"What?" Lexie exploded startling the two other people on the train with her. She didn't even bother to give them apologetic looks but she did lower her voice as she hissed, "What do you mean Xena's gone to Planet Fae?"

Dewie shrugged. "I mean exactly that. I saw her on the way out."

"On her way out? Did you ask why she was going?"

"I did but she was in a hurry and couldn't explain. She just said she had to go and that she'd be back soon."

Lexie's thoughts were all over the place. Confusion, indignation, and fear mixed into a volatile cauldron of emotions, on the verge of detonating.

They said they wouldn't force her. They promised! They signed a magically binding contract! Wasn't that supposed to mean something?

"I don't think they forced her to go," Dewie said, which was how Lexie knew she'd spoken out loud. "Xena seemed like she wanted to. Or more like had to go. Urgently."

"That doesn't make sense. What would Xena urgently have to do on Planet Fae, where she's never even been before?"

Dewie shrugged. "I don't know. That's what I thought she would tell you. I thought maybe she didn't want me to know because she didn't reply to my texts."

Lexie frowned and went back to check her last text to Xena which had been two days ago, where she'd told her that she'd made a new card. Xena never replied. How did she not notice?

To be fair, between her dad, Tate, and her cards, Lexie had had a lot on her plate. Still. She was a shitty friend for not even knowing that her friend had potentially been kidnapped. And no matter what Dewie said, Lexie was sure Xena hadn't left on her own. Why on earth would she?

"She didn't tell me either," Lexie said. "I don't know. Something about this doesn't feel right to me."

Dewie blinked and said, "She did not have any ugly birds on her shoulders when she left. I would have seen it."

At least that much was comforting. "Thank you. That's good to know."

Although Lexie had initially planned to go home and immediately get started on the card crafting, her mind was now occupied with Xena and her little impromptu trip. She just couldn't believe that Xena would leave without telling her. She'd told Dewie so why hadn't she told Lexie? Had she simply forgotten, or was there more to it?

Lexie decided to reach out to Emma to find out for sure. On her way back, home, she stopped at the Healing House catching Emma right as she was coming out of her office.

"Hey, Lexie," Emma smiled despite the weariness in her eyes. "How are you doing?"

"I'm good." Lexie was too tense to make it sound convincing so she simply got to the point. "Did Xena tell you she would be going somewhere for a while?"

"No, but the school told me. They said it was a school trip." Despite her words, the worry grew in Emma's expression. Emma was probably feeling the same thing she was.

Lexie didn't want to worry her even more but she needed to voice out the anxiety gnawing at her.

"Do you think…I mean, you don't think they've taken her to Planet Fae without her permission, do you?"

Lexie almost regretted the question just from how sick Emma looked from the very thought of it. Emma fought to appear brave as she shook her head. "No, I don't think so. They explicitly promised they wouldn't do that, and put the terms in a magically binding contract. Plus…"

"Plus…"

"I spoke to Luke and he said...He has some contacts who looked into everything the officials said and it turned out to be true. No one can force Xena to go if she doesn't want to. The Fae won't even accept her in that case."

"What if her tutor coerced her then? Or deceived her?"

Emma bit her lip and shook her head. "Xena wouldn't just leave and go to the Fae planet without telling me. She told me she wouldn't.'"

And Lexie didn't think Xena would leave without telling her either but this whole thing was giving her a bad feeling.

"I'm going to try to reach one of the embassy officials," Emma said. "I have their number. I'll also reach out to Victoire and find out exactly what happened. And in a week if my daughter's not back then I'm going to raise hell." A hard look entered her eyes, a furnace in their depths.

Lexie nodded. She wanted in on that plan too.

Emma suddenly sighed and her expression turned sad. Her voice was low as she murmured, "It's hard to believe how quickly things are changing. It feels like it was only yesterday she came home with me for the first time. I never thought she would be taken away from me so quickly." Her eyes watered and her smile trembled at the corners. "It's funny how life works out."

"Yeah." Lexie didn't know what to say, but her heart ached for Emma.

Aiden had told Lexie over the summer that while he'd been in jail, Lexie had predominantly stayed with Emma, and sometimes Max and Luke. In many ways, Emma had become a mother to Lexie at that time and Aiden thought that might have been one of the reasons she started looking to adopt after Lexie was back in Aiden's custody.

Lexie couldn't imagine what it would feel like to bond with a child so closely and have them taken away from you. Worse, Lexie had lost all her memories of those moments with Emma, forgetting all that they shared in those weeks.

Emma was probably afraid that she would lose Xena in the same fashion as well.

"You're right," Lexie said, trying to instill her with a confidence she didn't feel. "Xena wouldn't just leave permanently like that. I'm sure she'll be back. She probably just forgot to mention it because she was so busy."

"Yeah." Emma gave her a fake smile too. "That's what I'm hoping for."

Lexie nodded, making a little small talk before she continued home. Even after she left the hospital, Lexie kept thinking about Xena, conspiracies mounting in her mind.

