He is sitting on the roof.

This is technically allowed, because no one knows about it and has disallowed it; he is far more careful about it than he is about actual rulebreaking, because once they learn it's possible they can stop him. He is sitting on the roof under Telperion's blazing silver light and he can see all of Tirion and no one can see him and he's thinking and everything is okay and then a house appears in the sky. 

No one except the Valar could do that, and usually they wouldn't. 

He feels the delirious happiness that only comes with interesting problems, and he stands up on the roof and tries to get a closer look.

"We're - we're pretty high up," says Jenny, peering nervously out the window. "Ah - there's a city underneath us, I'm afraid."

"Is there anywhere I can land?" asks Matilda, rubbing her forehead. "I think I should land. I really think I should land."

"I'm looking!" exclaims Jenny. She opens the window and sticks her head out and looks down, searching for a suitable location.

The house hovers very still in the sky. Wisps of strange dark smoke curl away from the curved section of earth beneath it. The exposed end of a pipe releases a belated gush of water, which splashes onto the palace roof not far from Fëanáro.

The house could fall onto the palace and squish him.

If it did that he would see his mother.

He does not move. He does start trying to imagine what kind of force could float a house.

The house begins to drift gently downward, inch by inch.

"I see an empty space that's big enough and close by, but it has people in it," says Jenny. She leans a little farther out the window. "Excuse me!" she calls down to the people. "I'm very sorry, but we need to land this house! Could you please move?" Quieter, to herself: "I suppose there's no reason to assume they speak English..."

Matilda squeezes her eyes shut against the light. She tries putting her hands over her eyes, but really, doing anything on purpose with her body takes too much attention away from maneuvering the house. Unfortunately, having a very bad headache also takes too much attention away from maneuvering the house.

The house is not going to crash on the palace. It is going to land in the square. It is wobbling too much for a Vala to be doing it. Fëanáro is so curious now that he thinks he actually would be annoyed if the house landed on him and he was delayed from learning about it. 

He slips down from the roof and runs for King's Square.

The dirt beneath the house, which was previously arranged into an approximately perfect partial sphere centered somewhere in the middle of the house, begins to shift. Another pipe breaks, splattering more water onto the edge of King's Square. By the time the house is hovering fully over King's Square, it has a nice flat cylindrical base, and its flight has stabilized significantly: it descends at a slow and perfectly even pace, giving the people in the square plenty of time to get out of the way.

The figure leaning out the window continues to call out apologetic-sounding phrases in her utterly foreign language. Inside the house, someone makes quiet pained noises, and then a sigh of deep relief when the house finally settles safely onto the ground.

"Everyone get out of the way," he says, and they do, and he walks as confidently as he can up to the door so no one thinks 'isn't Prince Fëanáro not supposed to leave the palace alone' and he stands on his tiptoes to open the door so no one thinks 'Prince Fëanáro is too tiny and incompetent to do anything' and he opens the door and says "hello".

The person who shows up when he opens the door is adult-shaped if not quite adult-sized - she would make an unaccountably short Elf. Perhaps she is not an Elf.

She looks down at Prince Fëanáro and says, "Ah - hello," in flying-house-person language. Her thoughts indicate that this is a greeting, and that she is confused and exhausted and afraid, but determined to be polite. "We're very sorry about landing our house in your town square," she goes on.

She's speaking another language! Not just another dialect like Telerin or Vanyarin Quenya, another language - 'hello,' he echoes in hers. 'we're very sorry about landing our house in your square? we're very sorry? we're very sorry about landing?''

...She peers at him in confusion, then glances over her shoulder.

"Matilda," she says, "there's a little boy at the door and I don't think he speaks English."

"I have too much of a headache to learn a language right now," says a different, younger voice from somewhere out of sight in the direction addressed. "Can you get me some water and a Tylenol?"

"Yes, just a moment," says the adult. She turns to Fëanáro again. "My name is Jenny," she says, indicating herself by gesture although her thoughts are clear enough to make the extra effort redundant. "Do you want to come inside?" Again with redundant mime.

"My name is Fëanáro," he says immediately. "...my want is to come inside?"

"You could say, 'Yes, I want to come inside'," Jenny suggests. "It's nice to meet you, Fëanáro. Please come in. I need to get something for Matilda in the other room and then I'd be happy to teach you English."

She beckons invitingly and then turns and goes to the kitchen, where she fills a small glass with the sputtering tap's last gasp of clean water and gets a bottle of pills out of a cupboard and proceeds with these items into the living room. A girl who might plausibly be Fëanáro's age is curled up on the couch holding a pillow over her eyes with both arms.

"Yes, I want to come inside. It's nice to meet you, Jenny. It's nice to meet you, Matilda."  People are gathering curiously; he ignores them all and walks in. 

The door swings neatly shut behind him.

Matilda unpillows her face long enough to down a Tylenol with a gulp of water, then immediately covers her eyes the same way again.

"Better?" says Jenny.

"Ow. Ow. Ow," says Matilda. But she lowers one hand from the pillow to wave it dismissively. "I'll be fine. Teach the alien kid English. What's his name? Fëanáro? It's nice to meet you too, Fëanáro. I have a really bad headache."

Matilda's thoughts are harder to decipher than Jenny's. For some reason everything she sends is accompanied by a detailed and comprehensive mental picture of the house and every single thing inside it. Maybe flying house people don't know how to properly control their osanwë.

"I'm not an alien," he says patiently, "I'm an Elda. You're the aliens. Do you want me to fetch you a healer?"

"Oh," blinks Jenny.

"Telepathic aliens! Neat!" says Matilda around her pillow, sounding for the first time more excited than pained.

"If a healer could help with Matilda's headache then fetching one would be very nice of you and we'd appreciate it very much," says Jenny.

I require a healer, he broadcasts. Not personally, for a guest.

"Fetching one," he says in English.

"Thank you," says Jenny.

"Thanks," says Matilda. "What's your language called?"

"Quenya. What's your language called?"

"English," says Matilda.

"I thought you had too much of a headache to learn a language right now," says Jenny, smiling slightly.

