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.
He can cast fourteen cantrips a day and usually uses them all within ten minutes of waking up.
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.
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."
"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."
"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."
"You can make stone and metalwork that does anything, all kinds of magic, and even without magic you can turn it into all kinds of things, and you don't have to do the same thing twice, and you're making things instead of just reducing them interestingly - I don't mean any offense to Yavanna or people who like plants, those just aren't very - they're not going to change Valinor."
"That's kind of the hope in having interdisciplinary talks like this one," Mahtan says, "that things which are very hard from one angle, or not approached as a problem because the discipline has different tools, turn out to be tractable in a different approach that wouldn't have occurred to anyone. Of course, we usually don't get to reach so far as another world for inspiration."
The Eldar are easier to read and also enjoy the talk tremendously.
Afterwards there is an elaborate dinner with lots and lots of courses and Nerdanel whispers that they just keep going forever, she thinks, but that one can ask for desserts when one is supposed to go home and sleep and then get desserts and then leave. Nerdanel is on her left and a Maia named Mairon who has a particularly nice face and is almost good at moving it the way humans do is on her right.
Mairon tries after a while to expand on the question someone had asked her after the talk. "All of our power in the world either works by singing to Creation or by ordering everything at the smallest conceivable level. This seems like it's operating on some scale in between those, and one more accessible to incarnate minds, which is appealing."
"Not as much as you might think? Some, at the higher tiers, and I think sylphs and a couple others are actually so short-lived that it makes it hard for them to get anywhere on a worldwide scale, but humans are represented in most fields. Maybe just because there's lots of us so there's more prodigious talents? I haven't looked at the per capita share."
"Um, the closest thing that comes to mind is a spell called 'atonement', which I don't remember a lot about and it's divine magic. It wouldn't do free will outright, I think - I'm not sure there's anything on my plane that lacks it to start out - but it might work on an oath." (She has been thinking about this for reasons.) "It's very fuzzy divine stuff but the popular conception is that the caster can discharge somebody's mistake onto themselves and then it's easier to clear, it's more of an energy cost than anything else."
"I don't know any of it to start out, and the resident divinities are a lot different and don't ultimately run on divine magic," she says. "There's some cross-domain applicability between arcane and divine, so I'll have a better idea of whether I'll ever get to the point of being able to figure it out in a few years. Well, figure it out without resorting to planar shifting the applied theology section of a library from my plane into my house."
"Going and getting them would be. I think staying firmly in Valinor and just sort of summoning books would be okay. Well, in terms of antagonizing the universe; it would be stealing. I'd probably want to do it with a Vala looking over my shoulder just to be really sure but my plane hasn't done a single thing to me or anybody else since I've been here."
"Um, resurrection spells do that - dead people go to one of several afterlife planes. And an overlapping set of planes produce summonable animals, which have some combat use so of course that's the thing everyone summons. And I think there's a thaumaturgical debate about whether, like, fire spells are just generating fire or if they're summoning it from the Elemental Plane of Fire? 'Summon Library Stack' would be new but not conceptually unprecedented."
He laughs, stretches his arms in a motion that's almost humanlike. "I imagine we could have managed it. Melkor had allies in all kinds of forms in the last war. Our fortune in getting you has almost nothing to do with what they could have sent through instead. Though if it'd landed in the palace with the baby prince that might have caused problems."
"Some of the Eldar didn't agree to come here. I'm not sure how they'd feel if we went and spruced up their homeland. I know even less about the peoples of distant lands. I am sure there are some who'd want to first ask Eru's counsel, too, though -" he waves a hand - "we might not be interpreting Eru correctly, if I do say so myself."
"Well, Valinor in a general sense, not necessarily in any specific aesthetic or politics or layout or anything. If there's somebody who objects to arbitrary plants being edible or the eventual availability of launderers or not having to keep everybody you know within arm's reach all the time lest something eat them I'd love to hear their arguments."
"CanI send you research notes occasionally? I would like to work on figuring out whether your magic has access to some kind of interpreter that allows it to do the same things we're doing with much less precise control, and if the answer is that it does, and we know the fundamental results that we're trying to achieve, your project would be one of understanding the function of the interpreter and possibly how it was created. I do not particularly expect this to work, but I think it's worth examining."
"My universe has a lot of power structures that don't form a sensible hierarchy with each other. 'The universe' is what we call the thing that prohibits science, and it does it by, well, being the universe - it can make science unrewarding at best and counterproductive or lethal at worst. Here, it's not the universe and doesn't have being the universe privileges; but wizardry might run on something else that doesn't answer directly to the universe, at least outside its jurisdiction."
"We are eventually going to pardon Melkor, in exchange for his aid on a task no other could attempt, and the immediate aftermath of that attempt is unknown to us because mercy and a second chance cannot be granted with full knowledge. Many Years after that new lights will rise above Arda and new races will be born to it, and they will war, but through tragedy and horror some of the Elves will meet them and aid them, as will I, and eventually they will multiply and fill the whole world save Valinor, and have great and terrible kings and build great and terrible things."
"Melkor's pardon is inevitable unless you happen to find the means to break oaths; the problem that only he can fix is that there are people sworn to him who have orders right now to do harm, and he can resolve it by telling them they are free to go live their lives, and we must attempt to aid them. Melkor's pardon may be for the good anyway; we can pledge ourselves to better courses. The arrival of Men is not for three hundred Years. That seems enough time for you to be quite a disruptive force."
"It's less concentrated - not just one Melkor doing everything unpleasant like it's his calling - and the tools to address it are way different, magic and subtle arts and every third person you meet being really into swords and people going epic; and the variety of afterlives and etiquette sometimes being a matter of life or death in the most arbitrary ways and a hundred kinds of people instead of like three; and there not being hardly any benign authority figures to go to for help."
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 goes home to her hourglass set. Six seconds, least casting of illusory sound. Ten of those to a minute, sixty minutes to an hour, twenty-four hours in a day.
She compares and does arithmetic. She can ballpark some of it without having to sit around all day, she has old notes on how much sand and how big the aperture -
And she sits back in her chair.
Something is desperately wrong with her sense of time and it's so wrong that she didn't notice - didn't even have the niggling urge to check - for a decade -
"I'm like thirty," she murmurs. "I'm like thirty and I didn't notice. The minutes feel about right but the days are twice as long as mine and I couldn't even tell, I've been here for a decade and I don't have a decade's worth of anything to show for it -"
"And that would be really impressive for a year and solidly respectable for two and, like, good try, if it were five, and it's been ten, I have had ten years in a science fantasy paradise with all the help I can think of how to use and negligible side demands on my time and I do not yet hold all time and space in the palms of my hands -!"
