View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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.
+ Show First Post
subtly_artistic
"Nerdanel gets to study with Mahtan and she's pretty impatient."
"She kept correcting me and taking things out of my hands to show me how she'd do it."
"No, because she was right, and I felt stupid."
subtly_artistic
"Maybe she noticed that you prefer to learn things as fast as possible and was trying to help. Do you think she'd do that to someone who was teaching her?"
"...no, because she wouldn't know what to do with them."
"She talked really fast and got bored easily."
"Me bothering her about whether her father would take me, me being sad about not accomplishing anything."
subtly_artistic
"So far none of the things you've listed seem like they'd be any trouble at all to somebody who was teaching her a skill."
"What do I do that would be?"
subtly_artistic
"Well, I've never watched Mahtan's teaching style, so I'd have to guess - after all, you work fine with me when I'm teaching a thing, this isn't purely generic, it's more about fit. You feel very strongly about setting your own schedule and have trouble pacing yourself. You have strong, intrusive emotions that affect how pleasant company you are when you aren't getting sustained feedback to the effect that you are accomplishing things and are good enough and so on. You're really suspicious of most people's motives and jump to uncharitable explanations for things they say. When you aren't getting what you want you try harder to get what you want, often in very imperious or bullheaded ways, instead of backtracking to find out if it's a good thing to want in the first place or if there's a compromise. You're averse to signaling respect for any but a handful of traits which people like to be respected regardless of."
"Oh.
That's a lot."
That's a lot."
"I'm a really awful one."
subtly_artistic
"No you're not. You're brilliant and adorable and I love you and I want you to be able to solve all your problems so I'm trying to tell you what things might be holding you back."
"But that's so many things! How could you love someone with that many things wrong with them??"
subtly_artistic
"Everybody has things wrong with them. Besides, that list doesn't happen to rub me the wrong way. If you're setting your schedule, I can just wander off and do something else when you're busy. I'm the sort of person who was going to be a full time therapist so when you're upset, I want to help, not leave the room. You listen to me when I explain what I really meant even if you jumped to a conclusion first, since I know how to explain stuff so you'll understand; and you often also listen to me about how to get what you want better. And I don't get hung up on signals of respect."
"Do you think Mahtan does?"
"I thought my father'd be insulted he wasn't taking me and insist, but he didn't."
"Because in general people are very flattered to have the chance to teach our family. There were thousands of people who wanted to tutor me even though I had a reputation as a difficult student."