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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
Fëanáro turns ten. The whole city has a minor festival for this, which lasts a week. Major festivals last three.
subtly_artistic
Bella thinks this is a little long for a festival, but she has adjusted to thinking of a Valinor festival more like 'Khersentide season' than like specific holidays which last one day.
She should really get a calendar or something, she wasn't keeping track and might have forgotten if people weren't hyped up about the festival. Do they do birthday presents here? She puts in some very concentrated work and turns up with a dovetail of feather fall and expeditious retreat and a principle stolen from assorted cantrips and winds up with a spell that does, not quite flying, but really very impressive soft-fall jumping around if he'd care to leap medium-sized buildings in a single bound. She presents this to him in a scroll tied up with ribbon. "Happy birthday!"
She should really get a calendar or something, she wasn't keeping track and might have forgotten if people weren't hyped up about the festival. Do they do birthday presents here? She puts in some very concentrated work and turns up with a dovetail of feather fall and expeditious retreat and a principle stolen from assorted cantrips and winds up with a spell that does, not quite flying, but really very impressive soft-fall jumping around if he'd care to leap medium-sized buildings in a single bound. She presents this to him in a scroll tied up with ribbon. "Happy birthday!"
He is utterly delighted with it and has somehow not spent all his magic for the day yet and until the spell expires no one can hold a conversation with him because he is in fact leaping every medium-sized building in sight.
subtly_artistic
The spell lasts about a minute and a half. It is every bit as adorable as she predicted.
Rúmil's presumably around, right?
Rúmil's presumably around, right?
He is! His gift to Fëanáro is a number of elaborate instruments for calligraphy.
subtly_artistic
"I had to put that spell together really fast," Bella murmurs, when Fëanáro's visible leaping a few blocks away. "The date snuck up on me. Has anybody invented the wall calendar?"
"I don't think they have. You did very well for so little notice. Wall calendar? Just a paper with dates to cross off?"
subtly_artistic
"Yeah. And sometimes a picture on the opposite side of the page for every month but I don't need that part."
"I am sure if you mention the idea to someone, one will be on your door as soon as the festival's over."
subtly_artistic
"Have I mentioned lately I like gift economies? Well, this one, I probably wouldn't like all possible gift economies."
"I think it only works among people who like creating things and who have enough of all the things they really need."
"It certainly suits the Noldor very well. That was a very generous present you gave Fëanáro."
subtly_artistic
"I thought he'd like it and it looks like I was right. I have this vain hope that when he knows enough different spells he'll be paralyzed with just enough indecision not to use them all up before breakfast every time he wakes up."
"I think when he's twenty or so he'll have learned some restraint. I hope. If not, perhaps he'll just be so powerful he can't use them all so quickly."
"Let's just hope he doesn't ask the rest of us to cast it on him all day."
"You are a wise woman, Bella."
"Did we determine how much longer the years here are than the years on your plane?"
subtly_artistic
"...You know, I actually got a set of hourglasses once they were available and I never confirmed that days are the same, but my sleep schedule's not slipping weirdly or anything... Uh, year at home is three hundred sixty five days."
"A year here is seventeen hundred twenty-eight days."
subtly_artistic
"I, um."
Bella grabs some scratch paper and does some arithmetic.
"And I've been here about a - year?"
"Yes," he says, "you have."