"Maybe my standards are unrealistic but this still isn't ten years' worth of anything. That's a third of my entire life, I have now spent a third of my life here and I have not gotten a third of my total absorption of information and production of work done and it should have been more than that because the first third I spent being a small child and the first two thirds I spent in a universe that bites if you try to do things -"
"I - I don't understand how this could have even happened in the first place," she says slowly. "I can see not noticing the days being long, maybe it turns out I rely a lot on noticing how tired I am for feeling when in the day it is and the Trees are perking me up so it feels like one day per day, I can buy that I'd miss a factor of two, that way. I can lose hours between sleeps and it makes sense. I don't know where my days went - no one was refusing to tell me how many days things were, it just - it didn't seem important - does, does something about the Trees or Valinor mess directly with time sense -?"
"So I just - go to Manwë and explain that this is very alarming and I would like my sense of time restored to its original condition." Pause. "I bet Fëanáro would like it too, come to think of it. I guess it might make being a small child more frustrating but he's always worried about not getting enough done."
Bella spends the trip diligently running out her magic every single day - she holds a bit in reserve until she's going to go to sleep, then spends it - trying to feel out the bits and pieces that eventually free Proper Wizards from having to cast discrete 'spells'. She solicits obscure Quenya vocabulary. She borrows Rúmil's friend's eyes and looks at things with Eldar vision. She notebooks. She practices teekay, which tires her out but doesn't have a hard limit. She seems terrified to slow down.
I'm not actually worried about external deadlines. I'm worried that I spent ten years not noticing that a thing was happening to my mind. I am very interested in making sure that I'm capable of staving it off manually. The rock she is levitating spins in the air.
By now it's familiar; her skin prickles like the air is full of static, her hair tries to stand on end, the world goes silent around her except for the distant impression of an angelic choir, and Manwë's chosen form is tall and muscular and powerful, a god of the airs who could toss lightning bolts, with a long beard and the eyes of an old man - or they should be, except they're glowing - and he says "Hello, child."
What has changed about your time sense, and what would it mean to you to have it changed back?
Minutes feel normal, but I spent an entire local Year not noticing that the days were more than twice as long - which could just be the Trees making me need less sleep - nor caring that there were almost five times as many days in a year, which I don't know how it would have happened. It seems like it might be making it easier than it should be for me to put things off and work slowly and linger over things without defined endpoints of which there are many and to consider things that happened years-as-my-plane-counts-them-ago 'recent'. - Although I do like that I can still pretty clearly remember things from my home plane, if there's a way to get the rest of my time sense back without the fading memory.
The things you are describing are properties of Valinor, not things done to any person within it. The Ages leap by here, but not in a way that we could forestall for a single individual. Events feeling recent and memories of them being vivid is a great deal of how time is sensed. You could live outside Valinor, on Tol Eressea, which is safe from dangers but has less of the magic of the continent itself.
It seems inappropriate and unwise to have you as the first Man in Arda an Age before they were supposed to arrive. We've been speaking with Eru about changing your fate to that of the immortal Elves, as the simplest approach. It is a grave thing and not done lightly, but if you desire it, you would then not age within Valinor or outside it.
I'm not sure that's exactly how it works in my world either - um, in the short term I prefer not aging but as far as the rest of forever is concerned I would like to have more information or expect to be able to change my mind at some point if more information comes to light.
They can't fix it, but Tol Eressëa is outside the effect. It's also outside the Treelight, so I probably only gain a factor of five, not ten, sleeping more, but that still means I'll work faster than I have been, probably have something to ward myself inside a Year.
"Sure, as soon as I can ward off the time-slidey thing. I might come to visit, even, if I need a vacation in there somewhere, a while spent not-time-slidey can lead to needing a vacation and timeslideyness isn't awful for the purpose as long as I manage to leave on a schedule. But I really don't expect to be gone longer than half a Year, probably less. I literally accomplished in the time I've been here what I'd have optimistically expected in a tenth of the time without this effect. I'll come back with all kinds of cool stuff to show you."
"I actually suggested bringing you along to talk to Manwë, but Rúmil pointed out that it might make it hard to socialize or something, being in Valinor without the time-slidey. So I'll test it out for like a few weeks and see if it makes me antisocial but yeah, I should be able to cast it on you just fine."
Off come the glasses. She starts poking at the principles of light; the spell spell she has doesn't last but if she can wrench off some of it the way enchanters do with things like "heat" and whatnot she might be able to make enough to see by. She makes a little progress on this during the boat ride.
Some people live here, right? She didn't get around to actually learning to build a house. It will probably take her at least a week to get a magic house arranged even if that's her top priority. Maybe she can crash with somebody. In she hikes, dragging wheeled luggage. (Wheels: they caught on.)
Bella is kind of a house person. She will prioritize a magic house, and in the meanwhile under the stars is fine. She already feels a little clearer-headed out here. She can probably get it done real fast. She glows her necklace a little harder and starts work.
...So it turns out that the sudden mad rush to get a spell invented in time for his birthday is just kind of actually how long it takes to invent a spell as long as she has a decent pivot point and any practice freeforming in the gaps. They move along at a good clip. How long until a boat comes for the prince?
"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."
"...Um, I was able to avoid most of the effect on my trips to and from seeing Manwë by keeping a schedule without achieving 'blinding panic'," she says. "Also people usually don't weigh decisions by what will make them more concerned; if they're concerned about you their reaction is likely to be to keep a closer eye on you so that they only have to be concerned about known things."
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.
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.
"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."
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."
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 -
"The pain's not really the problem, the problem is that I forget what I want, what I care about - no, I don't forget, I just stop caring, and I don't have enough information without the feeling of caring to evaluate different solutions. You know Fëanáro better than I do. What do you think he needs?"
"I ask him what he's working on - you have to understand, the missing memories are distressing, I spend a lot of time wondering what it is I'd want to forget, I haven't thought of the truth but I think of a lot of things, most of them awful - and he decides I don't really care, which isn't true but it is true that I'm grasping for straws because I do not remember his childhood and he's like a stranger to me."
"I'm not sure what exactly he's picking up on... um, he tends to externalize a lot of his self-esteem, what might be happening is that if he's not the most compelling thing in your life whenever he's around, and he can't be because you're fretting about what you forgot, he assumes it's because he's not interesting enough, I'm not sure he's actually capable of fully getting that the problem is that your mind's not working as it ought to..."
"Ssssorry about that. It would usually be really irregular for a therapist to be treating somebody closely related to one of her friends, the advice on dealing with it is pretty much 'don't', I don't think this is why but it does mean there's no good way to disentangle it when there's nobody else to refer you to."
"It's not exactly predictable - if I list side effects that could happen and one sounds like it wouldn't bother you I can sort of lean that way, but only the way you can lean one way or the other if you're walking on something high and narrow, leaning either way makes it more likely you'll fall at all. Um, side effects for making you forget that you forgot things, if I did it wrong, might affect your memory more generally - you might just forget stuff, or remember it backwards or weird in some way, or remember random things so vividly that they crowd out other stuff. You might have weird, possibly unpleasantly weird, dreams. Youuuu might get paranoid and think that people are plotting against you as an alternative explanation for why they seem to know things you don't."
"Oh yeah, much. The mind shield spell to ward off the time slidey thing is really complicated so I'm not seeing major returns on that right away, but when I pick something more conventionally doable as an interim project I'm blazing through it. Fëanáro, if I teach you to fly are you going to try to fly to the island?"
