do spell development or is there some intuitive component witches have natively that I wouldn't?"

"I'm... not actually sure. You wouldn't be able to trial and error anything but I guess you could probably learn the herbs and runes and how the goddesses' invocations work and stuff for someone else to try?"

"Goddesses?"

"...yes. You really don't know very much about witches, do you. I know there are witches in Italy!"

"Yeah but how would I even learn this stuff, the media makes up all sort of ways witch spells do or don't work."

"We also felt it would be too frustrating to look up too many things about magic, knowing we would never be able to use it ourselves."

"But now you can't restrain yourself."

"You're right here," he says, gesturing emphatically in her direction with both arms.

The daemon sighs and covers its face in a very understated facepalm.

"I just really thought it'd be common knowledge that we have goddesses!"

"Could've been just local Italian witches, could've been made up by media, are they real?"

"They do stuff when I tell them to!"

"That's very concerning! Interesting, but concerning."

"Generally they do not do stuff if one does not tell them to."

"That's... differently concerning."

"Oh, why?"

"It raises the question of why and whether they like anyone better and what kinds of powers they must have that limit them so but permit them to help out with spells—is it only spells, or can you just like pray for good fortune and get it?"

"Some people think so - some people think that's how witches dying works, actually, but other than that the results are underwhelming."

"What, witches die because of—actually is it just violence? You don't get diseases, do you?"

"Violence, despair, and boredom."

"Despair and boredom, what?"

"Somebody's husband dies, or she finishes her epic poem and doesn't have an idea for another one, or something, and she puts her affairs in order and turns up dead."

"Just... like that?"

"Yup, very peaceful. Yambe Akka's also the goddess of mercy."

"I suppose if they... are okay with dying like that... maybe the despairing ones aren't..."

"My understanding is that at least at the time they prefer it."

"The goddesses would know...?—wait, do you have an afterlife?"

"My guess is no."

"Why?"

"I think if we had one then probably dying wouldn't be particularly merciful at most of the times we do it - like, either it does freaky mind control, or you're still despairing or bored, right - and it would not be generally considered desirable to live indefinitely, which it is."

"I... suppose..."

Luca hops over closer to Pathalan: "We generally feel that most problems are temporary and boredom and despair don't escape that list, while death is quite not temporary."

"Oh, we plan to live forever," Pathalan assures Luca.

"Ideally everyone should be able to," he says gravely, "even if not everyone would want to."

"Witches can, mostly," she says. "Just requires a little more self-management."

"Still better than the whole 'growing sick and ill and frail and slowly losing your mental faculties one by one and then dying no matter how well you self-manage' schtick we got going on. Maybe you could figure a way to spell people into becoming witches. Or—guy-witches. Wizards?"

"Or at least immortal. Lots of people I don't wanna hand magical powers who don't deserve to die over it."

"I guess but currently the only selection method is 'happened to be a girl born of a witch', right, so it's not like that in itself would change much. And it seems like magic is a lot less exploitable if everyone can do it."

"We do have, like, education and social technology about it."

"Slow rollout? Only be given magic if you pass this course about it? Have to be adopted by a particularly prosocial witch, it's fine if no currently-existing witch does it because you're immortal anyway and you can wait?"

"I mean, maybe, but that seems a lot more complicated than just inventing the immortality part."

"Yeah, fair, the only part that's like sort of morally mandatory is that part, I just think having magic would be neat."

"I'll think about it."

"I and everyone else who wants magic thank you for it," he says, grinning and half-bowing (to the extent he can while sitting down).

"What would you do with it?"

"...I don't even know, I didn't think that far ahead. Probably spell development for, I don't know, would it be too cliché'd to say 'charity'?"

"It's difficult to gauge the extent of what magic can or can't do, from the outside, but it seems to be able to do more than we've seen done, if we extrapolate some things."

"Extrapolate what things?"

"Existing magic. You can fly, there are we believe protective charms, development is possible at all and if there are moving units of meaning it seems to be plausibly flexible, and it is demonstrably flexible enough to summon an inanimate object as well as the person holding it and his daemon. From this it seems like large-scale transportation could be easily revolutionised and if nothing else the vast amounts of riches this would generate us could be invested in aforementioned charitable goals.

"Off the top of my head."

"There are protective charms, yes, though flying's not a spell, it's the cloud-pine. I'm not sure it scales up as you're hoping - a witch has to personally place every rune, and it took me a while to do enough of them to summon one alethiometer and person."

"Perhaps, that's why it's just extrapolation, but it does seem suggestive. Even if you absolutely need a witch to do it, if you could make it so everyone touching some specific object could be summoned you could employ witches at various transportation hubs around the world. An airport for teleportation magic. It may not be possible but it is the genre of idea existing magic makes us think of."

