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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
"The first few times I fell asleep in my chair and missed dessert."
She's smiling slightly. "Luckily when I woke up it was still going on."
subtly_artistic
"That's a lot of dessert. I hope you had room to try everything you wanted."
"We have all the Ages of Arda."
And then people are leaning in to ask Bella more questions about wizardry.
And then people are leaning in to ask Bella more questions about wizardry.
Mairon tries after a while to expand on the question someone had asked her after the talk. "All of our power in the world either works by singing to Creation or by ordering everything at the smallest conceivable level. This seems like it's operating on some scale in between those, and one more accessible to incarnate minds, which is appealing."
subtly_artistic
"I'm not sure if on my plane Creation is even sung to," remarks Bella. "And the universe wouldn't have let us mess with enough stuff to figure out all the very small things, I think, so this is what was left for magic to do?"
"It's excellent to have something controllable and repeatable with effects at an ordinary scale. What is interesting is that of the three methods it's the only one which drains one. I can't think why that would be."
subtly_artistic
"I'm not sure. I mean, wouldn't singing tire a person out if they did it long enough?"
He looks flummoxed. "Hmm. Maybe. I don't know. Is singing tiring for people?"
subtly_artistic
"Eldar need less sleep than I do but they do still sleep, if nothing else. And it dries out the throat, too."
"You can get the same results with musical instruments," he says, "though I suppose that doesn't solve sleep. Still. The limits on use of your magic seem to be much firmer."
subtly_artistic
"I mean, they stretch over time. Mine are growing pretty fast considering it's only been a year, really."
"Eventually do you suppose you'll be more or less able to do your magic at will?"
"Do the longer-lived races have much advantage on your world?"
subtly_artistic
"Not as much as you might think? Some, at the higher tiers, and I think sylphs and a couple others are actually so short-lived that it makes it hard for them to get anywhere on a worldwide scale, but humans are represented in most fields. Maybe just because there's lots of us so there's more prodigious talents? I haven't looked at the per capita share."
"It's said in this world that Eru gave Men free will, and that this gift compensates for the brevity of their lives."
subtly_artistic
"I mean... free will's nice and everything but lacking it doesn't seem to be inhibiting the Eldar much as long as they don't go around making oaths."
"It inhibits us much more than them," he agrees. "It may have nothing to do with the gifts of Men in so many fields."
subtly_artistic
"My plane, humans are mostly known for numerousness and adaptability."
"There are much worse things to be known for. You've certainly demonstrated the adaptability."
subtly_artistic
"There's harder things to adapt to, I'm not that impressed with myself."
"Does everyone in your world have free will? Do you know if there's magic that can grant it, lift a oath of the sort we give?"