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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
"It might be true. Can't be that there's anything wrong with saying it if it's true."
"Because saying true things isn't wrong," he says, "no matter what. Otherwise we wouldn't really be the Noldor, if truth and its pursuit weren't always good."
"Those don't make much sense to me," he says. "I wouldn't be a therapist. I'd be really bad at it."
subtly_artistic
"It's important that people can think private thoughts," she says. "It's still important, maybe even more important, if their thoughts are messed up in a way they need help with; so instead of saying that if someone needs therapy they have to sacrifice the chance to have private thoughts to get it, we say that 'told to a therapist' still counts as 'private', no matter what."
"But if someone else guessed your thoughts, it wouldn't be wrong to say them. Just because people get to think private thoughts."
subtly_artistic
"Guessing is different from knowing for a fact like a subtle artist can. And it could still be wrong to comment; I'm trying to point out that there's a counterexample, I'm not saying it's the only one, it's just the easiest to explain."
"Truth is really important."
subtly_artistic
"And that is why telling lies is wrong. It does not justify saying everything that happens to be true in no particular order with no particular care."
"I could walk around glaring at the people who say mean things about me. But then I think they'd just think meaner ones. And it's not like in your world where they can get in trouble for it."
subtly_artistic
"When I say people shouldn't say mean things about you I don't mean that they should be stopped, I mean they should decide not to do it in the first place."
"Well. They won't."
"I don't think I'm tainted by the Enemy."
"Mom says definitely not but I think she'd lie."
"She's really desperate to get me to believe everything's okay."
subtly_artistic
"Well," says Bella, "that doesn't mean she wouldn't use real information to convince you of that, if she has some."
"But if she had fake information she'd use it too. I can't trust her."
subtly_artistic
"If it were a lie, you're assuming she'd be more desperate to convince you than to deal with you hypothetically being marred by Melkor. Do you think those would be her priorities?"
"Probably. No one knows what to do about being marred by Melkor. Just hope for the best. Maybe that's why they have Rúmil spend so much time with me."