"It can, yes, especially if you were expecting a more complete answer than just 'yes' or 'no', consciously or otherwise. One-card spreads don't have the... how do I put this... Usually spreads are sort of like sentences? Or stories? They divine together. A single card can only do so much, and you're limited to interpreting one of the seventy-eight meanings of the cards.

"The Fool is a good card to start learning tarot with, though, because it's the first, and also the last, of the major arcana. It symbolises the start of a journey, freedom, innocence, a new phase of one's life, being unshackled by expectations, or not having your role or self fully defined yet. It is also the card of actors and clowns. Reversed, it's the journey going bad, innocence turning into gullibility or naïveté, carelessness or recklessness, impulsivity, distractedness, and so on.

"You can also try to do a more intuitive interpretation of the card. Arguably that's the best way to learn the tarot deck, is to get your own deck, shuffle it, then draw one card a day without shuffling it again in the morning and trying to identify how it showed up in your day in the evening. That makes the meanings get associated with actual parts of your life. If you look at the Fool, how does he make you feel? He is carelessly almost stepping off a cliff, followed by his loyal dog who is trying to stop him, with the sun behind his back and his meager belongings in his bag...

"In a spread about finding an item, you could interpret the Fool reversed as the deck telling you that looking for this item is a foolish endeavour, something you should maybe not be doing, or that you haven't thought through. It could also mean that if you try looking for it anyway, that will start you down a journey that may not be a journey you want to go on."

"I actually have my own deck already - that evening trick is really neat, I'll start doing that, thank you." She gives him a genuine smile.

Then she reaches out and gently traces the art of the Fool. It's well drawn, and she has a surprising amount of affection for this very first card she ever flipped. "Your interpretation feels accurate to me. I suppose for now I can give up the item as a lost cause." With her current resources. Look, she knew that finding the evil book was going to be an unpleasant journey she didn't want to go on, that she maybe shouldn't be doing it at all, but - it's literally her job, so. Gonna foolishly (Fool-ishly) do it anyway.

"Though - do you think tarot could check if someone else has found it?"

"Ah, certainly," he says, putting the Fool back on top of the deck and starting to shuffle it again. "Like before, we would start with the first card saying 'yes' or 'no' and then move on to a larger spread if the answer is 'yes'." He offers her the deck to shuffle and cut again.

She doesn't need divination to know that she's going to have so much shuffling in her future. Might as well get her practice in now. Shuffle, shuffle, cut, shuffle.

So, obviously when she thinks of the question 'has the Antigonus Family Notebook been found by someone else,' she means 'has the unit of Ray Bieber and the notebook been found by/made contact with someone else,' but she's not going to say this out loud.

Shuffling complete, she returns the deck back to the table.

He once again pulls one card and gives it to her, face down, horizontal.

The Three of Wands, reversed.

"... Well that's a no," which is very good if it's accurate, "but I'm less clear on minor arcana meanings...?"

"Well, we can start with the picture itself before thinking about what the meaning should be, theoretically. There is a man holding a staff, looking at ships in the distance, thoughtfully. What does that evoke for you, and how would its reversal relate to your question?"

"In this context, it evokes the impression of searching. The way I'd immediately interpret it is - no, someone else hasn't found it yet, but they are looking. And it's only a matter of time before it's found."

He nods. "That seems like a reasonable interpretation. The usual meaning of the Three of Wands is momentum, looking ahead, growth, and reversed it symbolises a lack of progress, delays, or frustration. So perhaps the reason for the negative result in the first query was that whatever it is won't be found by you, but it will be found by them, whoever they are."

It could also mean that they're finding hunting down that damn notebook just as frustrating as the Nightwatch is, but she's not going to say that out loud. It could very well be wishful thinking. It'd certainly make her feel better if the nebulous secret order that got several people killed was having trouble with the book they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

Instead, she just nods thoughtfully. "Is there a - tarot meaning booklet or something that you know of? That I could refer to?"