"You know witches don't generally use money, right?"

"Another advantage of the plan 'make me a witch'."

"So you can get filthy rich! I see."

"And make other people witches! They can get filthy rich, too. And isn't money meant to be a way to represent how much value I have generated to society?"

"We don't particularly have much use for vast quantities of money, anyway. We're fine living reasonably frugally," says Luca, raising a wing in the direction of the huge backpack.

"You did say charity, I suppose." She turns the turkey legs over.

"I think project 'make everyone immortal' still takes precedence, mind you!"

"Witches can bless trees, can't they? They can presumably curse things, too. There seems like it should be a way to combine those things to reduce the population of, or even perhaps completely extinguish, certain parasitic species or carriers of diseases, as a step before scale witchlike immortality. As an example of a more directly charitable application of magic."

"Range isn't that good," she says.

"Teleport to relevant locations—actually, if one can create a spell that tracks alethiometres then maybe one could make something to track malaria-carrying mosquitos, somehow—or malaria-immunising potions? We have even less knowledge of how potions work than the rest of witch magic."

"You're aware there's a vaccine, right?"

"Yes, but last we heard it required specific cooling conditions that were hard to move to the more remote locations that might benefit the most from them. And something about needing multiple shots? We're fuzzy on the details."

"But it's not bottlenecked on witches."

Sadde spreads his arms out. "Everyone's a witch!" He settles back down. "Although I guess if we can already turn people into witches we can turn them immortal so we might as well just do that." Shrug.

"Everyone being a witch is bottlenecked on witches."

"It can explode exponentially if every new witch turns two more people into witches on average."

"Maintaining that rate adds a lot of screening cost though."

"Maybe we can resurrect people and that relaxes a lot of constraints."

"That sounds unlikely."

"Nah, that's on my list."

Blink.

"Wait, for real?"

"It's harder than immortality, I think, but with an alethiometer, yeah, I hope to figure it out. I don't think it improves the witch bottleneck that much though because there are way fewer dead witches than dead mortals."

"No, that's not why, I meant that then it's less urgent to turn everyone immortal immediately because then anyone we miss we can get later. So yeah still bottlenecked but that's less a problem."

"How? Past-watching? Where is the spell getting its information from? ...maybe the same place the alethiometer is."

"It's a proof of concept all right."

"Was it made with witch magic?"

"No, but it demonstrates the principle in general."

"How was it made?"

"Pretty sure no one knows."

"I know. I'm just musing aloud."

"The information I have is 'by a dude'. So."

"He should have left a manual."

"Maybe the alethiometer itself can tell us."

"Presumably!"

"What a handy tool. How hard was the spell anyway? Do you need a blood moon to have happened however many days ago last blood moon was so you'll need to wait many months or can you do it whenever you're not particularly cross with grains of sugar?"

"Oh, I'm going to redo it after we've eaten."

"Was the development itself particularly difficult?"

"A few months."

"Huh. Surprising that you're the first one to think of this."

"There aren't that many witches, and most of them don't study that much magic."

This is Sadde's "what a goshdarn waste" face.

Shrug. She pulls out the turkey and the broccoli and divvies it up.

Ooh, food! He's actually kinda hungry, what with the long trek he just got surprise-snatched from.

It's pretty plain, but roasted just so.

Eh, still food, and he's been on travel rations for the past few days, so.

Om nom. She grabs an apple from the fruit bowl when she's had her meat and veg.

"Thank you very much for the food," Sadde says when he's done. "So it just occurred to me—is there a way for you to protect the alethiometer from being snatched by someone else doing a similar spell?"

"I could try some stuff, but mostly I just don't expect any other witches to do that. Since I'm apparently the first one to think of it."

"I suppose... But security through obscurity does not leave me feeling very secure."

"You want me to, what, curse your alethiometer?"

"Is it a curse if it's positive?"

"I don't know what kind of effect you're looking for here."

"'Cannot be fetched by magic' would be good."

"I'd classify that as a curse! What if you drop it somewhere inconvenient?"

"'Cannot be fetched by magic except Isabella's'?"

"Way more difficult."

"Yeah, makes sense that it would be."

"I'm glad that you find magic so sensible."

"It's just, what's it called, that thing where more complicated things are less likely to be true, it makes sense that they'd be harder to make a spell for."

"Occam's razor?"

"That must be it."

"It doesn't always apply very straightforwardly - witch magic treats living things as more basic than they are."

"Does it map more neatly to, like, mental concepts, maybe?"

"Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it."

"That seems like a good aesthetic fit, at least. And should still hold that putting more conditions together would make stuff harder."

