It turned out that the Fae method of communication and identifying 'intent' made no damn sense.

Alright, maybe that was unfair. It made a little bit of sense, but not in the ways Lexie would like it to.

They told entire stories just to pass on a single message. And sometimes that message could be something as basic as "I want my coffee hot." Seriously, that wasn't even an exaggeration. Aiden once relayed a short soliloquy about a young elf whose mother had run out of ingredients to make him a special meal on his Naming Day, and then when she had gone out to buy the ingredients she'd accidentally slipped on smyl (magical toad vomit) and fell. When she tried to get back up, she couldn't because she had no energy to. As it turned out, some races of elves (who were creatures also under the Fae umbrella) needed to drink a special beverage every morning called Poi-fye, to gain energy in order to tackle the day. So like coffee. And the woman in the story, named Sh-l-b hadn't drunk hers because it had not been hot enough by the time she left home. So essentially, she'd met misfortune because her coffee wasn't hot.

And that story formed the intent behind a card in the Brewers deck that made beverages hot.

What a waste of time.

Lexie wanted to find this Shelby creature and make her pay for the wasted minutes that it took for Aiden to explain that to her.

And the thing about the stories was that the lesson, or as Aiden called them, the 'intent' behind them the stories wasn't the same each time. Sometimes you would hear two identical stories about giants pillaging villages and, in one of them the intent would be to lock your doors at night, and the next one it would be to treat giants nicer. So one of them was used to design a card from a security deck that helped you check if your locks were steady enough. And the other one created a card in the reporter's deck and it helped boost your charisma temporarily during interviews.

So yes, after weeks of study, Lexie still couldn't make heads or tails of what exactly she was supposed to do to get the intent right each time.

And she tried her hardest.

Aiden decided at a point that she should probably learn a few Fae languages (of which there were thousands) in addition to their varied culture because he thought that would better help her understand the subtext behind each story. Lexie didn't complain. She accepted it and thanked Elvira for helping her rent some of those Fae cultural textbooks. She added them to her already busy study schedule and pored over them for at least 3 hours every night. But all she learned from them was that the Fae were a confusing set of equally confused races seemingly only bound by their enjoyment in confusing humankind.

And Lexi could sense the glee and superiority complex in each of the texts (written by humans but supervised and edited by Fae), where they were teaching lowly humans how to form intent using better communication to hone their magic better.

And to be fair, some of the stories in the Fae history books were amusing. But Lexie couldn't enjoy them because she didn't feel they were getting her closer to her goal.

So about a month after lessons began, when Aiden presented her with yet another story that she couldn't decipher intent from, Lexie finally blew out a frustrated breath.

"This is hopeless," she said, feeling a little like a failure.

"Because you're not perceiving properly," Aiden said. He was sitting across from her and seemed sympathetic but also amused by her problem.

"It's not like I'm not trying!" She glared at him and he chuckled.

"I know you are, honey bee. But you have to be patient with yourself. You can't be good at everything from the get-go."

"I know." Which was a shame. Lexie liked being good at things from the get-go. Made life easier.

But this was like her with Mrs. Lancaster's 8th grade calculus class where she couldn't make heads or tails of what was going on. Lexie completely blamed the woman for her distaste for math. Mrs. Lancaster seemed to take pride in confusing her students and hated to be asked questions, humiliating anyone who tried. It had only taken one verbal beat down for Lexie to never ask her another question again.

At least, Aiden was different. He welcomed questions and answered them well. But it still wasn't helping her much.

"I didn't expect to be great at it," she said as her father slid another cup of Muan tea in front of her, her third today to soothe her annoyance. "But I didn't expect to be this bad. I mean I'm supposed to be smart, aren't I? How come I haven't made any headway?"

"There are different measures of intelligence dear, at least when it comes to a system ranking," he said gently. "I think you likely score high on things like memorization, analytical thinking, and creative application. Probably high emotional intelligence and intuition as well. But I'm guessing perception will be your lowest stat on the board."

