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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
subtly_artistic
And Bella reads about Fëanáro appearing on her plane, studying magic, discovering magical shortcuts, getting angry about the functioning of the place, and then being eaten by a dragon for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
She shuts the book.
She shuts the book.
"Do you like it?"
"Are you mad at me?"
"So take me with you."
subtly_artistic
"I'm seriously tempted, but I think there might be long-term problems if your parents didn't trust me to respect their decisions about that sort of thing; they might decide that we aren't allowed to hang out, or to do so unsupervised, or that you're in too much of a hurry and it's unhealthy and you shouldn't be allowed to have the anti-time-slidey spell..."
"Yeah. They might do that."
subtly_artistic
"And I think that would be worse than you having to wait for me to figure it out on my own."
"I don't want to be eaten by a dragon. It's just realistic. I'm not good enough."
subtly_artistic
"I'm just worried about what writing an entire story leading up to your self-insert being eaten by a dragon implies about how you're feeling. I could go ask your father if I can bring you back..."
"It wouldn't be a good story if I died right away, it'd be like a joke. This way it actually hurts. You get attached to the little Fëanáro and then you realize he's gone."
subtly_artistic
"I am assuming you knew how you were going to end it when you started it."
"Yeah."
subtly_artistic
"I think I will try talking to your father. If he's not with your mother."
"He probably is. They spend most of their time together."
subtly_artistic
"Well, then I will talk to him via osanwë from here."
Do you have a moment?
Do you have a moment?
Bella! Yes.
subtly_artistic
Is Miriel with you or should we continue this conversation in person?
We're together. She finds these days - very draining and confusing.
subtly_artistic
I'm sorry about that, I wish there were more I could do. The thing I wanted to discuss is possibly letting Fëanáro come back to the island with me when I go back first thing tomorrow.
I appreciate your concern for him. If he'd asked us I would have considered it, but instead he ran away and terrified us and inconvenienced a great many people, and does not seem to regret it.
subtly_artistic
I'm not sure this response is going to get him to regret the right things if it just goes on long enough.
What do you mean by that?
subtly_artistic
...I'm having trouble thinking of a, a neutral way to put it - um - he doesn't have the maturity or, or general emotional resources to consistently consider being polite and making compromises to be desirable in itself, the thing he notices about situations is mostly whether what he considers important is a strong factor in decisionmaking. And he doesn't know what your internal decisionmaking looks like, and finds reading people really difficult, so his most available test for whether what he feels like he needs factors in at all is whether he gets it or not. I think it would be entirely reasonable to impose conditions or something, especially if he hasn't apologized to Miriel yet, say, but right now his understanding of the situation is that you're hurting him for no reason and the best reason I was able to explain to him for why I wouldn't just carry him back myself is that this would get worse if I did that.