The months passed with an interesting routine.

Most of Lexie's time was dedicated to learning card magic and card crafting, now with her father's blessing. Aiden was diligent, teaching Lexie everything from the detailed origin of card magic to intricate factoids of Fae etiquette. He also helped her know which of the pathway nodes she could probably get away with tweaking and which were the more dangerous adjustments. However, once summer rolled around, he began teaching at the Arcadian Research College and didn't have as much time for their lessons. Not that Lexie was resentful. On the contrary, she was quite happy to see her dad once more doing what he loved.

It had taken a lot for Aiden to be able to teach again. He had to agree to increased surveillance, more check-ins with his parole officer, and a significant cut of his pay going toward facilitating the added measures. Furthermore, every lecture and every meeting with a student had to be recorded, and preferably supervised by another teacher.

Aiden agreed to all that without a word of protest, and his parole officer spoke highly of his impeccable record and community service so far. The court-assigned psychologist put in a good word too. Thus, it was a done deal.

Lexie had in-person school on Aiden's first day teaching so they'd headed to the train together, with Aiden in his best tweed suit, looking nervous but excited. He adjusted his glasses multiple times on the train, and Lexie thought she heard him murmuring his introduction, which unfortunately included a dad joke. ('Well, I was looking for an icebreaker for the start of class but we're already having a pretty hot summer, aren't we?').

It was bad, but he wouldn't take it out no matter what Lexie said.

"Dad, that is a terrible joke," she told him.

"It's good," he argued defensively. "I'll need something to break the ice and that always got my students at Victoire cracking up."

Lexie reminded him that there was a difference between [Hero] students who were probably in awe of his reputation and hence eager to please, and college research students who were probably cranky, possibly broke, and definitely socially awkward if Elvira was anything to go by.

Nevertheless, Aiden was stubborn and so the joke stayed. His nerves persisted for the rest of the trip, even with Lexie trying to calm his fears, assuring him that his suit looked appropriately pressed, his cookies would remain warm in the flask and everything would be okay.

"You'll do great," Lexie told him. "You're a fantastic teacher."

He smiled at her. "Thank you, Lex. I appreciate that."

Despite her words of encouragement, deep inside, Lexie thought it might be a rough first day anyway, for all the reasons she'd mentioned above. And also because, well, he was an ex-[Villain].

But somewhat to her surprise, it did go well.

Aiden picked her up from school in significantly higher spirits which told her everything she needed to know but she asked anyway, "How was it?"

"It was…much better than I expected actually," he said. "The joke wasn't the hit I would have liked it to be, but that was probably because the first part of the class was spent getting the students' curiosity out of their system. Most wanted to hear about my missions from my [Hero] days and a few were curious about my short-lived villainy, but very few were openly hostile."

"There were openly hostile people?" Lexie asked frowning.

"Of course," he said, then winked at her. "But don't worry. I'll win them over."

And months later, nearing the end of the summer semester, he claimed he had. He'd come home ecstatic that day with an empty flask that had been previously filled to the brim with cookies. He'd claimed that it had been an extraordinarily good day, and the students had been totally into the lesson. One student even wrote him a letter that said that Aiden helped him understand magical concepts in a way he never had before, and thanks to him, they were no longer considering dropping out of the program. Aiden had the letter packed neatly in his bag and beamed when Lexie suggested that they frame it.

Of course, Lexie didn't understand just how beloved he was, until she actually visited him once after school. The Arcadian Research College was a sprawling campus that reminded her of when she'd toured Yale. Old stone buildings with stained glass windows, steeped in history. Lush green grass with students hurrying across, very few stopping to talk to themselves. An Orinian flag hung and fluttering in the courtyard.

She passed by it to reach her father's lecture hall, a large space with enough seats for a hundred. When she opened the door and walked in, she found him surrounded by a gaggle of students all arguing with each other, while he played chaperone with a bemused smile on his face. It was clearly the end of class but most of the students still stuck around, some paying attention to the argument that the group was having and the others having conversations with each other. Some of them shot her curious looks as she entered, hovering near the doorway. Lexie was focused on her dad at the center of the podium.