"I thought so too," says Matilda, with a quickly-stifled giggle. "Ow. Laughing hurts."

"The healer's coming. Where are you from? How did you fly a house?"

"In English that's, 'The healer's coming. Where are you from? How did you fly a house?'," says Jenny. "And the answer is that we are from America, which is a country on a planet called Earth very far away from here, and Matilda is a very special person."

"I can move things with my mind," says Matilda. "I haven't ever moved this big of a thing for this long before."

And someone rushes in, looking quite panicked and less panicked once they see Fëanáro is in perfect health. Fëanáro points at Matilda and the new arrival starts singing. The headache lessens immediately.

Matilda uncovers her face and beams a smile at the newcomer. "Thank you very much! Fëanáro, how do I say thank you in Quenya?" The structure and contents of her house are beginning to fade from her thoughts at last.

"Thank you," he says.

"Thank you!" repeats Matilda. "Wow, that's way better than Tylenol."

"What's Tylenol?"

"It's a painkiller," says Matilda. She manages a functional osanwë introduction to the concept and its component parts, neatly organized if clumsily transmitted. "Am I doing the telepathy thing right?"

"Yes. Do you not do it usually?"

"It isn't a thing humans can normally do at all! Is it normal for - what's the plural of Elda?"

"Eldar. Yes, but we can't fly houses." He communicates envy, fascination, frustration. "Yet."

"I'm the only person I've ever met who could move things with their mind the way I can," says Matilda, "but obviously if you want to figure out how to do it anyway, I want to help! Can you or other Eldar do any things that are sort of like flying houses? Would it count if you built a house that could fly and then you piloted it?" She transmits a loose impression of the concept of airplanes.

"Flying houses with your mind seems more ...versatile," he says dubiously, "but we could build one of those anyway, that looks like fun. Do you know what alloy of steel that is?"

"No. I might have a book about it, though."

"What's that?"

"...A book? Do you not have those?"

She holds out her hand and summons one off a shelf, opening it to show him. "It has words in it."

The symbols in the book match the symbols that appear faintly in Matilda's thoughts whenever she speaks.

"We don't. What a clever idea, give it to me so I can look closer."

"Sure," giggles Matilda, and she floats the book to him. It's a cookbook, with pictures.

"I'm not going to be able to guess the correspondence of symbols to sounds in your language without more familiarity with your language, would you keep talking?"

"Okay," says Matilda agreeably. "Or I could just tell you, but it might be more fun to guess. Or, wait, if you're telepathic can you read everything I'm saying where it's written down in my mind?"

The symbols in her thoughts are definitely less clear than the ones on the page, but also definitely a big improvement over not having any guidelines at all.

"I can, is that habit one that is typically acquired when learning symbol-sound correspondences? Or are symbol-sound correspondences innate among your people?"

"No, I don't think Jenny has the same thing," says Matilda.

"I don't think I do," Jenny agrees, and indeed the symbols do not appear in her thoughts - although they appear in Matilda's, as Matilda hears her.

"I think it might actually be kind of rare," Matilda goes on. "Although plenty of people learn the symbol-sound correspondences just fine without it."

"I might have enough to go off," he says, "but keep talking. And then I'll teach you my language, though it doesn't have symbol-sound correspondences and I don't want to invent them on the spot, it seems important that they be beautiful and well-suited."

"Can I help invent them?" asks Matilda excitedly. "I've never had a chance to invent an alphabet before!"

"Yeah, of course. Yours has fifty distinct symbols I've run across so far, do you have that many distinct sounds? I bet we can do it with less."

"We don't have nearly that many sounds, it's just each letter in our alphabet has two different shapes. I'm not sure why. Your alphabet doesn't need to have capital and lowercase letters if you don't want them."

"I think people will learn it faster and like it more if there are less extraneous symbols. Do you have parchment and a quill I can use, or should I call for one?"

"I have paper and pens," she says, and a drawer opens across the room and disgorges a notebook and a ballpoint, both of which fly over to Fëanáro. "Will those do?"

He starts disassembling it. "You're very talented, what materials did you use for these?"

"I didn't make them, I just have them."

"They were probably mass-produced," says Jenny, with vague mental images of factories and printing presses. "The paper is made of wood pulp and the pen is made of plastic. I don't know about the ink."

"Well, their inventor is talented. What's plastic?" He has disassembled the pen and reassembled it. 

"It's made of... I'm not sure, actually," says Matilda. "Jenny, what's plastic made of?"

"I'm not sure either. Petroleum, I think? I can go get the encyclopedia," Jenny suggests.

"No, I can do it," says Matilda. She glances up from the spectacle of Fëanáro and the pen, and a second later a book flies into the room. It hovers in front of her and flips its pages. "Yes, plastic is mostly made of petroleum." Flip flip. "And petroleum is mostly made of fossilized algae."

"Oh. We might not have any of that, the light might be too new." He frowns. "We'll figure out something. This could be done without plastic, anyway, I think."

"Which, the pen? Yes, probably," says Matilda. "There are pens made out of things other than plastic. What do you mean, the light is too new?"

"Algae didn't grow except in the time of the lamps, and now that the Calacirya have been opened to the Sea," he says absently, "and fossilizing things takes a very very long time."

"...I think the way your planet is lit and the way my planet was lit might be different," says Matilda. "We had a sun and a moon and you wouldn't call them lamps unless you were being metaphorical. And they didn't make light like the light you have now, either."

"Oh, you haven't seen the Trees? You've got to come see the Trees, they're really pretty. Also I can show you the palace and you can live there while we're figuring how to move your house out of King's Square."

"I can..." starts Matilda.

"I don't think you should try to fly the house again right away," says Jenny.

"It's probably not very polite to leave it here," says Matilda.

"We did the best we could, and I don't want you moving entire houses around without making sure it's safe first."

"If there's a healer to sing my headache away it'll be fine! Anyway, I'm not even sure it's moving the house that hurt so much, I was doing lots of other harder stuff."

"Please, for my peace of mind, work up to lifting houses if you're going to do it again," Jenny says firmly.

