Varric's still chatting up the bartender, but other that, everyone's gone.

Problems: Truth is very hard to sacrifice to, and Bellona and El burned their philosopher's stones on resurrecting Bellona and healing El, and Bellona probably shouldn't sacrifice any body parts (or, worse, parts of her mind, or something more nebulous) for knowledge of other timelines. She doesn't know what else she'd sacrifice though, and she's pretty sure it has to be hers in some meaningful way...

And she doesn't know how much to reveal or hint at.

She's never told anyone about the Gate. About Truth. Not here, and not in Amestris. She's alluded to it, with those who've seen it, and she's said suspicious things referencing it, but...

She definitely hasn't told anyone here about where she goes when she sleeps.

But... Maybe she can get help, or at least advice, without playing her full hand. (And she shouldn't trust this woman all that much anyways, but... Somehow she does.)

"I have a way to - sacrifice things, in exchange for knowledge."

"'There always has to be a sacrifice for Truth' - that sounds like a message for me. But... I don't know what I'm willing or able to sacrifice right now, or how much I'll have to give for what we'd need."

"I'll guess this has to do with your alchemy, and not using blood magic to summon demons, which is what anyone else would mean."

"In my experience, sacrifice is always costly and rarely worthwhile in the long run if you have any other options. The only way to cheat that is to get someone else to stand for you."

"It has to be something I have meaningful claim to, I think, though that can be - something someone else gave me. I'm... Unsure if standing for someone would worth in the way I think you mean, though it's possible to sacrifice something of yourself to benefit someone else."

(She doesn't think his sins were Father's true downfall. There was a debt, a bill he'd avoided paying, foisted off on everyone around him... And in the end, the collector had come calling.)

"And my alchemy works on equivalent exchange. Which mostly means it's obnoxiously hard to cheat, but. Things go better when I don't actually try to cheat it, and..."

(Long ago, she'd seen the Gate for the first time - and she'd flat out asked her Truth if she knew what was beyond - and the answer had amounted to no, and so Bellona had taken the Truth's ephemeral hand and led it through the opening doors...)

"It's - in some ways the opposite of your experience, I think. The times I've traded recklessly... It rarely feels worth it at first, but... In the long run, I find I was given what I actually, truly needed." (El doesn't feel that way, she knows, and nor does anyone else who's seen the Gate except maybe Ling, but also El has a distinctly hostile relationship with her Truth, and most other people are bad at perspective.)

(Losing her body sucked, but it was useful in the long run, and the knowledge she received was ultimately worth the pain. And they fixed things in the end, through the gift their dad gave them. And she knows El would never regret the loss of her arm in exchange for Bellona's continued existence. (Equivalent doesn't, after all, mean equal in value; a work of art and a lump of unworked material provide the same equivalency.))

Tiny smile. "I might be able to trade memories of useless errata for useful knowledge, actually; I haven't tried that yet, but as long as it's the same amount and kind of information, the math should work out... The main problem is guessing the equivalency correctly; that'd be very dangerous to underestimate, and inconvenient if the errata turns out to be actually useful and I overstate the strength of the trade. And something like 'knowledge of other timelines' might function on a more esoteric and harder to measure substrate, like potential, which is something only the desperate trade in."

...But...

" - Though this might all interact very weirdly with time travel, especially if any of my other selves ever figured it out."

"The rule of thumb I've developed is that time travel increases the complexity of a given problem exponentially, scaling by the number of loops."

"There's investigations I'd do before making any commitments... That'll be important to include in my calculations, though."

"Quite."

"You're an unusually good soundboard for my thoughts, you know," she teases. 

"Your thoughts are much better than those of many others."

"You're good at listening, then."

"Do you consider that a compliment, or a fact?"

Hum. "Both, perhaps."

"The best kind of each, then."

Giggle blush! 

Heh. Cute.

"You're pretty," she blurts out.  

"Why, thank you."

"The time loops are probably more relevant, but, it bore saying."

"Motivation is also an important part of problem solving."

"I'd be motivated to solve this even without a pretty woman to impress... But doesn't hurt, true."

"I'll be very impressed afterwards, I promise."

Preen! "I'm not impressing you yet?"

"You must allow an older woman her secrets, darling."

Giggle. "If you say so. Though I'm very good at ferreting truths out..."

"Stick to our enemies for now. The rest can be a reward."