Gilda sat at the desk in the room and and stared at the piles of paper.  The forests were being fixed.  That entire document was worthless.  Miator had a new wing so that meant all this was worthless.  All of the campaigning, all the speeches, all of it was worthless.  She bit down on the end of her pen and shuffled the stacks of papers around.  This wasn't fair, none of it was fair.  The presidents were incompetent, she'd had to tell them what to do.  How had they managed to finally get anything done.  She had certainly worked hard on getting the schools to unite but that was to overthrow the mismanaged presidency.  Saving the schools was her job.  Who were they to suddenly do their job in the final semester?  Now what could she do?  Repairing the forest was off her CV, as was Miator.  It would have looked so good and now nobody would remember her contribution.  It would just be them, when good things happened it was the leadership that was remembered, not the brilliant mind who forced them off their butts with a shock baton. 

Gilda gritted her teeth harder and the plastic pen shattered.  Ink sprayed across her face and in her mouth.  She coughed and sputtered, then threw the pen into the small waste bin by the desk.  The desk also had not escaped the pressurized ink.  She looked at the paper, splattered with ink, useless.  Useless before, even moreso now.  Gilda slammed her hand on the desk.  It wasn't fair, they stole her achievements, her accolades.  A president who did nothing was pathetic and there was so little to do now.  She looked at the lamp at one corner of the desk.  She wanted to grab it, throw it out the window.  Instead she stood up and threw all the papers on the desk to the ground with a big swipe of her arm. 

A blank slate.  That was all she had now.  Nothing planned, nothing prepared.  She slammed both hands down onto the desk.  Then she did it again.  None of this was acceptable.  Gilda was breathing heavily now, her chest heaving.  Rage was better than a a swim or run when it came to getting the blood flowing.  She needed this.  She needed fresh blood to bring fresh ideas to her head.  The school would know her name and soon.  She smiled an inky smile.

Hilda had been having a pretty relaxing day all things considered.  Sure there had been a good number of annoying exams or assignments to complete in her classes, but those had not been difficult.  Merely troubling, that was all.  Notes from her sister had helped Hilda get through those subjects she had little skill or interest in and the maths and sciences got her quite excited.  Throw in a few cute girls to 'help' with their 'homework' and it'd been a fruitful day for the bespectacled twin.  There weren't any club activities so she'd not been able to demonstrate her genius for costume design to other girls yet again.  A shame, she had a few new ideas for what club members ought to cosplay!  That could wait until next time she supposed, but spring was an opportune time to do costumes and get great pictures!  If only people understood the beauty of creating costumes and setting scenes for photo shoots more.  

In a fairly good mood she found herself stepping back into the dorm room she shared with her twin, Gilda.  They were fairly different in their goals and desires, so she didn't expect her sister to really understand about the costumes.  Even if there were some awesome things you could do when there were two identical girls!  Gilda was kind of a stick in the mud about that stuff so Hilda wasn't gonna push it today.  Things were too pleasant, going too well to make her want to ruin that by getting into an argument over the virtues of costuming.  Judging by what she saw when she walked over to her bed that was probably a wise decision anyhow - Gilda was pouting.  Or getting mad.  It could be hard to tell even for her identical twin.  With a sigh Hilda sat down on her bed and figured she ought to at least try and calm her sister down.  Sharing a room with an annoyed would-be-Empress would not be fun at all.

"Yo, Gilda," she greeted her sister casually, working a kink out of her neck, "What's up?  Did someone not recognize the virtue of our lineage again?  Or did some girl shoot you down because she preferred the carefree twin?"

"Easy for you to make jokes." Gilda said through gritted teeth. She turned and glared at her sister. There was still ink on her face and some dribbling down her chin. "What I wouldn't give to live in your head, free from worry of the future and college, and tomorrow." She wiped her face and stared at the ink. She stalked over to her hamper and pulled out a damp towel and started wiping her face off. "If you must know, my campaign was too successful. Months of work and now its all down the drain because the student council got its act together and finally did what I was telling it to do." She spat some ink into the towel and threw it back into the hamper.

"So now, I can put campaign manager and leader and all that on my future CVs but nobody will remember that part. All people are going to care about are the stupid presidents who fixed the problems. No one will care that it happened last minute and the whole process was a nightmare of internal power struggle and stupid love triangles, just that it got done." She sat down on her bed. "I based my whole bid for presidency on this, now who's going to vote for me?"

It didn't take long for Gilda to start lamenting the collapse of her obsessive campaign for a presidency that might not even be open for her taking.  From what Hilda had heard whilst whispering sweet nothings into girls' ears and designing ridiculously elaborate costumes, the current Student Council President for LeRim had been a calming influence on the Miator and Spica presidents.  Whatever her twin had been working at, wouldn't the current president get more credit for that sort of thing anyway?  Now her sister was furious about losing a future which nobody had guaranteed anyhow.  She adjusted her glasses so that they settled more comfortably on her nose while her mirror image complained about things not going her way.  That kind of annoyed Hilda - she was trying to enjoy herself here and here Gilda was trying to put a damper on such relaxing sentiments.

