"And they're not yours, so you're hiding them, so it sounds kind of like you want to steal my books. Why don't you just copy them? It'd take a while but the copies would be all yours."

"I'd be twenty by the time I finished."

"They're long, I don't think they're quite that long. Why do you want them so badly that you're trying to steal them?"

"They're the most beautiful things in the world and I thought I'd never see them again and I still don't understand them, I have to at least learn everything in them."

"Most of them are about subtle arts, which I think doesn't even happen to people here, and the other ones are about history of my world and about arcane magic, which I also don't think is a thing here. In the long run you probably just want to write your own books, and get other people excited about writing books, and then there can be lots," she shows him an osanwë image of the university library, "instead of hoarding the handful I happened to have when I had my accident."

"Yes, I'll do that. But I still need to learn everything in these. Can we learn more writing?"

"Sure." She has a blank notebook and a pen. "Want to guess how to spell my name? And we can figure out a transliteration for yours."

"B - E - L - A? I remember all the letters," he says, jumping onto a ledge to sit at her level. "Mine would be F - A - E - N - A - R -O, right?"

"Close. It's not a perfectly regular correspondence and there are spellings that don't make sense; I've got a double L." She writes this out. "You could spell your name that way if you wanted but I'd be more inclined to swap the first A and the E -" Feanaro, she writes.

"How is your spelling pronounced, and how's mine? Why does Bella have two lls?"

She pronounces the two versions of his name. "Double letters are sometimes there for no good reason, and sometimes there to distinguish between words that are different but not pronounced differently enough to get different actual letters, and sometimes people who are really used to all these words think it'd be pronounced differently with a single letter - in 'Bella' it'd change the vowel a little, see, this is 'Bella' but that would be, mm, 'Bela' -" Slightly altered, more emphasized first syllable. "Also it's not a Pax name originally so the language it came from may have been using double letters for something else entirely."

He looks enchanted. "The language it came from?"

"I don't speak that one even a little bit, but yeah, my name is from another language, it means 'beautiful' - there's a bunch of them that use the Draconic alphabet like Pax does and some of them are related. Like Kharoline, which I studied a little in school and barely remember any of. And there's others that aren't related at all and just started using the alphabet separately, and then there are totally other alphabets." She writes Kharoline and Draconic and Pax and then some of the swoopy letters that Rúmil thought were prettier.

He watches, wide-eyed. "How many languages are there?"

"...I don't know. A lot. Hundreds and hundreds. And different ways to speak the same language, accents and dialects and colloquialisms!"

"That's amazing. That's - what else is it? I don't have enough words -"

"If you osanwë me an idea I'll tell you how to say it."

Soaring, all-consuming curiosity, splintering as it hit a new idea and sees how many new ideas branch off of that one and is swallowed up in desperate need to immediately figure out all of them.

"Ooh. Um, if you want to describe how many languages there are relative to that feeling you might say 'rich' or 'overwhelming' but it'd be a little more natural to talk about the feeling itself, you're - consumed with the need to learn about all the languages. I wish I'd paid more attention in school and could at least get you more than a handful of words of Kharoline..."

"I think it makes more sense to call it a property of the languages, it's that learning things means there are more things, so you have to get all of it to matter at all..."

"What do you mean, learning things means there are more things?"

He's bouncing. "So, like, learning your way around the palace. It is useful, but once you know it you know your way about the palace, it'd be silly to start thinking about the ways one gets around palaces in general. Or how many kinds of animals they are, or the hymns of the Valar. And then there are things where, when you learn them, it's obvious that to really understand you have to understand a related thing, and that to have a full picture you have to be able to use both of them for a third thing, and there is a deep underlying thing and once I work hard enough and am smart enough I'll understand everything, but even just looking I can see how much that is, and languages have so so much to understand about them, and there are hundreds of languages, and if I don't want to spend an Age on it I have to see the deep roots right away."

"Ah, so you want to be a linguist, not just a polyglot."

"I want to know everything not because I already learned it all but because I understand it all and can learn it, really fast, when I need to. Otherwise I wouldn't be able to figure out what to learn first and what if there was too much to learn in all the Ages of the world and it ended and I still didn't know everything?"

"...That is a very interesting ambition. Sort of like being omniscient only - on demand? You want to be so smart that you can know anything just by wondering about it?"