Ice, meanwhile, takes a scroll and stuffs it into her bag and starts quizzing her objective truth teller.
"I'm really not sure, but it seemed really rude to say that it was the best day with you right here next to me."
Cypress is looking over his wife's shoulder. Not subtly at all, in fact, he looks excited.
"The alethiometer says - it's not a runecaster and only runecasters can find runes. But..." (fiddle fiddle) "Given a vocabulary of runes, it could produce lists of them for spells."
"It doesn't sound like that big an improvement over my software, then, or at least the next version of the software," says Phix.
It's not phrased like a question: he sounds pretty okay with obsessively finding runes, and excited and happy in general.
"More runes is always better. But maybe we can outsource, now, to somebody who's not in college?"
"Education and, uh - Spanish, though I might cut that if your translation spell is as good as it seems."
"What year is it on your Earth? Mine's currently in the middle of 2015."
"That math doesn't work unless I was born later than you. Ninety-four?"
"Eighty-seven. Huh. But it's still totally an Earth! With, like, Las Vegas and Siberia and hurricanes named after people and stuff."
"... Cool future tech. Do you have cool future tech? I know it's only a decade but cool future tech would be great!"
"Maybe! I'll have to actually look up what's been invented in the last ten years - and for that matter make sure it matches up before that. Since we have witches and daemons and bears, oh my, although I guess you might not find the bears that remarkable."
"People bears. Who wear armor and live way up north. And don't turn into humans."