Matilda sighs. "Okay." She gets up from the couch and goes over to hug Jenny. Behind her, the P volume of the encyclopedia closes itself and puts itself down on a table.

"You really have to teach me that, it's neat. And I can tell people to move the house the traditional way, or ask a Vala to move it the way you did."

"Teach you what? Telekinesis?"

"Is that what you're using to lift the books? If so, yes. I could do more complicated crafting if I could hold more things without touching them, and the applications for glassblowing are absurd."

"I'd be happy to, but I'm not sure if it's teachable," she says. "I only found out I could do it by accident, and I've never met anyone else who can."

"I'm sure most people don't try," says Jenny.

"Well, that's true," Matilda concedes. "The way I started out was staring at something and concentrating really really hard on it moving. It's gotten a lot easier with practice. But I don't want to just recommend that you spend days staring at objects willing them to move as hard as you possibly can, because I bet that would be really boring and frustrating if it turned out you couldn't do it."

"Yeah, I think I'll find a different way to do it. It's not important yet, anyway, inventing an alphabet is way more interesting."

"Inventing an alphabet is really interesting!" agrees Matilda. "Do you know what you want the letters to look like?"

"Not yet! Not like yours, they aren't pretty enough. Come here and I can draw things and we can see if they're any good."

She goes there.

"One thing I remember about designing alphabets is that a bunch of the letters in English look like other letters flipped upside-down or backwards and there are a lot of people who find that hard to read," she mentions.

"We'll have to do better. Hmm, one nice thing about having letters be rotations of others is you can have letter design reflect where the word is spoken in the mouth and so forth. But maybe that could be done without any letters being other letters flipped."

"I bet we can think of a way to encode that information without making any letters geometrically congruent," says Matilda. "What are all the sounds in Quenya?"

Jenny is regarding them both with immense fondness.

So he tells her all the sounds in Quenya and then starts writing out some options for them to consider.

Matilda excitedly follows along and offers suggestions both aesthetic and practical.

It's probably a good idea to design for ease of use, since lots of people are going to be writing in this alphabet and it shouldn't be unnecessarily complicated to write in. How do you design for ease of use? Well, how about they try writing out various sample letters a few times and see which things affect their comfort and convenience and writing speed. Matilda fetches more paper and pens. She attempts sample letters both telekinetically and by hand. Her mental grip is flawlessly steady; her manual penmanship wobbles a bit. This is usefully informative, since it's good to have an alphabet that's still readable even with mistakes. "Jenny, do you want to help us test our letters?"

"I'd be delighted," says Jenny. She grabs a spare notebook and pen.

"It also needs to be beautiful, or people won't want to use it and have it adorning their homes, and it needs to cover more languages than just Quenya so that other peoples who haven't had the idea yet can use it, and it'd be great if you could write Valarin in it, maybe then people'd be able to learn Valarin and right now they can't because it's too hard."

"Is Valarin another language? Is it hard to learn?"

"Yes, the Valar speak it and they don't have mouths so it's not designed for mouths. I'm going to learn it but I have to be bigger first because the Valar give me a headache and also live far away."

"Well, we can design the letters to be pretty. If we're really clever maybe we can make the system nicely extensible, so that if we encounter new sounds later, we can add more letters for them and they'll make sense next to the rest. Oh! And is there more than one dialect of Quenya? In English, all the words are mostly spelled the same in different places even though people sometimes pronounce them really differently, and that makes it easier for people to understand things written in different dialects, but I don't know if you want to make Quenya letters like that too. Why do the Valar give you a headache? What's a Vala?"

"They give me headaches because they're - I don't know your word, our word is just Vala - they created the world - and they're so much bigger and more magic than us. There are three dialects of Quenya and then we almost might want to write songs of ours that are from Qenya which is what we call the language our people spoke before we came here. Some of them use such different sounds I think I want different letters, like if we were Vanyarin my name would be Hweanáro."

"That is pretty different," Matilda agrees. "Let's see what we can come up with. If you want to make the same alphabet good for Valarin too, should we ask a Vala to help even though they might give us headaches?"

"Yeah probably. Maybe we should get it working for the Eldar first, then we can expand it for them."

"That's a good idea," she agrees.

He's sketching out possible designs. "People won't use it if it's not pretty enough."

"It's good to make it pretty anyway, but will they really not use it if it isn't? Nearly everyone uses writing on Earth even though our alphabets mostly aren't as pretty as the things you're designing."

"I don't know anything about Earth. People here mostly don't like or use things if they're not pretty."

"Well, then we will make a very pretty alphabet."

"Yep. We need to make sure our names are pretty in it, too, since we'll be writing them a lot. Do you like this, for Matilda? We could swap a few of the characters -"

"That's pretty!" she declares. "I like it."

"Excellent. Now I have to figure out whether to demand everyone adopt it by royal decree or just entice them into it somehow - perhaps we should write some books, that might do it -"

"Writing books sounds like way more fun than a royal decree," Matilda asserts. "We could write some ourselves, or translate some from English, I've got lots."

"All right, let's write some books. Do you have any really good stories that'll make everyone want to learn to read so they can read them?"

"I have all kinds of stories! What kinds of stories do the people here like best?"

"Romantic stories," he says bitterly. "Because of the King's marriage. Lots of romantic stories. They adore romantic stories. And hymns to the Valar, those are popular."

"...Um, is something wrong?"

"Letters are way more interesting than me being sad, so we should probably keep working on the letters. But my mom was sick and my dad wanted to have more children and the Valar said he could get married again but only if my mom died forever, so he asked her to die forever and she said okay, but I don't think he should have asked and I don't like the person he married."

"...That's really sad and I want to hug you, can I hug you? Then we can go back to doing letters if you want."

"You can hug me while I write if you hug me from behind, then I don't have to stop."

"Okay."

So Matilda hugs him a hug of the described type. And manipulates writing utensils with her thoughts. Multitasking!

And after a few minutes people stride in, looking extremely stressed. "You don't have my leave to enter the flying house," Fëanáro says, not really expecting them to care, and they don't. "This is Matilda and Jenny and they have my invitation to assist me on an important project."

