"Last time I bailed them out from a stupid choice I killed thousands of innocent people to do it."

"Odette's not going to do that."

"Yeah, well, if you'd asked me, I would have said the same thing."

"I'm not saying she's a better person than you are. But she has more power and therefore more options. If she sees a bunch of Feanorians fighting a bunch of other elves, in addition to 'let them die' or 'join in' she also has 'pick everyone up and put them all several meters away from each other, and demand an explanation.'"

He laughs. "Yeah. I could have made use of that option. In my experience being more powerful doesn't make people solve problems more compassionately. I hope it all works out."

"Well, we aren't Doomed, so maybe."

"Nor are the Valar, and the last time my cousins got into trouble the Valar killed hundreds of thousands of people to retaliate."

"Well, Odette certainly isn't going to do anything like that."

"I rejoice to hear it. Are you going to go visit her sometime?"

"Yep. Given how attached my sister's gotten to your cousins there's no way I'm not going to want to meet them at some point."

"Well, I'm sure Odette can fly you over. I'd also like to see them - it's been a few decades - but not during the war, I don't think."

"She can! She's convenient like that."

"Are you going to eventually pick up flight yourself?"

"Enh, I could fly if I really needed to, but it's mostly Sympathy and it's less pain-efficient than running and I'm not very good at it.."

"Fair enough. What fun things does an Effort focus let you do?"

"Healing, obviously, running and other physical augmentation things, moving things around, changing their shape, increasing the amount...this isn't a comprehensive list, you understand, the study of how the different sections of magic interact with different things you might want to do with it is its own field of study and not one I paid particular attention to. I could, you know, probably give a decent intuitive guess as to how best to do various things under various constraints, but I couldn't give you a formulaic definition. Um, things with instantaneous effects are often Conquest? Anything where you want to fudge detail work is usually Sympathy?"

"I'm starting to get a broad picture, yes. Thank you."

"That's why a lot of really delicate things, like mind magic, you pretty much always want to do Sympathy, because you all but can't know the details well enough not to need any fudging at all."

"And your sister's specialty in Sympathy is very strong?"

"Mm-hm. She's amazingly resistant."

"And uses magic constantly. You passed out from the pain. Does she just - not do that?"

"She, uh. Likes it. The pain, not the passing-out, she doesn't do that part."

He smiles. "That  - would do it. Well, it's very much for the best for us."

"She likes it because she's so resistant to Sympathy that she could do mind-magic to herself and make herself like it," she elaborates. "Which is really impressive, both that and the osanwe. Doing mind magic to yourself is...opening your mind up a lot to the influence of magic."

"How'd she get good enough to be good enough to confidently do that in the first place?"