Prepared how?

Half-Maia, right? In theory I can do most of what my mother can do and I could have picked things I could use to protect my people but instead the only ones I have are, like, 'cheer people up' and 'make people less tired'. 

How do you specialize like that?

Songs, for us, it's all songs. They take a long time to learn and refine. 

Sarelle would have a field day. She's got air like I have fire, she can do sound with it.

That'd be amazing! Most people have to sing, if you want to use it in combat, can't exactly go around carrying instruments. I'm way more powerful than typical but useless in a fight - wasn't expecting one...

How long does it take to get a new song working?

Powerful ones that do exactly what you want can take a century. Something less specialized or with less caution about side effects or that you can modify from an existing one, still years. 

That seems like such a long time to take at anything. What are the - steps?

I think different places do it different ways but here you first compose a song, and then you perform it and get a feel for what it's doing and start tweaking it for the things you care about, and then once you're very sure of it you scale it up, and scaling it always introduces new unexpected effects it has or directions in which it's doing something - sometimes it turns out it's not doing what you want at all, it's doing something related...

What's the content of 'scale it up'?

Do changes to make the song more powerful. You could make it all the way powerful right away and then tweak from there but that's how you get killed. 

That would seem to follow. ...How many drafts do you usually go through? How long do these songs get?

Maybe forty drafts? The tweaking at each stage can take a very long time though. Most songs have an effect by a minute in and it's a rare magic song that's longer than twenty. 

Yeah, I can see how that would take a long time. ...hundred years still sounds like a bit much though.

That kind of song would be long, and you'd have to power it up very slowly - maybe a hundred drafts - because of the risk of things going wrong at each stage. 

Nod. I've been very timid with active mind magic because there's no real safe test.

Lots of music is the same way. Sometimes it's safe with my mother testing, sometimes that'd be even more dangerous. 

What makes the difference?

Mind magic'd be incredibly dangerous to test on her, because if she stopped working we're all dead. Anything physical or anything that affects the mind in some way Maiar aren't affected - like things that replicate the effects of alcohol, say - is perfectly fine. 

Huh. Yeah, so far all my active mind magic has been on really desperate humans and orcs who would have otherwise had to be killed.

That seems like a safe way to go. We don't let either of those into Doriath, so less chance to test it. I tried some things with rescuees of Angband. 

...what things?

Things for panic attacks. Mood. They probably wouldn't want you inside their head, the Enemy does enough of that. 

Wouldn't expect them to.