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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.
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subtly_artistic
"You can make stone and metalwork that does anything, all kinds of magic, and even without magic you can turn it into all kinds of things, and you don't have to do the same thing twice, and you're making things instead of just reducing them interestingly - I don't mean any offense to Yavanna or people who like plants, those just aren't very - they're not going to change Valinor."
subtly_artistic
"Druids can do cool things with plants, but I'm nowhere near done enough with wizardry to try to go figure out divine magic."
She nods. "You're doing interesting wizardry, though! Ata made us all learn the healing spell before we were allowed to work the forge."
subtly_artistic
"I'm glad it's there if you need it! I was expecting it to be really hard, arcane healing is weird and niche in my world because clerics do it all."
"That's kind of the hope in having interdisciplinary talks like this one," Mahtan says, "that things which are very hard from one angle, or not approached as a problem because the discipline has different tools, turn out to be tractable in a different approach that wouldn't have occurred to anyone. Of course, we usually don't get to reach so far as another world for inspiration."
subtly_artistic
"I didn't know my talk was supposed to be interdisciplinary!"
"It's your magic system! We use a different one!"
subtly_artistic
"Okay, but the talk itself is supposed to be all wizardry, right?"
"Yes, of course. Sorry to scare you."
"You seem to be rather thriving. Lovely house, by the way."
It's not really all that long a walk. Aulë's halls are elaborate stone caverns.
And there are a lot of people. Some of them are Maiar. Some of them are just Elves. Mahtan's daughters are the youngest, but not by a lot.
subtly_artistic
And Bella calms the heck down because she has this down cold.
She goes up to the front and says hello and gets right into it.
She goes up to the front and says hello and gets right into it.
It goes over very well. The Maiar are funny when they're concentrating. Some of them forget to breathe and some of them forget to move and some of them move their eyes in slow circles around in their heads and some of them sneeze sparkles of exuberance.
The Eldar are easier to read and also enjoy the talk tremendously.
The Eldar are easier to read and also enjoy the talk tremendously.
subtly_artistic
Bella tries not to laugh at the Maiar very much.
She will take questions, at the end!
She will take questions, at the end!
Oh they have so many questions. They have questions about whether the magic system can be characterized as parallel in certain specific ways to a different magic system she's never heard of but that the questioner hurriedly tries to explain.
subtly_artistic
...she can make vague guesses based on this hurried explanation? Um, magic items enchanted in the local sense register to detection.
This is a wholly satisfactory answer and he looks delighted.
Afterwards there is an elaborate dinner with lots and lots of courses and Nerdanel whispers that they just keep going forever, she thinks, but that one can ask for desserts when one is supposed to go home and sleep and then get desserts and then leave. Nerdanel is on her left and a Maia named Mairon who has a particularly nice face and is almost good at moving it the way humans do is on her right.