"The house is in the middle of King's Square," says one of his father's assistants, looking very stressed.

"Yes," Fëanáro says. "We cannot move it yet but we will see to it that it is moved."

"Oh, I should really learn Quenya - what's the problem exactly?" asks Matilda. "Is it the location of the house?"

"The location of the house and me vanishing, my father doesn't yet have the much-desired other children and so I am the crown prince and if I vanished it would be a source of great dramatics. Not that they'd be sad. It would simplify the thing where I don't like my father's new wife."

"Oh." She frowns slightly. "Well, if they want the house moved, do they have somewhere they want it moved to in particular?" Glancing at Jenny, she adds, "Don't worry, I won't just pick it up and go there right away, but if there's somewhere to put it then I can take a break from designing a writing system to do safe sensible experiments with how much I can lift now, and if I'm lucky it'll only take a few minutes to verify that I can do it safely and then get the house moved. And then I can go right back to alphabets!"

"You could move it here -" he projects a mental map of the city - "that land's mine and right now it's empty."

"Sure, okay. Where would I find some stuff that's in between person-sized and house-sized, to practice lifting? And can I dig up your land a bit when I get there so my front door can be at ground level again instead of on top of a basement's worth of dirt?"

"We could go outside and commandeer some heavy furniture for you to practice with," he says, and then to his father's attendants, "we're going to move the house. It requires a few tables and large blocks of stone. Would you like to go fetch me some?"

"That sounds like it would work," says Matilda. She gets up, the better to go outside and commandeer some heavy furniture with Fëanáro.

And they walk outside. They meet quite a crowd. Telperion is at her height, and everything is silvery; a few thousand people have pressed in to stare.

"That's a lot of people," Matilda observes. "Gosh. I guess I should expect that sort of thing when I go around landing houses in cities."

"Do you do it often?"

"No, I've never done it before."

"It would have been smarter to land it outside the city. Though then it'd have taken me longer to find you and longer to discover books and writing."

"My head hurt a lot and I was afraid if I didn't land it really soon I might drop it. I don't think it would've been smart to risk dropping it," she says.

"Oh, you weren't flying it on purpose? Why were you flying it?"

"Something really weird happened," she says, attempting with mixed success to render her memories of the really weird thing into a comprehensible form. "And the really weird thing was trying to destroy a bunch of stuff, and I didn't want to let it, and then it kind of... dug my house out of reality, and it felt like we were falling for a really long time, and I had to hold the house together with my mind because otherwise the in-between place would've eroded it to nothing and me and Jenny would've died. And sometimes we bumped against a universe, but always at a really inhospitable part, like vacuum or the inside of a planet, and the first time we bumped against somewhere hospitable enough to have air, it was here and I pushed the house into it and then I was flying my house above your city with a really bad headache."

"In that case it was smart to land the house where you did," he concedes. "I ordered them to bring me giant blocks of stone and furniture and things so you could practice. It looks like that's over there."

Matilda smiles. "Okay. I'll see how much heavy stuff I can lift safely."

She goes over to the heavy things and picks out the lightest-looking available one, a sturdy table. It rises smoothly into the air and then lowers itself to the ground again. Next she floats two tables, then three.

He would like to watch her do that but it's not as interesting as the books and anyway he's fending off people who want him to go back home Fëanáro let the Valar handle this. So he mostly leaves her to it.

She lifts enough heavy things to verify that her head doesn't start hurting even when she is lifting more than the weight of her house.

Then she goes back into her house and explains matters to Jenny, and asks if Jenny would prefer to be inside or outside of the house while it is moved to its new location, and Jenny says she prefers to be outside, so they both come out of the house and Jenny holds Matilda's hand and Matilda picks up the house very carefully, making sure to get all the house-related dirt off of King's Square, and lifts it until it is too high to bump into anything, and then she lifts herself and Jenny too and flies all three of these things over to where Fëanáro said she could put the house, and there she puts them all down.

Fëanáro is surrounded by scolding people and is saying biting things to them and wishes the house would have crashed on him after all.

Well, after Matilda has put the house down and Jenny has gone back inside it she remembers that she never got an answer out of Fëanáro about whether or not she may dig up his land, so she flies herself back to look for him.

When she observes that he is surrounded by scolding people, she frowns slightly and flies toward him faster.

Her arrival does sort of break up the scolding. It at least gives everyone someone else to look at. Fëanáro continues asserting that Matilda and Jenny are his guests and he will do as he pleases.

"What's going on?" she asks, landing neatly on the ground next to Fëanáro.

"Everyone's upset and wants to ask the Valar what to do and want to take you to the King for an audience but his wife will be there and I don't want to see her."

"Oh. Why are they upset, specifically?"

"People are silly and get upset about anything they don't understand."

"That's true. But I don't like to make people upset. I should learn Quenya so I can explain things properly and then maybe they'll be less upset."

"I'll say things and send you the translation with osanwë so you learn the language." And he switches to Quenya. "Matilda is teaching me something important and the square is all cleaned up and we can bring this to my father's attention tomorrow and everyone should calm down."

"Thank you," says Matilda to Fëanáro, this being a bit of Quenya she has learned already.

Everyone else thinks this should be brought to his father's attention right now.

"They aren't ready for an audience with a King, she had a headache recently."

"Can you tell them that I want to learn to speak Quenya before I have an audience with a King in it, and that it should only take me a day or two if you help me learn?"

"Oh good idea." He says this to his audience. 

Matilda smiles. This seems to her like a very reasonable solution!

"Okay," he says, "I think that'll work, but I don't want to go back to the palace because I'm not sure I can avoid my father's wife. Can we go to your house? People will come find me when they need me. Which they won't."

"Sure, we can go to my house. I put it where you said and then I came back because I remembered you never told me if I can dig up the ground to fit my house neatly in it or not."

"You can definitely do that, sorry. I don't care about my land."

"That's convenient. Would you like me to fly us there now or would you rather walk?"

"Flying's nice. How long did it take you to learn that?"

