Reroll

“I'm dying.  I could maybe get treatment, but…” he trails off.

“But you'd have trouble being the President at the same time.”

“Yeah. Medicine only goes so far.  But your magic… well. How much?”

People who are dying will pay anything for just a little more time… which is part of why it's bad to charge more than you really need to for the procedure, “I don't charge for healing, Mr. President, and you've been decent enough. Here…” I pull out my Library, use Diagnose… yep, brain tumor, and it's just starting to spread. He's taken some constitution damage, and is on meds for the pain. It's easy enough to fix… Restore Health and Restore Spirit, combined in one action via Greater Restore, without touching him thanks to Ranged Healing, clean out the cancer, fix up the damage to his health, and clean the painkillers out of his system in one go.  Just to drive the magic point home, I use Restorative Cure as well, and Invigorate the President at the same time, tossing on a lot of the Vitality talents to make him feel really good for a long while.  Give him the star treatment, really.

“Oh wow I feel good.  Better than I have since I was in high school.”

“You'll beat track stars right now,” one of the effects gives a speed boost… “that will fade shortly,” when I disconnect from my Library and lose the temporary talents, “but the cure is forever. I also cleaned out the painkillers, as you don't need those now.”

“You should open a hospital…” he pauses, “Ah.”

I chuckle, “I already work at one once a week, yes.  I don't think I'll be renewing my contract with them, however; I now have better sources of funds,” the President chuckles at that, “and I don't really like limiting myself to one place.  Anything else I can do for you?”

“That's all for now… thank you.”

I nod, “My pleasure… I turn for the door, and a Secret Service agent opens it for me… an aide takes me back to my skycrane, where… my dragon is giving rides?  I don't know how the little kids got onto the white house lawn, but my forty five foot long shiny metallic dragon has six kids on her back, and is flying them around, doing loop de loops in the air, taking them really high then diving, cracking jokes, and otherwise just showing them a good time.

What?

I mean… it's harmless.  Nobody's getting hurt, nobody looks frightened, and everyone is clearly having a grand old time. I suppose I did tell her to be friendly, and she is being that.  So… good, I guess.

I wave my dragon down, and she comes, “Time to go… please gently unload the kids.  And… good job, I think.”

“Sure thing boss,” the dragon rumbles, “Sorry kids, but I gotta go.  Back to your parents….”

The kids give a most endearing “Ahh…” and one asks, “Will we see you again, Puff?” from a little girl.

“We'll see,” my living painting of a magic dragon… that must be why the kids called her ‘Puff’... rumbles back at the little girl.  “Off you go…” my dragon reaches onto her back, gently picks up the little girl in a claw, and sets her down by the crowd….

Where she runs to a woman and says, “Mommy! Mommy! I got to ride a dragon!”

As we both climb back into the skycrane, I ask my pet, “So how did that come about?”  I signal my ship, and the walls close up.

“Ah, well… you told me to be friendly, so I did.”  The skycrane starts to rumble as the thrusters engage.

“Still.  How did that…” I'm not sure how to phrase it.

“Oh, well… you know how little kids can be.  One got away from his mother, came up, and asked if he could touch me.”

I think I get it, “And you taking pains to not be scary, and being friendly, so of course you said yes.”

“Exactly,” the paint beast agrees, “and not to be outdone, his sister came up, and asked if she could climb up.”

Yeah, I think I see where this is going, “So of course, you agreed; it’s not like they can hurt you.”

“I'm pretty much invulnerable as long as that Regeneration spell from your shadow holds, yes,” my dragon agrees, “and then the other kids in attendance came and swarmed me… which was fine.”

“Who suggested flying?”

“One of the reporters,” okay, that answer catches me off guard, “He asked if he could get some flying shots.”

“So of course, you said yes.”

“Oh yes.  The kids weigh basically nothing,” for a Gargantuan dragon, that's actually true: As a Gargantuan quadruped with a strength score of thirty seven, the beast can carry some eight tons before she'll even notice the weight, and can still move around well enough with some twenty four tons of cargo, “and I can catch any that fall, so there was little risk.”

“Well… that works.  I imagine the photographer got some great shots.”

I get to work making more minions, because I know I'll need an army to police Mythics… or just an army for war.  I also take a little time for Query Self, sorting out how well possible approaches will do.  Starting with strongarm tactics… not great.  Pretending to be harmless… worse.  But hey, I have two hours to check on options.  So I ‘test’ lots of strategies. Begging… nope. Logic… nope.  Intellectual superiority… nope. Threats… nope.  Gifts… nope.  Quietly suggest they try to spy on my tech… that goes extra bad.  Diplomacy skill… there's enough of them that the horde of representatives puts the CR out of reach, nope. How it’ll benefit them… nope.  Stupidity… wait, THAT works?  Huh.  I need to play the idiot girl who's protected.  That's… ugh.  I suppose it's for a good cause.  Refining that… friends… eh. Relatives… eh.  “The goddess”… that works, huh?  Ugh. Fine….

By the time we arrive, I have a strategy in hand (as well as several thousand more soldiers) for once I'm in.  I don't like it at all, but my future self assures me it works like a charm… not that charms work for most people, but they can for me.  Oh, and I can add, “the laws of logic” to the list of things I break next time: Time travel, am I right?

My entry to the UN is very much like the one to the White House… minus the literal red carpet.  I mount my animated painting when the ship comes to a stop, the walls come down, there's about a zillion pictures from a thousand reporters trying to get THE shot.  

“Still a diplomatic mission,” I whisper to my painting, who just nods this time.

The crowd of reporters is again held back by those pole and velvet ropes used by theaters and things, backed by armed guards.  I look past the crowd and see the iconic glass slab building, the zillion flags from as many different nations, and… several shorter buildings? Oh, they have signs: The Dag Hammarskjöld Library, the General Assembly building, and others… the glass slab building is apparently the Secretariat Building… good to know.

A few armed guards and aides… I'm not sure who's… escort me down the main road, while I look at the flags… like a tourist. Ugh. Eh, I can come back invisibly and gawk later. For now, I focus on what's in front of me, walking along like I have somewhere to be and this is all perfectly normal, something I've done a thousand times.

But seriously, I want to look around and soak it in.

They take me to the general assembly building, that big building with the central dome. From outside it's just a big blob of concrete. Inside… it's a lot nicer; a zillion seats looking at the podium and the two giant screens under the lights.

I'm given a seat off to the side, along with a headset, while the normal business of the UN runs… lots of speeches by a bunch of nations… a vote or two…oh that's dull… I get translations through the headset.  And… I kind of feel sorry for the translators having to repeat all that rhetoric all day. Blech.

Mind, thanks to the Culture skill from Starfinder, I don't actually need the translation for most of them: I get a new language every level, know a bunch for my starting intelligence… and other than Shae, there's not all that much use for the fake languages of the game… so I just took real world languages, working my way down the list of most populous. So I know English, Mandarin, Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese, and a great many others.

I do need the translation for some of the speakers: Earth has a lot of languages.

Eventually, I'm informed that I'm up to speak soon, at the invitation of the United States.  So I grit my teeth, review the plan in my head, and prepare to give my ‘speech’....