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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.
subtly_artistic
Fëanáro has requisitioned three blocks in the center of the city for a library. It only has one book so far but it is going to have more of them and his first official, serious decree, which he gets dressed up for and makes before his father's court, is that anyone who writes a book can get it copied for the royal libraries.
He can cast fourteen cantrips a day and usually uses them all within ten minutes of waking up.
He can cast fourteen cantrips a day and usually uses them all within ten minutes of waking up.
subtly_artistic
Bella does not rely on him for systematic magical research assistance. But he now knows all the nondamaging spells she has.
And she has other people to rely on for systemic magical research assistance. Olórin remains delighted to help, and eager for the first accidental explosion; Rúmil is writing a grand history of Arda but is happy to work on magic with her whenever he doesn't have a pair of eyes for that project.
subtly_artistic
Bella is sometimes his eyes for that. She doesn't read very fast in Quenya yet, so she can get it at almost full speed even focusing on the part of the paper he needs looked at.
She gets a written (well, actually, looks like it's been embossed into the page) invitation to give a talk to Aulë and his Maiar and his students.
subtly_artistic
She has more than high school curriculum to talk about now! She plans two hours of "how to read scrolls", "derived principles of spellcraft", and "the future of wizarding research and invention", puts together another copy of the lot of the spells extant to pass around, meditates on her nervousness around Valar/public speaking/being Not A Real Wizard (...she kind of is one now), and schedules a day.
Mahtan offers to come into town and walk her there, in case she'd like the company or is nervous because it would be quite understandable. He is very famous and well-regarded and this is only partially attributable to Bella happening to give him the idea of glass first.
He arrives, with Nerdanel who has grown several inches and a younger girl who is even smaller than Nerdanel when they first met. "Bella, my apprentices," he says, beaming. "I have been accused of nepotism but I insist my daughters just happened to be the most talented children in the business. You've met Nerdanel. This is Hyellindë."
subtly_artistic
"Hello again, Nerdanel; it's lovely to meet you, Hyellindë." Bella can pretty much converse in Quenya now.
"We're looking forward to your talk," he says. "Or should we discuss any subject at all but that?"
subtly_artistic
"It's okay, I don't think I'm going to really freak out until I see the whole audience."
"Could ask them not to take material form," Nerdanel says, giggling. "The Valar are so excited about your kind of magic, they've never heard anything like it."
"And they've been working so hard on their forms," Hyellindë says, like a proud parent. "It's very tricky for them."
"Oooh," Nerdanel says, "Yavanna explained it to me. See, we're all made of really really small pieces, impossibly small, and they're all folded in specific ways into slightly larger pieces called proteins that are the building blocks of people. But the reason proteins fold the way they do is because of the laws of the universe, and around the Valar the laws of the universe just sort of - forget what they're doing, and in a Vala the same pieces won't fold into proteins, so they have to manually shape them into the right way and then keep them like that. They are so so much smarter than us that they can do that, and after a lot of practice it only takes about a hundred times as much attention as we have to start with, but it's still a lot."
subtly_artistic
"...Wow. Why do they need proteins? If they're so small? They'd look right if they used whatever the smallest visible piece was to build themselves. Visible to Eldar."
"Oh, they can look right pretty easily. Most of the ones that just materialize and reappear and stuff are doing that, just trying to look right. But if they want to try our foods, hear our songs the way we hear them, use our magic, they have to be us, not just look us-like. So lots of them have learned how to do at least one properly incarnate body. Lots of them haven't, you just mostly don't see those ones around."
"Yavanna's pretty cool," she says, skipping along. "It's too bad her domain is plants, they're not very interesting."
Mahtan sighs.
Mahtan sighs.
"What am I supposed to do with them?"
subtly_artistic
"Arrange them into bouquets? Eat them? Turn them into woodcarvings? Bonsai them?"
"Yeah, exactly," she says.