[Coldsaturn]

"how did i die when we were in the Academy together, only to be in the Academy together again?"
We were in high school, think of the Academy as university. And as I said, everything on Philos is stretched loooooooong because people absolutely lost their sense of time when they became immortal.
Think of the anecdote as being the beginning of high school, and the Academy you're playing now as being basically the last year of college or uni. Then stretch that gap of time because it's Philos and they're slow as fuck.

"unless i don't get born and grow up like a normal person, and just appear incarnate and fully formed like Athena. which... would be wrong because I definitely grew up like a normal person with Caleb, suspicious medical lab experimentation aside."
This is the right question! How does this work?
You were definitely a child with Caleb and grew up. But in the Abysswalker timeline MC says that she has no parents, she literally spawned from the planet's core. And here we have this little conundrum: we definitely died when we were in high school, but are together with Xav again. And our age gap doesn't look like it widened. If he had to wait for us to be born again and grow up again, he would be way older than us. But he isn't.
Our death and our rebirth doesn't seem to include an entire cycle of being born and growing up again, necessarily.

- i know i prefer some of the other boys a tad more, but Xavier is wonderful.
Same. He's a comfort blanket personified. Awfully pretty to look at, but a comfort blanket nonetheless. You know those people that you see and suddenly you sigh and the weight of the day just slips off you? That's Xav.