That's worrying, but it's - still probably not that, most mood disorders don't involved being possessed by demons or anything at home.

Demons?

Evil beings that eat humans or parts of them and like to cause mayhem.

Yeah, I didn't notice anything that worried me about him, just about his, you know, childhood. But maybe I can fix it.

Bella decides to let Miriel's friend introduce the situation.

Bella stands up. Hi.

What are you going to try?

I have a kind of power called 'subtle arts' which perceives and interacts with minds. I can't just reach in and flip a switch, but if you work with me I might be able to help make it easier for you to think around and past and eventually without the problems with your mood that are making it so you can't do anything. It is potentially dangerous, if I make a mistake. I'm not fully trained and there isn't another, better subtle artist here to call if something goes wrong. But I'm more likely to do nothing at all than to do something to make you worse or differently impaired, and hopefully I'm more likely to be able to help at least a little than either. It might take months or years to get anywhere depending on how complicated is, and since it's troubled you for so long it probably is pretty complicated, but I'm happy to try.

What do I have to do?

The most important factor is that you be willing to be open with me. I've made a professional promise that I'll take patient confidentiality with the utmost gravity - it isn't literally unbreakable like the kinds of oaths your people can make but it is very serious. You can tell anyone anything you like; I can't, no matter what I see or what you tell me, with the idea being that then you'll be willing to tell me or let me look at whatever might help. I need your consent to do anything at all complicated or delicate and it will help for some possible things like that if you're very relaxed. And sometimes if your mind needs to walk through a certain process you'll need to do some of the work yourself - depending on what I find I might ask you to meditate on certain ideas or visualize certain things, stuff like that.

I'm - not very good at focusing or trying to do things.

Yeah. That's one of the reasons it could take a long time. I might or might not be able to help with that in very short bursts, depending on the details of how your mind works, and I might not need anything that focused from you at all.

Alright.

Bella looks for a place to sit where Miriel will be able to see her.

You can sit on the bed, Fëanáro always does.

She sits. I met him, he's really cute. Would you be more comfortable just chatting first or should I get right into it?

Like to know more about you, but I'm not very good at chatting either.

Okay, I can talk about me. I'm Bella Swan. I'm from a horrible dangerous plane where there's lots of things about as powerful as Valar and not a one of them anywhere near as nice, and the universe punishes people who experiment on it. I'm younger than I look; my species doesn't live very long and I'm a young adult at age just-shy-of-nineteen. There are lots of species and lots of cultures in my world. I'm from one called the Imperium, which is mostly humans like me but has other kinds of people too, and has a pretty high standard of living for the average person and some conveniences that haven't been invented here yet in spite of all the horrible danger. I finished the standard educational program that everybody in the Imperium does, and I've done one year of extra academic work on top of that because I wanted to learn to do - well, this, pretty much. I was about to start my second year but I couldn't find my classroom, and walked into a different classroom that should have been locked but wasn't, and fell into some kind of magic thing, and landed in a storage room in the palace, right near Fëanáro. And I am gradually becoming less terrified of things like royalty and gods and literally everyone I meet, so that's nice.

Terrified of royalty?

Uh, yeah. If I had landed via magical accident in my Emperor's palace I would have had a very unpleasant time and then probably been executed. Since he would have assumed I was an assassin or something. And we can't do the binding oaths thing so I couldn't just swear I wasn't an assassin. Royalty tend to have and use a lot of far-reaching powers over their people and anyone else in their jurisdiction.

And are constantly afraid of people trying to kill them?

Yeah. Um, I think we might have more people. And more violent people. And more different cultures of people, which don't always get along. So it's the sort of thing they do actually have to worry about.