Ask The Alethiometer!

[Kappa]

I don't know if I'll answer new questions or not. Doing alethiometer requires a particular kind of brain and I am not oversupplied with any kinds of brain at the moment. But if you ask, I might be inspired to answer.

[DanielH]

I’m not sure how you were asking the alethiometer all the questions you did; a lot of them seem to require more than three symbols, but whatever.*

For these questions, I’ll let w be the level of meaning of Owl for “witch”. For other non-canon meanings I’ll just use xs, ys, and zs, which do not keep the same value between questions.

The first two of these questions simply had to be asked. The next two might be answered in HDM canon, but I haven’t reached there yet, or already in Effulgence, but I don’t remember. For the one after that, I expect to have a boring answer, along the same lines as why witches are female. The last one I expect to be potentially interesting.

-x,y; -1,z; -1?
Abundance, currency; Europe, transition; America? “How will the Euro change with respect to the dollar?”, a better question to ask than “Will the Euro fall against the dollar?”. See here for why it needed to be asked.

-3; -2; -2?
Church; knowledge; Authority? “What does the Church actually know about the Authority [versus happen to guess about by coincidence/metacausality]?”

-2; -2; -x?
Christ; Authority; relation (as in a connection between things, not necessarily familial; this fits the lute through philosophy, the third meaning)? “What is the relationship between the Authority [who we saw] and the Christ [which the Church always talks about]?” Implies as a subquestion, “Does the Christ exist [within the worldsheaf, because obviously he exists in Narnia]?”. I don’t remember a Christ-like figure in the Belling of the Alethian afterlife and I can’t find one in the HDM wiki, but it’s the second layer of meaning for something, so it’s worth asking about.

-w; -1; -1,x?
Witch; nature; dæmon, bird (assumed present through spring, not simply because it is a bird)? “Why do witches always have bird dæmons?”. I’m half expecting the same thing as a response, “It is the nature of witches to have bird dæmons.”

-1; -w; -2?
Dæmon; witch; power? “Why do dæmons in the form of witches only get some of their powers?” I’m fairly sure there’s a better way to ask this, but I can’t find it without adding a fourth hand pointing at the compass, to indicate a quantity that isn’t everything.

* The history of the alethiometer indicates that disassembling an alethiometer, adjusting the mundane clockwork controlling the three question-hands to add space for more, adding those more from another disassembled alethiometer, and reattaching the clockwork to the first, should work. It also implies that one should be able to replace the standard 39 symbols with others (or adjust the clockwork to add more) and get something perfectly functional with the new meanings. Obviously, both of those would be completely irresponsible things to try unless one had a way to make more alethiometers *cough*pentagon*cough* or was completely unable to use them in their current form.

[Kappa]

I ask the alethiometer questions by having it as a character in my head the same way I have other characters and reading the questions on this forum as it. It's perfectly capable of understanding questions presented through ways other than the movable hands. I would describe it as terribly charmed by your question-asking methods, though.

[DanielH]

I figured that was the answer, like how Cam could ask it questions without even knowing the symbols. I did enjoy coming up with these, though.

EDIT: Obviously my analogy crosses universal lines. I still think it makes sense. You could have required all questions be phrased as usual Alethiometer-style input (and probably gotten fewer), but you decided to take questions in more forms, and you decided to allow that in-universe too.

[Highfivegloriousdinosaur]

I was wondering if you're still asking the alethiometer questions on behalf of us! I was wondering; what is my daemon's settled form?