Kayday
patreon
29 - A Blast From The Past
🕑 Added 2025-02-16 08:32:47 +0000 UTCLexie emitted a loud yelp and hopped up in her excitement.
The <Hustle and Shuffle> card also gave her a boost that made her jump nearly nine feet in the air before she landed.
“I did it!” She couldn’t believe it. She jumped up again and again, the buoyancy only adding to her joy. Elation coursed through her. The notification blinked in her vision.
She really did it!
She managed to prove one of her theories. Not only that, she also got academic validation from a system that was pretty much the God of this world. What a rush!
“Ha.” She brushed imaginary dirt off her shoulders and dusted her hands. “That’s how it’s done.’
She said it to no one in particular because no one was home. That took a little wind out of her sails. She really really wanted to share this discovery with someone. Typically, she would tell Mickie or Logan when she hit a major milestone or solved a particularly hard differential equation. But of course, neither of them were here and she had no other friends, except her dad. And Aiden certainly wouldn't want to hear that she was experimenting…probably. At least, not for now.
Maybe when she was done she would tell him, and show him her findings and her methodology. That way he would see how safe she’d been the whole time.
As it were, she could only commemorate her victory alone and she danced around the room in celebration. Eventually, that wasn't enough. She was dying to talk about it, to tell someone, even if they couldn't hear her.
So she dashed to her bag, reaching in to grab the phone.
She opened up Logan's texts and started a voice recording.
Luckily, the voice-record function still worked. Lexie's voice came out in a rush of excitement.
“Hey, Lo! I know you haven’t heard from me in a long time but I’m doing great. I'm not dead or anything. I'm just in a video game. Also, something cool just happened today. I activated a magic card with no mana waste whatsoever which is crazy." She still couldn't believe it and if not for the mild headache she was having, she might think she was dreaming. "Logan, I know it doesn’t sound like it but it’s totally a big deal. This isn’t the same as me nerding out over finally solving that differential equation. This actually has much bigger implications.”
She paused by habit, thinking of what to say next that wasn't going to be a full rundown of everything she'd just done. That would just bore him.
And then Lexie sighed, realizing that she was probably being insensitive. Here she was happy about card magic while Logan was probably mourning her death. They'd probably already had a funeral and everything. Logan probably hadn't left his room in weeks.
Or maybe he had. Maybe he'd already gotten over it, and her reappearance would make everything worse.
Reality crashed into her, ripping away her joy. Lexie swallowed past the knot suddenly lodged in her throat.
That was the hardest part about being gone, the thing she really didn't want to think about. The fact that while she was here, everything back home was probably moving on without her. Even if she did manage to make it back, she wouldn't be the same person who left and neither would Logan or Mickie. Neither would her parents.
“I miss you guys." Lexie's voice was more subdued now, and a tad hoarse. "Like, really miss you. I hope you’re okay. Especially you, Logan. Don't give mom and dad a hard time, okay? They just lost their daughter. And you just lost a sister which…sucks.” Lexie’s happiness had completely leaked out by this point and was quickly being replaced by the grief she’d been trying so hard to fight for weeks. That was why she stopped reading Logan’s messages. Because of the thoughts that she was trying not to have, the sinking sadness in her chest, the sense of deep loss of something she was scared she might never get back.
“I’m sorry, Logan. I didn’t mean to die like that. It was a mistake. I’m trying to come back, okay? So just hang in there." She coughed to clear my throat, heated tears pushing behind her eyelids. "And tell Mickie, I'm sorry too. I should have gone home with her. This wouldn’t be happening otherwise." But then Tate might be dead in that scenario. Or maybe not, considering it was her surprising Robbie that got her shot. "Tell her that I'm sorry I missed all those parties she threw. I should have gone to them instead of doing homework. I should have…I should have done a lot of different things.” Lexie’s vision blurred, and her eyes got watery. She swallowed past it and continued the voice note in a choked voice. “I miss you guys, but I’m doing well so far. I met a really cool guy. His name is Aiden. He's taking good care of me while I'm here."
And he was, so much so that she didn't miss her old life all that much, which made her feel guilty as heck. She missed aspects of it, like Logan and Mickie, but she’d lived a pretty empty life apart from those two. She’d done nothing but study, occasionally watch YouTube videos, and study some more. Other than Mickie, she'd made almost no friendships or meaningful connections with anyone. She was simply a robot existing before she died.
