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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
"Yeah." Sigh. "Since she can't cooperate this will be easier if I knock her out and probably less distressing. Is here okay?"
subtly_artistic
Nod. "This is going to take hours and hours. I may be done by the end of the day but not before that."
subtly_artistic
"You're welcome." Sigh. "- It's not Fëanáro's fault. I don't think I've been able to get him to really believe that."
"I think Fëanáro operates under a concept of 'fault' where everything he hasn't fixed yet is personally his."
subtly_artistic
"He's already really close, and if he figures out that she's action blocked he's going to realize that she can't have sworn to hate him because that's not an action. It's not up to me, though."
"It'll be up to her, once the oath isn't relevant to her decision making." He frowns. "Anyway, thank you. I will let you work."
subtly_artistic
And she puts a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door and gets to work. Delicate, cautious, exploratory, tentative, figuring out from first principles almost how to make sure she doesn't twitch wrong and wipe out something more important than Miriel's theoretical ability to kill her child.
She takes a short break for a snack and then she sits back down and starts building the block. Reversible, light, almost cloud-fluff, it won't knock loose in an unconscious patient and she wants to quadruple check. Quintuple.
Piece by piece by piece. Not this way and not that, not at any level of indirection, not by proxy nor psychological manipulation nor by self-delusion, you may not.
Bella skates through the architecture after she's made it. Tries to look with fresh "eyes", over and over again. Imagine Professor Winters is telling her this is an example of a badly done block, what's wrong with it, what disaster would befall this patient if it were all pressed into permanence -
It's a few hours after Mingling gives way to silver light that she reaches for the king. I'm done. I won't know any more than I already do about how good a job I did until she wakes up.
She takes a short break for a snack and then she sits back down and starts building the block. Reversible, light, almost cloud-fluff, it won't knock loose in an unconscious patient and she wants to quadruple check. Quintuple.
Piece by piece by piece. Not this way and not that, not at any level of indirection, not by proxy nor psychological manipulation nor by self-delusion, you may not.
Bella skates through the architecture after she's made it. Tries to look with fresh "eyes", over and over again. Imagine Professor Winters is telling her this is an example of a badly done block, what's wrong with it, what disaster would befall this patient if it were all pressed into permanence -
It's a few hours after Mingling gives way to silver light that she reaches for the king. I'm done. I won't know any more than I already do about how good a job I did until she wakes up.
subtly_artistic
Bella takes the sign down, files away the form she had Finwë sign, and grabs something to eat. She doesn't keep a lot of food actually in her house, it's so easy to go down the street and get something, but since nothing rots here she can casually have sandwich fixings around without worrying about whether she's going to get through her whole loaf of bread in a timely manner. Chew chew.
subtly_artistic
"Probably." Yawn. "She'll have a headache when she wakes up, that's from being knocked out not from the procedure. It'll go away in half an hour to an hour. I'd - I'd like to know the results when I wake up if that's convenient."
subtly_artistic
"Um, that'll probably be pretty obvious to her, the real question is whether anything besides it working or not happened."
"Oaths are inactive when you have no reason to believe you can make progress on them. As long as she thinks it worked, she won't feel the oath at all. We will inform you of other things that may have happened."