He thinks it's amusing that she's experiencing the same uncertainty about him that most people feel all the time. What a terrible fate.

It's sometimes an active process, knowing that he's about to think or is thinking something unhelpful with a heuristic, and deciding to not do that. The 'no more of that' from a moment ago. It's sometimes a habitual one, yes, where he holds an alert pose and tension in his body, and then his thoughts shy away from certain things without much active intervention thanks to all the practice. He also put in a lot of effort to disconnect facts he knows and how confident he is of them from how he learned them- Doing that feels something like this:

Miss Waltana is probably a so-called spark of genius | The spark of genius is real but not well known

Moderate confidence recent time | High confidence, moderate time

And he could stop it here...

Report from an informant just today, people who know I know: Kireh, the waitress, possibly the innkeep, possibly the police chief | Cached expectation from several months ago, people who know I know: (Several people Kireh has never seen), Kireh, possibly others as a general-background-fact.

And he could stop it here...

Lovely lady, if grumpy, he played the concerned bystander to have her go subtly question Waltana, and [this] is his model of what she thinks of him (she's kind of suspicious now but nothing for it really) | He's met several prominent engineers including Nansen, and the ones who come up with baffling breakthroughs all share manic, distractible tendencies. Nansen was an aggravating idiot of a genius.

Wow.

(It is a terrible fate! People should trust each other's Lawfulness, as verified by magic or the statement of a superior, and nothing else.)

"I want to regularly check on your intentions toward me, but I'm satisfied for now. Whether or not we form a lasting agreement, I'll go buy the house for you now. Can you recommend a solicitor to verify the ownership of the house in a hurry? And someone to appraise it?"

As long as the benefits from being exposed like that outweigh the costs, very well.

He pulls away from the read and gives two names. "Though I don't know if they'll be available on short notice. Shall we go to the bank for a moment for the thousand pounds?"

"Yes. If we can't verify that the person we give the money to owns the house, and he doesn't, and the police fail to recover the money, can you 'ensure that causes problems' without harming anyone else? Can you find him."

"No, if we can't find any documents for the good man's property, I'll need to talk to some chaps down at City Hall before just giving him a bag of cash."

"Okay.

If you're coming in person for this, do you still need me?"

"I think at this point I'll go handle the details myself, and you can get to your engagement with McAllen and whatever other business. Sensible sort, he is. Feels a bit rushed but we can't dawdle around. I've paid up for your legwork with that shilling earlier, yes?"

He stands and turns for the door. 

"Okay. Yes, and you still have two pence on your tab with me.

Do you want the Charm Person now?"

"Yes, I can see what it's like and take notes."

"Okay.

It will last exactly seven hours and I cannot dismiss it early. I consider that information a strategic secret which you should not use against me, if you are capable of being allied with me." And if I find out that anyone else on this planet learns that, I'll know you leaked, she does not say.

Charm Person.

He feels a break in his thoughts, and then it's obvious that Kireh told him a secret because she's his friend. She seems familiar and reliable, a comforting presence. The reason for his opinion of her isn't apparent, maybe he's keeping the reason separated from the fact like he often does? If he tries to analyze his memories of her, they might not match how he usually interacts with his friends, but that's fine, she's an unusual person after all.

Kireh immediately leaves to check on Waltana.

(Marcus Cromwell pauses, says 'Fascinating', and stays back in his room when she leaves.)

Waltana is in the room! With several pages filled with notes, and actively fiddling with something in the end of the adjustable-arm-set. It seems to have acquired a bunch of wires and strings, and there's a pair of glass jars that she's done something with, with a copper wire from the pressure cooker leading to them.

She turns and glares, then blinks and frowns. "Oh, hi. Where'd I put it..."

She fetches two sheets of paper.

What could you do with access to a flying machine?

Extract power from the winds at height? Coordinate automata signals from distant areas, communication systems I.E. radiotelegraph. Make use of the cold temperatures at heights somehow? Use the difference? Wind is driven by temperature differences. Cold is the OPPOSITE of a problem! Weight is a problem, tradeoffs between range and speed and performance and cost. I don't know how to fly but it may be possible to make an automaton-ship, or at least automaton away SOME of the work.