"Yeah." Because she came from a world where things made sense and people tackled problems scientifically, not magically. People didn't just perceive things. They analyzed and experimented and then got a result that they could predict each time. But that wouldn't help her here, because here she was somehow supposed to just feel her way to the truth.

"And there's all those Fae books I have to get through," Lexie groaned. "Don't get me wrong I like reading fables as much as the next girl, but the Fae are just ridiculous at this point."

"Well, what did you think would happen when you become a research scholar?" he said. "As I told you before, they spend most of their time in a room reading and studying. If it's not text, it's algorithms. Only a portion of their time is spent experimenting and even less of that is spent out in the real world."

"Is that what you had to do as a scholar?"

He toggled his head. "More or less. Mine was a little different because I didn't go to a scholar academy. What I did was self-study that the [Hero] academy helped facilitate so I could use my scholarly class even if I didn't necessarily want to become a full-fledged [Researcher]."

"They can do that?" Lexie asked and he nodded.

"Victoire is very powerful and very influential, and they have a huge budget for just about anything you could dream of. Although they only let a handful of the admits do individual research like that, I was an S-ranked scholar so they allowed me."

"Lucky. So all the card scholars at other schools, they have to learn all this Fae history stuff?"

"No," Aiden said, shocking her. "Perhaps they learn enough to pass card theory in their first few years, but very few of them learn the language and culture of the Fae and even fewer keep up with it, I believe."

"They don't?"

Aiden shook his head. "Most of them make new cards by simply amending existing cards, tweaking them to get similar yet different results. That's one of the reasons why most cards now are essentially a derivative of other cards and we have nearly ten party's planner's decks. Very few are doing anything cutting edge. Also another reason why cards are declining in popularity." His lips curled with distaste. "Anyway, the method I'm teaching you right now, that's the proper way to learn it. And it will serve you better in the long run."

Lexie could only stare at him incredulously.

Was he serious? There was an easier way to do it, and he'd had her reading Fae script for a month?

Lexie blew out a breath. "Okay, I get it. And don't think I'm not appreciative of you teaching me all this because I am. Super appreciative. But is it possible that I can just do it the way they do it for now? Just until I get the hang of it."

Aiden's eyebrows furrowed to show his disapproval. "That would be taking the easy way out Lexie."

"Yes, but hear me out. I want the easy way out for now. And then maybe in like a year or so, when I can finally make heads or tails of Fae culture, we can do things the hard way." Lexie shrugged. "You have to learn to walk before you can run, right?"

He rubbed his chin in thought. "Yes, but this isn't like that analogy. This is more like you learning to walk backward before you learn to walk forward. But I suppose it might not be so damaging to do it that way, as long as you make sure you keep up with your Fae studies. The more you do that, the more you learn to think like the Fae and the better your perception gets."

Stolen story; please report.

"Of course," Lexie said, brightening up. "I can even write you a paper every day about one aspect of Fae culture if you want. And then in return, you can teach me how to reverse-engineer the cards I have and use them to make new cards. Doesn't that make sense?"

Aiden thought about it some more, then finally gave in with a sigh. "Fine. But I have to warn you, this way isn't going to be as easy as you think either. The intent is the thing that provides the magic behind the card, that links all the pathways together, the thing that stabilizes the card and gives each card its activation symbols. Using one card to make a similar skill for another card without taking into account the differing intent will not always work out. Sometimes all you end up with is damaged card pathways or a broken card. So this 'cheat' isn't a sure thing either."

"No, I get that." Lexie nodded. "But will it work like 80% of the time?"

"I'm not sure," he responded. "It's hard to say how often it would work. That would depend on the card, how strongly specific the intent is, and how many changes you try to make."

"Okay." So the trick then was to try to make as little changes as possible and pray that somewhere on the Fae Planet, Shelby did not forget her coffee.

With that said, throughout the following week, Aiden began to teach Lexie pathway creation, theory and amendment. He knew at this point that she was already playing with her card pathways and experimenting with nodes and so he told her how to do it in a safer manner.

