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Bella's house gets done, and she fills it up with things. She experiments with magic, and theorizes when she has more data to work with; when she runs out of her steadily increasing mana supply for a day she studies Quenya. One morning she sits bolt upright in bed, realizes she has not seen a single wheel since she got here, and runs off to Mahtan to explain the concept, which is, it turns out, new.
When Fëanáro is feeling sociable she hangs out with him. He finishes his novel. (In it, the school turns him over to social workers and adopt him out, he escapes his foster family, he encounters a dragon and talks his way past it with stories about Arda, he studies wizardry and is unreasonably effective at it, when the dragon opens a portal to Arda he sneaks through too and the Valar slay the dragon, he fixes his mother with magic, and then he masters planar travel himself and conquers Bella's plane.) He finishes his typewriter, too; Bella's of the opinion that it would have been easier if he made vowels separate instead of consonant-hats, but it works okay like so. She acquires one when there is more than one, and learns to type, because crystal balls are a long time coming.
She has made some progress, though. She finds the common thread in dud combinations that produced an aura, and successfully decomposes all her original spells into pieces and begins to make new combinations. Most of these are trivial like the increased character limit arcane mark. Reverse-engineering her undead-damaging spell, though, gets her (small) arcane healing well in advance of when she was expecting to have that down. So anybody who lives on her block and cuts themselves cooking breakfast can knock on her door - or that of anybody who's getting the spells as she turns them out - and get that seen to without bothering a Maia.
Once a month she sees Miriel. Bella doesn't have any ideas that land any better than "forget you forgot something". But forgetting the contents of that foolish, foolish oath is at least a holding pattern that lets Miriel pretty much live her life, so, therapeutic success? ...Bella makes sure to remind Fëanáro that he is very adorable and lovable and adored and loved.
subtly_artistic
subtly_artistic
Bella takes the sign down, files away the form she had Finwë sign, and grabs something to eat. She doesn't keep a lot of food actually in her house, it's so easy to go down the street and get something, but since nothing rots here she can casually have sandwich fixings around without worrying about whether she's going to get through her whole loaf of bread in a timely manner. Chew chew.
subtly_artistic
"Probably." Yawn. "She'll have a headache when she wakes up, that's from being knocked out not from the procedure. It'll go away in half an hour to an hour. I'd - I'd like to know the results when I wake up if that's convenient."
subtly_artistic
"Um, that'll probably be pretty obvious to her, the real question is whether anything besides it working or not happened."
"Oaths are inactive when you have no reason to believe you can make progress on them. As long as she thinks it worked, she won't feel the oath at all. We will inform you of other things that may have happened."
When she wakes, there's a letter. "There've been no problems that we noticed. We talked about it and decided to tell Fëanáro. We'll let you know if there's anything we need. Thank you. Finwë."
subtly_artistic
Oh thank all the blasted gods.
Bella takes deep breaths...
...goes and gets breakfast...
...sets an hourglass and lets Valinor smooth away an hour of her morning so she can calm down...
...writes a lot...
...and then tentatively wanders palaceward to see how Fëanáro's coping, if he would like to display how he's coping at her.
Bella takes deep breaths...
...goes and gets breakfast...
...sets an hourglass and lets Valinor smooth away an hour of her morning so she can calm down...
...writes a lot...
...and then tentatively wanders palaceward to see how Fëanáro's coping, if he would like to display how he's coping at her.
subtly_artistic
It is really fucking awkward to have a small child aware that you knew his mom had sworn to kill him and you did not do very much about it for reasons he has professed not to understand. She waits to see what he's going to do.
"I know you weren't allowed to tell me anything or even help me figure it out. But I got so used to you helping me figure things out that I didn't work as hard on doing it myself as I should have."
"I should have figured it out much sooner! Then this could have happened and everything would be okay."
subtly_artistic
What I wound having to do was extremely dangerous. I would have tried it sooner if it weren't for that. It seems to have worked out in practice but I was terrified some side effect I couldn't fix was going to happen and she'd have to live with it forever because I wasn't good enough. It could have happened. The previous solution had drawbacks but it was much safer.
Not having memories isn't very safe. Or - I guess it's safe in that nothing worse will happen, but that's the same way being dead is safe. Or being small.