Her response made sense, on the surface, but Alfred wasn't entirely convinced. His situation was one of her assignments, too, so why not just say that if anyone asked what she was doing with her afternoon? It wasn't as though she was sneaking away from work to come and cuddle on his sofa, or something. She could have just said, without even lying, that she was taking a few hours to tie up some loose ends regarding the whole cursed chest debacle, and no one needed to know exactly where she physically was while she was doing it. That being said, he didn't want to argue about it. She was here now, so best to just move forward.

"Yeah, alright," he said with a small shake of his head, because he had exactly zero interest in hearing about any of the 'other Pictish things,' as she'd put it. It would essentially just be an itemized list of things that she had chosen to prioritize over him — over intervening in the curse that was lurking in the background waiting for an opportunity to kill him. He didn't need to hear that. On the one hand, there might have been things on the list that really shouldn't have come before saving his life, since most of what he'd heard about the Pictish curses in rumors had been decidedly more tame than what had happened to him and to the Voyager. On the other hand, and almost worse, they might have been things that absolutely should have been prioritized above him, from a detached Ministry standpoint. People had died from some of these curses, after all... he just didn't know whether Zelda had been working with any of those particular cases.

He wasn't really ready to let go of the annoyance he felt, though, and if he let her talk about her other assignments and it turned out her delay had been justified, he'd have to. Instead, he steered the conversation forward by asking a bit brusquely, "So what's the plan, here?"