"Not very long. I've only had this ability at all for a few months."

She picks up herself and Fëanáro and flies them to where she put the house and puts Fëanáro down and looks at the part of the ground where she would like to put her house. A hole digs itself. She moves her house into the hole. Then she piles up all the dirt she took out of the hole next to the house, very neatly and tidily and without ever once interfering with something outside of what Fëanáro described as his land. It all takes about a minute.

"In that case maybe I should work on it. I was thinking writing was way more interesting but writing books will take me longer than a few months, unless I can think of a way to do it very quickly- do you know any of those? - and if I can do other things while moving things with my mind it'd be a real time-saver. And I'd like to fly."

"Well, there's computers," she glosses the concept mentally, "those make writing go really fast, but you'd need an electrical generator and I don't know how to make one of those. There might be a book about it somewhere. Or typewriters. Once we invent an alphabet we can invent a typewriter for it. That's probably a lot easier than computers, because computers have lots of complicated stuff going on that I don't understand yet, I was going to start studying them this summer."

"We can do a typewriter," he says, "I'm not very good in a forge yet but we could always ask someone else to make the metal in the shapes we need if we want it really quickly. Or we can learn. You get better in a forge by practicing."

"It would be neat to learn how to forge metal! But if we want a typewriter quickly, asking someone else to make the parts is probably more efficient."

"We want to know everything in the world as quickly as possible," he says, "but a typewriter helps make other learning faster in a way metalworking doesn't, so I agree with you."

"Maybe computers can be next after typewriters, then. I think computers would help make other learning faster too." She bounces happily. "Learning is fun!"

"Yeah, I'm really glad that a house dropped out of the sky with all these useful things like writing, i wouldn't even have realized for a couple years more that we needed it. Computers need generators? What do you know about those, anything at all?"

"I don't know much about them, but my encyclopedia probably knows something!"

"Okay. Let's figure out our projects for the next few weeks and get a list of materials right away so I can requisition them, then we can do whatever seems most urgent - teach you Quenya, maybe."

"Yes, if you teach me Quenya then I can go have an audience with the King while you stay in my house and read encyclopedias. Okay. We want to teach me Quenya, and we want to invent an alphabet for it and then build a typewriter, and after that we want to figure out what we'd need in order to build an electrical generator and then do that, and probably once I know anything about computers I'm going to want to build one that's better than the one I have but that's probably more than a few weeks away."

"So we should ask for a lot of paper and ink and probably someone skilled with metalworking in general since we don't know yet what exactly we'll need for a typewriter and generator. Anything else?"

"I think that's probably enough things," Matilda decides.

"Hardly! But it means we should start working instead of planning. I ordered everything. I can talk aloud in Quenya while we work on the alphabet."

She giggles at 'hardly'. "Okay!"

Alphabet time!

"Quenya is one of a lot of spoken languages derived from primitive Quendian, but most of them are spoken in the Outer Lands and I'm not sure there's any way to get our alphabet to the Outer Lands. We should have an alphabet that works to represent them too, as best as we can, especially since you can fly and we might be able to go over to visit them sooner than I was expecting," he says, osanwë-translating as he goes. 

"That's sensible," Matilda agrees. "Everyone should be able to have an alphabet if they want one."

"And if everyone uses ours then we'll be able to read each others' work and learn each others' languages faster. Plus I don't think the Teleri are exactly going to invent it on their own."

"The Teleri?"

"There are three tribes of the Elves. The Vanyar, who live around Taniqueti, the Noldor, who live here, and the Teleri, who live by the sea. The Noldor like building things. The other kinds don't. The Teleri don't have paper or ink so I don't think they'd invent writing."

"It would be hard to invent writing without paper or ink. Although I think in my world some people did it once by poking clay with pointy things to make neat-looking pointy letters. But then all their writing was on clay tablets. Paper and ink are much more convenient."

"And they also wouldn't bother, because they wouldn't invent it just because it's such a beautiful idea and there isn't anything they'd need it for."

"Do no Teleri like inventing things?"

"If they did they'd move to Tirion and join us, because living houseless beneath the stars on the shore is really nice if you're Teleri but makes it hard to invent things if you're so inclined. Or maybe you invent better boats. They're great at boats."

"They sound like the kind of people who would be great at boats."

"They're really amazing boats! Beautiful and fast and quiet, I don't know by what other criteria one would evaluate boats. We can go see them sometime once I have leave to leave Tirion, but it's a long trip, several weeks..."

"Is it still a long trip?"

"We don't have any measures of distance in common yet, do we? You know how far a normal person can run in an hour? It's about a hundred times that distance."

"I don't know if my normal people and your normal people can run the same amount in an hour," she points out. "But I think I can probably fly faster than an Elda can run."

"Much faster. But maybe not a hundred times faster, if you're that fast you might fly into something because you didn't see it coming. Are there lots of flying-person collisions on your world?"

"There aren't flying people on my world. Except in," she makes a reasonable effort at loaning the word in from English rather than dropping out of Quenya entirely, "airplanes."

He suggests a couple other possible loan-alterations for airplanes. "You're the only flying person in your whole world?"

"The only person I've ever heard of who can move things with their thoughts, in my world."

"That must be lonely. Why are you the only one? Is it hard?"

"I don't know exactly why I'm the only one. It might just be that I happen to be the only person with magic in my entire world, but that would be weird. But it would also be weird if lots of people had magic and I was the only one who'd ever noticed."

He frowns. "I can do some magic. I can -" and he can, now, it's strange, yesterday this wouldn't have worked if he'd tried it and it is not just the additional information present here, it's something else, but - 

a chair spins around on the ground. "I should be able to pick it up, too, I think I'm pushing wrong."

"That's odd," says Matilda. "Didn't you say only the Valar can move things around like that? Or was I not understanding right?"

"I did say that but then I thought about it and realized it'd work." He creased his brow. "I don't know why I thought so. I don't know how opinions about that got inside my head. That's kind of weird."

Matilda ponders this.

