Sounds complicated.

Absurdly so. I can't think why it couldn't work in principle, though.

I guess, if he refines it enough. It seems like it might take practice to use, too, for making it stamp a particular letter to be less time consuming than just writing it.

A lot of people would call it lazy, too.

Why?

Well, because it involves looking at something that has a lot of work associated and deciding to find a way out of doing the work. Personally I think - there is a very important difference between Fëanáro noticing that a book will be a lot of work and trying to invent something easier and Fëanáro noticing that a book will be a lot of work and ordering someone to write while he dictates.

I don't see why it shouldn't be less work to write a book. The interestingly hard part of writing a book isn't forming the letters! Being able to write fast will let him do more of the part that's actually worth it for itself. He'll have more time to spend on plotting and editing and moving on to the next book.

He nods, You've read more books than I. Was his all right, for a child's?

I was really impressed. I mean, for one thing, children generally don't have spelling and grammar that good. Adults sometimes don't. And he's been speaking Pax for a single-digit number of days. It was... stylistically not the sort of thing that I'd expect to see in a bookstore, even if bookstores tended to contain self-insert fanfic, but that's because it's not informed by all the conventions of fiction publication, not because it was bad, it was definitely doing all the things it needed to do and I want to read more of it.

I'm so glad. I wouldn't want to lie to him about it, but I'd love to be able to encourage him, and he does seem to have an aptitude.

The description of being stuck in his throne was really vivid.

The King has stopped asking him to do that. It was a disaster every time.

At least he eventually catches on.

He is very capable in most respects.

And Fëanáro contradicts me if I suggest that parenting is not one of those respects.

I think everyone tries to explain Finwë's decisions to Fëanáro when sometimes it'd be wiser to say 'your father's making a mistake'. But - it feels like cowardice to say to a child 'your father's making a mistake and I'm not going to do anything about it', so no one does.

I have 'he's making a mistake and I have lingering royalty phobia' to fall back on...

Can you stop thinking of him as a King? He doesn't have the power to throw you in dungeons somewhere, he just has the same name as someone with that power.

If I stopped thinking of him as a King I'd probably get really annoyed the next time he phrased something as an order.

...what makes that acceptable to you? Is it that coming from a King it doesn't imply disrespect the way it would coming from someone else? If it's only not annoying because he has the power to enforce it, I don't understand how that works with your growing confidence that we don't conduct ourselves that way here.

I mean... there are non-King people who can order me around, I'd generally do what a teacher said, say, and those don't scare me. But that's within a limited context, compared to what kings can tell me to do. You'd actually have to go really far up the ranks of people who can tell me to do things back in the Imperium to find anyone who can state as a fact that I am going to tutor his toddler once a week and expect not to be sniped at for being presumptuous however enthusiastic I am about tutoring his toddler. My parents could do that if I had a sibling, or a little cousin maybe, but I don't, and otherwise it wouldn't come up like that.

Fair enough. The man you and Fëanáro spoke of who frightened you so much?

Uh, not a teacher, but a faculty member. Being vice-chancellor doesn't technically authorize him to announce that I'm going to tutor his child, if he had a child, which as far as I know he doesn't, but it can stop mattering whether someone's technically authorized if they're... She trails off.

'bad like Melkor', Fëanáro said, 'or bad like your gods who just don't think people matter', but I'm not sure there's really very much difference.

She shivers.