He has a dozen questions about the rules of magic and how they get this result.

"I don't know yet! That's what I'm trying to find out. I think maybe it's borrowing something that gives prestidigitation its weirdly long duration for such a novice spell, and applying it to the character limit, but I'm not going to be confident until a few more rounds of increasingly uncertain experimentation."

He's satisfied with that answer and goes around stamping things with an improved arcane mark until he's out of magic.

Is it just his name?

His name in the new Quenya letters, yes. "We're calling them tengwar," he says, "and I haven't figured out how to do it like yours, not yet."

"Most people don't have ambigrams as theirs unless they were in ninth grade arcana with me," she says. "You could do something else to fancy yours up."

He promptly pulls more paper out and tries a dozen variants.

He's delighted that she's learning it and is happy to point to things as they go around, in case it helps with vocabulary. Or they could put labels on things! It'd help her with vocabulary and everyone else with learning to read!

They could totally put labels on things! What is sticky and nondamaging?

He can't think of anything but they can test things! He'll find a block of stone that doesn't really matter and they can try various tree saps and anything else that comes to mind to suggest.

Tree saps don't seem especially nondamaging. Maybe some of them are. She vaguely thinks glue might be made of horse hooves? She is not sure where she heard that and it might be made up.

"The horses need their hooves. We could ask a Vala but that's a bit boring. Honey?"

"Won't that attract bugs?"

"Yeah. Hmm. We could go to Lórien and ask it to make us something, and then later try to figure out what else has those properties."

"Good idea. Are you allowed to go there now?"

"Are you sure that was the only reason and we don't need to check?"

"If there's other reasons then we shouldn't check because what if someone says no?"

"What if the other reasons are good?"

"There aren't any good reasons for not letting me do things, it's always that I'll make someone sad or scared and I can't live my whole life not doing anything that makes anyone sad or scared or I fall apart and that makes them sad and scared anyway."

"There was a good reason for not letting you play around with dangerous magic," she points out.

"If you think there's a good reason for something there might really be," he admits.

"I can't think of any good reason you shouldn't go to Lórien now," she says, "but I don't always think of everything."

"Sure you do," he says. "Let's go. Nothing's dangerous anyway, this isn't your world."