"Folks," Aiden finally put up his hand in an attempt to halt the argument, "I'm glad that you're so passionate about this topic, but truthfully it's a philosophical discussion that has transcended millennia, so we likely won't find an answer for it now."

"That's because the answer is so obvious that to argue against it is stupid and deliberately contrarian." The blonde boy next to him sneered at another brunette boy. "It's clear that everything abides by magical formulas. It's the only thing that makes sense. Soft magic systems are a thing of myth and wishful thinking from people not talented enough to do real magic–"

"The Guardian's magic worked by a soft magic system reportedly," a girl interrupted him. "And that was said to be more powerful than anything we have today."

"If it existed," he countered. "And that's a big 'if', considering we don't even know if the guardians did exist or it was just superstition that was used to explain Fae magic of today."

"Ha. Now you show your bias," the brunette huffed sardonically. "We don't use Fae magic, only a Fae-adjacent system. And the Guardian's existence is pretty well-documented."

"Yes, documented long ago, when people thought 3D designs were revolutionary. They probably saw a Fae giant and thought it was a god."

"Yes, but there is evidence that we had magic as early as a thousand years ago. And the Fae only came to Earth about a century ago, so how did magic exist on Earth before them without the Guardians?"

"You mean the Fae only made themselves known to humans a century ago. They could have been operating here for millennia without being noticed. I mean some of them are shapeshifters, aren't they?"

"What, you think aliens resided on Earth for that long, and none of us were the wiser?"

"Obviously. Humans are famously the dumbest species in the interplanetary alliance."

"Hey, Doug, that's out of line!" The girl called and that triggered more arguments from people jumping to defend their species against such slander. Aiden held up his hand again, trying to control the noise level, reminding them that there was another class going on next door. As he did, his eyes caught Lexie's.

She waved and he waved back.

"Well, this has been lovely," he said loudly. "But unfortunately, I have to leave you to continue this discussion on your own. My daughter's here."

That sent the group's eyes Lexie's way. She heard whispers ranging from, "Aw she's so cute," to, "That's the daughter he's always talking about?" and a couple of people even said, "She's so lucky. With a dad like him, I'll bet she'll never have to struggle with advanced magical calculus."

The girl who had been arguing with Doug frowned and swung her head back to Aiden. "But Professor, you haven't even answered my question. Doug here derailed the whole conversation."

"Of course, Joan, my apologies. How about you come to see me first thing tomorrow morning during office hours? I'll make sure to be here before 7:30."

"Alright," Joan said, suitably pacified.

"What about me Professor?" a boy in a lab coat who was still seated called out. "You said you would go through my last test and tell me everything I did wrong."

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

"Oh yes, I did say that, didn't I? You can go right after Joan."

"And extra classes for me, Professor?" a reedy-thin boy meekly said.

"Yes, Pierre, you can be after Peter, who is after Joan. You know what Joan, why don't you make a list of everyone who needs to see me and arrange it in whatever order seems fair. Does that sound good?"

Joan nodded and raised her chin to reflect her increased sense of self-importance due to the duty she'd been given. Aiden finally pulled away from the crowd and walked over to Lexie with an accomplished smile on his face and a bounce in his step.

Lexie grinned, happy for him.

"Shall we?" He took her hand, waving at several people who called out to him as he left.

Even with his busy schedule, Aiden made time out to continue his lessons with Lexie intent, Fae culture, and card pathways. Lexie was getting a hang of pathway design, seeing the patterns emerge. Typically, the beginning of the pathway had a lot more AND and OR nodes, which slowly narrowed down the skill to be as specific as possible. Then they would use buff/debuff nodes on pathway branches to tweak different parts of the skill and make them more or less prominent. And then finally, they would include a variable debuff node at the end (right before the ability/effect node) just in case the system thought the card was too powerful and they needed to turn it down a notch.

Elvira and Aiden taught Lexie that even after the card had been approved, and the pathways had gotten fixed, card mages often left some nodes semi-flexible, so they could rework the cards after the fact, to occasionally make second and third editions of the deck. They would later tweak these cards using those flexible nodes, but the tweaks couldn't be dramatic or the system wouldn't approve. And the changes also still had to make sense with the intent of the card or the card wouldn't work.