What could you do with help from a glassblower?

Chemistry equipment! Proper flasks treated to resist acids, with easy ways to clean them. Boiling vessels that won't crack under high heat. Thin-bottom flasks with magnetic mixers? Distillation column I.E. an alcohol still but better, meant for proper chemical work. There are different formulations- Make substitutes for missing material or for strength or insulation? With proper glassware we can make medications, industrial acids, rubber, cleaning chemicals, and more. Perhaps even directly chemically synthesize edible sugars? Plants do it somehow.

What could you do with help from a trained engineer?

What CAN'T I do with help from a trained engineer. They'll take the ideas I have and make them less rickety, more able to actually work. The best engineers are masters of 'scaling up'. Taking a new process or a proof of concept and making it work a thousand times all the same. Someone who knows lots of basic tricks would save me a lot of time- Instead of inventing a way to drill a triangular hole, or rust-proof a piece of steel, or whatever other thing, they know how to do those steps already and I can focus on the more 'impossible' things that sparkiness can do.

Can you make a person better tolerate the cold, or tolerate heavy clothing?

Medicine is tricky business, the body does naturally respond to cold by restricting blood flow to the extremities. But we NEED that blood flow to actually keep working and stay healthy. Possibly inducing high levels of activity? But open blood flow = more circulation = more heat ESCAPES even as more is generated. Direct alteration of the body is something I would not be confident in without the assistance of a medical doctor. To make them tolerate heavy clothing, improve the clothing. I think the issue would be 1, cost, 2, bulky clothes getting in the way, and 3, discomfort. But some discomfort is better than freezing to death. Perhaps a small burner that feeds warm steam into a tube-lined coat, like a building's radiator writ small?

Can you get energy from the changing seasons?

It's too slow, anything I can think of on this front is impractical and inefficient. The changing seasons barely have any effect on the deeper earth, and the variations along a single day are much more extreme than those of a season-to-season. 

Can you get energy from the ocean?

There must be a lot of energy bound up in the waves and tides; Capturing that mechanically, somehow, like one does with expanding steam, might be feasible. A heavy structure anchored to the seabed with a bob that rises and falls against resistance? I'd need to watch the ocean and try things to be sure. Alternately, things do grow in the ocean. You could perhaps process and burn algae and kelp.

Can you make glass from rocks?

Well, duh. The right sort of rocks at least- Glass is silica or quartz. But what is glass, anyway? It has some fascinating structural properties as far as the crystal formation goes, completely amorphous. I wonder if you could temper metal in such a way, and what properties it would have? 

Each has a few sketches and semi-related rambles under the first couple of lines

"I did the rest too, give me a moment to find them..."

"-Aha, here!"

Can you keep ice from melting?

Yes, with high pressures or simply by preventing it from accumulating heat. Ice is a crystal structure- It may even take up new properties in sufficiently exotic conditions? I'm not sure this would be useful though.

Can you keep water from freezing?

Agitation helps. Contaminants of any kind help lower the temperature freezing occurs at too, salt water is well studied. Perhaps some way to ensure any ice that does form is promptly exposed to heat and melted? Ice floats, so a heat source at the top of a basin?

Can you keep a forest alive without putting it in a hothouse?

All plants that I know of WILL die if the temperature is cold enough; The water in their cells freezes, bursts, and destroys the processes of life. Pine trees resist this with huge amounts of sugar in their sap, using the freezing-point-lowering trick. A hothouse seems the only real way without access to Darwin's research or some other method of making extreme modifications to plants. There may be something of the sort as a possibility... Black colonies of lichen and scum that keep themselves warm with insulation and sunlight?

What could you do with my body? I can heal from most careful surgery.

