That's all they can do, then.

Unfortunately so.

Back to work, then.

No one ever returns looking for the ring. And, somehow, El gets a sense it should really remain a secret - just hers, to admire, to investigate, to use. (It'd be so very useful, wouldn't it?)

El's mind - it's hard to notice, but she's perhaps sharper than she was. New ideas tumble through her brain, especially for ever more effective (and, incidentally, vicious) weapons. She dreams of the respect people will show her when she demonstrates these, the awe in their eyes...

No point in sharing; only one person can wear it at a time. So she'll just keep it to herself, spending more and more of her free time simply admiring it in secret away from Bellona. It's okay though, because she's working fast enough to make up for it.

She's also coming around to a policy of using better weapons to end the war more quickly. (And it would be a shame to not build these things she's thinking of...)

"...Are you okay?" Bellona asks at one point, after she hasn't seen El in... More than a day, actually.

"Hm?" she says distractedly. "Fine."

"You've been - withdrawn."

"Busy. You know."

"I can help."

"Don't you have your own things to do?"

"...El, you're my sister. I wanna work with you, especially on these big projects... Especially if something's bothering you." She sounds hurt.

"I said I'm fine!" she snaps.

She steps back. "...You don't sound fine."

"Oh, what would you know about it?"

"You're not acting like yourself! - El, listen to yourself! You... You don't yell at me..."

"Maybe I should! Just leave me alone!"

Bellona makes a hurt noise -

Then turns and stomps out of the room.

"FINE!"

She snaps up a solid wall to close off the doorway after her.

And Bellona goes to sulk, avoiding El.

El returns the favor, putting on the ring whenever she has to move through common areas of the house.

Bellona starts trying to talk to her again two days later - looking for El, hanging out in common rooms...

El has been getting on just fine without Bellona (in her opinion). She declines to respond to these overtures.

Bellona spends a while kind of walking around in a cloud of depression (mixed with anger, sometimes), then avoiding the apartments entirely...

Then a rare book El'd been trying (and failing) to get her hands on appears in front of her door, with a stack of helpful notes, and drawings of them back in Amestris, and a note on top -

I love you.

I don't like fighting.

Please, El?

Is she mocking her now?

El turns the notes and the drawings to dust and almost does the same to the book, but can't quite bring herself to. So instead she kicks it viciously across the hall.

Why is she wasting her time here? She should leave the idiot dwarfs and the idiot mountain and her idiot sister and go out and do things.