My life on Earth 2 sucked, she realized.
And she was doing the same thing here too, not making friends and keeping herself stuck in her room studying. If not for Aiden forcing her to go to school and to go for walks, she would never leave her home. She would be stuck in this room making breakthrough after breakthrough.
All to get back to her family and a life that she was quickly realizing wasn't much of a life at all.
But she couldn’t leave soon anyway, right? Especially seeing as how she needed to awaken her magic first, and give it time to grow. So did it matter if she took her time and maybe explored this world a little? This was an opportunity to do magic, something she might never get again. Would it be that horrible for her to relax and enjoy it? Make friends? If for nothing, she could find someone to bounce ideas off of?
And while she was here, she could do something that actually mattered. Conduct research that would help people.
At least craft a healing card, no matter how impossible it might seem, and leave Earth 9 a better place than she found it.
Maybe that was the point of it all, the point of her being here. And even if it wasn't, it was something she wanted to do.
Lexie had a lot of regrets about her first life.
She didn't want to regret this one too.
“We’ll see each other again, guys,” she whispered, wiping her eyes. “Just give me time? Alright?”
And then she sent the message, expecting it to fail but still slightly disappointed when it did.
As she stared at the 'No Service' bar, she finally sighed and deleted the message altogether.
***
Later that week, Lexie discovered that one of her first assumptions was wrong.
Not every card had just one deactivation sensor at the end of the pathway.
A couple of cards had two or three sensors and it seemed the more powerful the card was, the more sensors it had. She supposed it made sense. High-powered cards were more mana-demanding and so required stricter safeguards to prevent people from burning out from mana waste or harming themselves by twisting their pathway.
But that discovery put a wrench in her plan to boost the powers of all her cards by using waste particles to shorten activation and strengthen the effect.
She had pretty much figured it out for the lower-powered cards like <Hustle and Shuffle> and <Easy Clean Up>.
But for higher-powered cards, she had to figure out how to bypass the multiple sensors along the intended card pathway. Even triggering just one of the sensors automatically deactivated the waste card, and if the sensor was early enough in the pathways, deactivating the card didn't generate enough waste to produce the effect Lexie wanted.
The problem bugged her for nearly three days.
She thought about it every free moment, at school, at the clinic with Aiden, while she was watching the AFC, and even while studying in her free time.
She tried activating the waste card first and then stopping it before it reached full activation, but it didn’t work. She also tried partially activating waste card and then effortfully leaking mana out of it without deactivation. But that was time and mana-wasting because, by the time the intended card activated, most of the mana had dissipated into the mana cloud. She didn’t have the shaping skills to hold the waste mana in place for very long.
The only thing that sort of kind of worked was attempting to skip the sensor itself.
This was done as follows:
She partially activated the first section of the intended card, before the first sensor. Then while holding it there, she used a black hole to push mana particles out of that section into the cloud and then into the second section, thereby skipping the sensor area entirely.
Then she activated the waste card as well, and used that to push more mana into the second section.
This was, of course, extremely difficult to do. First of all, pushing mana out of the pathway wasn’t necessarily difficult but without the waste mana creating an unequal concentration gradient, it was hard to push it back in. Creating mini-black holes to skip the sensor was also a killer. So she was doing two hard things at once.
Then when you added the extra pathway that she had to pay attention to, there was just too much going on.
The first time took her nearly two minutes to complete activation, and she was breathless by the time it was done. And it still hadn’t worked.
She decided that she either needed better mana control, or she had to find an easier way to do this.
She trained herself with more black hole exercises to get finer mana control.
She also did more shaping and visited deadrooms twice more through that week, staying nearly two hours each time.
She didn’t get it right after countless tries. After a week, it was looking like she had to give up on this idea.
And then something very strange happened.
The two cards she’d paired up that day for practice were the <Hustle and Shuffle> card and the <Getting Out of Hand> as a waste card. While neither had multiple sensors along the pathway, she always liked to experiment with her simpler cards first to avoid wasting too much mana. She’d started the process of partial activation, pushing mana, creating black holes, and skipping imagined sensors.