"I suspect you wouldn't hold still for the portraiture if you were awake." Bella sighs. "Look, I - I can't tell you all the stuff, I've explained why I can't do that. But I also don't have to tell you anything that I do happen to be allowed. She says I may tell you that she loves you, and I know you don't believe her, but can you believe that I wouldn't relay it if I didn't believe her?"
"Why do you think she'd be effective at looking like it?" murmurs Bella. "- and I don't think practicing a skill like pottery is how you lose days, you'll still be better at pottery after doing more of it. If you don't want to wind up having invested a lot of time into being good at pottery that's a separate, but possibly related problem."
"I'm seriously tempted, but I think there might be long-term problems if your parents didn't trust me to respect their decisions about that sort of thing; they might decide that we aren't allowed to hang out, or to do so unsupervised, or that you're in too much of a hurry and it's unhealthy and you shouldn't be allowed to have the anti-time-slidey spell..."
...I'm having trouble thinking of a, a neutral way to put it - um - he doesn't have the maturity or, or general emotional resources to consistently consider being polite and making compromises to be desirable in itself, the thing he notices about situations is mostly whether what he considers important is a strong factor in decisionmaking. And he doesn't know what your internal decisionmaking looks like, and finds reading people really difficult, so his most available test for whether what he feels like he needs factors in at all is whether he gets it or not. I think it would be entirely reasonable to impose conditions or something, especially if he hasn't apologized to Miriel yet, say, but right now his understanding of the situation is that you're hurting him for no reason and the best reason I was able to explain to him for why I wouldn't just carry him back myself is that this would get worse if I did that.
"I talked to your father and he wants to talk to you in person," Bella tells Fëanáro. "...I may have suggested that if you didn't apologize to your mother yet that would be a perfectly reasonable condition to set on going back to the island. And by may have I mean I did that."
"They presumably don't want you to apologize for lying, so this is not an obstacle. They more likely would want you to apologize for losing your temper and hurting her feelings. You don't have to say every thing that you would mean if you said it and you particularly don't have to yell about it and I assume you do in fact regret doing that, even if not for ideal reasons, since they would've let you stay in the first place if you hadn't."
"Well, I don't know how exacting they are about precisely worded apologies but maybe you could say that you're sorry that you and your mother are having such trouble building a healthy relationship and for any part you have in that without specifying what part you think that is likely to be."
"I heard that you got greatly distressed by something related to mortality and your world, went off at once for Manwë, went off at once in the opposite direction for Tol Eressea, accidentally took Fëanáro along, gave Finwë a week of nightmares, and are planning to return eventually. Did the rumor mill distort the truth too gravely?"
"...I didn't know about the nightmares. Um. That's what happened, yes, I found out that there's an effect in Valinor that makes time seem to pass differently and I don't like it, but Manwë couldn't except me from it like I wanted, so I'm working on a magical solution after which time I'll move right back."
"When I was ten I told a persistently overfriendly classmate that while she seemed very well-intentioned she wasn't interesting enough to hold my short term attention as long as I wasn't out of books and I didn't expect to still want to be friends with her when I went to college and she was farming goats so there was no point in us talking. ...What are you hoping Fëanáro'll reinvent before you'll teach him?"
"Most children genuinely don't get much out of metalworking at ten, they don't have the attention span, they're not physically strong enough, he won't be behind at all if he starts at twenty. I think he wants to do it because metalworking is a skill highly prized by our people and he's going through acquiring knowledge like it's a checklist. I think he'll get more out of it if he starts it when he wants to make something out of metal."
"I think the ideal mindset for a beginning metalworking apprentice who is not yet taller than my knee is curiosity about metal and how we can alter it. Fëanáro is a very curious person but tends to have a mindset of 'I need to already know this' not 'I wonder what this is'. I don't know to what degree he can cultivate the latter, but time might help him. Metalworking happens in close consultation with lots of other people and with Aulë, and I'm not sure Fëanáro is good at engaging respectfully with adults who might only have time to tell him their decisions and not their reasons."
And Bella goes to get some food in the square and putters around in the pleasantly vacationy slide of time until she's tired, then goes to her house and sleeps; and in the morning she eats breakfast and heads straight for the palace to fetch Fëanáro unless he has managed to have another screaming argument with his parents since she last saw him.
"Being smart is a solution to most problems. People can often get a surprising amount done even if they aren't smart, or are smart only in really different ways from you or me. And sometimes figuring out a smartness-based solution is just unavoidably time-consuming compared to using some other trait."
"When I give somebody something and it's not a sort of rote, 'happy Khersentide have a set of teacups', thing, but a spontaneous thing, I start from noticing something that they'd like, or that they could use help with. Like how I thought you'd like the jumping-around spell because sometimes you look like you're going to figure out how to jump that high without magic at all; or how I knew you were upset over the time sliding and thought a watch might help. I bet you could notice that kind of thing if you tried. I think it's okay if other things about making the thing you give the person are interesting in between the part where you decide to make it and the part where you give it to them."
"He said 'maturity', and I said this would only be a better answer than 'age' if he could tell me what that meant in a way you could work on instead of wait for, and he said that he prefers a different attitude to curiosity than you display - more wonder, less impatience - and that you would probably need the skill of respecting adults' decisions without always needing to hear or be able to guess at the reasons. Well, he said adults, but Nerdanel has a head start and you should probably mind her too if it comes up."
"It's never, 'that would be better to leave for when it's raining and it's not going to rain until the Valar tweak the weather back to normal'? It's never, 'that's best done in a group and you're the first person to express interest'? It's never, 'you didn't say please'? It's never, 'I don't have the spare time to help with that until I finish this project'? It's never, 'I'm not good enough to produce whatever you're asking of me'?"
"It's important that people can think private thoughts," she says. "It's still important, maybe even more important, if their thoughts are messed up in a way they need help with; so instead of saying that if someone needs therapy they have to sacrifice the chance to have private thoughts to get it, we say that 'told to a therapist' still counts as 'private', no matter what."
"Well, I've never watched Mahtan's teaching style, so I'd have to guess - after all, you work fine with me when I'm teaching a thing, this isn't purely generic, it's more about fit. You feel very strongly about setting your own schedule and have trouble pacing yourself. You have strong, intrusive emotions that affect how pleasant company you are when you aren't getting sustained feedback to the effect that you are accomplishing things and are good enough and so on. You're really suspicious of most people's motives and jump to uncharitable explanations for things they say. When you aren't getting what you want you try harder to get what you want, often in very imperious or bullheaded ways, instead of backtracking to find out if it's a good thing to want in the first place or if there's a compromise. You're averse to signaling respect for any but a handful of traits which people like to be respected regardless of."
"Everybody has things wrong with them. Besides, that list doesn't happen to rub me the wrong way. If you're setting your schedule, I can just wander off and do something else when you're busy. I'm the sort of person who was going to be a full time therapist so when you're upset, I want to help, not leave the room. You listen to me when I explain what I really meant even if you jumped to a conclusion first, since I know how to explain stuff so you'll understand; and you often also listen to me about how to get what you want better. And I don't get hung up on signals of respect."
