[ There's another long blinking pause in which Harold processes this, and particularly as he stares at this glowing rotating prism in her hand. It has to be said that he's taking her seriously and listening to her closely; any disagreements or objections are from real thought, not casually disregarding her perspective.

He can't say he's upset at being considered an imaginary number, of all things. It actually seems quite apt; Harold is legally dead and hasn't used his own birth surname since he was a teenager. He's been imaginary for quite some time, in that he definitively exists and can be proven to exist, but cannot be objectively quantified. He's not totally sure that's the reasoning she's applying here, though. ]

So that I may form complex numbers and interact usefully with the world of matter? [ he hazards a guess, frowning. He does like signal processing... ]

This is getting frightfully abstract. Does your, ah, glowing shape assist you in some way?