Extract useful materials like blood or bone or fur, then allow them to heal. Not unlike what we use livestock for, cows live and die to provide us meat and milk and leather. People BREED cows and pigs and all the rest, and there's a science to it... Why can meat be produced only by eating plants? Could a plant GROW meat? Studying your body to see if any clever mechanical solutions exist. Venom channels or skull padding or informative bone structure? Unsure. Modifications and implants: By grafting muscles from one place to another, new ranges of motions can be made possible. Make the tail more flexible and stronger? Make the fingers double-jointed for flexibility? Need an anatomy textbook. It's a dream completely beyond me, but I might like to graft myself enormous bird wings, or a fluffy tail.

What challenges would there be to living deep underground?

It's actually warm underground thanks to the Earth's crust, but there's no light down there, and no way to exchange air with the surface. Oxygen is needed and carbon dioxide must be expelled, meaning large ventilation systems to bring outside air in- These would be vulnerable to freezing, and the air being brought in would be cold. Burning coal to power anything would be impossible as well, the same problem but many times worse. Some non-combustive power source is needed. Radium decay? I don't know enough about that, and where would we get radium. Growing crops underground would require light and power sources as well.

Can you make a flame that only produces light?

That's called a lightbulb. The best lightbulbs still produce a lot of heat, because the radiant emission of hot things is just the way they work. There's other sources of light, chemical fluorescence. I don't know a lot about it, but some sort chemicals release light as they react to each other and produce relatively little heat. You could even make such a thing reusable if there was a way to reverse the reaction? It would only be a flame in the most technical of senses, since flame refers to oxidation. Alternately simply capturing and retaining the heat of a flame may serve? 

Can you reduce the amount of food a person needs?

I still don't know enough about medicine! It's documented that athletes and soldiers need much more food than civilians, and children need less as well. Could I make people smaller, and thus need less, perhaps? Some sort of drug that keeps people slow and inactive? It might make them useless for work, but it would reduce their hunger as well. Or a drug that blocks the body's signals demanding one go eat. It would remove 'hunger', if not actually reduce the need for food. DANGEROUS- You would have people starving themselves to death and never even realizing it. Make them photosynthesize like plants? People aren't BIG enough and are too active for that to help much... Improve the body's furnace somehow? We don't understand how respiration works exactly! Biology may be 'just chemistry' on some level but it's incredibly complicated.

And did Waltana damage any part of the room?

Marra's Inquisition.

Kireh reads the papers. "Good. How did it feel to write out your thoughts?" Was it distracting? Helpful for focusing? She didn't actually intend for Waltana to write it all out, but she'll learn what she can from the accidental experiment.

Glass is already made from rocks, huh. If Waltana wants a tail and wings, Kireh will be delighted to feed her vanity!

"Do you know how long the cold will last? Will the deep earth stay warm that long? Can you make coal? Can you make a chemical device like the reversible chemical lightbulb, but optimized for heat, to be worn under clothing? How do you store heat, from a flame or otherwise? How is 'carbon dioxide' usually destroyed and 'oxygen' created? Can you grow plants in high pressure so ice doesn't form inside of their cells?" Darwin's a spark, she recalls, but unusually religious. Maybe actually more like a druid?

Kireh is supremely satisfied with her physical form - all marrenai are. But could she be even more awesome? Sure! It would be fun to fly again, although if she ends up with an underground shelter with humans bred to be small, wings might get in the way of slinking through tunnels. She'll start with some extra ears, maybe.

Outsiders have discrete varieties for some god-reason, with a gain in soul-strength typically used to transform into a different variety. Marra has only a few varieties and encourages more individual growth and variation - Kireh knows a cantor with a giant snake tail instead of legs. (Presumably this policy comes at a cost to Her, but She is the Awesome Diverse god of vanity, after all.) If Kireh gets wings, will she turn into a sietaziz? If she doesn't strengthen her soul, she's not strong enough to be a sietaziz... or if she keeps removing parts of her flesh, which is literally a mixture of her soul and Lawful Evil essence, and reattaching the parts after she heals, will she keep getting more soul infinitely? That can't be right. Probably pieces of her that are removed stop being part of her soul - her blood is useful for Infernal Healing but that's just the Lawful Evil component of it, right - and rearranging pieces of her while keeping them attached doesn't create more soul. Maybe someone will attack her shelter and she can fight them off!