"It would normally be rude to demand that someone teach your child even if they didn't want to, and people who are high-status enough can expect more politeness even from people who are also high-status. A while ago Rúmil suggested that I could stop thinking of your father as a king and I said that if I did that I'd probably be offended the next time he phrased something as an order."
"I was not particularly adored on my own plane. People usually didn't hate me but I didn't have many friends, or any really close friends, and I had a very ordinary relationship with my parents - so I'm not at all sure this is a skill I have and not just something about how my personality interacts with being here."
"I pay attention to how I feel about hypothetical situations like - putting off things that I can technically do anytime, sleeping in when I wake up in the morning - that one might not work for you - spending an entire week celebrating a festival and not getting anything else done..."
"Well," she says, "when you stay up, you certainly have more done ten hours later than you would if you went to sleep. But since some of the things you want to do are 'magic' and 'lucid dreaming', I do not think you have more done a year later than you would if you went to sleep."
"See if anybody else wants a necklace, make as many as there's demand for. Put together another one of those lectures, probably, I've got enough material. Write down everything I can remember that I haven't already written down from my plane, because it's not going to feel fresh and recent forever. Invent more magic items."
"I want a launderer. I'm tired of having to prestidigitate my clothes clean. And I want a crystal ball and a scriber although I'm sure that will take ages. I am told people will want to communicate with their loved ones who didn't come to Valinor, too, so I want something for long distance communication."
And in the morning they have breakfast and do last-minute packing and say goodbye to the permanent Tol Eressëa residents and say that if any of them want the bungalow it's theirs, and then she goes "oof" scooping up Fëanáro and both of their sets of belongings and away she flies.
"I feel like they're trying to do what'll appease me instead of reacting to me with real emotions. I always make them sad and it makes me feel so worthless and lost. I feel like I have to be someone else around them. I feel smaller. I don't think I make them happy. I think I'm an obligation. I bet they wish they didn't have children. I bet they wish they had a different one."
"If she does figure it out, sometimes, but for some reason figuring it out is itself a thing she has to forget? Why would she forget things anyway? What problems are better if you forget them? They do that sometimes for slaves of Melkor but if one turned out to not like forgetting they'd just remember..."
"if it's not that she's stupid it has to be something related to the memory. I"m thinking, don't interrupt me. When it's gone, she wants it back, and knowing that having it back won't make her happy and that she'll choose to do this again doesn't make her stop trying to get it back. And not just an idle curiosity, she can't let it go."
"I was trying to work around to empathy for the bind I was hoping you could independently derive that she's in. If someone cannot drop a particular subject when someone else is in the room, it is on their mind a lot. I was going to suggest you imagine how distracted you'd be if you couldn't remember how to read."
"They might not notice. Some people don't realize they're in pain until they think about it in some way it doesn't normally occur to them. And if they noticed they might feel ashamed to tell anyone or like they weren't good enough to possibly help even by making your mother feel less alone or just too tired to go to Lórien and meet a queen or like they're intrinsically poisonous and would ruin the garden if they went there or something like that. People can think all kinds of things when their minds are broken."
"Because my plane doesn't know about your plane. Also I'm not sure anyone would want to summon you if they did; even ones who were not you personally might attract negative universe attention from being from a science fantasy world and also you don't have obviously useful combat powers which is what summons are usually for."
"I really don't know at this point - I started trying to walk him through perspective-taking as a sort of social skills exercise but I don't know how far I got or whether it'll even help. A mechanical loom sounds like something he'd have fun with in principle..."
"Oh. That'd be hard, since there is definitely a low rate of acknowledged mental illness in the population for the one set of books and very few wars being conducted by wizards and assassins and such for the history stuff. Not a lot of call to discuss it in Quenya."
"Yeah, that's my guess is that it's a species thing. I mean, I like pretty things, but we've already noticed that I don't care about exacting handwriting, say, to the same extent. Handwriting should be legible and walking should get you places and beauty is for decorations."
"Most kinds of undead are mindless, invariably evil, or both. They're unpopular with almost all major religions - partly because clerics have particular advantages at getting rid of them - and people also don't like the, mm, aesthetics, of beings that are made out of people's corpses and are healed by things that damage the living and vice-versa. I made that little healing spell out of one that's meant to damage weak undead."
"There's a lot of debate about that. If there's exceptions, which I guess there might be, no one talks about them. Some kinds you have to have been already evil in life to turn into, or have, mm, strong negative emotions - ghosts are like that - which interact badly with negative energy or something? Some of them have to eat people and get unbearably hungry and less intelligent if they don't until they cave, stuff like that. The most common kinds are just mindless though, they lurch around causing trouble and don't think or speak."
"Yeah, that's about how people feel about undead at home, so if somebody says, 'no, it's okay, I found this weird undead-becoming ritual and I don't have to sacrifice any babies or replace my intellect with a negative energy spirit or be completely ruled by overwhelming hunger', people go 'eugh' anyway."
"I haven't talked to any of the people who got reembodied, I didn't know them or anything, I was just happy they got to come back - maybe it's - like how I remember stuff from my plane like it didn't happen ten my-plane years ago? To keep their lives fresh so they can go back to them? There ought to be a better way to do it but Manwë couldn't opt me out of the time slide, the Valar aren't omnipotent -"
When she comes by, Rúmil's friends - two tall men with long hair worn looser than is conventional in Tirion - thank her in earnest for the necklaces and insist that in exchange she visit them sometime. There are giant lizards much taller than men in the south, it's a bit of an adventure, but everyone needs a bit of adventure in their life.
Bella works on stuff. She's quite good at teekay now, although not as good as she had expected to be at age thirty; she can at least braid her hair to Tirion standards with a couple mirrors and not use her hands, and she can get quite elaborate that way. She will borrow and then enchant necklaces for anybody who asks, and on days when she has none of those she works on testing other spellcraft. Soon she has a launderer. She works in a bit about that to her lecture the morning of, and then shows up and tells everyone who attends what she's been up to.
Um. Okay.
She packs for a couple days; even flying won't shorten the trip that much. Debates going the long way so as to more easily bring somebody with borrowable better eyes, decides against. She lets Fëanáro she's going to be gone, and Rúmil. And she flies to Taniquetil.
When we last spoke, you told me that you desired to retreat to Tol Eressea because of your dislike for the pace of Valinor. We thought this was a wise compromise. We had some reservations about the solution you created, but desired for you to return to the people you care for and who care for you. We are very concerned with the free distribution of this enchantment. Most people in Valinor are happier with the current pace of days. Now that necklaces exist, they have to take them or fall behind, and we expect that eventually everyone will be wearing necklaces and less happy than they were before.
You are very unusual. Perhaps this was an inevitable complication of having a mortal in Valinor. Regardless. The necklaces no longer work, except for yours because you were the only person the time-slide caused any distress. Please do not try to design things that make the typical person less happy and which they'll have a hard time not using if everyone else has it.
