"But I don't want them to have to develop their own! I want them to be able to use ours so everyone on the world can read each others' stories."

"Okay. Well, when Pax borrows words that use sounds Pax doesn't have, it develops conventions of letters that otherwise don't usually go together, to represent that. And then Pax eventually has the sound but it still uses the conventions to signal it because there's no system to re-standardize it. This is where a lot of spelling irregularities come from, you've probably noticed already."

"We're not going to have any spelling irregularities."

"Not to start out, maybe, but after a while? I hear people are calling glass 'bella-stone' for some reason even though I didn't really invent it, how would you spell that with these letters, you don't have a B? You'd have to make something up and maybe you guys wind up pronouncing it P and the Teleri wind up pronouncing it V and somebody else manages to get it actually right and then you can either spell it different ways or in ways that don't represent how it's being said."

"So we come up with a letter for all sounds," he says stubbornly. "We're going to get it right."

"Then you wind up with a linguist's alphabet, which will never catch on for everyday use, there's too many possible sounds, you can't even say them all as you mentioned with the Valar's real names."

"I'm sure there's a solution, I just haven't thought of it yet."

"Okay. Well, can I go ahead and get used to these letters for these sounds, anyway?"

They debate this vigorously for a moment, and then conclude that she can.

Fëanáro looks horribly torn between teaching her words and helping refine the alphabet for sounds not used in Noldorin Quenya. Rúmil settles this for him by insisting on getting them something to eat. So Fëanáro climbs into her lap and starts teaching her words. "Fëanáro is beautiful in my alphabet, isn't it? That was important to me."

"It is! I was actually wondering if there was a way to squish it in Pax - there's a spell that sticks a magical signature to something but it's got a six-character limit. I think the vowel stacky thing you have going on will get around that, and if it doesn't one of my only useful experimental results so far is an arcane mark with a higher character limit."

"It's less than six characters, if vowels don't count."

"Yeah. You would've had to condense it somehow if you wanted to do it in Pax. I can't use my whole first name, so I have an ambigram of 'Bella' in a swan cartouche."

"We picked a 'b', so I can show you how to write your name in my letters now."

"Okay, let's see."

He starts writing. "And then you have to show me your mark. What's an ambigram? what's a cartouche?"

"There's one on the inside cover of all my notebooks." When he has her name written she flips to that. "See, it says 'Bella' -" And she turns it. "And it still says 'Bella'. That's an ambigram. I don't know how to make them, I paid one of my classmates to make me one when we were learning this spell in class, she wound up with a tidy fortune for the service for a ninth grader. A cartouche is something you surround a word with, especially a name, and mine looks like a swan, which is because of my last name. That part does not go upside down."

"Oooh. Maybe I should have refined the letters so ambigrams were easier to pull off."

"Draconic isn't designed for it at all," she says, "but the girl who made mine could make most anything work."

He scowls. "Then I can do it too. Just let me think."

"Okay. I think she had a book on how to do it or something though so it might take a while to invent from one example alone."

"I'll write a book about how to do it, once I figure out how to do it."

"Cool."

He wastes a few pages of scratch paper trying. By then Rúmil has returned with food. A few of the things you seemed to like yesterday, he says.