But those tweaks helped Lexie understand a lot about pathways in the coming months.

Using that knowledge, Lexie started working on adjusting her existing cards. Of course, as they were still subject to system approval, she couldn't buff them all the way up like she wanted to, but she could, for example, make Sir Hoppington do a few more skills than just backflips. She also managed to reduce the clumsiness factor of the <Out of Hand> card by turning the debuff node so it would debuff that attribute more. She did this just in case she needed to use the <Getting out of Hand><Hustle and Shuffle> combination as she did for Terry during the eye fight. And since the debuff node was variable, she could change it back if she wanted to, and use it as an attack card rather than a support one, which was cool.

Another cool thing Lexie found out was that, while she couldn't technically buff cards by turning up their buffer (as the system wouldn't allow it), she could buff them by skipping debuff nodes on her activation. This was done by using the black hole method to push out all her mana from the pathway right before the debuff node and then push it back into the pathway right after the node. The node remained inactive when it didn't come into contact with mana and so, this allowed the skill created to be more powerful.

Of course, she'd only tried this once with <Hustle and Shuffle> and after she told Aiden, he made her promise not to do it again.

She planned on keeping her promise for the most part. At least for now.

But it was nice to know that she could go a lot faster than she thought with the card.

While Lexie got good at theoretically designing the cards, and even making the cards she had better. But she still struggled with making new cards because of the whole intent thing. Aiden was right. Trying to use an already existing card's pathway to create a new card wasn't always accurate and sometimes the results could be unpredictable. It was usually more likely to work when the cards were similar, but when she'd tried to create a card that made one more stable and agile (basically by creating the opposite of the <Out of Hand> card), the pathway had simply fallen apart and refused to work. She didn't know why, and she'd tried to reverse engineer it from all angles but it simply wasn't working.

She and Elvira tried to work on it and Elvira told her that her designed pathway was theoretically perfect, but it wouldn't work probably because the intent for <Getting Out of Hand> was too specific to that skill and could not be amended. And so she would need to find an intent that she could amend for the new skill. Or simply come up with an intent on her own that the Fae would have approved of. And that was the hard part.

Now while Lexie's perception was getting better at guessing intent in other cards, thanks to all her rigorous Fae studies, she was still only correct less than half the time. And coming up with intent on her own, for something that had not been done yet, was a whole other beast. But she tried studying lots of similar cards to see what she could glean from them.

Apart from those lessons, a significant chunk of Lexie's time was spent with Dewie's documentation journal. Lexie was still taking note of the things that Dewie saw, but one thing was starting to become clearer to her the longer she did this; Dewie's visions seemed to have a Fae component to them.

One of the things Lexie had noted in Fae culture was that goblins were often a sign of mischief, and warts, like the ones Dewie had seen on Lloyd's girlfriend, were actually a sign of stomach issues caused by an improper diet.

Lexie had once seen the girl curled up on the bathroom floor and discovered that she had an ulcer of some sort. Lexie had reported it to the school nurse and the girl was referred for treatment.

Dewie was sad that it had happened despite his warning, but Lexie was somewhat excited that she was getting to the bottom of his visions. Dewie may or may not be seeing Fae creatures, which meant that he probably had some manner of perception. Of course that meant that, in order to create the 'Dewie Deck' as she was starting to call it, she would need to know a lot more about Fae symbology. But on the bright side, with Dewie's help, she might actually get better at identifying intent.

Which was fantastic to know.

The final thing that took up some of Lexie's time was helping with Xena's social media stuff. Xena was gaining more and more followers rapidly as lots of people loved her style, even though they didn't necessarily know who she was. Lexie became the defacto assistant/manager, helping Zee scout locations, going shopping with her, and helping her research how to schedule posts. And that hard work was paying off. If Xena didn't become a healer, she could probably make a serious go as an influencer, and with at least three major sponsors, she would be set for life. Which was what Xena was going for.

"I wanna make money soon," she said while they walked through a store at the mall. "Emma doesn't get paid for me anymore after the age of fifteen and so I'm on my own from there on out."