Torches bobbing in the streets of Tirion, the panicked movements of a crowd - Fëanáro, still speaking: "We, we alone, shall be the lords of the unsullied Light, and masters of the bliss and the beauty of Arda! No other race shall oust us!’
And Fëanâro, surrounded by faces she does not recognize, all of them speaking the same terrible words before the crowd -" ‘Be he foe or friend, be he foul or clean,
brood of Morgoth or bright Vala,
Elda or Maia or Aftercomer,
Man yet unborn upon Middle-earth,
neither law, nor love, nor league of swords,
dread nor danger, not Doom itself,
shall defend him from Fëanáro, and Fëanáro’s kin,
whoso hideth or hoardeth, or in hand taketh,
finding keepeth or afar casteth
a Silmaril. This swear we all:
death we will deal him ere Day’s ending,
woe unto world’s end! Our word hear thou,
Eru Allfather! To the everlasting
Darkness doom us if our deed faileth.
On the holy mountain hear in witness
and our vow remember, Manwë and Varda!’
And Fëanáro at Alqualondë - 'wait,' their King says, 'think it over' - rushing out to the shore, ripping the ships away from their sailors, and someone shoves him and falls into the water and he draws his sword -
- Fëanáro sailing away, tens of thousands left dead on the shores of Alqualondë -
- Fëanáro arguing with someone in a howling icy wasteland - 'we don't have enough ships for laggards and cowards, let's go' - lighting the ships afire on the other shore - charging directly for a terrifying iron fortress -
- dead. And the Halls of Mandos for the rest of the Ages, refusing to admit any wrongdoing, refusing to cooperate in his own rehabilitation.
The problem, Manwë observes, is not that he needs to move faster.
She had some idea of writing it down but that was not in a transcribable format and anyway she thinks it's all burned into her brain forever.
"I'm trying to get him to move differently too but it only works because he knows I'm helping, knows I want things he wants for himself, if he's desperate to be fast and I don't help him I don't, I don't see how to touch - anything else -"
It stopped working and I tried to figure out another one but I couldn't figure it out and couldn't figure it out and couldn't figure it out and I kept thinking of other things I wanted to be doing but I wasn't sure if that was the time slide so I made a calendar with everything I wanted to do every day and compared it to everything I was doing every day while it worked and if I do all of that then it's okay but every day I don't get it all done I feel like I'm going to die and people talking to me is so distracting so I came up here and I have to finish a translation of these chapters today and then a letter to someone interested in establishing a guild of linguistics and then invent a spell and then that'll be enough for today please go away.
They're worried a bunch of people will want them, and then people who wouldn't want them will have to have them to keep up, and they left mine because I was the one who noticed and objected in the first place and I asked them to leave yours and they wouldn't but they said they wouldn't break mine if I loaned it to you.
They said it was because I was the one who was distressed. I told them you were distressed too, and then they said some things about what you're apparently fated to do and... it wasn't good... and they don't want you sped up to do not-good things faster... but they said my necklace is mine to loan out. And I have free will so if you just hang out with me a lot maybe you will not be fated to do anything horrible.
The Valar broke all the necklaces except mine. And showed me awful things about what Fëanáro's fated to do to explain why he couldn't have his unbroken too, but I have free will so I can probably fix it, I didn't have the nerve to ask them while they were all - Valary - at me why if they didn't like the look of fate they'd interrupt anything I was trying to do at all but they said they wouldn't break mine even if I shared it. So I loaned Fëanáro my necklace, we're going to have to work out how to share it around but I think I can do most of what I needed it for with aggressive scheduling without driving myself as spare as he would.
The Valar were all assembled and did something you considered unreasonable, and you told them why it was unreasonable and asked them for more information and got a concession - lousy concession, but still - and a better picture of what they're worried about. The Bella who arrived here would have been too terrified to do any of that. Or to keep inventing things.
I sort of wish I had asked what they can possibly be thinking, preventing me from interacting in certain ways with Fëanáro because they don't like his fate. That seems - bizarre. It didn't sound like they wanted to enforce it per se, just like they were only willing to see it change if the way to do it were to - shrink him -
I only got bits and pieces. The Trees were dead, I don't think that was his doing but he had some way to fix them and wasn't doing it. Swearing a long incredibly foolish oath to - get some thing. I think Finwë was dead in the vision, I don't think that was him either, he was furious about it. Copious lethal violence over boats so he could sail away. Charging the Enemy, dying. Staying dead.
"- I didn't know it had gotten that bad. Um, mine still works, the Valar only broke the other ones, and I'm going to loan it to him off and on, which should help him feel better. I can talk to him about the loom and, uh, advise him against slamming his head into walls."
"Their kid was running around in a panic hitting his head on things and screaming at people," she points out. "That sounds pretty frightening to me, enough that they might have trouble concentrating on whose reason was better. Did you tell them what you were scared about?"
"Well," Bella says, "apparently whenever she eats breakfast with you she accidentally gives you impressions about how she feels about you which probably aren't what she meant at all, and if enough of those accumulate she might not be able to salvage anything out of her relationship with her only child; that sounds like something very important at stake."
"I'm not expecting you to know right away. Maybe if you got good at perspective taking you could try to figure out what it is she wants when she does something you don't like - sort of like I needed to figure out what you were getting out of hitting your head on stuff, although it'd be a little harder because it might not be easy for her to describe it to you - and then tell her a better way to get what she wants."
"Working on a water blast for you - unless you want to do that yourself? I can go back to crystal balls if you'd rather - and I have two hour blocks marked for teekay practice and most of the rest of the day is devoted to writing down things I remember from my plane like wheels and glass and stuff so I don't forget them."
"I don't know. I could have designed it that way to start but it might not work that way without redesigning it and I don't know if I should expect to be able to tweak it now. But if it does work I can sit on the left and write with teekay so you can use your right hand."
She doesn't go to the palace first thing in the morning; she wants to get notes-from-her-plane written up and Fëanáro has a tendency to distract her. She shows up after lunch, having written what she thinks is probably a reasonable number of pages for the number of hours put in.
"Maybe you could figure out the fabric in those pants I was wearing when I came." She still wears them occasionally, although less. "Denim for everyone. And it would be a good chance to practice relaxing around your mom and figuring out what she could be doing to make it so you feel it when she says she loves you instead of just thinking she's only saying it."
"I don't know either. If it helps him - pieces of my fate take place in mortal kingdoms, many thousands of years from now, very far away, where books are still written in his letters and the sign of his house is still carved into the magic doors of thriving, happy kingdoms. I do not understand how it happened or what he did. But."
"With the Valar generally. The necklaces. How they treated you about the necklaces. The reembodied - I am so grateful our dead are back, of course, but these are the ones who died a thousand years ago and not traumatically, and they are not very well, and I don't know when or whether they're even going to try on everything else."