She has not damaged the room, just rummaged through the piles of parts for the best bits, like the glass jars. "Hmm! Writing them out instead of just thinking was a little strange, like..." She had to make sure only DECENT ideas actually got written down, so it got rid of all the chaff and nonsense? That's not quite right... "I turned ideas over in my head until one seemed good. Just actually thinking about things for a set amount of time was new, too."

"I have no idea really, I don't understand climatology and all I can do to guess is listen to what the papers say. There weren't any good books on it. The deep earth will stay warm for, practically, forever. Earth is fucking huge, there's mountains of coal's worth of heat down there. That's what volcanoes are, do volcanoes run out? Charcoal is the state of the art for making coal... Plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen but it takes a lot of them, it's complicated and you want one sentence answers right now probably, uh."

Could she grow plants in high pressure? That might mess with the other mechanical systems, the xylem and phloem and transpiration... There's research on stimulating plants with electricity to induce high-speed growth, that might help with the oxygen too, or just some chemical process that does it. Might end up just being easier to draw in new air and use a regenerative heat exchanger to limit the damage...

"Hmm... Oh, this is for chemical work." She indicates the jars with wires and stuff. "Separation of water into hydrogen and oxygen, I wanted the hydrogen, you can burn it or use it in chemistry. I can take a shortcut in the rubber with it, maybe. I wasn't really planning when I built it." (Chemical bonds shifting and breaking apart, balances of materials...)

"Thinking about things for a set amount of time, meaning sixty breaths? How did that feel?" Was she really constantly paying attention to her breathing, or just counting at least sixty breaths?

It's not great that Waltana started a whole new project without 'really planning', but it's not the right time to comment on that: far too late to be a effective punishment and they'll have a discussion of strategy for using sparkiness later.

"I know a pilot for a flying machine. If my shelter is to be underground, I'll buy the IEC plans for the mining drill. I have almost made an agreement to get funds for my shelter, so for now, I want you to focus on things that would be useful for your engineering personally rather than products to sell.

I'll make some noise and ask you to move around and maybe I'll do other surprising things. I want you to keep concentrating, ignoring the irrelevant and moving when I tell you."

Is the stuff under the pillow still hidden?

The pillow and stuff under it is undisturbed.

"I kept wanting to move on but reminding myself not to. And trying to think of other things based on the same question It was infuriating, but strangely relaxing?" She was probably not constantly paying attention, at least at first, but counted the breaths later on as she got used to the exercise

"-Stuff for my own use? Makes sense. Maybe even skip selling the pressure cooker, I'm coming more and more over to the idea of using it as the centerpiece for chemistry. Focus on the work despite the distractions, you mean?"

"Okay." More writing exercises, then. "Yes, focus on your work despite the distractions."

For the next half hour or so, Kireh bustles around, gradually increasing the intensity of the distractions: humming to herself, "step to the left", tapping on Waltana's shoulder in time with the humming, "come over by the window", drawing the curtain, removing the curtain, rolling it up so it brushes against Waltana randomly...

When it's after 1:30 by Kireh's estimation, she packs up the curtain and sewing equipment. "Keep working. I'm talking, but keep doing what you're doing. When you can't get any further here, read the note on the bed. Keep working for now." Can Waltana take that in without falling out of her spark concentration?

She leaves the shilling coin from Mr. Cromwell at the foot of the bed, not touching the pillow, and the writes the note:

Buy a book about plant or human internal workings; a specialized engineering book, ideally one I can sell later. Study it until I return and write down any thoughts it inspires.

The question here is whether learning more trained-engineer knowledge helps or hurts. If Waltana gets better at intuitive engineering overall, applying the concepts she learned from the book in original ways, studying it is good. If her spark doesn't benefit at all, studying it is probably bad, especially if her trained engineering does benefit overall. If she gets better at using her spark but only for living things, Kireh will have to come up with another experiment to decide whether the trade-off is worthwhile.

Waltana makes some more changes, then starts testing the tiny set of stabilized arms, moving one and watching the small motions of another. Then she takes part of it apart, changes something, and puts it back together.