All the manipulation was causing strain on her physically and mentally. It had also caused the pathways to twist slightly, shifting closer together. Lexie was concerned that the deviation of the pathway would trigger the structural sensors, deactivating both cards instantly. She struggled to rein it in but she was mentally exhausted by that point and it wasn’t working. She expected deactivation to happen as she continued her observation.
But something else happened instead.
Both pathways snapped into place but not to their original form.
Instead, they bonded to each other, forming a link, just as Lexie completed activation.
A breathless rush of power filled her as she opened her eyes and blinked.
What the hell just happened?
Lexie stared down at her hands wondering why her whole body felt...jittery.
Did the cards...combine?
It didn’t feel like it usually did when she activated the <Hustle and Shuffle> Card. But it didn't feel exactly like when Veronica had tripped her either.
It felt different.
Almost like she was both.
But that was…impossible, wasn’t it? At the very least she'd never heard of anything like it.
What exactly had she done?
She hopped and found that she was shakier on her feet, but also lighter. She tripped on air but her landing was soft, and she was also able to bounce several feet in the air.
Very odd indeed.
She was so focused on the feeling that she barely sensed the ding in her periphery alerting her that she had more notifications.
+1 ingenuity.
+1 discovery.
Research points.
That was good. At least she’d discovered something although she wasn’t exactly sure how. She’d somehow managed to combine two cards into one. That was incredible. Could she do it again?
She checked her system screen to see which card it would say was activated.
It showed both of the cards were active, but it was for a much shorter time. The cards shimmered in and out of focus and her SI also indicated there was an error in the activation so the activation time would be much shorter to compensate.
What an unintentional but encouraging turn of events.
Unfortunately for Lexie, it wasn’t replicable.
Lexie tried to do it every day for the next few days but she failed each time. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to activate the two cards at the same time while the skipping sensor. She had to bring the card pathways together in a specific way, maybe a pattern or equation that she didn’t exactly recall.
Probably had to do with the structure of the pathway. Maybe it had to twist in a certain configuration. But it was too hard to figure it out and testing it so many times was a strain on her.
Eventually, she decided to revisit that topic later and went back to perfecting her waste mana activation method.
***
“Lexie…”
Lexie's eyes opened and she found herself staring at Dewie’s blinking brown eyes.
“You’re drooling,” he said. “And my mom’s chauffeur is here.”
Lexie sat up and wiped the drool from her lips, blinking blearily at her surroundings. She was exhausted. Although that was to be expected, considering how far she had pushed herself last night.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“It's three. Schools over,” he said. “You dozed off during Mr. Norris’ class but I don’t think he noticed because Bennie kept distracting him with questions. And then Abernathy got Mr. Norris into a lengthy argument about volcanic eruptions that took forever until class ended."
“Abernathy did that?” She blinked. “Why?”
“So you wouldn’t get caught.”
Her heart warmed. Well, that was strangely sweet of him. She knew that she’d grown some camaraderie with the boys but she didn’t think they would hatch an elaborate plot to distract a teacher for her.
“I helped too. I stayed behind to make sure no one drew on your face with permanent markers,” Dewie pointed out, his eyes a little hopeful for praise.
"Thanks," Lexie smiled. “Why would anyone do that?”
He shrugged. “It’s what they did to me when I fell asleep. They drew a little lizard. But it was weird because it had two round legs instead of four."
“Oh.” She felt bad for him. Lexie had a feeling that it wasn’t a lizard they’d drawn on his face but she didn’t want to break it to him. That would make it worse. “Sorry about that.”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t really permanent. It came out after a month."
Yeah, but that was a month of walking around with skinny genitals on your forehead.
“That stuff you see,” Lexie ventured carefully. “Why not... I mean, you could just not tell people about them. I feel like that would make your life a lot easier.”
Dewie shook his head. "Last time I didn’t tell, my grandma died."
“Because of the…lizard people?”
He nodded. "My mom warned me not to talk about stuff like that anymore. She said it wasn't publically necessary information. And so when I overheard the lizard people plotting, I didn't tell my grandma because I didn't want to get in trouble." His eyes grew aggravated, his finger twitching. "She died that night. The lizard people pushed her into a ditch."
Lexie's chest swelled with pity. Poor kid. To think he blamed himself for his grandmother's death when it was more likely that the older woman had probably gotten confused and fell on her own.
