"Well, their inventor is talented. What's plastic?" He has disassembled the pen and reassembled it. 

"It's made of... I'm not sure, actually," says Matilda. "Jenny, what's plastic made of?"

"I'm not sure either. Petroleum, I think? I can go get the encyclopedia," Jenny suggests.

"No, I can do it," says Matilda. She glances up from the spectacle of Fëanáro and the pen, and a second later a book flies into the room. It hovers in front of her and flips its pages. "Yes, plastic is mostly made of petroleum." Flip flip. "And petroleum is mostly made of fossilized algae."

"Oh. We might not have any of that, the light might be too new." He frowns. "We'll figure out something. This could be done without plastic, anyway, I think."

"Which, the pen? Yes, probably," says Matilda. "There are pens made out of things other than plastic. What do you mean, the light is too new?"

"Algae didn't grow except in the time of the lamps, and now that the Calacirya have been opened to the Sea," he says absently, "and fossilizing things takes a very very long time."

"...I think the way your planet is lit and the way my planet was lit might be different," says Matilda. "We had a sun and a moon and you wouldn't call them lamps unless you were being metaphorical. And they didn't make light like the light you have now, either."

"Oh, you haven't seen the Trees? You've got to come see the Trees, they're really pretty. Also I can show you the palace and you can live there while we're figuring how to move your house out of King's Square."

"I can..." starts Matilda.

"I don't think you should try to fly the house again right away," says Jenny.

"It's probably not very polite to leave it here," says Matilda.

"We did the best we could, and I don't want you moving entire houses around without making sure it's safe first."

"If there's a healer to sing my headache away it'll be fine! Anyway, I'm not even sure it's moving the house that hurt so much, I was doing lots of other harder stuff."

"Please, for my peace of mind, work up to lifting houses if you're going to do it again," Jenny says firmly.

Matilda sighs. "Okay." She gets up from the couch and goes over to hug Jenny. Behind her, the P volume of the encyclopedia closes itself and puts itself down on a table.

"You really have to teach me that, it's neat. And I can tell people to move the house the traditional way, or ask a Vala to move it the way you did."

"Teach you what? Telekinesis?"

"Is that what you're using to lift the books? If so, yes. I could do more complicated crafting if I could hold more things without touching them, and the applications for glassblowing are absurd."

"I'd be happy to, but I'm not sure if it's teachable," she says. "I only found out I could do it by accident, and I've never met anyone else who can."

"I'm sure most people don't try," says Jenny.

"Well, that's true," Matilda concedes. "The way I started out was staring at something and concentrating really really hard on it moving. It's gotten a lot easier with practice. But I don't want to just recommend that you spend days staring at objects willing them to move as hard as you possibly can, because I bet that would be really boring and frustrating if it turned out you couldn't do it."

"Yeah, I think I'll find a different way to do it. It's not important yet, anyway, inventing an alphabet is way more interesting."

"Inventing an alphabet is really interesting!" agrees Matilda. "Do you know what you want the letters to look like?"

"Not yet! Not like yours, they aren't pretty enough. Come here and I can draw things and we can see if they're any good."

She goes there.

"One thing I remember about designing alphabets is that a bunch of the letters in English look like other letters flipped upside-down or backwards and there are a lot of people who find that hard to read," she mentions.

"We'll have to do better. Hmm, one nice thing about having letters be rotations of others is you can have letter design reflect where the word is spoken in the mouth and so forth. But maybe that could be done without any letters being other letters flipped."

"I bet we can think of a way to encode that information without making any letters geometrically congruent," says Matilda. "What are all the sounds in Quenya?"

Jenny is regarding them both with immense fondness.

So he tells her all the sounds in Quenya and then starts writing out some options for them to consider.

Matilda excitedly follows along and offers suggestions both aesthetic and practical.

It's probably a good idea to design for ease of use, since lots of people are going to be writing in this alphabet and it shouldn't be unnecessarily complicated to write in. How do you design for ease of use? Well, how about they try writing out various sample letters a few times and see which things affect their comfort and convenience and writing speed. Matilda fetches more paper and pens. She attempts sample letters both telekinetically and by hand. Her mental grip is flawlessly steady; her manual penmanship wobbles a bit. This is usefully informative, since it's good to have an alphabet that's still readable even with mistakes. "Jenny, do you want to help us test our letters?"

"I'd be delighted," says Jenny. She grabs a spare notebook and pen.

"It also needs to be beautiful, or people won't want to use it and have it adorning their homes, and it needs to cover more languages than just Quenya so that other peoples who haven't had the idea yet can use it, and it'd be great if you could write Valarin in it, maybe then people'd be able to learn Valarin and right now they can't because it's too hard."

"Is Valarin another language? Is it hard to learn?"

"Yes, the Valar speak it and they don't have mouths so it's not designed for mouths. I'm going to learn it but I have to be bigger first because the Valar give me a headache and also live far away."

"Well, we can design the letters to be pretty. If we're really clever maybe we can make the system nicely extensible, so that if we encounter new sounds later, we can add more letters for them and they'll make sense next to the rest. Oh! And is there more than one dialect of Quenya? In English, all the words are mostly spelled the same in different places even though people sometimes pronounce them really differently, and that makes it easier for people to understand things written in different dialects, but I don't know if you want to make Quenya letters like that too. Why do the Valar give you a headache? What's a Vala?"

"They give me headaches because they're - I don't know your word, our word is just Vala - they created the world - and they're so much bigger and more magic than us. There are three dialects of Quenya and then we almost might want to write songs of ours that are from Qenya which is what we call the language our people spoke before we came here. Some of them use such different sounds I think I want different letters, like if we were Vanyarin my name would be Hweanáro."