Following the directions is a lot harder than tuning out distractions. Either she's distractible and working more uncertainly, or she's extremely focused but doesn't seem to register the instructions to move, and grumpy if actually interrupted.

She closes her eyes for a moment, then reports, "I thought about the cool things I could do with such a book and now the spark wants it, so I'll remember. One you can sell later, though."

"I think practicing more would be good for you, later."

And now to the police station.

Carrying a rolled-up curtain.

"Ah, the mind reader. Why do you have a curtain?" The same front desk person who was here yesterday asks her, tiredly and making a face.

"I was hoping to mend it while I'm waiting before and between" interrogations "interviews, if that's allowed?

Also, while I imagine that Chief McAllen might already be planning to speak with me today briefly, I have several topics to discuss with him, some regarding our business together; and some unrelated, for which I will compensate him for his time."

"...It's a bit odd, but I suppose between interviews it's fine. Chief also wants to talk to you after, about continuing your services past the initial two days. It's doing wonders for our backlog already."

"Okay." Hopefully if it's 'doing wonders' they'll be willing to keep her on when she asks for substantially higher pay and shorter hours. "Do I need an escort to the interview room?"

"Yes, let's get to business."

The rules are the same as before, but there's specific lists of questions the interviewee agreed to ahead of time this time. They have fewer people for her to interview this time, a lot of them for minor disputes or incidents like accidentally killing a chicken or breaking a window. The officers want more time to focus on real troublemakers rather than minor ambiguous stuff. The most exciting moment is a man who swears his twin brother is the one responsible for a robbery- and isn't lying.

Chief McAllen will talk to her after.

"When you said you wanted to give me a list of questions to ask, I didn't realize the interviewees would know the questions ahead of time. I'm still pretty sure my perceptions today were accurate, and even if there was a single fixed publicized list of questions, it would still be hard to fool me, but I want to be clear that you're making a trade-off.

I assume that you want the suspects to be relaxed, and to feel the emotion of trusting you, me, and the police as a whole. Understandable as a way to make them more pliant, although distasteful to me. You're already in a bad situation if people are committing so many crimes with the expectation of getting away with them. There should be no hope of escaping punishment. If you can't enforce the laws with your resources, either the police should be expanded or the laws should be trimmed.

The instructions to the interviewees already say that I will not reveal off-topic information and that they will not get in trouble for thinking of unrelated crimes. Why is that not enough? Why do suspects fear that you might be lying about that assurance, such that restricting the questions and allowing them to prepare relieves that fear? Have the police of some other city broken their word, or made people regret contacting them? If I were her Majesty, I would consider such looting of the reputation of my government to be treason.

Anyway. Business.

I am willing to work another day for you on similar terms, but it is likely that my circumstances will change dramatically soon, making my time more valuable.

If you want to focus on speed at the cost of accuracy, I'm willing to sell my other mind-reading spells, the ones I can only do a few times per day. Today, I don't have any use for them, but in the future, I expect to value each spell as equal to an hour of my time. To effectively use them, the targets must not know the exact time I read them, and they must have been kept waiting long enough for their deceptions to falter. With a single use, I can scan a roomful of several dozen people - I'm not saying my true limit - over the course of a few minutes. Assuming that they are startled and don't deliberately let me read them, at least half a dozen will resist me. Trying to read them again will probably work, though.

I am likely to find lodging of my own soon. Are you interested in paying me directly to keep the same curfew?" Kireh doesn't mention running through the streets. She hasn't had to yet, and if she was ever in such a desperate hurry, her price to hold back would be steep.

"I'm likely to succeed at building my own shelter. You have a better grasp of Lawfulness than most, and I would like to hire you or otherwise recruit you. Are there others you would recommend for their Lawfulness? They don't have to be police." The official story is that there will be space for everyone, implying that Police Chief McAllen of Bristol will be, after the evacuation, Police Chief of some shelter holding refugees from Bristol. But if the sheltered population is much smaller, especially the criminal types, his new position might be inconsequential.