"Yes, I can get you one," he says, getting up and leading the way out of the room and back to the one he'd been in. "I find it most useful to think of the major arcana as the Fool's journey, and the minor as a story being told from the perspective of each suit."

Yay! A new book for her the Nightwatch library! Gonna have so many books in that designated book space.

"Hold on, I haven't paid you yet," says Elaine, a little amused. His fee is cheap, but she's not going to be cheating him, even if he clearly isn't in this for the money. She retrieves two pence and offers it to him.

"Oh," he says, looking surprised that someone would want to give him money for his services. "Thank you," he says, accepting them. "Um, this book is the club's, so you can read it here," he says, offering her a small book with the picture of the Fool drawn on it, "but there are also other copies for sale at a discount for members at the reception, if you'd rather take it with you."

"I think I'll take a copy home," to the Nightwatch library. And guess what! This is absolutely the kind of thing she can get recomped for! So it's not something she has to pay for out of her own pocket.

"I'm happy to do a palm reading for you, if you're curious. I will be happy to explain things as I go, like you did for me." Mostly she needs to come across as a legit diviner with real powers, and, damn it, she figured out a whole tidy system for her bullshit, she wants to get to explain it!!!

"Oh, um. Uh, how much do you, ah, charge?"

"Eight pence, but you've been so helpful I will do a palm reading for you for free," she says, brightly. "Explanations included, no sneaky fees or anything."

See, the problem with being as cheap as two pence is that the diviner looks like a total amateur, which - in some ways she is, but in many others, she is distinctly not. She suspects Glacis, as the designated Cheapest Seer In The Divination Club, doesn't get all that many customers, because he feels too cheap. Clearly the reason he doesn't charge much is that he doesn't need the money, and is doing this entirely for love of the game. However, from a business sense, if he wanted to attract customers to practice on, he'd be better off getting a tent and a well placed spot to attract random passersby, not join a divination club that caters to people that are really into divination, and want it done professionally.

But the business advice can wait until her definitely very legit and very real reading that he's totally going to let her do, because he's a divination nerd and she's offering a ~new interesting thing~ for ~free.~ Hehehe.

"Oh. Well, if it's free, then I'll accept. Palm reading sounds interesting, I don't think I've heard of that."

"It's really interesting, I like it a lot!" And, since they are currently in public and audible to, most importantly, the receptionist that sets up clients with seers, she can begin the bullshit early, as she leads him back to the Topaz Room for the 'reading' itself. "I learned the technique from a book I was translating from an obscure dialect of Feysac, from the Fourth Epoch. It's not quite as flexible as tarot divination seems, which is part of why I want to branch out, but I am quite sure it's better at divining things someone wasn't looking for, which might turn out to be quite important to them."

Technically speaking, this is more 'things she picked up from her college roommate that was more into this sort of thing' than anything she read from a book, but, well. Needs must. Not like she can explain that one truthfully, now can she...

"Something someone wasn't looking for?" he asks, following her. "Like what?"

"Well, the most obvious are latent health problems the subject might not realize they have, through directly looking at it through the life line on one's palm." Since the Sight is excellent at that, and that's the real blatant cheating she's going to be doing for sure, she's just going to own it. "But there's also subconscious stuff that might be hanging over someone, or habits and business ventures that they don't realize are leading to their own unhappiness or destruction."

"...huh. Okay. If it works it works," he says, sounding curious.

That looks like a man who is successfully hooked on the premise. Admittedly this is approximately the easiest person to convince ever, since he's in this club for the fun of it, but still. Beginnings of victory in her new hobby of being an actual diviner pretending to be a charlatan.

She sits down on the other side of the same table she sat at before, then scoots the chair so the table's not in her way. "Your dominant hand is your right, yes?" she asks, having already noticed when he was doing her divination. But the aura of ~already knowing~ helps with the mystique a bit.

He nods mutely, eyes widening a bit, and offers her said hand.