"Try not to experiment with the same card for too long," he said. "You weaken its security protocol that way and can lead the card to self-destruct with enough time. And while your method of skipping nodes is quite clever and might work for now, it might not be possible once you have your full mana capacity. Another thing to be careful about is pushing too much mana into the waste card pathway. Again, it might work for now, because your mana is too tiny to cause much damage but eventually you will have enough mana to cause damage and if the security protocols fail, the backlash can hit you."

Lexie nodded and noted down all his warnings and what would happen if she shirked them.

Then, finally, Aiden showed her the basic construction of a pathway.

And yes, it really was just logic gates.

Once you identified the intent and purpose, Lexie just had to logic her way through from one end to another to create a suitable skill.

For example, the intent behind the <Out of Sight> card was that scared rabbits needed to hide souls or something to that effect. And the purpose was to create a card for a creature to hide from predators.

So logic dictated you had to have a method of first identifying the predator and then a method of hiding and then you had to link it to create a logic tree.

"To create this tree, you must first start by asking yourself whether this will be an effect or an ability card," Aiden drew it on a pad so it reflected on a hologram floating in the air. The hologram was of a big flat card with all the pathways highlighted inside, a nice visualizer they'd gotten courtesy of Elvira so that Aiden could educate Lexie. "In the case of <Out of Hand>, it's an effect card and so the effect node or effect gate goes at the very end of the pathway because it informs the direction of the skill. Now you might say why are we figuring out the last node first? And that's because it's good to know if it's an ability or effect early, so you can rule out other paths that don't make sense, choreographically or logically."

He placed the node down and some of the highlighted pathways blinked off.

"Now you see in this card there were all these pathways available to you. Thousands of them. But once you put that final effect node, a few of them disappear from the screen. This is because these are no longer viable paths for you to take. Some of them are things that you can't do with an effect card, for example, and the effect cannot be used to boost your mana like that pathway over there would have done. And this is a choreography that won't make sense for an effect card. But some of these pathways are simply restricted for safety reasons so the card doesn't do too much."

"Can I override the restrictions?" Lexie asked and her father shot her a look. "Not that I'm going to. Just asking."

"I'd prefer not to answer but I have a feeling if I don't, you'll find out the answer anyway. Yes, there are ways to override restrictions but it's not advisable. Let me stress on that. Very not advisable, Lexie. This is a starter card, for learning purposes, so the restrictions are there to help to guide you. But with a regular blank card, there will be no guides to help you know which path to take, and no restrictions to protect your card from destruction. With those cards, you sink or swim on your own, and once you try to do something you shouldn't, the card will not correct you and will simply self-destruct, costing you a lot of money and time."

Lexie nodded. Money and time were two things she didn't want to waste. So she would stick to the rules for the foreseeable future.

Aiden continued to teach her what each node did. Exclusion nodes used the [OR] function and addition nodes used the [AND] function. There were also equivalents of the XOR gate, NOT gate, NAND gate, NOR gate, and XNOR gate. And there were also buff and debuff gates. Apparently, most of the 'locked' Heismann nodes she'd found in the card pathways that supposedly didn't do anything, were debuff nodes or debuff gates depending on which textbook one used.

"Card mages like to use a lot of these debuff nodes because of the way the card approval process works," Aiden explained. "If a card is deemed too powerful or capable of causing too much damage, it will not be system-approved. So rather than recreate the card from the start every time the system rejects it, mages simply use the debuff node they installed ahead of time to reduce the effect of a given ability or reduce the time that the skill is in play. Then they submit the card for approval again and keep debuffing until they finally get it approved. And once the card is approved, all the pathways are then locked into their current positions and the nodes are also locked. But as you've figured out my precocious daughter, the locked nodes can be unlocked by various mechanisms. But you probably shouldn't do that too often."

"I won't," Lexie said breezily but Aiden didn't buy it.

"They're locked for a reason, Lexie," he said. "So be very careful if you're going to play with them, and heed my earlier warning."

Once again, Lexie nodded.

