Chapter 2: Level upper – 0

Michiko doesn't matter, everyone's always telling their stories without her. If chess is meant to emulate war then she's always in some other country, peaceful and pointless.

Only it isn't peaceful! It's not even pointless, her little red heart hurts like that, knocked to-and-fro by storms and endless rains.

She’s so moody!

She has a lot to be moody about, though. Her powers suck and she’s weak and she’s a shitty student, how did she even get into this place, and her Fate-assigned roommate and partner she’s stuck with four years sucks, and given all the shit he gets up to, everything that’s happened to him he gets more Life Experience in a week than she’s gotten in a decade, a half and a little more so she’s also jealous of him!

Which is weird, because his personality sucks, but you wouldn’t believe that would you?

Would you, traitor, empty observer, a convenient conjuring in Michiko’s head, for her to blame all her problems on.

She throws her pen at her desk.

Throw is a strong word. She drops it while feeling aggression.

Maybe that could be a throw? If she were a better psychokinetic, it probably would be. Her power slips out of her grasp, though, isn’t in sync with her emotions, her thought, her consciousness, her Will, true or false.

See! She has no psychic gift or talent! She was awakened when she got to Lydia Wark International School and she didn’t even really apply for the psychic power, or make for a good cutting edge psychic researcher so she was pretty shocked she got in? She was just running away from her past, still is, and there’s no better way to do that then to take a few steps ‘out of bounds.’

She crammed to get here in Washington. Not Washington state, that’s what she was running from, but Washington, D.C., the birthplace of psychic power, the resting place of the Condor Raid, a city that had lost number and language and coherence and was built back from the top by the Imperial Dynasty of America, who came from… who came from… did it matter? She didn’t know.

(It was rend asunder by [Null Point] so completely. No trace of humanity, worldpower or worldly power was left. But President Winthrope remembered it well, or so he thought. The monuments, the history, all the living souls, he kept them so dearly in his dreams?
And yet when Washington returned in 2044, it was clear to everyone that it was taken apart and put back together by someone who didn’t understand how it worked.)

People said Washington was pretty hard to enter in general, with all the changes, but she got into a night school there super easily? The administrations there accepted everyone. Was it possible that you were grosser, more dejected than her? Ah-ah-hah, she’s just kidding. Don’t mind her discordant laughter.

The things she learnt while there were pretty conventional, anyway. Conventional enough that she passed all of the difficult Lydia Wark tests even if her GPA started slipping. Her parents noticed, scared of losing their good         child, but the first year of Lydia Wark cuts into the last year of high school, she was free of the tears, the screaming and the torment, but not really. Not really.

Would she lie to you?

She’s not clearly miserable, slumped over, pen rolled to the edge of her desk but luckily, so luckily not fallen off it, partner looking at her, smirking, judging. Why would she be mentally ill.

“Akutagawa.” People don’t seem to like to refer to her as Michiko? Maybe this guy just likes the guy she stole the last name from more.

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“Y-yeah?” she stumbles to say.

“Can you give a definition of psychic power not already mentioned.” She doesn’t know. What was mentioned?

She got this one into her head in Hancock Cram, maybe nobody’s said this one?

“Psychic power is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will,” she recites.

“Did you think that it would slip past my notice that you’re quoting Aleister Crowley?”

Like the wizard? Is she actually? It’s certainly slipped past her notice!

Hm.

She can salvage this!

“Do you one hundred percent believe that psychic power manifested within President Ezra Buckley out of nowhere in 2040, no precedents, no nothing?”

“We discussed this at length a mere five minutes ago. President             may not have been chronologically the first person to become possessed or to host the mass anomaly, but I believe that the fact that history has gathered around him and defined him as such indicates that psychic power used him as a lead anchor and could possibly have worked chronologically backwards. Nevertheless, this does not mean that some charlatan and pervert who pretended that throwing his personal rivals down the stairs was a potent form of magic prefigured and predicted the system of psychic power.”

Michiko doesn’t know anything about Aleister Crowley actually, apart from the fact that his life was more interesting than hers.

She should probably shut up.

She doesn’t.

“Many things have started out as false and been rendered true.”

Michiko looks at her water bottle.