"You don't really think she'll kick you out after fifteen do you?" Lexie gave her a look as Xena stopped to admire some pants.

Xena didn't answer at first, but Lexie saw the doubt in her face

"Seriously?" Lexie raised an eyebrow. "I know you like to do the 'you're not my mom' stuff as a bit, but you don't for one second think that Emma would do that right? She loves you. Truly."

Xena finally sighed. "I know. But having a kid isn't cheap and it's not like she makes a lot at that job of hers. And if I do want to become a healer, I'll need money to buy books and tools and all that stuff. Money makes that easier."

Lexie stiffened, the way she always did whenever Xena spoke about being a healer. But she forced herself not to say anything. No point in arguing about it, because that dream was unlikely to come true anyway.

But Lexie did agree with Xena on one thing. Having money did make things easier. Which was why it bummed her out that she couldn't gamble anymore. On the bright side, Aiden upped her allowance thanks to his salary increase, and she still had money saved up so she could afford dead room visits to help her channel her mana better. She was now down to activating most of her cards in under six seconds with very little waste. But Lexie still wasn't satisfied with that. While Aiden was amazed by her progress, Lexie thought she could do more. She wanted to activate the card in under a second and she knew she could do it with a little more training.

Aiden told her that it might get harder when she awakened.

"Your mana's going to grow exponentially," he said. "And it will be more difficult to control and manipulate."

But the thought didn't bother Lexie. She was happy to have more mana. Maybe it would help boost her in some ways.

But in anticipation of that, she kicked her mana control lessons into overdrive, visiting deadrooms at least twice a week, to the point where she had perfect control of her current capacity. Having achieved that, she wanted to be able to craft at least one card in a month and to be able to create a deck by the end of the year. In the fall, she worked hard toward that goal, almost to the exclusion of everything else. She made time for her friends of course, and kept up a little bit with the Fighter's circuit. Even though she didn't have a lot of time to watch matches anymore, she still managed to keep note of the important highlights. Top Dog remained number one in the league for the entire year and Conrad maintained his number two status. Kane was number 8, Bunny number five, and TechnoCrat number 11. Therefore Top Dog's team became the highest-ranked team earning them millions of credits in sponsorships and deals.

They each individually exploded in popularity, becoming more mainstream-famous. Top Dog was even reportedly dating a chart-topping singer at a point which Xena mocked Lexie endlessly for. The joke was on Xena though, because Lexie liked the singer, Tiana Moon, too. TxT was her favorite couple and when they broke up Lexie mourned their short union and the wasted relationship goals.

Speaking of relationships, Uncle Max had a string of girlfriends Lexie never met in that year, and according to Aiden, it was more than usual because he was bored and grumpy from missing dungeon season. This also meant that he threw himself into making all manner of weapons at his home. Going into his garage was like visiting an underground bunker full of military-grade machinery with some medieval weaponry mixed in.

He didn't get to use them much because there were no more unstable dungeons spawning. Still no news on where they came from or why they happened, but Lexie was at least glad to not be facing dangerous beasts every other fortnight.

And as the season passed in relative harmony, almost an entire year had gone by since Lexie first arrived in Hovelton. It was almost time for her to apply to schools and she looked up [Research] programs she would want to attend, if she got her pre-affixation changed. That reminded her of applying to college, which further reminded her of home.

She tried to put her old world out of her mind as much as possible to stave off the depression, although she would periodically record and send texts to Logan that never went through. The last one was a voice recording on Logan's birthday where she told him that she was proud of him for turning fourteen. She'd had Aiden unknowingly bake a cake for him and sung the birthday song alone in her room, blowing out the candles by herself.

And then she cried so hard that Aiden rushed up to comfort her, worried about her distress. He thought she was crying about her mother. He told her that Lara would be proud of her which only made Lexie cry even more. It was a somber day, and Lexie fell asleep cradled in her father's arms.

She locked her phone in her drawer after that and didn't check on it for a while.

By fall, she got a shoulder-length haircut and shot up a half-inch in height.

And System Day was right around the corner.

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