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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
Where it's shady and peaceful and everyone is happy to see her and happy to hear that Miriel reached Tirion uneventfully.
subtly_artistic
Yep! That happened! Hurray.
...sheeeee's bored already. Are the people hanging out in Lorien talking about anything interesting?
...sheeeee's bored already. Are the people hanging out in Lorien talking about anything interesting?
Not particularly. Lots of singing.
subtly_artistic
Well, singing's something. She listens to singing and eats random plants and tries to find what random plant textures go best with thinking it'd be great if the random plant tasted like a cheeseburger / caramel pudding / tuna salad. She picks and chocolateifies a few fruits to leave by the magic tree so she'll remember them, because she forgot to bring Fëanáro any before.
Eventually she dozes off.
Eventually she dozes off.
They're still singing when she wakes. The trees have turned the colors that outside Valinor would be associated with autumn.
subtly_artistic
Ooh, pretty.
She has breakfast (turns out there is no random plant that ought to taste like scrambled eggs but there's a kind of tree bark that can do decently at toast and she likes cantaloupe-inspired berries!) and then goes to the courtyard.
She has breakfast (turns out there is no random plant that ought to taste like scrambled eggs but there's a kind of tree bark that can do decently at toast and she likes cantaloupe-inspired berries!) and then goes to the courtyard.
Fëanáro is writing his book sprawled on the ground in view of her tree.
subtly_artistic
"Hi," she says. "I made these fruits taste like chocolate for you but I don't know if it lasts when they leave the forest."
"Oooh!" He stands up and holds out a hand for them.
subtly_artistic
She pours them into his hands and goes and has a look at his writing progress.
Fëanáro is struggling to figure out the symbols. It can be done. The first thing he learned to do with problems is know whether he has enough pieces to solve them, and he has enough pieces here, pages and pages full of pieces, if he were smart enough he'd know already.
The symbols are not concepts - it cannot be that this one represents a horse, this one a person - because they repeat too much; you would never tell a story that way. They could be sounds. He says a few sentences aloud, tries to imagine how you'd draw the sounds. The symbols repeat about as often as a sound might be repeated, spoken aloud. There are about as many varieties of symbol as sound. Yes, that's it.
Now to figure out which symbol is which sound.
He is thinking about something interesting and so does not notice the door open.
The symbols are not concepts - it cannot be that this one represents a horse, this one a person - because they repeat too much; you would never tell a story that way. They could be sounds. He says a few sentences aloud, tries to imagine how you'd draw the sounds. The symbols repeat about as often as a sound might be repeated, spoken aloud. There are about as many varieties of symbol as sound. Yes, that's it.
Now to figure out which symbol is which sound.
He is thinking about something interesting and so does not notice the door open.
subtly_artistic
Awwwwwwwwwwwww this is the best and cutest self-insert fanfic everrrrrrrrr.
"Fëanáro in the story is wrong," the real Fëanáro says. "He couldn't have figured it out without ever hearing the language. But he doesn't know that yet."
subtly_artistic
"You might be able to make some progress if you had illustrations in the books," she says, "but it would be extremely hard. How's the fruit?"
"He might have been able to figure out which concepts the words corresponded to, with enough books, but I don't think there's any way to get the sounds, not without knowing in general which sounds there are in languages and which sound clusters are common and even then that'd only get you a guess." He eats the fruit. "Oooh. Tastes - well, I suppose like chocolate."
subtly_artistic
"It's a weird texture for chocolate - I can get stuff there to taste like anything but the mouthfeel's all wrong for half the foods I've ever eaten. You could find a linguistics book with diagrams of how people hold their mouths to make sounds."
"Those exist?" He looks delighted. "I want to do that, now, but it's probably more realistic that someone would speak Pax to him and he'd figure it out from there."
"I shall have to write one." He looks crestfallen. "There are so many things I shall have to write. I pleaded with Rúmil to get his eyes fixed so he could help me - I can't be his eyes for something as precise as writing while I'm writing something different myself - but he just said maybe when there were better options."
subtly_artistic
"...I'm going to try to reinvent arcane healing. It'll be a long while though, arcane magic doesn't take to it as well as divine."
"The Valar could do it. I think he's being slow because people are worried about -" he scowls at the limitations of his Pax - reembodying everyone who was taken prisoner by Melkor and he likes going around as a visual reminder that you can be a perfectly delightful contributing happy Elf even afterwards.
subtly_artistic
Bella repeats that in Pax for him. "Well, he does do that, and very well."
"But he could do it and also have eyes, and help me write all the books we need."