She sometimes wishes she had her own computer.
She has a phone, which Charlie insists she carry with her, so that's all right and no one's going to call her unwitchly for indulging a beloved mortal. It will do simple web browsing. When she wants to do less simple web browsing, she goes to the library.
So here she is, in the Rockland Public Library, looking up alethiometers.
"Fellow named Pavel Khunrath." She settles on a dictionary. Her phone is already hooked up by USB to the computer to charge it; she downloads it thereto. "In Prague a long time ago."
"People who have them could be doing anything. The alethiometers don't just do facts, you don't just get to ask them if this Picasso is authentic is or whether Iraq has nuclear weapons. You could ask one how to solve global poverty. You could ask it how to generate clean energy. You could ask it how to do anything. And they're not, because everyone who has one has pettier concerns to worry about that take up their whole concentration, and the readers they hire are - you know that none of the alethiometers in known location are even in use twenty-four hours a day? They don't hire enough readers to keep them in efficent use! Oxford have one guy with a Classics education and a copy of Khunrath's dictionary and one grad student to help him, there's a waiting list to get them to ask it questions, the philosophers ask it what is color and they get a vague answer and then instead of arguing about what color is they argue about what the answer means, or what truth means, so no progress is made. The physicists are barely better, they say is string theory true, and of course none of these symbols just means yes or no, the alethiometer answers in complete sentences that they can argue about forever. If they asked it how they could empirically test string theory that would at least make sense. It's idiotic."
"Well, I was thinking I'd look for the lost ones," Isabella says. And then she twists around in her chair and looks at Kas assessingly. "To start," she adds.
"My plan involved using magic to find a lost one," Isabella says. "If that doesn't work I'll try getting official permission to use Oxford's. Possibly by enrolling there."
"Witches used to be able to get away with murder. That's no longer true, and I don't think stealing a nearly-unique object from any entity with a lot of security and lawyers would be a good idea."
"Of course I will," she says, tucking her phone into her purse-knapsack-thing. "How long are you going to be in Rockland?"
"Okay. Were you going to take me to some manner of place? Metis doesn't expect me back any particular time this evening as long as I'm home in time for renewing the firepit spells."
"A little before dusk. There's some setup I'm supposed to do for her, and then we're performing the ritual during the exact minute the sun crosses the horizon."
"Well, after we have the firepit fixed it's my job to cook dinner. That's about half of why Metis tolerates an apprentice, so she doesn't have to cook. She can but she doesn't like it."
"I don't know," she laughs. "Why would I know that? I don't go to them. I don't even know where the grocery store is because we have a deal to get everything delivered."