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This is the wrong building. She could have sworn the RA said "take a left at Emily, first on your right", and Bella did exactly that, and here she is and the rooms in this place don't even seem to be numbered, it's all letters and names. She's not going to find Intro to Subtle Therapy in Room 206 like that. Maybe the RA meant take a left after Emily, not before Emily? Maybe she was supposed to go the other way around the quad and approach Emily from the other direction? She's going to be late.
Bella tries to get out of the letter-named-rooms building to go ask Emily for directions, but that's not a stairwell after all, and there's someone shouting at her not to come in and she flinches back and clonks her elbow on the door and boots or no boots she's down and she -
- is falling -
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subtly_artistic
"Trying to make stamps for the letters for the thing that'll make writing go fast. It's hard. Not the stamps, that bit's easy, everything else is hard. I've been experimenting. You talk in your sleep. I didn't know what all the words meant, so I wrote them down so I could ask."
"Yes. You said -" and he starts reading. It's all nonsense.
He nods in satisfaction. "I don't think I talk in my sleep, someone would have mentioned it. Want to read more of the story?"
Fëanáro knows at once that this place is not the palace because it's very dark. There isn't light streaming in through the walls and through the ceiling to make everything look like it's shining, and there are things in the corner that look broken, and Father will be very worried and sad but also Fëanáro is so unlikely to be found here that he suddenly feels like he's floating.
Then he starts examining the room.
On one wall there are gleaming boxes, all of them identical, with elaborate diagrams going down the sides. The diagrams are precise and exactly the same on each book and he studies them for imperfections and cannot find any. He wonders what kind of artist does the same thing ten times.
He takes one of the boxes off the shelf and realizes that it is actually a sheaf of paper bound together with unimaginable precision. It falls open to more symbols, so precise, so obviously meaningful that it's like the artist is speaking out of the page. He knows at once that this is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. He wants to scream and shout and run and find the nearest person but also the artist is speaking and he cannot understand it yet and so he sits frozen, looking at the symbols, trying to understand.
Then he starts examining the room.
On one wall there are gleaming boxes, all of them identical, with elaborate diagrams going down the sides. The diagrams are precise and exactly the same on each book and he studies them for imperfections and cannot find any. He wonders what kind of artist does the same thing ten times.
He takes one of the boxes off the shelf and realizes that it is actually a sheaf of paper bound together with unimaginable precision. It falls open to more symbols, so precise, so obviously meaningful that it's like the artist is speaking out of the page. He knows at once that this is the most beautiful thing in the whole world. He wants to scream and shout and run and find the nearest person but also the artist is speaking and he cannot understand it yet and so he sits frozen, looking at the symbols, trying to understand.
subtly_artistic
"It's really - it's really nice how much you like books, how instantly you liked them," remarks Bella.
"I've wanted my whole life to make something that beautiful. I didn't even know it was what I wanted."
"I will add it to the list of things to fix about your world in my story."
"Well, why don't they like it? Are there no happy stories? I'll make happier ones. Is it too hard? I'll make it easier. Are there too many other fun things to do? That seems hard to fix."
subtly_artistic
"There are happy stories - although some people prefer sad ones or scary ones - and some people do find it hard but I'm not sure how you'd make it easier, and most people who don't like reading do like other things instead."
"You could make the letters easier to distinguish, if that's related to their problem? Or prettier, if the problem is that they don't find the letters beautiful to look at? Or you could make the correspondence between letters and sounds better and have no spelling irregularities."
subtly_artistic
"But then you'd have to convince people who find Draconic just fine to use your alphabet, and it might not even work, if the problem is they don't like sitting still and absorbing words."
"You could find a format so they don't have to sit still, and everyone will use my alphabet because I'll have killed all the bad gods and they'll do what I want."
"No! No one will have to be afraid because all the bad gods will be dead, but they will be very impressed I did that and want to read the things I write."
subtly_artistic
"So you're just going to flood the book market with your revised alphabet in your copious spare time and it'll catch on from there, I see."
"If that doesn't work I'll try something else. But by that point I'll have been epic for a long time and have written lots of epics about myself."
subtly_artistic
"I don't think most of them are autobiographical. Some, I guess, for epic bards."
"If I don't have time to write them I can still have them written in my better alphabet."
subtly_artistic
"That's true, you could totally commission the epics that way."
He's smiling. "Also everyone will live forever. Maybe they don't read now because they always feel busy, but if they didn't always feel busy they'd read more."