What if they did, in fact, trick Xena into going to the Fae planet? Was mind control a possibility here? Had that Monty Ward done something to Xena? What if this was something they'd been doing for a long time with other Lightlarks, and their governments had simply been covering it up?

What if Xena didn't tell me and Emma intentionally as a way to hint to us that something was wrong?

Maybe she wanted Lexie to come rescue her.

How? Lexie asked herself. Even if she wanted to rescue Xena, she couldn't do that right now. She was basically powerless.

She thought about the card deck brewing in her mind and just how easy it had been to create the cards she wanted in the dungeon. And she had two brand new intents to try out.

She may be powerless now, but she wouldn't be for much longer.

Tate told Lexie that they would delve again later that week. In the meantime, Lexie kept to her routine. She now woke up early to jog at least five miles every morning, still having to walk some of that, and did some bodyweight exercises. Then she'd spend the rest of the day on her Fae studies and also on pre-reading for the first day of class at Arcadia. She had less than a month left to start and she was preparing for that. There wasn't actually much for her to preread though.

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The first year at Arcadia was mostly theory stuff, and Lexie's studies with Aiden and Elvira put her at least two years ahead of the material when it came to card magic at least. She glanced through the textbooks anyway and accessed articles that she'd gotten with her brand-new nifty scholar ID.

Gosh, it was nice to get access on her own now.

While Lexie's study with Elvira had been focused on improving her cards, in Arcadia, she had to learn about magic in general; magical theory, magical elements, the history of magic and systemology, etc. She read through it one night, and managed to get to a chapter about Forbidden Magic and why certain skills had been taken out of the system.

For some of them, like versions of necromancy that required the death of other creatures, and mind control, it was fairly obvious why they shouldn't exist anymore. But the fact that teleportation was forbidden stumped her, especially since teleportation orbs were still in existence.

According to what she read, some types of teleportation were allowed. For example, summoners could technically teleport people and items through portals from one area to another. It could only be done under a very specific set of circumstances, where they had encoded the destination and got system approval first. 'Free teleportation', where one could go anywhere they wanted with magic, wasn't allowed except with teleportation orbs.

Maybe that was why it was so difficult for Lexie to create the teleportation effect and she had to settle for fast jets of speed.

Of course, Lexie didn't understand why free teleportation was banned and the book wasn't great at explaining it, except to cite a few incidents where improper teleportation technique had led to one or two individuals getting lost in space and time. Lexie wondered if maybe someone had accidentally traveled to another dimension or another planet like that.

Yikes, if so.

Nevertheless, that didn't seem like a good reason. All magic, as Lexie understood it, had its casualties so why were certain things like teleportation and early card magic singled out to be too dangerous?

Typically with most of the other Forbidden skills, more specific examples were given–the book named the villain who had destroyed civilizations with necromancy and told the story of the horrific Mindmeister who'd enslaved groups of people. Usually, the Forbidden Skill had to cause some level of mass destruction first before it got wiped out by the System entirely.

The fact that they just mentioned vaguely what improper teleportation could do, without going into the specifics of who had done what with it, made Lexie vaguely suspicious.

So she began reading into teleportation orbs to find out exactly what made them different and why they didn't work in dungeons. That was how she found out that teleportation orbs were technically made from a complex combination of science, alchemy, and magic. It was created and discovered by young genius engineers Valentina Koslov and James Murry. Teleportation orbs didn't work like a portal. It worked by essentially encasing stuff in a high-speed forcefield that made everything in it immaterial and speeding it to its destination while preventing matter disintegration. Didn't seem much safer than Free Teleportation, but apparently, the distinction was important enough to make a world of difference.

Lexie resolved to ask about it whenever Aiden got home but between working at the clinic and helping Terry and Glinda with their baking, he may not have much time.

Lexie closed her eyes and tried to trace the pathways she could observe in her teleportation orb. Of course, this orb had three sets of pathways, its physical pathway, a pathway for mana flow, and another pathway that governed the alchemical makeup of the orb. She analyzed each one but it was too twisted and complicated to figure out.

She would figure it out later. Maybe instead of trying to make a free teleportation-style card, she would make one that mimicked a teleportation orb.

The idea of creating what was essentially a forcefield-encased pocket dimension made her nervous. It seemed like this huge thing to her, something only elite mana users like her father could do. But her father had been able to create one actual pocket dimension at a young age, and the only difference between them was that he'd had a bigger mana reserve than her. But if Isaac ever made her that generator, and she used a land card...she could do anything she wanted. She could create the teleportation card.

Or she could permanently damage her pathways.

Either way, she would have an answer in the end.

***

"Hmmm, this one is tricky."

That was the last thing Lexie wanted to hear right now. They'd been marinating in darkness for what felt like hours already and while Lexie wasn't necessarily afraid of the dark, she didn't enjoy it either. Tate had been hemming and hawing while reading the inscription on the dungeon wall, muttering to himself in a language Lexie couldn't understand.

Lexie finally asked, "What exactly is the issue?"

Tate turned to her as though just realizing she was there. "It's a riddle," he said. "But it's a tricky one."

"What does the riddle say?"