"Don't remember the halls, have tremendous difficulty readjusting to having bodies, very overwhelmed, very anxious, very lost, don't necessarily remember things well from before the halls either. The friend I told you about liked women, before, by Cuivienen, and now she doesn't and doesn't recall it well, and I know they're doing the best they can but it's really not good enough."
"- there's kind of a lot of complicated history to it, um, it was correlated with abusive parents to be sent to have it done, the results were usually really horrible whether it technically worked or not, Khaele's church objected and some of the more liberal sects of Kherstianity too, it was unpopular with one species which is mostly same-sex attracted..."
I'd - I'd really hope they wouldn't touch my subtle arts, but in theory I could get a wide range of results with those if I practice enough, it's just that most of the intermediate practice steps besides telekinesis involve working on minds and I can only get to the 'impose mental constructs on reality' step when I'm a lot stronger than I am; I wasn't planning to go that route. Um, it's possible Vala-theme divine magic could work and then they could case by case any request made as it happened if they really wanted to micromanage it, maybe they'd like that better?
Oh, that. I mean, none of the actual science fantasy is written to be realistic because no one knows what science would actually be like. It's stuff like 'because I know the science of Ballistics I can always hit my target' followed by thirty pages of comic book about someone with an ostensibly nonmagical slingshot making ultra-precise shots and making quips. I don't know to what extent real science results would resemble that so I don't know what to say to aim at. Engines maybe. Mass production?
Um, science fantasy chemistry talks about novel materials with weird properties - stuff clear as glass but flexible, say, or with incredible tensile strength. Also explosions, but I'm not sure we need explosions unless we can turn them into the dense fuel sources thing. Biology the sci-fan is all about making new organisms or modifying existing ones including people into versions that are useful to have in some way - stronger or resistant to diseases or whatever.
Translations, he wants to translate all my textbooks. He's also been thinking about how to get words Pax has and Quenya doesn't widely adopted. And he finished a draft of a water-spraying spell that's supposed to help him let off steam so he doesn't hit his head on things when he's upset.
I'm not sure I can do anything about the dizziness, but Rúmil mentioned that you have some fuzzed-out memories? I might be able to help there, although it would involve looking at them myself. I'm professionally forbidden to tell anyone anything about stuff I see in people's heads without permission, though.
This is not the right question; that is like asking what kinds of grass she is familiar with an able to distinguish when the question is 'has it gone to seed' or 'can she braid it'. She combs through the fuzz, seeing how it responds to subtle perturbations. Is it a separate thing or a property of the memories themselves? How deeply entangled?
Fëanáro is sketching. Plans for a mechanical loom. "I apologized to my mom," he says. "And she said she loved me, and I got annoyed with her, and she said she didn't hate me, and I said that was much better, and then we cuddled and she told me a lot that she didn't hate me, and it was okay until I got impatient, and she said she was feeling impatient too and embroidery was nice because you could work while cuddling, and then we talked about the loom and I agreed we should do it."
She delivers her lecture. Subtle artists exist on her plane, and have this range of innate and developed ability! Incontinent mindreaders are a thing but they can usually be trained to stop that, which is good because insert spiel about the importance of privacy of thought. This is also the foundation of subtle arts therapeutic practice: confidentiality! And informed consent! This is the formal definition of informed consent. This is the not-in-the-local-sense-an-oath she took about this when she started her course of study. Here's how she was educated for the year of college she attended before she tripped and fell into Valinor, practicing doing things gently and without looking at anything she wasn't supposed to and being periodically lectured with her class about not being judgmental about the contents of people's minds. The following "therapeutic practices" are controversial and, in several places, illegal. To make the whole thing less passive-aggressive she includes a section on advanced psionic workings she has heard of but can't demonstrate, shows off some teekay, describes pyrokinesis, mentions lucid dreaming.
It might come down to just flooding him with enough positive energy; but they should also be sure there's a way to feel around any detail work that needs doing in the process and handle runoff if there's an energy overshoot. Lots of little kinks to work out. It might take them a whole week.
"Fëanáro was very sympathetic about me losing my memories and wanting them back, and said it'd probably make him crazy too, and I could have his of the same time period. So he tried sharing them, though they were mostly very blurry because he was so little, and I was - reacting, the way I do around him, and he noticed, and he got angry with me like he usually does. But usually he runs off and this time I told him I didn't know why it was like that and maybe we could figure it out. And we talked about possibilities for a few hours and then he did run off. And came back in the middle of the night and said he thought I'd sworn to hate him or something. And then I - remembered. It sort of fell into place. And I said that I certainly hadn't done that. And he said that it made the most sense given the information, and I had to agree that it did, and then I told him I'd go ask you what to do but we shouldn't go together because of confidentiality."
"Mostly okay. Fixed Rúmil's eyes, working on crystal balls and long-distance messaging." Are you sure that you actually remember and didn't just think of something that made sense? It's possible you knocked the veil loose but it's also possible you've placed a belief 'around' it.
Okay. I can put the veil back, but... that might not be the best idea. If I put it on firmly enough that him having most of the right idea can't knock it loose that's riskier and it'd make your conversations with him really confusing and I don't think we should expect him to leave it alone.
I was thinking if I was paralyzed then I couldn't hurt him but I think I'd go crazy, not being able to work - if we told Finwë and he had me arrested and guarded, anything where there was no way I could do it - but that'd cause such a stir, people'd be so confused and scared - it hurts a lot even to think of ways of getting around it -
She sits very still. "I can't help you-"
"All right. I love you and I'll figure it out without your help. Bella, is Fëanáro in the right general area?"
"That shouldn't even count," he says, "oaths are supposed to require intent. But I suppose you dwelled on it afterwards, on what you thought you'd committed, and that'd make it worse -" He shakes his head. "Bella, can you do an action block that is permanent?"
"No," Miriel says.
"She can't say anything else," he says. "Can you?"
"Similar broad range of side effects I mentioned when I was first warning you that this stuff is potentially hazardous, I'd guess there'd be a bias toward leaving fixed action patterns - getting stuck in loops of behavior and needing help or a context change to break out of them - or obsessive thoughts about the forbidden action, which might happen even if I do pull it off textbook perfect, or making it overbroad so she also couldn't do other, loosely related things..."
"I'm going to go write up a thing for you to sign just for - superstitious peace of mind reasons."
And she goes and gets some paper and writes up as best she can from memory a declaration that Miriel is to be considered incompetent to withhold consent due to prior magical alteration of her will and has two places for Finwë to sign, one as king and one as husband.
She takes a short break for a snack and then she sits back down and starts building the block. Reversible, light, almost cloud-fluff, it won't knock loose in an unconscious patient and she wants to quadruple check. Quintuple.
Piece by piece by piece. Not this way and not that, not at any level of indirection, not by proxy nor psychological manipulation nor by self-delusion, you may not.
Bella skates through the architecture after she's made it. Tries to look with fresh "eyes", over and over again. Imagine Professor Winters is telling her this is an example of a badly done block, what's wrong with it, what disaster would befall this patient if it were all pressed into permanence -
It's a few hours after Mingling gives way to silver light that she reaches for the king. I'm done. I won't know any more than I already do about how good a job I did until she wakes up.
