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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.
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subtly_artistic
"I don't want to go back. We're so fast here! I feel so much more alive!"
subtly_artistic
"I know, I know. But it probably really hurt her feelings that you said that."
"But she doesn't love me, she just pretends, and she's awful to you."
subtly_artistic
"I can't explain the details of her treatment but I can tell you that I don't want you to resent her on my behalf."
"I always thought if I was good enough at everything she'd come back and she did come back and it didn't make everything better and I didn't start feeling like I was good enough."
subtly_artistic
Bella picks him up and hugs him. "You've read through all my textbooks by now, right?"
"Yeah of course."
subtly_artistic
"I am pretty sure there is a part in one of them about how people often think they'll feel better if some thing outside them happens, and sometimes they're right, but usually not if the thing they don't feel good about is themselves. That's not going to just fix itself when something happens to you."
"Right but your textbooks are for people who can't fix their problems by inventing things and becoming beloved by everyone. Obviously that's a better way to fix problems if you can do it, it's just they mostly can't."
"The textbooks wouldn't know. People who can invent things and become beloved by everyone are really rare."
subtly_artistic
"Okay: the background assumption is that this entire class of things doesn't work. What makes you think that it's different for you just because you can invent more things?"
"Because I can invent things that no one else could possibly do, things that fix all the things wrong with the world, and lots of why people are sad is because things wrong with the world. Like your world. Probably has more sad people in it, right?"
subtly_artistic
"Yes, it does, but the paragraph I'm talking about is about self-esteem, not situational depression like 'oh no my family was eaten by a dragon' or 'oh no I live in poverty'."
"I think I had situational depression about my parents not loving me which I thought was situational depression about my mother dying and my father grieving."
"I think he tries."
"What do I do now, though? I don't want to go home."
"That was before I yelled things and hurt their feelings."
subtly_artistic
"...Yeah, that probably didn't help, did they say that since that happened you can't stay a few weeks after all?"
"They just looked super sad and my mother said 'I love you' but she's not good at lying and I ran away."
subtly_artistic
Khersis Dei on a stick. Squeeze the kid; this is the prescribed response: squeeze. "She doesn't have as much practice as she should by now because she was gone for so long."