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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
Do you think that approach will help him, ah, develop the emotional resources to value politeness and compromise, or to recognize that people can care about him while having overriding concerns?
subtly_artistic
I think it'll give me a better opening to try to explain, and that I can get through to him about this sort of thing more consistently than most people? Most kids pick this sort of thing up by immersion but I think he's much better attuned to explanations.
Can you send him in here, please?
subtly_artistic
Okay.
"I talked to your father and he wants to talk to you in person," Bella tells Fëanáro. "...I may have suggested that if you didn't apologize to your mother yet that would be a perfectly reasonable condition to set on going back to the island. And by may have I mean I did that."
"I talked to your father and he wants to talk to you in person," Bella tells Fëanáro. "...I may have suggested that if you didn't apologize to your mother yet that would be a perfectly reasonable condition to set on going back to the island. And by may have I mean I did that."
"I meant what I said to her, though," he says.
subtly_artistic
"They presumably don't want you to apologize for lying, so this is not an obstacle. They more likely would want you to apologize for losing your temper and hurting her feelings. You don't have to say every thing that you would mean if you said it and you particularly don't have to yell about it and I assume you do in fact regret doing that, even if not for ideal reasons, since they would've let you stay in the first place if you hadn't."
He makes a funny face. "I regret that it is true. Since it is true, I don't particularly wish I hadn't said it, since anyway if they'd have let me stay it'd have been only because they didn't know how I really was."
subtly_artistic
"Well, I don't know how exacting they are about precisely worded apologies but maybe you could say that you're sorry that you and your mother are having such trouble building a healthy relationship and for any part you have in that without specifying what part you think that is likely to be."
"I could say that."
He scampers off. Thank you, Rúmil says.
subtly_artistic
You're welcome. I hope it helps. I only sort of know what I'm doing.
As do all of us. You sort of know different things than anyone else.
subtly_artistic
On occasion I even know things uniquely applicable to Fëanáro.
Everyone knows that there's something wrong but you seem unusually good at identifying it, yes.
subtly_artistic
- every other adult's childhoods are really far away, she observes.
There weren't children born in the years the Valar fought Melkor, because it was so terrifying. The generation born in Valinor are all six hundred years younger than the next one.
subtly_artistic
Even if there were a bunch of recent adults they couldn't be as recent as I am, Bella says.
I suppose not, no. And you have a lot in common with him.
He smiles. And get even faster-paced and more ambitious!
subtly_artistic
Yeah! she giggles. I don't know how long Fëanáro's going to talk to his parents for, I could go relay his question to Mahtan or just hang out and see if I can throw a ceramic since he left this lump of clay here conveniently presquashed.
You should try it! It really is useful for prototyping. Nerdanel was here when Mahtan was talking to the King and she could do all sorts of useful things with it.
subtly_artistic
Prototyping what? asks Bella, sitting at the wheel like Fëanáro was doing and tentatively prodding the clay.
Anything you'd want to do in metal, mostly, since that's harder to shape afterwards. She was trying to show Fëanáro some ways one could improve the typewriter.