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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
"He said you told him he wasn't old enough, and he did not find this answer convincing given that Nerdanel's his age."
"He's not mature enough, will he like that any better?"
subtly_artistic
"Yes, if you can describe what 'mature' means in terms of things he can set his mind to instead of wait around for."
"I think the ideal mindset for a beginning metalworking apprentice who is not yet taller than my knee is curiosity about metal and how we can alter it. Fëanáro is a very curious person but tends to have a mindset of 'I need to already know this' not 'I wonder what this is'. I don't know to what degree he can cultivate the latter, but time might help him. Metalworking happens in close consultation with lots of other people and with Aulë, and I'm not sure Fëanáro is good at engaging respectfully with adults who might only have time to tell him their decisions and not their reasons."
subtly_artistic
"Okay. I think I can translate that for him at least somewhat usefully. Thank you."
"My pleasure. Do you have any interest in picking up the skill?"
subtly_artistic
"Maybe one day, but in local years I am technically only three."
"I suppose I earned that. Best of luck on Tol Eressea."
subtly_artistic
"Thanks."
And Bella goes to get some food in the square and putters around in the pleasantly vacationy slide of time until she's tired, then goes to her house and sleeps; and in the morning she eats breakfast and heads straight for the palace to fetch Fëanáro unless he has managed to have another screaming argument with his parents since she last saw him.
And Bella goes to get some food in the square and putters around in the pleasantly vacationy slide of time until she's tired, then goes to her house and sleeps; and in the morning she eats breakfast and heads straight for the palace to fetch Fëanáro unless he has managed to have another screaming argument with his parents since she last saw him.
Fëanáro has managed to go a day without screaming arguments.
Packed? Oh. Right. That's a concept. He races around packing.
subtly_artistic
She waits. As long as he is racing she will not make remarks about wasted time.
He is indeed racing. Soon he has a bag full of things.
subtly_artistic
"I'm not sure you've got the mana for the whole flight so I'm going to carry you," she says, "do you want to sleep on the way?"
"No, I want to look at everything!"
subtly_artistic
"Okay." She gets his bag on her back and scoops him up in her arms and lifts off. Zoom!
He points things out as they go, asks questions about rivers, falls quiet as they reach the beach - "Can you sense the time-slide effect going away?"
He scrunches up his face. "I don't think so."
"I'm not a hundred years old by your world's rules though so obviously it's still affecting me."
subtly_artistic
"Different species still mature at different rates, which is probably a factor. You're sort of trying to brute force it by being really smart but you're getting uneven results."
"I hate running into things I'm just not smart enough for."
subtly_artistic
"Do you mean you have encountered anything where how smart you were was the limiting factor, or that you don't like it when being smart is not the solution to a problem?"