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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
"It doesn't feel like it's been almost five years. It feels like one."
"Well, it has been one."
subtly_artistic
"But I mean, like - to the extent when I got here I was nineteen I'm like twenty-three, twenty-four now. ...If the days are even the same. I should check if the days are the same, the Trees might be keeping me on a longer cycle -"
"Well, we have hourglasses now! That's easily checked."
subtly_artistic
"Yeah. I'll - I'll go check. I'm going to check now."
She goes home to her hourglass set. Six seconds, least casting of illusory sound. Ten of those to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours in a day.
She compares and does arithmetic. She can ballpark some of it without having to sit around all day, she has old notes on how much sand and how big the aperture -
And she sits back in her chair.
She goes home to her hourglass set. Six seconds, least casting of illusory sound. Ten of those to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours in a day.
She compares and does arithmetic. She can ballpark some of it without having to sit around all day, she has old notes on how much sand and how big the aperture -
And she sits back in her chair.
The festival is still ongoing outside. It's loud.
subtly_artistic
A festival that lasts for a week lasts for six days each of which is slightly more than twice as long as a day at home.
Something is desperately wrong with her sense of time and it's so wrong that she didn't notice - didn't even have the niggling urge to check - for a decade -
Something is desperately wrong with her sense of time and it's so wrong that she didn't notice - didn't even have the niggling urge to check - for a decade -
The Treelight is golden and placid.
subtly_artistic
Bella goes with her arithmetic back to Rúmil.
"I'm like thirty," she murmurs. "I'm like thirty and I didn't notice. The minutes feel about right but the days are twice as long as mine and I couldn't even tell, I've been here for a decade and I don't have a decade's worth of anything to show for it -"
"I'm like thirty," she murmurs. "I'm like thirty and I didn't notice. The minutes feel about right but the days are twice as long as mine and I couldn't even tell, I've been here for a decade and I don't have a decade's worth of anything to show for it -"
"Oh," he says. "Oh. I'm sorry. Um. You have a lot to show for it, you learned a language and helped raise a child and teach him to read and write, you reinvented the principles of magic and invented new spells -"
subtly_artistic
"And that would be really impressive for a year and solidly respectable for two and, like, good try, if it were five, and it's been ten, I have had ten years in a science fantasy paradise with all the help I can think of how to use and negligible side demands on my time and I do not yet hold all time and space in the palms of my hands -!"
"I see," he says. "I'm sorry. I don't think you're holding yourself to reasonable standards but I can imagine what it feels like to fall short of them."
subtly_artistic
"Maybe my standards are unrealistic but this still isn't ten years' worth of anything. That's a third of my entire life, I have now spent a third of my life here and I have not gotten a third of my total absorption of information and production of work done and it should have been more than that because the first third I spent being a small child and the first two thirds I spent in a universe that bites if you try to do things -"
"Not a third of your life. A third of the life you'd have had if you'd kept living there. A tiny tiny fragment of your life, Bella, you have all the Ages of Arda..."
"I'm sorry. What do you want to do? Come up with a plan so the next year doesn't slip past you as quickly? Go live as a hermit on Tol Eressea so we don't distract you and make you invent more slowly?"
subtly_artistic
"I - I don't understand how this could have even happened in the first place," she says slowly. "I can see not noticing the days being long, maybe it turns out I rely a lot on noticing how tired I am for feeling when in the day it is and the Trees are perking me up so it feels like one day per day, I can buy that I'd miss a factor of two, that way. I can lose hours between sleeps and it makes sense. I don't know where my days went - no one was refusing to tell me how many days things were, it just - it didn't seem important - does, does something about the Trees or Valinor mess directly with time sense -?"
"Um. I think so. It makes the long Ages go by swiftly, is how people usually say it -"
"Manwë, probably. You want to go up to Taniquetil and talk with him?"
"Okay. Uh. I don't know anyone who's gone to Manwë with a complaint."
"Yes, but, you know, more suggestions for improvement, and Manwë is the King of the Valar..."