Bella takes the sign down, files away the form she had Finwë sign, and grabs something to eat. She doesn't keep a lot of food actually in her house, it's so easy to go down the street and get something, but since nothing rots here she can casually have sandwich fixings around without worrying about whether she's going to get through her whole loaf of bread in a timely manner. Chew chew.
Bella takes deep breaths...
...goes and gets breakfast...
...sets an hourglass and lets Valinor smooth away an hour of her morning so she can calm down...
...writes a lot...
...and then tentatively wanders palaceward to see how Fëanáro's coping, if he would like to display how he's coping at her.
What I wound having to do was extremely dangerous. I would have tried it sooner if it weren't for that. It seems to have worked out in practice but I was terrified some side effect I couldn't fix was going to happen and she'd have to live with it forever because I wasn't good enough. It could have happened. The previous solution had drawbacks but it was much safer.
Something could have gone really horribly wrong yesterday. I spent all day checking over and over and over, and because I'd never seen it done before I could only make my best guess about whether I was checking the right things, and it would have been a real disaster if I had made a mistake. People's minds are not toys.
"Good question. I haven't been focusing on that but I have examples to work from, souping them up shouldn't be conceptually difficult. I just really don't want to wreck the boots I have because without them I can barely cross a level surface. ...I suppose I can fly now so as long as I expect to get it sooner or later I shouldn't be too paranoid about that."
"Uh. I am not aware of magic having been made to fix that except by, like, putting you in a time pocket or something, and you'd still have to spend all the time growing, it'd only be skipped from everyone else's perspective, and also time magic is stupidly dangerous and might interact weirdly with Valinor so we probably shouldn't go there. Magic could make you look grown up but it wouldn't accelerate your actual development."
"In general kids are more impulsive and think shorter-term, learn certain categories of skills faster and better compared to similarly untrained adults but practice them less methodically, act more self-centered - at one point I memorized a list, this would have been important if I'd specialized in pediatric therapy, that's all I remember."
Excellent! She plans to make a magic item version if the spell itself seems to work well, but the prototype spell will work basically like an osanwë or subtle arts conversation, beginning by announcing that this is a communiqué from so-and-so and indicating how to reply. Prototype lasts fifteen minutes.
A little while later she starts churning out little wire jobbies that wrap around the ear and do message spells. She's got them in a version with a usage limit of their own and a version that draws on user mana; she recommends the latter if you're going to share it around and the former if you're not. She's working on an unlimited version.
Eventually, though, she has a design that allows fully featured etherscaping, will permit connection to a scriber once she invents one, and supports the invention of further grafts onto the design if someone wants to invent ballgames or calculator apps or something. (She delivers a lecture on Things Crystal Balls Are Known To Do to encourage invention there. And then teaches introductory etherscaping.)
Her lessons are so routinely well-attended that there's talk of building larger lecture halls. Fëanáro might try ballgames but has been wasting most of his mana on developing ever more complex variants on dramatic-expression-of-emotion spells and on flying everywhere. He declares it a festival when Bella finishes crystal balls, and then ignores his festival to spend the whole time working.
Bella is getting used to delivering talks to large audiences. Bring it on. Here is how Caltrop Sweeper works, it is a popular ballgame. Here is the concept of a blog. Here is what she remembers about fiction publishing websites; Fëanáro independently reinvented this one subgenre. Etcetera.
The Valar are very worried that, given the opportunity, lots of people would hop to the Outer Lands, do dangerous things, possibly commit crimes against their fellow Elves or eventually against the other races that will arrive in the Outer Lands for which they can escape accountability by hopping back to Valinor, and otherwise use their place of refuge as one of leverage. Does Bella have any ideas about how to avoid that?
...She hasn't met anybody who seems like the type but she hasn't met everyone... Uh, maybe if you are in Valinor as of right now you could need a permit to go to the Outer Lands or something? She could build a time limit into the spell, if they think dangerous and/or criminal things might take a while?
"In schools back on my world there were surveys about how well the teachers were doing. Student evaluation forms. They were to help the teachers know where they weren't getting through to people effectively. They didn't always work, for various reasons; I think if I survey people you're teaching they won't tell you anything you might be doing wrong."
"I don't sit in on all your classes and I am not reading your students' minds, so I don't know all the things they might not know about how you're doing. They might not tell you because you're the prince or they're worried you might be fragile for family related reasons."
"I still don't sit on your classes and am still not reading your students' minds. My impression from what I have seen is that you're pretty good but kind of bossy, but I can't unpack for you how this is impacting your students because I'm not one of them, or reading their minds."
"It's hard to listen to somebody who uses twice as many words as they need, or who says things that you wind up wishing you hadn't bothered with, or who asks questions they don't really want the answers to, because that's a waste of time; and it's hard to listen to somebody who's trying to elicit strong feelings - or not even trying, necessarily - that aren't how you want to feel about something and that you'll feel weird about later, or that make you spend the conversation resentful or anxious or frustrated. I think what I'm worried about is that people might be resentful if you're bossy; I'm not worried about you wasting people's time pretty much at all."
"- but if Fëanaro decides he does want to get a jump on having ten children without having to pick out somebody to have them with that is a branch of magic he might be able to cook up, it's not impossible, so maybe the Valar should be advised of that and not let it work."
Well, if there were more subtle artists she'd suggest having two kinds of therapist so if someone wanted help but couldn't allow oath tampering they could get as much help as they could accept rather than having to try to conceal the existence of the oath. But it's just her.
If someone picks up the skillset of therapy without the subtle arts part (due to a demand/supply mismatch) they would have an advantage compared to her in doing non-oath-tampering therapy, or rather a disadvantage in the opposite direction, so she will be the oath-tampering kind. If she ever meets any orcs those oaths are getting tampered with.
She goes through some of her old notes one day and asks Fëanáro if he ever made or still wants the personal space spell.
Bella gets underway on a version that gives a bit more distance (Fëanáro may have to share a room with people he doesn't want to hug him; people fleeing from orcs presumably have no such consideration and may be less polite about repelling orcs into walls than the subtle give worked into the ring's magic.)
And Bella goes back to everything else. There's plenty of it. She's getting pretty good at working at a respectable speed without the necklace; she just has to pay attention to herself (and wear a watch, and set timers). She's good at paying attention to herself.
Dreams is easy; lucid dreaming for the long term solution and regular applications of a block against certain concepts entering dreams for the short term.
Flashbacks to traumatic experiences she can do in one session running the patient through the memory over and over while it's stripped of emotional content and salient detail - if you're flashing back to the time the orc chased you to the edge of a cliff and you broke your leg, now you've worn into the pattern of the memory the unexciting overlay of "the time nothing in particular caused you for no reason in particular to be nowhere in particular and then nothing in particular happened" until your mind wonders what all the fuss is about and leaves you alone.
Panic attacks she has to actually induce one per person in her office to see how each patient's manifest, but from there she can set up interrupts on the feedback loops. Anxiety's similar, and her textbook also recommends breathing exercises and meditation.