Lexie didn't know how old Dewie's grandmother had been but that explanation seemed a lot more sound than his lizard people claim.
Lexie tried to get him to see it, even if it was just to ease his guilt.
"I don’t think that was related, Dewie," she said gently. "I think it was probably just a really sad accident."
Dewie didn't respond. He stared at her with a fathomless gaze that had just a hint of pity. Like she was the clueless one here.
Okay, then.
“Thanks for staying." Lexie gave him a grateful smile. "I appreciate it."
A tiny smile appeared at the corner of his lips and he asked, “Are you going to go back to sleep?”
She checked the time on her SI. Her dad told her he would be working late today and she was supposed to hang out at the school lobby to wait for him. She’d meant to use that time to sneak off to a deadroom but she was exhausted and she didn’t want to push herself too hard.
She'd spent the last few days significantly taxing her pathways and she needed rest.
So maybe she should just take today off. After all, she’d made a discovery just recently. Two actually. She'd earned a little sleep.
“Yeah,” she said, yawning. “I think I’m going to nap a little more and then head home.” Her dad could always call her on the system when he arrived.
Dewie blinked at her. “You’re gonna sleep here?”
She nodded.
“You’re not scared someone’s gonna draw on your face with permanent ink?”
She smiled. "No, I'm not. Thanks to you, I’ll remain on alert.”’
Dewie nodded and picked up his fine leather backpack swinging it over his shoulder. “Alright. But if they do, hairspray and orcish gecko saliva get it out faster. I looked it up after the incident, just in case.”
Lexie nodded and he hesitated a bit before heading to the door.
“Bye Dewie,” Lexie called out.
He stopped, turned, and gave her one of his small smiles again. “Bye.” And then he left.
Lexie laid her head back and the cool desk. Hopefully, she could sleep off her exhaustion so her father wouldn’t detect that something was wrong.
***
The next time Lexie woke, she heard a loud ringing.
It didn’t sound like a system call.
It sounded like the ringing of a cell phone.
Her eyes flashed open and she found herself in her bedroom. Her room in Hovelton, that is, not in New York. She frowned, glancing around. How did she get here? Did Aiden pick her up and carry her all the way home? She hadn’t even noticed.
Did she not wake up for the entire train ride?
Strange.
Her attention was almost immediately snatched by the incessant buzzing and clamoring in her drawer. She pulled it open and stared at the device that was making all the noise.
It was her cell phone.
It took a second for the cobwebs in her sleepy brain to clear enough for her to figure out why that was wrong.
Her cell phone was ringing.
And then it hit her like a lightning bolt.
It wasn't supposed to be ringing.
She didn’t have service. Hadn’t had service in months.
She scrambled for it, getting out of bed, her hand shook as she stared down at the blinking icon on the screen.
It was her brother calling.
Logan.
Her finger shook so hard that it took her nearly three tries to answer.
“Hello?” Her voice was hoarse and heavy with disbelief.
“Lexie?”
A wash of so many emotions, relief, longing, and hope, flooded her so hard that she couldn’t contain it. She gripped the phone with both hands holding it at her ear, her legs shaky as she lowered onto the floor. Her voice was a single breath. "Logan."
“Lexie, where are you?”
“Logan I’m…” She didn’t even know how to explain it. “I’m in a video game.”
She expected questions, but he was silent. Probably stunned at the situation. Giggles bubbled out of her.
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. After I got shot at the gas station, I woke up in a place called Hovelton. I think it’s from your video game. You know, Heroes Online? And I met Aiden Sparrowfoot and Max and a bunch of other people–"
"You have to get out.”
Lexie paused, the urgency in his voice alarming her.
“What?”
“Lexie, something’s coming. You have to get out of there.”
She frowned but then she heard a slight whizzing at the other end of the line, like an approaching missile. And then the phone started ringing again, louder this time, distorting until it wasn't a ringtone anymore, but an alarm.
“Lexie, wake up!”
Lexie’s eyes opened for the final time and she bolted up in her seat, taking in reality. She was still in class and the alarms were blaring in her ears. She glanced around sharply until something caught her attention outside the window.
She stared at it in disbelief and shock.
On the bright side, it wasn’t a missile approaching.
Instead, it was a round orb that seemed to float in the air for a split second.
And then it exploded into a massive fireball.
