Moving the Needle (Book 4 of Royal Coin)

Hello.

My name’s Stick, and I gave that name to myself because I always stick to my guns.

I won’t mention what my old name was, but let’s just say that it wasn’t worth keeping around.

So I voted for a world leader named Emry, and he and his team haven’t been doing what they promised to do.

For example, they said that they were going to undo Rayne’s stupid “climate control” policies, and it’s now been a year into his term and that hasn’t happened yet.

And so I am now at the capitol to complain.

I know that I won’t be able to actually meet Emry.

I mean, the man gets so many death threats that he’s always keeping things on the DL, ya know?

Whenever I do see videos of him he always has this little cat with him.

It’s weird, right? I mean, why in the name of all that’s holy would he have a cat instead of a porcupine keeping him company?

The porcupine could protect him!, unlike that cute little cat.

Now, he would have to wear armor probably to make sure that the porcupine couldn’t hit him with needles, but since so many people wanna kill him shouldn’t he be wearing armor anyway?

Oh well, now it’s time for me to get my sign out.

It says, “The graph!, idiot, the graph!” and it has a picture of a cartoon character I created who’s called Graph-Man.

Graph-Man was created by a graph in order to protect it, and Emry should be running things like Graph-Man does!

This means ditching Rayne’s climate policies that are raising food prices, it means putting less of my tax money into the overbloated military that we have, an- Oh, you disagree about the military issue maybe? Well, you’re wrong.

See, we did get attacked by all of those hordes a while back, but those hordes are under control now and the overall size of the worldwide military is now 100 times bigger than it was before the hordes attacked!

We have enough firepower right now that the biggest threat against us is that we have a civil war and finish ourselves off!

We need to reduce the military by about 50%, and we need to put more safety policies in place in order to insure that our own firepower isn’t the death of us!

Anyway, my Graph-Man sign is now flying high!, and someone is coming up to ask me about it.

“What’s the point of your sign?”

“This is Graph-Man! Emry promised us things in order to win our votes, but the graph hasn’t been getting any better! It’s almost like he’s just Apex 2.0! And so I’m trying to get him to be more like Graph-Man and protect the damn graph!”

“That’s kinda cool… Imma make a sign too!”

The woman ran to a nearby store and then soon came back with a poster and some drawing materials.

I watched with interest as she went to town on the poster, and had soon filled it up!

“What’s that?”

“It’s Poll-Gal! I’ve been paying attention to what Emry’s policies have been vs. what public opinion polls say, and Emry hasn’t been heeding his voters very well! He’ll never win re-election at this rate, and we all know that that’ll mean that Apex will get back into office.”

“We definitely don’t want Apex back…” I said with a frown, “They don’t even pretend to truly care about polls and graphs! They just fear-monger with a bunch of bs, and they get enough people’s paranoia high enough to get lots of votes.”

“Yeah, they’re the worst!, and people did see through them in the last election, obviously, but if Emry doesn’t actually begin following through on his promises to align his policies with the polls and graphs then Apex will be able to capitalize on voter disenfranchisement and win the next election!”

“And we can’t have that!”

And so my new friend and I both held our posters up for all too see, and we hoped that the news media would soon take notice and question us so that we could air our grievances on tv.

That’s right! We knew that we weren’t gonna actually run into Emry, but if we were to get on the news then there was a good chance that he’d notice us and hopefully change his disastrous policies before it was too late!…