The Power of Hope

A person cannot live without hope.

That thought lingered unusually long in my mind that day: the conversation Sey and Ms. Kim had shared.

Ms. Kim couldn’t refute it in the end.

Emotionally, she looked like she desperately wanted to argue back, but ultimately, she couldn’t deny that El Valentine’s pledges were relatively lacking, and that the hope McMillan presented was far more Powerful.

She chugged her drinks with a suddenly depressed Demeanor, then left while shouting like a third-rate villain, “J-Just you wait and see. My fiancé will win in the end anyway!”

As for me, I didn’t really care which of the two candidates got elected. Whichever side it was, I didn’t think there would be any dramatic changes to my life.

Even McMillan’s supposedly unconventional Health Insurance was a story From Another World that doesn’t apply to me right now.

Because of that, I ended up treating the affairs of the World like watching a distant Fire, as if looking at someone else’s business.

Even though I have lived in this city until now, perhaps a part of my mind still held onto an ego that considered me an outsider, a stranger.

In reality, that wasn’t entirely wrong either. No matter how hard I tried to blend in, I was a Person From Another World who wasn’t born in this place or this era...