The sugar runes scatter.
The lights flicker.
And the witch is holding -
"Witch. Okay. That's why you're naked." He opens his eyes and—okay, okay, he does take a peek, but you can't blame him for that, can you? She's hot.
Uh, anyway. He stands up and dusts himself—seems like he's missing his left hand's two smallest fingers—then goes for the golden compass thing he dropped. He's wearing outdoorsy clothes—not as in clothes you go to the park in, more like clothes you on an extended camping trip in—and has a very large backpack that seems to stereotypically contain a rolled up camping bed and maybe even a tent.
"Anyway. I don't have much of a home, per se, right now, so here's as good as—actually where is here?"
"That is so cool—also it would have saved me so much time, like the last two years probably? You have no idea how long I spent looking for this one—it was abandoned and—" It has a dent. He frowns at it and opens it, and sighs in relief when he sees the little thin clock-hand-alike rotating unpredictably to point at the various different symbols.
"Thank you, thank you," he says, bowing—and then decides to get rid of the backpack and put it on the ground, to only mild protest of the bird of prey that has to shuffle out of the way when it tips and falls over. "My objection that multiple people actually using them is definitively better than one of them being stuck in a museum and another in an old dude's house and then there are two lost ones, that one stands."
"Yeah, I'm optimistic that I can learn to read it well enough to get better than indications that I'm already on the right track. Uh, there might be some exotic herb we've never cultivated that does stuff that we wouldn't naturally think of or realize what it does, something like that?"
"I think if we had one then probably dying wouldn't be particularly merciful at most of the times we do it - like, either it does freaky mind control, or you're still despairing or bored, right - and it would not be generally considered desirable to live indefinitely, which it is."
"Still better than the whole 'growing sick and ill and frail and slowly losing your mental faculties one by one and then dying no matter how well you self-manage' schtick we got going on. Maybe you could figure a way to spell people into becoming witches. Or—guy-witches. Wizards?"
"Existing magic. You can fly, there are we believe protective charms, development is possible at all and if there are moving units of meaning it seems to be plausibly flexible, and it is demonstrably flexible enough to summon an inanimate object as well as the person holding it and his daemon. From this it seems like large-scale transportation could be easily revolutionised and if nothing else the vast amounts of riches this would generate us could be invested in aforementioned charitable goals.
"Off the top of my head."
"Perhaps, that's why it's just extrapolation, but it does seem suggestive. Even if you absolutely need a witch to do it, if you could make it so everyone touching some specific object could be summoned you could employ witches at various transportation hubs around the world. An airport for teleportation magic. It may not be possible but it is the genre of idea existing magic makes us think of."
"Witches can bless trees, can't they? They can presumably curse things, too. There seems like it should be a way to combine those things to reduce the population of, or even perhaps completely extinguish, certain parasitic species or carriers of diseases, as a step before scale witchlike immortality. As an example of a more directly charitable application of magic."
"You could say county fairs have an aesthetic, but there's not a fundamental reason why Ferris wheels and cotton candy and guess-my-weight games should have anything to do with each other. They just appear together often enough that they appear to have an aesthetic, without that aesthetic being constructive in the sense that you can make predictions about what other things would suit county fairs."
"Yeah, we kinda just noticed that something didn't match a vague memory of ours and when we checked it turns out that the deeper layers of meaning for each symbol are not as well-understood as the shallower ones and are sometimes just speculative so different authors have different things and they get more different the deeper down the meaning rabbit hole you go..."
"Now that's going to be a hard question to ask, with three clock hands. ...I wonder how the alethiometer even tells, surely the symbols cannot determine things uniquely, I never looked up whether there's a difference if you have, like, the question in your head at the moment or are just following instructions..."
"Thanks!"
So he goes to have a shower and—doesn't really have pyjamas, so he'll put on some regular clean clothes—it occurs to him partway through that process that she probably wouldn't mind if he was just naked but on the other hand it's not actually warm enough for him to sleep naked so whatever—and to sleep he goes.
"You must pack very efficiently. How many eggs do you want?"
"Four," says her teacher, wandering into the room stark naked and combing her hair with her fingers.
"All right," says Isabella, and she cracks four for her teacher.
"Where'd you come from?" the other witch asks Sadde.
"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?"
"Yes but the experiment requires some level of blindness. Although honestly were these people more interested in weird complex questions than ascertaining the nature and basic functioning of these devices, how come there are so many bad ones. Anyway, if I get literally any answer at all that's better than the null results I've been getting so far."
"I think most people don't find alethiometers especially interesting and the ones who do mostly think it's interesting because they can learn information they want to know and you're a very rare bird for wanting to skip the known workable procedure for that in favor of experiments that will, much of the time, fail to work specifically because of your birdly rarity."
.......................that's hot.
But she said she doesn't date. So his only visible reaction to it is a ruffle of Luca's feathers.
"So if you just read me the symbols and numbers for a different question, without telling me what question it is, instead of me asking the alethiometer it again just from memory, it should work? If I'm your—assistive device."
"Huh. Well, Path's an Eastern screech owl grey morph and stuck that way. Settling's kind of a pity, though, it's much less practical - not too bad for you or me, but however much Path liked glowing a firefly would have been annoying in any circumstance and some people do have bugs and also changing all the time just leaves a lot of options open..."
"I'm not sure I'd even trust the shallow meanings - they're easier to get right but like who's going to check? How were any of the meanings derived to begin with? Who's going to sue you if you publish a completely bullshit dictionary but it has a really pretty cover so it'll look nice on people's shelves?"
"We ask some question like, I don't know, who would we need to contact to start working on new truth-seeking devices? Then it shows us, hmm, alpha-and-omega sixty-four. We've never seen omega sixty-four before, but the dictionary says it's, ah, the end of a fragile but stubborn existence, like that of a small flower growing in the cracks of a sun-baked street. Or something, I don't know, I just made that up. So we can try to ask questions we'd expect to have that as part of its answer, like something literally talking about a small flower et cetera, and see whether they do actually contain that meaning where and when we'd expect it."
And since Sadde is too engrossed with the magic truth-telling device to... notice... the witches' arrival, it falls to his daemon to hop over to them and say, "Welcome back. Metis, we hope you like wine; it felt right to get you something for allowing us to stay here, and it seemed traditional."
"Dude, witches are people, we do not have all the same profession and hobbies. Some witches just know enough magic to make their life as a gardener or a knife fighting instructor or a housewife a little easier. Metis teaches me broader principles of magic and how to extrapolate to build new spells."