"If you must take a privilege you could stop letting him teach magic classes. He was leaving his students behind anyway, so it's not a point of comparison, and it might be at least marginally more effective at indicating that the problem is irresponsibility and not something external."
"Oh, Bella, I have no idea where we'd all be without you. And you shouldn't have to keep yourself - limited - because there is one reckless child who will be be able to use your ideas to hurt himself. I wish your world's magic was harder to experiment on but here we are, I'm not going to ask you to stop inventing any more than to walk down the streets with your eyes closed."
"Four Years, that's not too long. I packed my bags full of things from Lórien last time we visited Lórien, I asked the trees to give me something very filling and nutritious so I'd grow up big and strong. And I have been working on a spell to catch fish and one to sleep in trees without falling out and I didn't leave until I had them both working."
Fëanáro's stuck in the palace, which means he can't come to her if he changes his mind about wanting her to go away. But she doesn't want to intrude. She swings by once a day around lunchtime to ask him how he's doing and if he's terse or annoyed she turns right back around.
We discussed with Eru the question that we touched on when you were considered whether to depart for Tol Eressea, the question of whether your fate should be changed to match that of the Eldar. Eru thinks that it should not. You are not bound to Arda, but ought to eventually depart it; you create and innovate and desire stimulation and excitement at the pace of Men and not the Eldar.
Fëanáro is desperately unhappy about something different, that's something, but he's also more powerful and less happy, much much younger. And doing more as a result. At this rate he'll kill people before he's of age, which is in some sense an improvement since he can be partially absolved of those crimes.
It is not your fault. You did much good and we commend and applaud you for it.
She wasn't overwhelmingly familiar with this room when she got lost into it; the desks have been rearranged but that could mean anything. The calendar says -
well. Of course she's been gone almost twenty years.
It takes a little while before she can stop being hysterical. In that time someone drags her to a health center, and a subtle artist bounces off her shields, and Professor Winters comes in and recognizes her -
They put her in a healing center room with a bed to calm down. It's the ugliest thing she can remember looking at in a long time. She wobbles her way to the bed (her home-enchanted boots are broken, of course they are) and hugs the pillow and shakes and waits to expire of spontaneously generated disease or random monster attack or Vice-Chancellor Embries or divine smiting or the sudden failure of all her biology-she-means-natural-essence.
She doesn't die. The Valar might have done something that stuck.
Or she might just not have committed any offenses in this universe's jurisdiction and should consider herself on lethal probation.
She no longer has to check herself to see if she's being slow. She has to check herself to make sure she's being small. Shrink and shrink and shrink until she fits here.
She must not try to be a wizard: here she is not a wizard, all her gains ill-gotten. It's possible she shouldn't even cast high school cantrips. Maybe if she learns them from scratch out of textbooks.
Subtle arts is - mostly something she handled with books from here and practice. Practice is okay. She may have begun to unobtrusively practice in some science-tainted way but the basic principle is allowed, she can probably keep her teekay advances, her progress in range and finesse.
Professor Winters contacts her parents for her. They're both alive. Coming up on retirement age. They grieved her and moved on and now here she is, hasn't aged a day, came back in strange clothes unable to stop crying.
The university sends her home to her mother.
And she practices being small.
She gets a new pair of boots. Storebought. Similar to her last set. Plenty of money socked away for them - the university paid out for her disappearance because it was negligent on their part, not recklessness on hers (her? reckless?), and getting her back after twenty years doesn't oblige payback. She gets a new knife. She is not a wizard here. She sleeps in her childhood bed and reads - not a speck of science fantasy, she puts all her science fantasy away in the back of the closet. No thaumatology. She reads biographies and cookbooks and poems and tedious coming of age YA literature and the news reports on her own mildly interesting vanishment and reappearance.
She hasn't aged a day. She mumbles lies about the outfit and says she doesn't remember much because she will never be able to stop if she starts, she'll wind up trying to orchestrate a mass exodus to -
- to some other science fantasy plane, there must be - no. There might be more, it is possible. She'd convince people to try to find one and something would eat her while she was acting like an apocalypse preacher in the street.
She reenrolls in school. They make her start over, although Professor Winters waives some of her subtle arts requirements after a private evaluation. Her hand lingers over the form to declare a major. Some people do double up even on the heavy technical stuff -
No. She's not a wizard here. She doesn't dare try.
She enrolls just the same as she was. It didn't get her killed before. Subtle arts major therapy track. She studies trauma and personality disorders and depression and family/relationship counseling and anxiety and hallucinations and sleep disturbances. She attends classes. She does her homework. She reads books. People murmur about her when she goes by. She doesn't apply for the arcane exemption to the weapons policy and goes everywhere with a knife at her hip.
She braids her hair every morning.
She graduates.
She finds work at a little practice in Enwich. She keeps the hours and takes the patients her boss doesn't want to cover and does more than her share of paperwork. She sees stressed out lawyers and insomniac wizards and suicidal jewelers and traumatized soldiers. She helps them. Her boss wonders how he lucked into someone fresh out of school so comfortable with seeing patients on day one.
She has a little apartment twenty minutes' walk from work. She spends more than she can justify on decorating it - surely, surely the universe cannot care if she has a lamp shaped like a tree? She didn't commission it, she only saw it and -
- and the rest of her discretionary budget she spends on books.
She does not read them all. She has a stack of foreign language dictionaries and popular novels in everything from Kharoline to Yokano and she doesn't even crack them open. It's just the only safe thing she can think of that might distract someone who might try to rescue her.
He would not arrive with old safe habits to rediscover under the veneer of having grown so far. He would not arrive with the dubious protection of the Valar, of that she's sure.
So if he shows up she will throw languages at him and run as fast as she can to the university and find someone who can banish him home where he can take all the time in the world to grow up.
They do.
He figures out how to use a tweaked version of Prestidigitation to take magic notes in the air. He figures out another spell that lets the notes be visible to no one but him. He is going to have planar shifting long before he is twelve and the only way for them to stop him is to bring his Bella back.
She puts the biscuits in the oven and goes and collapses on the couch.
And she dashes down the stairs and out to the grocery store, which gives her boxes, and she packs all of her books and her crystal ball and her notes, and then she writes a letter because her father hasn't caught up to having ethernet yet. She glances over at Fëanáro occasionally to see how he and Yokano are getting along.
Okay, so she can linger a little over the letter. She pulls her crystal ball out of the box to send her mother a quick note that there is a longer note to be found in the apartment and her patients all cancellation notices, then reboxes it. "That's everything important."
"Rúmil's friends say the Valar do not look in often, down here. So the plan is to teach you planar shifting and then find a way to refine it for desired characteristics of target planes - we need a science fantasy one and that's not safe to check - and then go there, if the Valar won't let you stay."
"Well, they can stop worrying about you when you're not in their jurisdiction any more, how about that," she says, "and then they can stop doing terrible things out of fear when they have this little understanding of how incarnate minds work that they thought anything about banishing me would help."