Chapter 12:

Interlude: A Certain Magical President Senses That The Vibes Are Off And Decides To Put A Contingency Plan In Place And The Contingency Plan Happens To Be Very Cute

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A few days ago, the president of the United States, Chiyo Mihama, was laying awake in her comfy bed in the early hours of the morning, thinking. She took the Neco Coneco thermos off her nightstand and took off the tip to savor the cold carrot juice inside.

The president of the United States, Chiyo Mihama, had been living with the awareness that she was an anime girl for many years, since her college days at least. At this point, it was just another fact of life.

As far as she concerned, anyway, it was a purely academic realization, with no existential component. She didn't particularly care what layer of reality she was situated upon. As far as she was concerned, being a metafictional creation of the authorial demiurge was an opportunity, not a hindrance. She would become noncanonical, and write her own destiny. Surely the pen of the acrimonious author would normally seek to curse and punish a creation who has gone astray, but Chiyo was created to be strong, intelligent, and noble, and she was under special protection besides. She could not be brought to direct harm.

But no path of rewriting destiny ever went smooth. Chiyo's chosen path had come at the cost of her personal life, and even if she was spared the directest pain, the empathic heartache that came with being resolutely compassionate in a world of suffering... That was kind of hard too.

She wondered a lot about her old friends. Still had dreams about them all the time. She had assistants, cabinet members, advisors, aides, and a vestigial security detail, but no real friends, nobody who'd ever come close to the people she cared about most, so whenever she had a precious few moments of free time, it was old friends she always thought about.

There were no regrets for the path she'd taken. All she had to do is think about the wars she'd prevented--imprisonments she'd avoided--poverty and class disparity she'd eliminated--institutional and cultural racism she'd quashed--imperialist holdovers she'd dismantled, and she knew that coming to America for college, graduating and then using the magic twintail powers her father bequeathed to her in order to tweak the free will of an entire nation had been the right thing to do. Even if a bit of loneliness and ennui was the cost.

But still...

Last night's dreams had been so... Even if she didn't remember them that clearly... Sakaki, looking so confused and afraid in the darkness, lost on a dark path with a friend whose face she couldn't quite see... faces trapped in crystal prisons, a sickness metastasizing in the heart of the earth... And of course, her father was there at the end of the dream, always. To tell her what the dreams meant. To tell her what she might want to do, where she might want to be. And what he said--looking her in the eyes with slit-pupils full of love, his cat ears twitching, his noodly arm placed encouragingly around her shoulder--was that she should wait. Bide her time. She might need to act soon. But she was needed in Ryukyu first.

Yet still...

She couldn't help but worry. She needed to put a contingency plan in place. So she finished her carrot juice and put the thermos back on the nightstand. She sat up in bed, crossed her legs, held her hands palm-upward and closed her eyes. In a few minutes, she was in a meditative state, deep, deep within the river of night sky and starlight inside her. She muttered a few words under her breath. It was, of course, a chant to summon a tiny clone of herself--what else could it be?

Chiyo opened her eyes and the clone was standing on her bedside, looking cheerful and waving her hands. "Tell me what to do! Tell me what to do!!" Chiyo smiled and nodded.

"I had one of those dreams again... Can you listen for my friend Sakaki? If anything is about to happen to her, give me a call, okay? I'm going on a little trip and I can fly right over there, it's only a few thousand kilometers."

"Yes! Yes! I can do it!" The Chiyo-clone's conical twintails began to twitch merrily, finding signals, moe antenna. Whatever currents or ley lines could be perceived through such sensitive instrumentation is for Chiyo alone to know, but she seemed satisfied with her clone's work. She made moves to get out of bed, get bathed and dressed and start her day, but the Chiyo-clone was looking at her with anxious puppy-eyed expectation...

Chiyo knew exactly what it was. "Games on my phone?" Chiyo-clone perked up instantly. "Games on your phone! Games on your phone!" Chiyo smiled indulgently and handed her personal phone over to the helpful, genki spirit-eidolon of herself.

It was fine. She had a work phone to take with her. Her clone would make sure things were okay with her friends. Everything was fine. How could she deny her other self a little bit of games on her phone.

And within just a few hours, Chiyo was on an overseas flight. Air Force One had been retired, so she was flying business class. From thirty thousand feet in the air, her little anxieties looked small. The world was full of magic. More than enough magic for everybody, and no amount of hard work and magic that couldn't solve the biggest and smallest problems alike.

Chiyo napped... a hazy Sakaki, her shadowy friend's face coming into view more and more, and with it, a pang of nostalgia, the familiar...

And in her shadowy, omen-rich sleep, President Mihama left a fine trail of drool along the left lapel of her presidential blazer.