"...I wonder," she says slowly, "if my magic comes with opinions about what you can do with it. And is transmissible. If you weren't telekinetic before I flew you, but now you're telekinetic and somehow knew it even before you tried..."

"That would explain it! We could test that by sending a messenger to people in other cities, asking if they can do things like this, and then seeing whether they can after they learn it can be done, or after meeting us, or after witnessing enough of it..."

"Yes, that's a good idea."

"I am ordering a messenger sent to Valimar with the following news. Firstly, they need a number of people, possibly children of sixteen or so like us, and they should ask if these children can move things with their minds. Then they should confirm it is possible and ask again. Then they should describe having witnessed it, ask the children if they saw the flying house, and ask again. Then they should send the children here to meet us, if none of them can move things with their minds yet. That should do it," he says, switching languages as he addresses himself to Matilda again.

"A good start," she agrees. "Wait, sixteen?"

"You look a little older than me but not much. Are you twenty?"

"I'm six. But that's in Earth years, which might not have anything to do with any local unit of time, and I guess there's also no reason why humans and Eldar should age at the same rate."

"Oh. Yeah. We'll have to wait a little while and see if our years are the same length. When I was six I was about this tall -" he gestures.

"How do you keep time here? On Earth there are approximately three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, and days are divided into twenty-four hours each, and an hour has sixty minutes and a minute has sixty seconds. And a week is seven days and a a month is about four weeks; there are twelve months in a year and they have irregular lengths for historical reasons."

"We don't divide into units smaller than half-days. There are seventeen hundred twenty eight days in a year."

"That's a lot of days. If your years are the same length as ours, your days would only be a few hours long. Do you subdivide the year at all?"

"There are fourteen months for the Valar, but they don't matter very much. And there are six days in a week."

"...How long are the months? Are they one hundred and twenty-three days each? That would leave a week over, which would be tidy."

"One hundred twenty, and then there are miscellaneous festivals."

"Oh, what are the festivals, then?"

"The festival of awakening - that's three weeks - the festival of arrival - that's three more - my birthday - that's a week - father's birthday, Ingwë's birthday, Ingwion's birthday - all of those are one week - the festival of harvest, the festival of reunion, the festival of Manwë..."

"I guess you probably don't have written calendars since until today you didn't have writing..."

"We do not have written calendars. We do have notation for math, but I don't know it."

"Ooh, I want to learn it!"

"Yeah, I'm sure you'd be good at it. I can ask someone to tutor you. You'll need to know Quenya first, though."

"Well, speak Quenya to me, then," she giggles.

"Audiences with my father were never much fun but they were more tolerable before the remarriage and now he doesn't even pronounce my mother's name properly, he adopted the pronunciation of it that she hates, and his wife is there and she's just so sad that I don't want to be a family she's a very loving person don't you know and I hate her and I know it's the Valar's fault but still she could have not done it."

"That sounds really unpleasant," says Matilda. "I'm sorry. What's the right way to say your mother's name?"

"Therindë. I still say it that way."

"Okay, I'll remember that."

"It means 'needleworker' because she did most of her magic and craft and invention on embroidery. She was really good at it. She made me so many clothes for when I would get bigger, while she was pregnant, and then I was born and she got sick and died."

"That's really sad and I want to hug you again."

"Okay. I don't usually like hugs but you're not much like my father or his wife."

So Matilda hugs him.

After a minute he turns back to the alphabet. "Is your Jenny okay? She seemed a little stressed."

"Jenny is okay!" she affirms.

"Does she also want to learn Quenya for the audience with the King, or are you going to translate?"

"I can translate. She wouldn't learn as fast as me."

"Is she Teleri?"

Matilda giggles. "No. She loves learning, she's just not as fast at it as I am."

"Okay. We'll teach her Quenya later. You must be very fast, if you are really six and your years are short. I wish I grew that fast."

"Why? I don't think I'd like growing any faster than I do."

"I"m really tired of being a little kid and people not taking me seriously and people assuming I just need a mother whenever I need, you know, tools or space or other reasonable things they'd believe a grownup about needing."

"Oh. Yes, that makes sense. I bet it's really frustrating if people do that all the time."

"They do. And sometimes I can order them out of it but not all the time and I don't really like doing that."

"If you want to spend all your time in my house now, you can do that. Jenny is good at taking people seriously."

"I want that a lot but it wouldn't be allowed and people'd be very sad and angry that I asked."

"Oh." She frowns. "That's no good."

"No. Do you get to live wherever you want?"

"I got to live with Jenny when I wanted to live with Jenny." She finds that her Quenya is not quite up to rendering this explanation, so - "My original parents didn't like me very much and I didn't like them very much either and then they wanted to leave town and I didn't so I asked them to let Jenny adopt me and they said yes."

"Lucky."

"Yes. I think people shouldn't make you live where you don't want to live," she says.

"I agree. I think most people think kids should live with their parents though."

"It would've been really bad if I'd had to live with my parents until I was all the way grown up."

He nods fervently. "I'm going to leave as soon as I possibly can."

"I wonder if I can help somehow."

"Maybe. But it's not a being-smart problem, those I usually solve."

"Sometimes being smart isn't the thing. Sometimes it's being - how would you borrow 'telekinetic' into Quenya? And sometimes it's not either of those and it's something else instead."

His face lights up and he starts testing out ways of borrowing telekinetic. It's actually pretty close to allowable as is; Quenya has all the sounds and most of the sound clusters are permitted.

This is a fun and rewarding activity. Languages! Yay!

"I bet you're good enough at talking to meet the King if you want to," he says after a few minutes.

"Okay. I think I should probably go do that. Will they prefer Jenny to be there even though I'll have to translate everything for her?"

"Think so."

"Then I'll bring her. Should I just go to the palace and say that I heard the king wanted to speak to us?"

"Yes, though you might have to wait a while, I'm not sure."

"I'll bring books."

She acquires Jenny and a backpack and puts books and snacks in the backpack and flies herself and Jenny and the backpack to the palace, where she lands in front of the most front-door-ish-looking door.

The palace is very large and shiny and beautiful. People at the door welcome her in and welcome her to Tirion and to Valinor.