"A good aesthetic fit for what?"

He gestures vaguely. "The way witch magic kind of looks like?"

That is kind of way hotter than it has any right to be. He should not flirt with her.

"There's a way it looks like, right, it has a whole thing going for it, with cloud-pine and sugar runes and herbs and stuff."

"I'm used to that all existing as a matter of fact rather than aesthetic!"

Sadde grins and shrugs. "But it does have an aesthetic!"

"You could say county fairs have an aesthetic, but there's not a fundamental reason why Ferris wheels and cotton candy and guess-my-weight games should have anything to do with each other. They just appear together often enough that they appear to have an aesthetic, without that aesthetic being constructive in the sense that you can make predictions about what other things would suit county fairs."

"Then maybe the aesthetic is just me pattern-matching various vague memories about descriptions of witchcraft I've encountered in my life."

"Which is legit but not a constructive aesthetic so don't lean on it too hard."

"Fair, fair, I'll try not to make any predictions."

"Or bet me on them if you do."

"I thought witches didn't use money."

"That's changing a little, I've currently got the use of a credit card as 'a favor' and I think money makes sense for some things."

"What things does it not make sense for?"

"I don't like the thing where you have to buy something to use the bathroom in a gas station or whatever. Fortunately I have found that glaring at people witchily substitutes."

"I think buying things at a gas station to be allowed to use their restroom is a noncentral case of trading money for goods and services!"

"And I don't think anything on clan lands would be improved if we introduced money internally."

"I can't comment on that, no idea how those work, but that doesn't seem implausible. I don't think introducing money in familial relationships would improve anything and it stands to reason there are other institutions with the same property."

"It's bigger than your average nuclear family but we are mostly at least a little related."

"Yeah that was my impression. And I think you guys probably have, like, loyalty stuff involved?"

"You could describe it that way, yeah."

"Do you use any money other than the borrowed credit card? Do you pay rent or own the land, and what about taxes?"

"My teacher has the use of the house as a favor. Witches don't really pay taxes - I guess estate taxes might hit us if our dads leave us money? And I guess with the credit card I wind up paying sales tax? Other than that no."

"Huh. That's really peculiar."

"We don't have incomes! And the clan lands - this isn't a clan land - are sort of like Native reservations."

"Oh that makes sense as a category. ...how many witches are there? I always figured your population would be much larger than what I think native populations are..."

"Smaller, there are only five clans in the States and there's like four hundred witches in mine and the others are likely comparable."

"Oh wow. Are most witches very old? Do you not have children often?"

"Half the children aren't witches! And if you meet a random witch she's probably between one and four hundred."

"...huh. That still sounds... are boredom, despair, and violence that common?"

"In the modern day violence is less common but there was lots of it five hundred years ago."

"I guess there was yeah."

"I think rates of boredom and despair might be dropping but nobody takes good data."

"Sounds hard to take good data when apparently the worldwide number of samples is 'low thousands'."

"There's greater witch density in Eurasia."

"Tens of thousands?"

"Maybe hundreds of thousands? I don't know."

"Maybe the internet knows it." Shrug.

"Witches are not early adopters, but there's probably an educated guess or five on there."

"Yeah that's what I'd be thinking. Like if you know at all that Eurasia has more witches then someone probably has finer grained information."

"I mean, we're believed to have originated somewhere in Siberia."

"Huh. Do you have origin stories? Or better yet, a documented origin?"

"We didn't invent writing any earlier than anybody else. There's mythology but unlike the goddesses it is no longer understood to be real."

"What, not by anyone?"

"Eh, maybe somebody, it's not popular."

"Huh, so very unlike the rest of mythologies currently in vogue out there."

"It's more like one of the ones not currently in vogue, yes. There's a D'Aulaire's book."

"I'm unfamiliar with it, I think."

"Well, get D'Aulaire's Book of Witch Myths out of the library if you're curious."

"Will do, thanks for the suggestion."

She finishes her food and puts her dish in the dishwasher. "All right, back up to the attic with me."

Atticwards!

"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..."

"Well. Guess I'll get a bunch and whenever I want to figure one out I'll try some questions with known answers."

"Yeah. Sure would be handy to have one of those people rumoured to have an intuitive understanding of the meanings, though."

"I'm not sure those are real, they sound like something someone would make up a story about for plot convenience and then, like, of course they'd be hard to find, most people never even see an alethiometer so how would you know if you had the ability."

"Yeah pretty much, but a boy can dream."

"Hey, if you find one..."

"You'll be the first one I'll tell about it."

"Thanks!"

He laughs. "No problem. Not like I'd tell the Louvre about it."

