"We mostly manage now. Some people really disliked it and got places outside the city."

Nod, nod.

"That could happen but the likeliest reason would be a polymorph accident or a fey curse or you actually being a fey in disguise or you looking like a child on purpose for some reason," Bella says. "And the one of those where you'd be least likely to volunteer an explanation would be the third one."

"So you'd be suspicious of me?"

"Yeah. And kind of scared, because fey wandering around in disguise are usually making up tests for people - they're not even really consistent tests, you could pass one with one attitude and fail the next doing the same thing, although there are some general principles."

"I'd probably go tell a teacher you were in there, honestly," she says. "Not a very plotty response."

"I'm pretty sure that what would really happen will make a good story," he says, "we don't have to distort it. What's a fey and what kinds of tricks do they do?"

"Fey are one of the kinds of scary too-powerful people. They mostly live in wilderness areas but they can go anywhere they like. There are more and less powerful ones but it's hard to tell them apart unless the one you're encountering is bound somehow to something or someone. They're especially known for changing the flow of time or possibly using liminal spaces in which the flow of time is different, inflicting disproportionate curses with inconvenient ending conditions on people who are rude to them, and sometimes giving out blessings or gifts to people who are polite."

"I'm sorry for scaring you. In the story."

"It's okay. It's only a story and I'm used to being scared a lot."

He hugs her. "You don't ever have to be again."

Hug! "Thank you."

And he buries himself in rewriting the story to reflect the correction about Emily and Bella going to find a teacher.

Bella heads to Lorien for magical combinatorial experiments! This time she gets a useful result: one mashup of arcane mark with prestidigitation gets an arcane mark with a longer character limit. ...Weird.

Someone comes by after a while. He has the form of a man, but is floating rather than walking.

...does he make the air weird or anything.

Not like Lórien or Aulë did, no. He lingers, leaning against a tree, and watches her work.

She's kind of not working any more, just watching him float with her pen poised above her record of the results shy of the last punctuation mark.

I'm sorry, dear, did I startle you? I'm just outright distracted with curiosity. Olórin, I'm a Maia of Lórien. Please don't let me distract you from your work.

Dude is still there. He has asked one of the trees to fashion him a pipe, and he's smoking it.

He peaceably watches from the distance.