"Thanks! It's a nice place!" she says. "I heard the King might want to talk to us, is that right?"

The King is indeed eager to meet with the newcomers who landed a castle in his realm. An audience can be arranged.

Matilda is pleased to hear it! Where should they go to wait for their audience?

They are shown to a very very elaborate room that seems to be made of glowing stone, with detailed engravings everywhere and everything gilded or silvered or otherwise shiny!

Matilda is delighted and fascinated by all the shiny things! (Jenny is shy and wallflowery.)

And then they are shown before the King and Queen. The King and Queen are both extremely pretty and rather covered in jewelry and exceptionally well-dressed and the throne room is eye-popping.

"Hello!" says Matilda to the King and Queen. "My name is Matilda, and this is Jenny, who doesn't speak Quenya yet. It's lovely to meet you."

"It is a pleasure to meet you as well, Matilda. We were surprised and concerned when a house fell out of the sky, but it seems there could have been much worse circumstances surrounding it. New people in Valinor are a delight to us. Tell us about yourselves."

"What do you mean by 'it seems there could have been much worse circumstances', exactly?" she wonders.

"If a house dropped on my city, I would expect much worse than a world-hopping small child and her mother."

"Oh, I see. Yes, that makes sense," says Matilda. "Well, we're from a planet called Earth, and I think the years are a different length there but I don't yet know how different, and on Earth I'm six years old. There was a bad magical accident that I don't understand very well and our house got knocked out of our world and fell between lots of other worlds for a long time, and we ended up above your city because it was the first place I could put us that had air. Your city is really nice and pretty and I like it a lot!"

"Thank you! The Valar will help you figure out whether it is a good idea for you to go back to Earth or stay here, but you are welcome in the meantime!"

"Thank you very much," she says. "Fëanáro let me put my house on some of his land, which was very nice of him. I think we'll be good friends."

"I hope so," he says. "The prince Curufinwë has been very kind and resourceful."

Matilda beams happily.

"Tell me more of this Earth you come from. Is Eru known there? The Valar?"

"I hadn't ever heard of Eru or the Valar before I came here. I don't think there's anything at all like the Valar going around doing things noticeably on Earth, or I would've noticed," she says.

He nods gravely. "What about people? How many of you are there? How are your lives?"

"There's about - twelve to the ninth power of us," she says, discovering partway through this sentence that she doesn't know Quenya number-words that go that high. Maybe there aren't any yet. "Mostly people are okay but sometimes bad things happen."

"That is a ....lot of people. There aren't that many people here. Not even close."

"There have been people on Earth for a while and there keep being more," says Matilda.

"...I gather. We are very new to this land."

"You have a really nice city for it being so new!"

He beams. "Thank you! What do you like most?"

"I like that you make everything so pretty! It makes me want to learn architecture so I can build lots of beautiful houses. And then learn everything else so I can decorate them all with sculptures and tapestries and so on. You are all very good at making beautiful things and it's really inspiring."

They are very flattered, and say so, and invite her to learn all these things.

"I will!" says Matilda, happily.

And they wish her well and this apparently concludes the audience.

So Matilda and Jenny fly back to their house.

Where he is reading her encyclopedias. "These are the most amazing things I've ever seen!!!'

"Aren't they neat? It would be fun to translate them into Quenya, I bet!"

"We need to! But I want to finish reading them first and I have a list for you of words I don't know!"

"Okay!" Matilda will happily explain all the words on the list.

He is appreciative and also he wants to keep reading he hasn't finished them all yet. He definitely hasn't remembered to ask her how the audience went.

Well, she won't bring it up if he doesn't. Playing with languages is much more fun. Matilda can work on testing and refining the future Quenya alphabet while Fëanáro reads encyclopedias!

Fëanáro is not going to stop reading encyclopedias until he has read all of them.

Gosh. That's a lot of reading. Matilda might need to spend some time sleeping while Fëanáro is reading all her encyclopedias.

Right, sleeping, that is a thing people do. Fëanáro does not do it much and even less since his father got married and even less now that reading exists.

No one in this house is going to pester him about bedtimes. Jenny and Matilda go to sleep and wake up and acquire breakfast from the kitchen and offer him some in case he is hungry.

He is! And also he would love to taste their food what interesting food what is it made of?

It is made of various things! Matilda knows what many of the foods are made of and Jenny knows some of the rest and would Fëanáro like to try chocolates, there are chocolates. You open the chocolate box and take out as many chocolates as there are people present and close the box and then everyone eats theirs, it's fun!

He would definitely like to try chocolates, and also learn where they're from and how they're made.

Matilda actually isn't sure about the process here! But from examining their structure she guesses that it probably involves melting the chocolate part and pouring it over the other stuff? Maybe somewhere in this world there are cocoa beans from which chocolate can be made. Someone should find out.

Everything grows in Valinor, there are definitely cocoa beans. The two of the should figure it out once Fëanáro can fly.

That sounds like a great idea!

He tries it on the spot. It does not work. "Do I need to build up from small things?"

"Maybe. We can try that and see if it works. Here, float a pen." She offers him a pen.

He can definitely float a pen. He does not seem nearly as delighted by this as someone should be.

"You're already picking it up much faster than I did! Okay, now try some other things." She looks around the living room and summons a procession of increasingly heavy objects - a bag of caramels, a book, a chair, a desk.

Book yes, chair no. He is very disappointed by this.

"If you can do it at all, you can get better at it," says Matilda. "I spent hours staring at small objects to try to make them move. But staring at small objects for hours is really boring compared to reading encyclopedias, so no hurry, I guess."

"Yeah, I can't think of anything I need moved as much as I need to read everything."

"If I ever find a way to go back and forth between here and Earth, you'll have lots of things to read. I did the math once and people are writing books faster than even I could read them all."

"That's amazing. I don't think it'll happen here," he calculates, "since we have less people and writing is much slower than reading."

"Well, when we run out of books to read we can write more!"

"I don't want to wait that long! We have to build some of the things in your encyclopedias, too."

