"Yes. And I don't suppose Annie and Aldaras would add a lot to the expedition anyway. Unless Aldaras's artifact tracking extends to useful things inside magics."
"That would be useful. We should find out, I've been essentially ignoring them in favor of..." He motions to Aya.
"You're entirely free to quiz them," says Prime. "I can go quiz them, too, I was just - you are more important to me than they and their resources are."
"What I mean is that probably all of the interesting information will be extracted from them whether we go ask them questions or not."
"Fair. We will find out eventually, and for now there's no reason to rush."
"Don't tell them I said that, by the way," he adds as an afterthought. "It would probably go badly."
"... When you put it that way, nevermind, feel free to tell them."
"That's just the same way you put it. I don't see why it would go badly."
"I don't know, the - 'By the way, in my giant scheme of numbers, you really don't stack up when compared to other people in my life' might be found to be insulting. I've had problems with it, but I think I'm just overthinking things now."
"I don't think Annie would care that some alt of her fiancé she's barely met doesn't rank her particularly highly. Even when Katydid warned everybody not to use their Adarins' numbers as a scoring system for an inter-Bell contest no one took the opportunity to wonder about other Adarins' numbers for them."
"They were planning to...? Right, good for Katydid. And that's - interesting. I won't worry about it, then."
"Apparently Rain told her it would be a bad idea, she didn't just reiterate that it would make her feel bad."
"It still - functions, it's just very thoroughly broken when it comes to Annie, and that breaks other things, too. It looks like he's used to it, anyway."
"It's okay. I'd get more useful information out of Annie anyway, probably. Bells are non-numerical."
"Yes. And similarly, I think I got more useful information out of Aldaras than I would have gotten from Annie."