Isabella gets her own dictionary and starts asking test/practice questions.

Sadde has no such restraint and his first test is whether the question needs to be spoken aloud or just thought at the alethiometer.

The alethiometer does not respond to the spoken question,

"You're supposed to twiddle the hands to point at whatever you want to say."

"Was trying to figure out whether I could get away with not doing that," he says blandly. "But guess not."

Time to get a test question but just use the hands and symbols without actually knowing what question he's asking. "Can you come up with a simple question and write the symbols down for me and not tell me what it means?"

"...I could do that, but, uh, why."

"Wanna figure out if I need to be thinking the question or something to get it to work."

"Do you want me to look up all the numerical levels for you too or are you trying to fly extra blind?"

"Extra blind, just want to see whether you telling me it and me just following instructions get any useful results at all."

"Do you want me to know the numerical values?"

"...let's start with no."

"Bird, tree, hourglass."

He tries it.

The alethiometer is still "saying" stuff - it never stops - but it seems to be saying unrelated stuff.

"Okay, now if you know the numbers?"

"Six, forty, eighty..." She looks at her index. "- eighty-one."

"What question even," he says, and tries again.

"I'm not positive I formulated it right, to be fair, I'm not experienced at this and only being allowed three is limiting."

The alethiometer says tree forty.

"Wait, is 'tree forty' a valid answer?"

"Yes! And we can check if it's actually answering the question I meant to ask - well, we can get some evidence, anyway - when we have the rematch."

"—the rematch? I'm dreadfully curious. Get me another question, maybe a simpler one with an obvious answer."

"Hmmmm..." She flips pages and finally says, "Bread twelve sun four bread fifty-five."

Try try try no idea what the question is...

The alethiometer says candle nine.

He relays this. "I wonder if it will pick up on valid questions even if no one around thought about them, or recently."