Matilda giggles. "Yeah! And reinvent chocolate. Definitely reinvent chocolate."

"There are so many things to invent," he says, sounding mildly distressed by it.

"Is that bad?"

"Don't you sometimes feel sad you haven't invented them all yet?"

"Oh. No, I feel happy and excited that I'm not going to run out of fun interesting things to do," she says.

"But what if you're not good enough until you've already done them?"

"I don't think I've ever thought that way," says Matilda. "I'm not sure if I think 'not good enough' is even a thing people can be."

"Not for most people, because they don't kill their mothers."

"...Um...?"

"No one else has ever done that. So I have to do a lot more just to be as good as they were born."

"...I don't think I agree with that," says Matilda. "But I guess I don't know exactly what happened. But I bet even if I did I wouldn't think you had to invent every good thing it's possible to think of just to be as good as someone that didn't happen to."

"It's not really what I believe, it's more how I feel. But yeah."

"It sounds like a really sad way to feel. Can I hug you again?"

"Okay."

Hug.

"I think you're a good person and I'm glad you exist. It was hard and scary being here and not knowing hardly anything about where I was and having that awful headache, and you helped and made it good and fun instead. And I want to be your friend and invent lots of great things with you."

"Well all of that's easy to do, at least. And we've already invented a lot of things and it's only been two days, so right now I am pretty okay."

"That's good. I'm glad you're okay right now."

"And if we keep inventing cool things I'll keep being okay."

"I will help you invent lots of cool things."

"Are we satisfied with this alphabet? If so we should decide how we're going to get everyone to adopt it."

"Do you think other people would be as excited about encyclopedias as you are? Or - the encyclopedia is really long, maybe our first translation project should be something shorter. Oh! Do you know anyone else who might have fun or be useful helping us test the alphabet and decide if we're satisfied with it and improve it if we aren't?"

'Only people who work for my father and right now I'm mad at all of them. Your mother, maybe?"

"I'll ask Jenny, then."

She finds Jenny. Jenny learns the latest iteration of the alphabet and declares it beautiful and easy to write in and all of its characters distinguishable from the rest.

"Good so now we just have to introduce it to everyone. Should we give a speech?"

"Maybe. Is that what people do when they invent new exciting things everyone shoud know about? I was thinking we could invent typewriters and write some books with the typewriters and then give people the books, but actually maybe we should tell people about the alphabet before we do that."

"It could take us a Year to write all those books, I think. Then everyone else will be behind. A speech might be the wrong approach - maybe an art exhibit?"

"Ooh! How would you loan the word 'calligraphy' into Quenya?" she wonders, with an osanwë summary of the concept. "We could write down words and sentences and people's names all pretty and then people would want to learn how to write so they could do that too!"

"That's exactly the sort of thing that'll work! calligraphy. caliñafië? I don't particularly like that, let's think of something better..."

"It sounds all right but I bet we can do better..." She suggests a few variants.

"Normally I wouldn't invent words this fast, it's such an important job! But we're going to need so many of them..."

"Yeah. Well, we can come up with ones that we think sound good, and other people can invent alternatives if they disagree, and people will use the one they like best, and I think it'll work out okay."

"But what if there are lots of words for the same thing and it's confusing and makes it hard for people to learn from each other?"

"There's lots of different words for the same or really similar things in English, and I think it's a nice way for a language to be. It could confuse people but mostly it doesn't. Are Eldar more easily confused?"

"We love inventing words and have lots and lots of words for very closely related things and sometimes for the same one with different emphases. But it's all deliberate."

"Oh. That's different from what I'm used to but I think it's also a nice way for a language to be..."

"Your language is nice but not very Eldarin at all, you can tell just by listening to it that you're a different kind of being."

Matilda giggles.

"I wish I were one of whatever you are. Especially if you get big faster."

"Human," she says, "in English. Are there things other than getting big faster that sound nice about being it?"

"You have books."

"Soon the Eldar will also have books."

"Yeah, but you guys came up with the idea on your own."

"I bet you would've thought of them eventually."

"Maybe another good thing about humans is that you're faster."

"I do like being fast!" says Matilda. "Although I haven't really tried being slow and I might turn out to like it too."

"I doubt it. It's not very pleasant."

"Sometimes things that are pleasant for one person are unpleasant for a different person. My birth mother really liked playing bingo and hated reading books, and I'm the opposite way."

"But you're smart," he says. "So you like smart interesting people things."

"I think there's multiple ways to be smart and like things as a smart person!"

"Yeah but no smart people like going slow."

"I haven't met every smart person so I don't know how I'd know that."

"You can notice patterns."

"I've only had six years to meet people in!"

"I keep forgetting that. You're as big as me."

"I guess I still don't know how long six years is. But I think it's less than six of your years."

"Well, you've been here for almost a day now, are your days much longer than ours are?"

"...I have no idea," says Matilda. "Wow, I really lost track of time. I'd better get a - do you have clocks?" She summons one from a nearby shelf and looks at it. It says six-thirty.

"Another thing we need to invent?"

"They tell time, it's useful!"

"Tell it? How? To everyone who walks by or just you?"

"These parts go around," she indicates the hands of the clock, "and point at numbers, and they go around very steadily, so it takes exactly an hour for this one to go all the way around and exactly twelve hours for that one. So if the long one and the short one are both pointing at the six, it's been six and a half hours since the last time they both pointed at the twelve."

"That's neat. Let's make some of those to show people too."

"Okay! We can find a different one to take apart since I'm using this one to tell how long a day is."

"You have several? I'll go find one."

"Okay."

There are indeed multiple clocks in the house. There's one over there!

He starts dismantling it. "Your craftsmanship is extraordinary."

"Clocks are neat! Hmm, what's a good word for clock..."

They pick one. He disassembles it and reassembles it and announces he could probably make one, perhaps they should set up a storefront in King's Square for Earth things...

What a great idea!

"I'm not actually sure how to acquire one. I can't just go ask someone to leave."

"Do you know how people normally get storefronts?"

"Build them, I guess, but now there's no more space in King's Square..."