"It's a derivative of the two-door question," he said. "You know that riddle that says that there are two doors, one leads to the good option, and the other leads to the bad one. There are two guards, one in front of each door, one of them always tells the truth and the other one always lies. You're supposed to figure out which door to pick."

"Oh." Lexie vaguely remembered a riddle like that back on Earth 2, although she couldn't figure out where on Earth exactly she'd heard it. And she'd never gotten an answer to it either.

"So from what I can gather, the two doors in this scenario are either there," he pointed behind to the left of the cave to a pile of rocks indistinguishable from the rest of the cavern wall except for the fact that there was a faded image of a gargoyle on it. "Or there." Tate also pointed at another pile of rocks with the inscription of an identical gnarly gargoyle. Those were the only inscriptions in the cave. There were other such creatures drawn all around so Lexie didn't know how Tate had figured out those two were the key.

"How do you figure that out?"

His eyes flickered in the light of his magical lantern. "The riddle reads, 'The treasure you seek is buried in dust, its guardian protects but which one to trust, one is a lie, and one is the truth, speak to just one, or prepare for your doom.' It's only level three so again, the riddle is pretty straightforward. The only thing I haven't been able to guess is which one of those is the correct one."

He traveled to both piles investigating as he pondered.

"Is there a reason why you can't try both?"

"Yes," he said. "The wrong one might lead the dungeon to collapse."

"Excuse me?"

He smirked. "I'm just playing. The wrong answer automatically shuts down the activation mechanism for the right door. So if we pick wrong we're going home empty-handed. Which I don't want to do since it was a real bitch finding this in the first place."

He scratched his chin as he surveyed it. Lexie held back, turning the question in her head. She was tempted to tell Tate to give up but then an idea occurred to her.

"What if the answer is a question?"

Tate turned to her in confusion. "What do you mean?"

"Are we allowed to interact with the guardian? The riddle seems to imply it."

Tate shrugged. "I guess. But it says you can only interact with one of them, and I'm assuming you can only do it once."

"Does it speak English?"

"It speaks everything."

Lexie nodded and walked to the gargoyle on the left squatting.

Tate cocked an eyebrow, frowning.

"Just trust me," she said.

He sighed and gestured for her to go ahead.

She stared at the twisted face on the cave wall and asked, "If I were to ask the other guardian what was the right path, which one would he tell me it is?"

The gargoyle immediately glowed and its face began to turn on the wall. The sound of earth crackling, and creaking echoed until the gargoyle nose was pointed at the pile of stone in the right corner.

Lexie turned back to Tate and pointed to the stone on the left. "That's the answer."

"How do you know?"

"Easy. You don't really have to figure out which one is lying to you because they'll both give you the same answer to the question I asked. If this guy's the guardian who always lies and his friend is the one who tells the truth, then he would lie about his friend's option. But if he's the one who tells the truth and his friend lies, he would also lie because he would know that his friend would lie to me. Either way, whatever answer he gives is a lie. So the other door must be the truth."

It took Tate a second for his eyes to light up. "You know I almost hate how smart you are sometimes."

Lexie smiled pleased as he started digging through the stones. Once he was halfway down the pile, the floor started to shake and the world spun into another environment, a dense forest covered in fog.

The floating door was once more behind Lexie.

"That was great," he beamed at her. "You know we make a great team."

"Yeah," she said. "I guess we do."

After he wandered off to do his stuff, Lexie sat on the ground and began crafting. The pathway for the first cards which she'd already dubbed <All-Around Protection> was easy enough to figure out and she'd designed it on the day she'd come home from the dojo. The second one, a card that built up her pain tolerance, was harder as it affected her brain and would only work in bursts. While doing that one, she also figured out something else she needed. Lexie wasn't comfortable with the fact that Tate could go off and she would have no way of reaching him for however long he was gone. She also had no way of knowing if he was in trouble or not. The frequent checkpoints weren't enough. She needed a card that could enable her to send and receive messages from Tate.

Luckily, Lexie had an idea of how to build one.

She'd spoken to Elvira yesterday about the difference between the types of creature cards. Basically, for some creature cards like <Easy Clean Up> one was only borrowing a very specific attribute of the creature (like the slime's ability to morph and conjure up many hands) and utilizing that once the card was activated. The creature was usually compensated for it, and part of the reason for the card's activation difficulty was how much was spent on that compensation.

But for a creature card like <Party Hopper> the card was literally designed and formed with the essence of the creature, which was why a hologram of it popped up when using it. Of course, this also made it difficult to adjust the pathway because the utility of the card was so deeply embedded with the essence that it was hard to disentangle.

Which was why Lexie decided to steal that essence and use it to create a new card like <Party Hopper> but with far more utility.

It wasn't going to be easy. To take out the essence, she essentially had to destroy <Party Hopper> leaving the Party Planner's deck one card short. But if she got it right, it would be a significant upgrade.

She managed to finish up the first two cards by the time Tate was done and she couldn't wait to activate them when she was home.

But as they left the dungeon for the second time, Lexie could swear she felt someone or something watching her.

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