And after that, it was time to practice on her own.

She began of course with her Party Planner's cards trying to deduce how they were created and identifying how many buffer nodes there were. She also started searching for a list of cards she wanted to amend to create her own cards.

While doing this, she kept up with her Fae lessons. She started making some headways with Fae language, quickly picking up swear words like 'Pulechtl' which meant a person who had lost their favorite broom, and 'Jhovit' which was a specific type of semi-soft turd.

And to prove that she was keeping up with her Fae studies, every morning Lexie would greet Aiden at breakfast with a new factoid she'd found out, or even give mini-presentations about whatever facet of Fae history she'd discovered.

It was during one of those presentations that Uncle Max visited to ask Aiden, plainly, for credits. Apparently, Max had blown most of his credits on something or the other, and he needed to buy new weapons. And Luke was refusing to lend him anything.

"I'll pay you back in a few months when a business deal goes through," Max said and Aiden sighed.

"Sorry," he said. "I wish I could help but I spent all my money on Lexie's birthday present.'

"Damn it," Max said and Lexie felt bad so she pitched in.

"I can lend it to you," she said. "In return for another favor you'll owe me."

Max shook his head without even looking at her. He was deep in thought. "Thanks, Lex, but I'm not talking chicken-change here. I need at least eight hundred credits."

"I can loan you eight hundred credits," she said without missing a beat.

It took a second for the words to register and for both men to glance at her.

"Where did you get eight hundred credits from?" Max asked.

She hesitated for a second and then sighed. It seemed the moment had come for her to tell the truth.

"I'm going to tell you," she said slowly to Aiden. "But you can't get too mad at me, okay?"

If anything Aiden's expression turned more apprehensive. "Lexie, what did you do?"

Lexie sighed again and then finally told the whole story of her very brief and very light history of gambling.

By the time she was done, both men stared at her in open-mouthed shock.

Max recovered first and asked, "You made how much?"

She avoided Aiden's eyes, saying meekly. "Only about 7000 credits in total…"

Aiden made a choked sound and Max burst into loud and raucous laughter. "I knew it! I always knew you would be my favorite goddaughter."

"I'm your only goddaughter," she pointed out.

"That makes it even better! Listen, we should go into business, kid. We'll be rich I'm telling you." As Max's eyes gleamed with greed, Aiden recovered from his shock and scowled at him.

After receiving a fair bit of scolding from Aiden, (who made her promise never to do anything like that again) and a fist bump from Max, Lexie went back up to her room for more studying. She texted Xena and Dewie intermittently, telling them she'd learned a new Fae swearword called T-tl. It was Elven and it meant 'a wooden idiot'.

Of course, Lexie didn't just teach herself the bad stuff, even though those stuck easier. She also learned good stuff like 'Popo' which meant 'an honored child guest who deserved cookies' and 'Gar-etch', which was 'a loved one I would give an important limb for.'

And when she was done with that, she brought out Aiden's poem for the day and tried to perceive the meaning behind it. She also did perception meditation exercises she'd found on Video Alley, as that was supposed to help unlock whatever brain cells people used to perceive things. At least that was what Master Maureen said. Lexie didn't know if she was for real or not, but a bunch of people in the comments section said they'd found enlightenment from it.

Nevertheless, hours later, Lexie still sat at her desk in front of a full moon staring at the passage.

She sighed. "Are you going to tell me what you mean this time, or are you going to be difficult?"

The page blinked up at her, not offering any help.

Lexie closed her eyes. She had to feel it. Perceive what the meaning was about. And not think too hard because thinking might be counterintuitive to perceiving.

"Come on," she muttered. "Don't be a Jhovit, okay? Just give me a sign or whatever. And you will be my best friend. Don't you wanna be a good Popo? I'll give you all the cookies you could ever ask for."

But still, no matter how much Lexie begged, there was no discovery to be had that night.

Except that somewhere, deep within the system, hidden from Lexie and the world by the 1's and 0's and all the other calculations that were constantly running in the background, an entity smiled.

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