Heartwarming / Super Supportive

• Hannah Elber is absolutely devastated when it seems like her mistake in trying to stop a Super Villain got Alden's parents killed and nearly killed him. It costs her her partnership and her job. Three years later, she gets a call from Alden, completely out of the blue. At eleven years old, Alden had decided to look into his parents' death and realized it wasn't the heroes' fault, and the first thing he did was call her to absolve her of her guilt.
  • Aunt Connie was in her early twenties and wildly unprepared to be a parent when Alden was orphaned, and honestly she's an absolutely terrible parent. But when Alden decides to test his theory about what happened that night, it's exactly *eight seconds* between him yelling for her and her being there to comfort him. Eight seconds that include toppled furniture, swearing guests, a dropped pizza, and a bedroom flung open so hard it ricocheted off the wall. Eight seconds until she was there for him.
• Gorgon is chained and bound to serve as the Chicago Consulate receptionist. He is absolutely forbidden to reveal more than the bare minimum necessities about the System. But Alden is his friend, so Gorgon manages to give him one hint, one skill name he needs to know. The next time Alden sees him, Gorgon's skin is "downright *charred* beneath his magical bonds". But it was the exact hint Alden needed, so Gorgon paid the price to give it to him.
• Kibby is grieving after her father and sister, trapped in a Mad Science Lab with little hope of rescue. Her mood seems to noticeably brighten after Alden asks her to teach him Artonan, allowing them to bond and to give her a distraction from her grief. He sticks with her through magic lessons for weeks, despite being unable to use his Authority for magic, until
  But finally, shortly after the first long night had fallen on them in truth, Kibby reached out with a determined pat-pat-pat.
  And a part of Alden that had been straining against the encroaching chaos for weeks and feeling its own presence for the first time ever—a part of him that had never known it could move as it pleased—reached out toward the small, kind existence that had been trying to get its attention for so long.
  And it patted back.
• “Mother,” she said clearly, “if this one makes it to you, place both of your eyes upon him. He has done more for us than he had to.”
• When she saves his life, "Mother" offers Alden a choice: She can take away his Authority Sense and his magic, and he can live a normal life as an Avowed, but if he decides to keep it, his Affixations will be agony, and he'll never be able to be comfortable with it. The cost is so high that Knights sometimes choose suicide rather than continuing to bear it. It's when he sees that giving up his Authority Sense also means forgetting Kibby that he refuses to give it up.
• When Stu-art'h thought Alden had died, he got a pet Ryeh-b't and named it after him. Also a C Mo F when Alden finds out.
• "Mother" decides to honor Alden's wish to try to live a simple life for a while by granting him a fake profile. All of the Contracts on all the worlds will *lie*, even to the Artonans, to keep Alden's secret.
• Alden convinces Lute to help the rest of the roommates' obstacle course team, and it slowly helps integrate him with more people his age.