Mara sat down in one of the chairs as if she had done this kind of thing before, even though the situation was different this ti. She gave Marceline a look that showed she was interested but not nosy.
"He told you sothing true, didn’t he?" Mara said, "And now you’re trying to talk yourself out of it."
She saw Marceline. "Did he talk to you about it...?"
"He didn’t have to." Mara poured coffee into three cups with the ease of soone who had done it a million tis before. "I can tell when soone is carrying sothing they can’t put down."
She pushed one of the cups toward Marceline. "I carried it for a while myself. It’s almost the sa weight, but with a different kind of situation."
Marceline grabbed the cup. "What happened?"
"Soone reminded that being wanted and being settled for are not the sa thing," Mara said.
She looked at Rex for a second in a way that wasn’t obvious, but that Rex noticed right away. "It’s hard to forget once you know the difference."
Marceline said, "That sounds like sothing that... makes life harder."
"It does," Mara said. "Well, only just for a while, and then it gets easier when you finally let it go."
She held her cup with both hands. "Rex is the kind of person who sees things clearly, and he’s good at it, like you could feel back in the days when you were younger."
"Not because he doesn’t care about people, but because he does," Mara said while taking a sip. "When he says sothing is true, it usually is... and you need to trust him."
Rex believes that he has truly changed Mara’s mindset, as he now considers her to be his, and he feels the need for her assistance to further persuade Marceline until she succumbs to her desire for him.
Marceline was quiet for a mont and stared at her coffee. There was so negotiation going on inside her head.
"... ..." She was silent for a long ti, thinking about what her husband had done for years without getting caught.
Rex didn’t do anything while he watched. Now was the mont to remain silent and allow the truth to unfold.
"My husband... actually has been seeing soone since last spring," Marceline said finally, in a voice that sounded like she was stating a fact instead of processing one.
This ant she had gotten further through it than she had let on. "I know who it is..."
"I haven’t talked to him about it yet because I was waiting to figure out what I wanted to do, and... I still don’t know." Marceline looked sad saying that, and it feels like she really needs to tell soone the sa age as her, which is Mara.
"You don’t have to know yet." Mara said, "You just have to know that you can want sothing else."
Marceline raised her head from her cup. She looked at Mara, then Rex, and then back at Mara.
There was a change in her face that wasn’t big but was real. Like a door that had been stuck finally opening.
She said to Rex, "So it is the truth that she warned about you," with a small, sad smile.
"What...? Who?" Rex asked.
"Helena," Marceline said. "She once told that you had a way of making people see themselves more clearly than they wanted to."
"I thought that was a polite way of saying you were nosy."
"Now you think it’s sothing else?" Rex asked.
"Nope..." Marceline said, "Now that I think about it, she ant it as a complint."
After that, the talk turned to lighter topics. And then Rex told Mara to help him take over Marceline’s heart by telling her experience.
Mara will get the sa treatnt as Marceline tonight if she can do it, and she agreed with hearts in her eyes. When Rex finally got up to eat breakfast before the Academy day started, the air in the room had changed.
The situation wasn’t completely resolved, but it felt lighter and less burdenso.
[MARCELINE BANCEY: DESIRE LEVEL UPDATED]
[BEFORE: 75/100; NOW: 90/100]
Rex read the notice as he walked into the main hall, and his face stayed completely blank.
"Ninety, huh? It’s so close and enough for tonight so that I can get that maximum desire bonus, just to get my new skills." Rex smirks.
He hadn’t done anything wrong except be honest with her and let Mara do what she always did, which was make other won feel understood. The Lustful Villain’s passive resonance was still there, quietly amplifying things under the surface of his Rex Rexilion identity.
He thought, "Faster than I planned," and he was happy about it in a practical way.
"And what’s even better is that I could abuse the maximum one thousand points by having a threeso with Mara as well, and it would generate a total of two thousand three hundred points."
"Fucking perfect..."
...
And so it begins again, day two of Rex going to the academy, and day two at the Grand Academy was a little less boring than day one, which was a low bar, but at least it was a bar that had been cleared.
Elizabeth Von Starlight’s session was more focused than the day before. She talked about how to use the theory she had taught in the first class in real life.
There was more movent, more hands-on demonstration, and less of the long lecture that had made Rex want to figure out how far away the nearest window was.
It also ant more chances to interact in a natural way.
He had prepared himself in the morning, maintaining his usual casual deanor. Not too eager, but not too distant.
This created a social middle ground that made people feel as though they had chosen to engage with him rather than being drawn in.
Talyra didn’t take much work at all. She appeared to have decided the day before that Rex was engaging and had altered her ntal map of the classroom to include him as a regular point of interest.
Two minutes after the session began, she stood beside him at the practical station, fervently inquiring if he had ever attempted to use telekinesis on a liquid object.
"Once," Rex said. "It doesn’t work the way you think it would."
"How does it work exactly?"
"Slowly, and then all at once."
She thought about this. "That sounds like sothing went wrong."
"Well," Rex said, "a lot of things went wrong about it."
She laughed, and it was the sa bright, real sound as the day before. Rex noticed that it ca easily, which ant she was soone who laughed a lot instead of soone who was acting warm.
It was important to know how to talk to her over ti.
Aisella ca over a few minutes later. She was more interested in the practical exercise than the conversation.
The three of them ended up working through the assigned demonstration together in a way that felt natural because Rex had made sure it did.
He was more careful with Aisella. She was perceptive, like most healers, and could pick up on emotional currents because her whole job depended on being able to read them correctly.
He let her talk more than he usually did. He asked her questions about how she was healing, which was the only thing she would talk about with the sa excitent that Talyra brought to everything.
She said that Divine healing worked differently than regular magical restoration. It worked better with the body’s own processes, was less likely to cause secondary problems, but needed more precise calibration.
"Most combat healers simply push energy into the body and allow it to self-regulate," she said, demonstrating a small adjustnt on a practice construct. "But that’s like telling soone to clean a room by putting everything in the closet."
"And it looks clean until you open the closet."
Rex asked, "What else do you have?"
She said, "I ask the body what it needs," and then she seed to realize how that sounded to soone who wasn’t in her practice.
"Well... uh... not literally, but there are diagnostic passes you can do before the main working that tell you where the real problem is, not just where it’s presenting."
Rex said, "That sounds like it takes longer."
"It does take longer... and sotis you don’t have enough ti in the field." Her expression shifted slightly, revealing the first instance of sothing truly difficult on her face. "That’s the hard part of combat healing for ..."
"...knowing when to do it right and when to do it quickly."
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