"Really? That's amazing. What kind of magic can you do?" 

I can fly! I can talk to people on other continents if I know anybody to talk to there. I can do laundry by magic and can wear my nice Valian robe again without worrying about wearing it out in the wash. I can heal, not state of the art back in Materia but still pretty damn good. I can freeze stuff and set it on fire. I can make more boots like my magic boots that make me less clumsy. I can detect magic, I don't know if it'll work on yours. I can do illusion sounds, and lights, and if I think of anything else that needs doing, I can just fucking invent it, because this is a science world!!!!
Also I'll be able to rework the talking to other continents thing eventually to get in touch with my Arda friends and tell them I'm okay, they'll be so worried.

Vanyel opens his mouth to say something and about six different sentences pile up on top of each other and he eventually closes it and tries to find something to do with his hands, what are people supposed to do with hands again, he's – Bella is now officially the most impressive person he's ever met, and she can fly, and – and most of what she knows about him is his horrible stupid problems, it's not fair, he wants to regret asking her for help at all but he can't because it really is better and– 

"I'm really glad," he manages. "I, um, I could help you with experiments if you ever wanted that. I like inventing ways to do things with magic." 

"It's because he has all the Gifts," Shavri jumps in. "Even he can't fly, though. That's awesome. I can't believe it. I have to–" she very deliberately stops herself and composes her face, "er, can I tell my friends, is that all right?" 

Yeah, sure, go ahead! And yeah, there are probably great ways to make the systems interact. Elf magic is slow so I didn't find anything with less than two decades of research with what they've got but yours isn't like that.

"...What do you mean, it's slow?" 

It can take upwards of a century to compose a magic song. To make a magic artifact, you have to spend years and years figuring out the correct sequence of instructions, which are in binary - just 'yes' or 'no' - and then break them up into blocks without ruining the structure of the spell, and then you have to think an entire block which can be thousands of instructions long at your artifact, without making any mistakes or you have to start the block over, and the simple ones that only take a week to make just, like, glow.

"...Right the Elves live for a long time, no? And everything is sort of slower?" He makes a face. "That sounds frustrating. If you're not an Elf, I mean, and you're not used to it. I would find that really frustrating. Also at least when we're making artifacts, if you make a little mistake it'll probably still work and you can patch it afterward if not, and it's not all in thousands of steps of only yes or no – who even thought of that? Is magic in Arda just fundamentally made out of yeses and nos somehow?" 

My understanding is that the music kind is actually fundamental but I was concentrating on arcana, not Arda magic. I invented a necklace that fixed the time slide effect but the Valar broke most of them, and I shared the last one with Fëanáro. He's an Elf but he didn't like the time slide any more than I did once we knew about it.

"Oh – the Valar are the big gods? That's–" he wants to say rude of them but it feels like a weird term to apply to gods, "um, inconvenient. What's the time slide? And, er, who's Fëanáro?" It's an interesting foreign name. Pretty. 

Yeah, it was unpleasant. I'd stayed away from all the research angles they asked me to and it really blindsided me. The time slide is what we called an effect over the continent of Valinor. On the other continent, a year feels like a year, and an Elf takes fifty years to grow up. In Valinor, ten years feels like a year, and an Elf takes fifty of those to grow up. I didn't make Fëanáro - he's the prince of the Noldor - grow any faster but I made a year feel like a year.

Vanyel goes a bit cross-eyed. "So you're saying if Fëanáro had been living on the other continent, he would've grown up in fifty years, but since he's in Valinor, it's...slowed down relative to the other place? So he would've taken five hundred normal years to grow up, but only experienced it as fifty Valinor-years? And instead you made it so he's going to experience five hundred years of growing up really slowly?"

He scrunches up his face. "...How does that work with everyone around him who doesn't have one? Is he talking ten times as fast?" 

It's not quite that direct. It's just kind of a lazy no-hurry feeling. You still do ten years worth of stuff but you don't do it at all efficiently. It would be a really nice effect if you were taking a long vacation but we didn't want it for everyday. When we had to share the last necklace I was able to compensate by looking at my watch a lot and developing a bunch of nervous habits about practicing teekay or reading during any unclaimed time so I wouldn't just lose days on end to concerts and stuff. Also I needed less sleep there, so when I went to an outlying island to develop the necklace I only gained a factor of five, not ten, because I suddenly had to sleep more often. Uh, the rate of growth is separate from the mental effect, it just happens to have the same rate of exchange - or, that's I think not a coincidence, the Valar did both, but they are separable.

"That sounds like a really weird world." Vanyel has so many questions. Probably several weeks worth already and he's pretty sure talking to Bella more will just result in...more questions. Also he...has other things that he really should address even though talking about magic is both a lot more fun and a lot less embarrassing. "I, er, can I talk to you privately after this, Bella?" 

Yeah, sure.

"Do you know why you needed less sleep?" Shavri asks while Vanyel focuses on eating his food. "I mean, it sounds like a thing the gods did, but that's a weird specific effect to be able to put on a whole area. I don't think it'd be possible to do with magic in our world. Is the god-magic different from the Elf magic?" 

Yeah, it is, they just kind of directly do things. The less sleep effect in particular is mediated by the - uh, the planet doesn't have a sun. Valinor is lit by magic giant glowing trees, a gold one and a silver one, trading off all the time, there's no night. The rest of the world is just lit by starlight but Elves can see heat, and see really well even when there's only the stars, and also make magic glowing things and use fire, so they get around adequately. Anyway the Trees also are generally invigorating in a way that results in needing less sleep.

"...That's such an incredibly weird world." Shavri bounces a little in her chair. "I have so many questions! Why did the gods decide to not make there be night, when do people decide when to sleep even, what does it mean to see heat–"

They didn't have a template where there was night to copy from. Elves need less sleep than humans and sleep every other day, usually during the hot part, except Fëanáro who liked to work manically for like a week at a time and then pass out on his desk.

Shavri looks like she can’t decide whether to be concerned or jealous. “Was that, um, bad for him?”

It wasn't great, and mana - the energy used for arcane spellcasting - recharges with rest, so it wasn't great for his development as a wizard, but I don't think it was going to cause any serious developmental problems. As for seeing heat, want me to show you? They can also see ultraviolet and their acuity is astounding.

"Wha– ooh, you can share with Thoughtsensing? That would be awesome. I'm so curious. Also it's sort of like that here, too, at least for Healers, your reserves replenish with food and rest so it's really important to take care of your body – I'm always telling Van that but he says he can just tap nodes which is cheating." 

Vanyel gives her a sour look and then keeps eating his food. 

Oh, we cheated too, Maiar have infinite mana and they'd let us siphon it off. Fëanáro used this as an excuse to skip sleep. But he was also trying to lucid dream and Maiar didn't help him cheat at that at all.

Here is an unfairly beautiful Valian landscape with crazy extra colors!

It is, in fact, super unfairly beautiful and the colours are amazing. "Hey, Van you have to see this!"