"If I were going to look for an intuitive reader I'd look in the Louvre, actually."

"—okay that's a valid point, yeah."

"I wonder if the Louvre would kick them out if they set up lemonade-stand style to read what the thing was babbling about."

"I think if they set up an actual stand, probably, but I doubt they'd care if it was just some rando talking there. I guess if they attracted too much of a crowd and made it hard to walk around the place?"

"Yeah, maybe. The Louvre might be uptight though, I don't know."

"Never been there, shared continental provenance notwithstanding, so no idea either."

"Anyway, if the existing dictionaries are no good we can make our own."

"They're probably any good, they did agree for the first couple of meanings per symbol, but yeah, we can."

"They may have done something annoying like get the first few all from the same source and then completely made up the rest. Like, with whom exactly could doing that affect their sales?"

"I was under the impression they were mostly for scholarly research rather than for sales, really. At least two of them were written by Professors at the University of Oxford, and the University has one, right?"

"Maybe those are legit and the rest are for people to put on their shelves and look nice like the I Ching and Tarot books they also never open."

"Well as far as I know the Tarot and I Ching don't actually work so at least the people with alethiometer books in their shelves can paint a picture of themselves as more worldly and sceptical."

"Fair enough."

"Although it would actually be pretty funny if those did work and no one had noticed, but presumably someone would ever have tried to do a study on that. At least after the invention of the alethiometers."

"Hm, they're fuzzy enough that I'm not sure it'd be easy to tell."

"Well, fair enough. ...alethiometers don't really do 'yes-or-no' questions very well, do they? I feel tempted to try to ask."

"A regrettable drawback. Numbers and yes-or-no."

"I wonder what kinds of design limitations their inventor was working under to make them be like this. Surely there could have been an inner circle with numbers and yes-no and other similarly useful and common answers?"

"One presumes if it were that easy he would not have made alethiometers as cryptic in their answers as they currently are."

"I suppose."

"I think something like a ouija board would be ideal. But maybe whatever it is has trouble with phrasing?"

"I don't suppose anyone's tried taking one of these apart and figuring out what makes it tick, right? Too valuable by far, I guess..."

"Yeah, you'd have to be really confident it'd work or at least that you could put it back together, though I do mean to eventually ask one about that."

"Now that's going to be a hard question to ask, with three clock hands. ...I wonder how the alethiometer even tells, surely the symbols cannot determine things uniquely, I never looked up whether there's a difference if you have, like, the question in your head at the moment or are just following instructions..."

"Oh, you do have to think the question, I believe. I'm not actually sure what added work pointing at symbols does."

"Mind reading, great."

"Not, as far as anyone knows, by a person."

"I'm withholding judgement on whether I believe alethiometers are not people until I've fiddled with mine any."

"The one in the Louvre does not seem to respond to topics people are thinking about when they aren't holding it, so it may just be a user interface decision."

"Given that alethiometers pluck objective knowledge out of thin air I wonder if, regardless of whether they themselves are some kind of people, someone could use one to effectively read someone else's mind."

"Crossed my mind. It'd be very low resolution but that wouldn't matter if you were good enough at reading it. Shouldn't work on me but I'm not positive and that doesn't help anybody else."

"Why not on you?"

"It's my birth blessing but it was designed for, like, curses, not alethiometers."

"Birth blessing? Witches get birth blessings? How do those work?"

"About the same as other blessings but with some added oomph?"

"Why added oomph? Can you only get one? Why only at birth? Can non-witches get it?"

"We were not previously aware you could bless people," Luca explains.

"Birth blessings only work at birth on witches one apiece because they tie up some of the recipient's magic, but yes we can bless people."

"What kinds of things can you bless people for, is it only magic or can you, I don't know, give your kid an extra ten IQ points, that'd be huge especially if it got heritable from there but I'd guess it wouldn't—"

"We can't do IQ points. Some birth blessings wind up panning out as talent in a thing - we don't pick the details, just a goddess - but not just being smart. Most regular blessings are for health and protection."

"—wait, so like, you pick a goddess and then you luck out to have something specific related to her? How do you find out which specific thing you have?"

"I don't have kids, I've never actually done one. My grandma was hoping I'd get an art talent, that I know."

"...art and being immune to mental spells and curses are under the same goddess?"

"There aren't very many goddesses! Stuff bunches up."

"I suppose it's not like deities in other pantheons have sensible groupings either..."

"Yeah, like, Apollo, what's up with him."

"Previously I thought what was up with him was 'he's fictional'!"

"I'm pretty sure if you tell him to do stuff no magic occurs!"

"Yes I still think he's fictional I just now have evidence of gods that aren't and yet contain multitudes, so to speak."