"Huh." He frowns. "What about cooking food, does that count? Does embroidery?"

"Cooking is too active and I don't know about embroidery - it might be like reading and count for some people and not others."

"Can I borrow other peoples' magic, so they can rest for me while I'm working and it counts?"

"...there is, actually, a way to do that, but I don't know how."

"Oh, good. I'll figure it out."

"It might be dangerous, I don't know. I'm hoping it'll shake out as an obvious principle once I've done more work."

"What work are you doing?"

She holds up her list of planned experiments. "I'm going to play with swapping around material components and somatics and verbals, and then some of the more conceptual pieces of the spells, and - see what happens."

He giggles. "Don't die. Mandos might tell you to find a safer hobby."

"Iiii might get hurt, if I discover that swapping something makes my acid spell and my armor spell swap how they aim, or something, but I don't have anything that deals out enough damage that I'd actually die unless I was fantastically unlucky. Maybe I should do my practice in Lorien? Since it's supposed to be healing there? What does one do if they break their leg or get burned on a cooking fire, here, I should have asked this a while ago, I'm so used to clerics."

"We heal pretty fast anyway, but you can go to a Maia if it's going to take a while and it's hurting you. Lórien has lots of Maiar who do healing, and Estë is the Vala of it."

"...I will put off experimenting with damaging spells until I am less scared of Powers."

"They aren't like your evil gods," he says confidently, and keeps writing.

"I know. That's why eventually I will be less scared of them."

"You can try them on me, I'm not scared of Mandos. I don't like Estë much but only because Lórien hurts to be near."

"I wouldn't be trying the mixes with the dangerous spells on anybody. It'd be something that happened when I tried the variant."

"Hmmm. It'd be good to have a Vala consulting, that's what you usually do on dangerous projects, and they can warn you if something will hurt you and stop it as it does and make it better if it did. But you can't delay starting until you're not scared!"

"Do... the Valar even know anything at all about wizardry?" she asks. "I can see how they'd be useful consultants on most things but I didn't get the impression wizardry was like anything they normally do."

"I don't know. They're supposed to know everything about the world but the kinds of magic they've taught us is very different. Maybe wizardry is more friendly to human minds but does the same thing as a thing they do, so they could still be helpful."

"I... guess I could ask one..."

"I'd go with you, but I can't."

"Maybe once you've got your reserves and do your sitting still."

"Right!" He wiggles at the very thought.