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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
And then she has peace and quiet.
subtly_artistic
Okay, so, the obvious solution to the problem is to get her spell working.
Sheeeee has no pivot points on anything mind-affecting, she's been steering well clear so far. She might be able to do it by arts; this will inhibit mass production but she's not sure there's ever going to be a demand for mass production.
She gives herself a week and a half to get solid, sustainable, sufficient-to-replace-boats-and-horses-for-personal-travel flight done, pivots from the leaping around spell and some air elementalist vagueness. Flies around, does not fall out of the sky. She'll be able to get to and fro when Miriel's appointment comes due, and visit Fëanáro if he doesn't just decide to try to swim it or something. ...She hopes he does not decide to try to swim it.
And from there she stares at her notes and thinks about walling off herself from the sliding of time, arts or arcana, either will do -
Sheeeee has no pivot points on anything mind-affecting, she's been steering well clear so far. She might be able to do it by arts; this will inhibit mass production but she's not sure there's ever going to be a demand for mass production.
She gives herself a week and a half to get solid, sustainable, sufficient-to-replace-boats-and-horses-f
And from there she stares at her notes and thinks about walling off herself from the sliding of time, arts or arcana, either will do -
He does not try to swim it. Though Ossë always spares a bit of his attention for fishing stupid Elves out of the water, so it would not have been disastrous. He goes back to Tirion with his tearful parents and they have lots of long talks as a family and Fëanáro obsesses over time and whether he is missing out on it.
subtly_artistic
Bella is due in to briefly restore Miriel's memory before she has a mindshield down. (But she has a functioning watch, which is her first legit magic item, and she thinks it will help. She has another in her pocket.) She lands in front of the palace and goes looking for Fëanáro first.
Fëanáro's library is being built. He's sitting outside watching the stone moved into place and typing and watching paint dry, quite literally: there are eighty slightly different swatches of it on a flat stone next to him.
"Hi. I don't think I'm mad at you but I feel mad and sad now that you're here."
subtly_artistic
"I'm sorry, if that helps. I got you a present, though." She digs into her pocket for the watch; it's a wooden bracelet with a flat rectangular panel in the middle of the smaller beads and numerals slowly changing. "It keeps time."
He reaches out and grabs it. Examines it. "How does it work? Are you going to stay here, or have you not fixed it yet?
And thank you."
And thank you."
subtly_artistic
"I haven't fixed it yet; this is just a quick visit. You're welcome. I dug out the bit of a bunch of spells that makes them only last a certain amount of time, shrank it, and it runs that down so it's counting seconds and hours of the day, and then I stared at my knife trying to figure out how magic was attached to it until it made sense, and then I had three failed prototypes before I got these two to work. I got somebody who could see the treelight from the island to tell me when it was Mingling to set them; they flip over to zero when silver goes white and then count up until it happens again."
"I haven't accomplished anything."
subtly_artistic
"...you do seem to be literally watching paint dry but I was imagining you had a reason."
"Oh, that's an experiment." He scowls. "It didn't bother me until I knew but now that I know I feel like I'm going crazy."
Hug. For like five seconds, then he gets wiggly. "I'm a hundred of your plane's years old, I should already have solved everything."
subtly_artistic
She unhugs when he's done. "I'm working on the thing. I decided to do it by spell instead of by subtle arts, because it's really hard to do subtle arts on oneself and it admits of less experimentation, and I think I know most of the pieces I need to figure out."
"Can you tell me about it? I still have four spells left. Maybe five. Some days I can do fifteen cantrips."
subtly_artistic
"I don't have a scroll of it or anything, but I can give you a structural idea -"
She's starting from introspective understanding of what the sliding feels like versus its absence; she paid attention on the boat ride, and on her flight over here, to what the change felt like, and thinks she's identified - in hopelessly subtle-artsy terms, but she tries to translate them - exactly what's changing and by what avenues. She's heard of mind defense spells; arcana and subtle arts don't exactly interact, but they can both operate on the same basic stuff, and she's reverse-engineered what she remembers of defensive mental enchantments to figure out what the effects and required mana expenditure might look like. That tells her that she needs more than these three things she's sure are essential - probably - she might be able to make a stripped down version but only when she's seen one working in full -
She's starting from introspective understanding of what the sliding feels like versus its absence; she paid attention on the boat ride, and on her flight over here, to what the change felt like, and thinks she's identified - in hopelessly subtle-artsy terms, but she tries to translate them - exactly what's changing and by what avenues. She's heard of mind defense spells; arcana and subtle arts don't exactly interact, but they can both operate on the same basic stuff, and she's reverse-engineered what she remembers of defensive mental enchantments to figure out what the effects and required mana expenditure might look like. That tells her that she needs more than these three things she's sure are essential - probably - she might be able to make a stripped down version but only when she's seen one working in full -
"Why d'you think Manwë said he couldn't do it? If you can do it?"
subtly_artistic
"I'm not sure. I mean, maybe he could but it would be really hard to figure out and he has too much other stuff to do, or he doesn't know enough about my species, or something; he just said it was a general effect and he couldn't except me from it."
"I don't think he has much other stuff to do. I'm not really sure what Kings do all day."
subtly_artistic
"I don't know either, but there could be a lot of it and I wouldn't necessarily have noticed him doing it by going and seeing him."
He huffs grumpily. Turns back to the typewriter. "Are you here to see my mom?"
subtly_artistic
"Yeah. It won't take long. I can stay a few hours after that if you want me to."