I don't think it'd do me much good here, it only works if everybody wants it, and anyway I'm happy to help - the things I'd be doing with money would have mostly been 'pay to have a place to live' and 'buy food' and 'give to charity' and those are kind of not things I need to do here. I didn't have a specialty picked out. There's a bunch. Mood disorders, trauma, family therapy - I probably wouldn't have gone for that, it would have been too easy to get into the habit of trying to convince everyone that the sensible solution I came up with will solve their problems - anxiety, disconnection from reality, impulse control problems, substance abuse, all kinds of things - She picks up her intro book. I probably wouldn't have ever developed the sheer force to specialize in undoing hostile arts or magical damage other people did...

Is that a common problem in your home realm?

I don't think of it as common, but it's... commoner than 'never happens'... people mess with artifacts they shouldn't, get into fights, have accidents...

Can you consistently attach a good feeling to hearing stories about your world? It sometimes feels good and I like that, I'd like to keep it.

Sure, can you focus on the feeling you want to keep?

Can you tell another strange story?

Hm. Um, the first I remember hearing about how dangerous experiments are was when I was very little and my mother caught me trying to take apart the television. Televisions are a magical device that tell visual and auditory stories, sort of like the osanwë that accompanies singing here only you can see it with your actual eyes. The stories are made by writers and illusionists and the televisions will put the same shows on all the sets that are tuned to pick up that story and not a different one. I wanted to know how it worked but I was going about it dangerously - I don't remember for sure but I might have just finished watching a science fantasy show where people took things apart - and Ranae stopped me and made me read a book about people who tried things like that.

Okay. I think I have the feeling.

Bella goes looking for it.

Curiosity, protectiveness, wonder, astonishment. I want to make a tapestry, of a little Isabella taking apart a television. I don't even know what televisions look like.

Bella signposts the feeling. Ours looked like this. It's like a shallow, miniature, wooden stage. I can stitch in the emotion to the category now if you like.

Go ahead. And she falls still.

Thank you. And I can test that one just by asking for another story!

Bella giggles. When I went to university, I got a magic knife which was enchanted not to cut me - because otherwise it would be pretty dangerous to go around with a weapon; but the school has a policy that everyone needs to carry one unless they get an exception, because we're not children anymore and can't be constantly supervised but need to be ready if we run into something dangerous. There's conscientious objector status, which I don't qualify for - I would totally be willing to stab a ghoul if it came after me - and there's an exception for if you're sufficiently dangerous unarmed. I'm not very agile even with my boots, so I'm hardly dangerous even with a knife, but the policy doesn't care about that; so I took a class called Arcane Defense and learned a couple spells but fell short of qualifying for the exception. So I still had the knife on me when I landed, and when I told my tour guide about it - I guess she didn't know what it was by looking - she had me take it Aulë and asked him to enchant it so it wouldn't cut anyone else either.

I feel it, she says excitedly.

Want another to make sure it wasn't just a coincidence?

Yes, please!!!

Eeeeee~ A popular entertainment in my world is fake warfare; it's called 'skirmish'. Everybody puts their weapons through a magic item called a mockbox, and gets an illusion version of the weapon which leaves illusion wounds and mimics all the magical effects of the weapon, and there's similar ways to make it so you can use other effects that would normally be lethal. People on a team are assigned point values based on how strategically valuable they are, and point-matched teams face off in a big arena trying to mock-kill each other. It's fun to watch when it's more battlefield control and magic, I get bored when it's about who's better at hitting the other guys with a sword, but there's usually something cool going on because teams can have dozens of people depending on how many point-heavy fighters they send out. People do it for fun, but it's also not bad practice for fighting in real life; the mockbox means they don't get in the habit of pulling their punches the way they would in a sparring match and they can go kill evil dragons or whatever one day.

That does sound fun. I think it would disturb the Valar if we had it here.

It's not perfectly safe even with the mockboxes. Nobody mocks their fists. I wouldn't suggest it.

Could you mock your fists?

There was actually a thing someone developed to mock entire people but it hasn't caught on mostly because it's incredibly creepy.

She giggles. How so?

Well, it... duplicates the whole person. The duplicate talks and everything. Some of the combat classes use it but it's not a thing in skirmish, too many people would bail out. Also if your mock did the fighting you wouldn't learn from it or get to have any fun.