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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
"Okay, good, because I already told him some of it. He doesn't want it. He's scared, I don't understand why it would have happened in the first place."
"I don't know either. If it helps him - pieces of my fate take place in mortal kingdoms, many thousands of years from now, very far away, where books are still written in his letters and the sign of his house is still carved into the magic doors of thriving, happy kingdoms. I do not understand how it happened or what he did. But."
"Valinor is fortunate to have you, Bella."
Rúmil finds them a little later. "Bella!"
"How are you? There's someone who would like to meet you, she's an acquaintance of mine from a thousand years back."
"Tomorrow? We talked for hours and the newly-returned get tired pretty quickly. Or - not tired. Overwhelmed. How's Fëanáro?"
He looks awkwardly from her to Olórin. "Lovely."
subtly_artistic
"Do you want to come back to Tirion until then or stay here?"
"I'd be delighted to go back with you and check in with the King."
And to the courtyard. "I'm very frustrated," Rúmil says. "Thank you for working with Fëanáro."
subtly_artistic
"You're welcome. Frustrated about the necklaces or something else?"
"With the Valar generally. The necklaces. How they treated you about the necklaces. The reembodied - I am so grateful our dead are back, of course, but these are the ones who died a thousand years ago and not traumatically, and they are not very well, and I don't know when or whether they're even going to try on everything else."
"Don't remember the halls, have tremendous difficulty readjusting to having bodies, very overwhelmed, very anxious, very lost, don't necessarily remember things well from before the halls either. The friend I told you about liked women, before, by Cuivienen, and now she doesn't and doesn't recall it well, and I know they're doing the best they can but it's really not good enough."
subtly_artistic
"I never heard of being dead turning somebody straight before. I know this is a different afterlife but that's... weird, the not remembering the afterlife itself is a more familiar afterlife feature..."
"Mandos did tell us that one of the things the afterlife would do was help you confront and overcome your faults. Which is a perfectly worthy purpose of it, but in combination with the not-remembering is just disconcerting to cope with later..."
"That's how he phrased it."
subtly_artistic
"I'd been sort of - I'd been assuming that Eldar just weren't ever - are you just not allowed -?"