the war with sauron in velgarth starts several years earlier, and Green acquires some refugees
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That's a really adorable concept for a store! Melody can't imagine it existing in Velgarth. She can imagine some of the things being sold existing in Arda, but Quendi don't do mass-produced goods so much. 

"What does you even do with five hundred folder colors?" Melody asks Kelta, as usual practicing by speaking out loud; she's only a little hesitant at this point, and she's been training herself to try to reduce the accent. 

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"You find your favorite one!" says Kelta. "Or your favorite thirty and then you color-code what you put in them."

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"Okay, I getting it!" She shakes her head a little. "No, getting - them? Some? And color-code Leareth's notes." What oh what are the color options here...? 

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"You want 'okay, I'm getting some!'"

There are lots of kinds of folders, structurally speaking - number and type of flaps and whether they have holes in them for insertion into certain hole-based organizational structures and what they're made of and how big they are. Once she's settled on a kind, it has basically every solid color she could think of, two-tone gradients between most pairs of them, and also:

- rainbow (tie dye)
- rainbow (ombre stripes)
- rainbow (pastel) (tie dye)
- rainbow (pastel) (ombre stripes)
- fourteen different ones intended to look like various kinds of rock
- another five that are trying to look like metals
- six kinds of pretend wood
- peacock feathers
- seven variations on "butterflies"
- three variations on "sheet music"
- 28 different photos of landscapes, spacescapes, seascapes, cloudscapes, etc.
- four attempting to imitate various fabrics
- three that're trying to look like leather (in buckskin, black, and brown)
- 15 plant motif closeups
- and a few dozen more - geometric, marbled, heathered, splattered, star-shapes, scribbles, brush-strokes, ones that look embossed or carved or inlaid or tooled or lacy or iridescent...
- AND you can also buy a voucher for a custom printed one to be redeemed online, recommended if you're buying gifts and the giftee's favorite isn't here.

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This is a much better shopping experience than it would be online! Melody can pick the folders up and turn them in the light and hold them up next to each other to see how visually distinct they are. 

She is pretty sure Leareth would only get the starscape ones if he were shopping for them himself, but they're similar enough to be easy to confuse with each other, and also he is NOT the one shopping, Melody is and she has that power! 

He can get one in rainbow tie-dye and one with butterflies and one that looks like a very sparkly rock and one that's metallic gold and a couple of gorgeous sunsetscape photos, one over sea and one over rolling meadows and the iridescent one.

And he can have ONE spacescape photo, the prettiest of them. It's going to be empty for now, because Melody wants to save it for once they're ready to start piecing back together the 'core memory' that he corrupted on purpose, and still isn't really able or willing to talk about. But she's pretty sure stars are involved. 

"These for Leareth?" She shows Kelta. "Do you think he– he'll like?" 

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"Does he like butterflies? Some people don't like them because they're bugs."

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"There have– no, there are, butterflies on the island we lived in Arda? I think he like, no, likes them. I know he likes sunsets. We were there when the first sunrise ever in Arda." 

Melody is at the stage of language-learning where she has little redirects in place for nearly all of her initial common grammatical errors, but they tend to kick in a fraction of a second after she says the ungrammatical version, so she's doing a lot of backing up and redoing her sentences. She actually has no idea if Leareth is bothered by other bugs? It's hard to imagine. If he is then it's almost certainly Melkor's fault but surely Melkor can't have gotten around to everything even with the stupid time dilation effect. 

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"Then it looks like a - well, it doesn't cohere, but if the goal is to be easily able to tell them apart I think you're set."

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"Easy to tell apart is what I want! And - cheerful? If he picking them they would be all dark and not cheerful." 

She is now perusing the sheet music theme. "- Maybe I get this for Vanyel? If I see him again, it be– no, it could be a surprise." 

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"Would he recognize it? I suppose he might learn to, if he likes music and wants to pick up ours."

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"Ours is - not the same but this look more like it than like writing? I think yours is better. Also this one have a picture of a lute. So a hint." It's not a picture exactly, so much a a sort of stenciled-in outline in pastel blue against the off-white background, with the music notes overtop. Melody thinks it's quite well done. 

She glances around. "Maybe I get one for me? But there are so many. Which one your favorite?" 

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"Of these? I guess the iridescent one, but if I were in the market for a folder I'd probably just go online and get them custom with birds on them."

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Melody grins. "I would maybe get it custom with a picture of a shampoo ad! They are very pretty. But if Quendi ever see it they would be -" she does not know that word, and switches briefly to Mindspeech, :- scandalized?:  "How do you say that?" 

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"Scandalized. Your fascination with shampoo commercials is really funny - I bet you could get bubbles, though."

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"Oh! I like that. - I like all your commercials, they are - interesting? And pretty. And short, so not so bad if interrupted."

SOMEDAY it will be less the case that looking after Leareth is like caring for a toddler. She's still managing to make it through TV shows - she's found a different therapy one that's more interesting and that Internet reviews claim is 'reasonably' accurate - but it takes much longer, she has a habit of pausing it to deal with something and then forgetting she was in the middle of it. 

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"Well, if you like them I'm glad they're there for you to enjoy." Ooh pencils made from naturalistic looking twigs.

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Melody doesn't think she wants pencils that look like twigs, she would forget they were pencils! She will examine lamps. Maybe she can get Leareth a cute little lamp to go beside his bed, so he can reach it without moving very far. Ideally not one that's breakable. Bonus points if the switch can be operated by a dog, then they can train Forgiver to turn it on if Leareth is upset in the middle of the night; it's one of the gentler ways to wake him from a nightmare if he's not quite managing it on his own. 

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There are ones with rocker switches or pushbuttons that a dog could operate, yup.

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Neat! Anything particularly stars-themed, or else vaguely reminiscent of Quendi crafts or architecture? 

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This one lets you fiddle with it so instead of being a lamp it projects a simple starscape onto the wall or ceiling! That one looks like a daffodil! This one can clamp onto a vertical piece of furniture and gooseneck about and it has a gold and a silver and a copper three-bulb situation!

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Okay that is one of the coolest things she has ever seen in her entire life, Melody is ABSOLUTELY getting Leareth a lamp that projects a starscape onto his ceiling! 

She eagerly shows it to Kelta. "This is amazing! Your world have so many things people make! How do people have time to make this, just - one lamp out of tens of lamps - and that only in this store?" 

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"- well, I'm pretty sure that's mass-produced? It doesn't look fancy enough to be handmade, I doubt anything in this store is completely handmade, there are probably several thousand of them scattered around in warehouses and shops all over the continent."

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"Right, I - said wrong word. I mean - the person who drew it that way? So it would be produced? Like– oh. Forgot the word for - people who draw houses and then other people build?" 

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"Oh, the designer. Or architect if it's buildings. Well, that part's fun, right? Some people really like coming up with ways lamps could be."

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"I guess!" 

Melody is going to look at desk ornaments even though, does she really need an ornament that doesn't do anything in particular, no she does not. But they're pretty. 

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