"Would you relax for a minute?  You keep ranting and raving like that and you won't survive to see your 'meteoric rise to power' or 'glorious future' or whatever it is you're after so desperately.  You'll have a heart attack or just a bunch of panic attacks and you'll be less useful than a pickelhaube in a balloon store," Hilda responded, her annoyance showing on her face, "So okay, you got all your goals met but you're still not getting what you want.  Maybe you should've made noise about those things but done it further away from the student councils?  Get people interested but not press the issue with the politicians you want to replace?"

Then she shrugged and added, "I think you ought to just relax a bit - you've worked really hard and deserve a break.  Take some time to just sit back and enjoy a good book and some tea.  Then you can go back to trying to restore the monarchy or whatever."

After a moment she sighed, "Look, just because things didn't go how you expected doesn't mean you're gonna fail.  Seriously.  Shouldn't a good leader adapt to the circumstances?  Tackle other pressing issues, campaign on your own merits instead of stuff that's happening in another school?  I think great-great-great-whatever Bill would be spinning in his grave if he saw you panicking after one thing didn't go right."

Gilda rolled her eyes at her twin. "You have the political savvy of a toaster oven." Gilda went over to a nightstand and checked herself for any remnants of ink with one of the hand mirrors. "And your country-isms may attract some girls but they're of no use to me." Gilda sighed and set the mirror down, satisfied with her appearance. "You can't hide a revolution, sister. Look at the girls in power, they are strong, beautiful women who rose to power by getting what they wanted. This school respects strength, the women who demand respect seem to get it. A cowardly campaign from a distance would not be noticed by those who needed." She put her hands palms down on the nightstand with a bang. "And because of my voice, things got done. There were other factors but I know I can make it seem like I helped spread the word. That I led the sisters to demand results." Gilda pushed herself away from the nightstand and walked to the center of the room where she started to pace.

"You can't write that on a college CV, they don't care about the little girls who pressured people to take action, they want the women who actually fixed things. And I will be that woman." She stopped her pacing and turned toward the window. "What issues are there left to tackle? My merits are obvious, you can see some of them in the mirror. It's the issues of the schools that have to be solved. Celebrations, budgets, all of it, and I mean all of the schools. The three sisters are tied together closer than any of us really understand." She turned to Hilda. "Sure most of what I've said is silly rhetoric, but that part is true. Astrea is not actually three different schools no matter what everyone seems to think." Gilda frowned, something was sparking the neurons in her brain. "It's like...bees? Honey, flowers, and bees." She tried to think it through. "No, flowers and bees work but not honey." She looked up at the ceiling. "You're better at this stuff than me, what are three symbiotic things? We're like those. If one of the three schools fails for whatever reason, the other two will die off quickly after."

Gilda's mouth turned into a frown. "Hey, have you been paying attention in history? Has the teacher taught anything about the history of the three nuns that made the schools? I mean, Miator was oldest but they didn't actually know each other right? It was like a huge time difference between them I think." She groaned. "I've got an idea, a thing in the back of my head but I can't tease it out. Like when you have a thought for a costume but the fabric doesn't lay properly or the fabric isn't real, I don't know. I have an idea but I don't have the knowledge for it to be a proper idea."

The ambitious twin's rantings were starting to get on Hilda's nerves yet again as she lamented various things.  None of them were of the sort which Hilda would find even remotely important, and they were even tiresome since Gilda harped about such things fairly often.  Often enough that Hilda had no problem tuning out about half of what her twin was saying.  Instead she started thinking about what sorts of costumes some cute girls in her class could wear for a group presentation in the following weeks.  None of them were overly developed in the chest area so she could just use patterns she'd made for a club member a while back.  There had to be some way for them to stand out individually while displaying team spirit, didn't there?  So.. matching outfit styles but different colors!  Which colors?  Blue, green, yellow, black and red.  Red was always the leader, so she'd make that for herself regardless of who else might be in the group.  That shy girl would be Yellow, probably.  Maybe they could look like an idol group with a slight military flair?  Yeah, lots of fringe on the epaulets.  That was the ticket.  Eventually she wasn't paying attention to Gilda at all as she began sketching out concepts for the outfits - a combination of cute idol and Prussian military looks that somehow worked.  At least to Hild it worked.

Then she stopped mid-sketch as her sister asked her a question.  Hilda lifted her eyes from the page after breaking the lead of her pencil and grumbled; this wasn't very fun for her.  At least having her ideas interrupted wasn't fun.  That said she tried to piece what pieces of information she'd heard during Gilda's ranting that might help her form a response.  Something about symbiotic life forms and not quite knowing how to put an idea together.  That sewing example helped her refocus on what they were discussing enough that a response would even be possible.  Taking the information she had, Hilda looked over at her sister and did her best to reply.

"Well I think they were separated enough that they might not have known each other.  It's like asking if Newton and Einstein knew each other.. though there's the distinct possibility of warped time-space allowing them to communicate.  However unlikely, it is a possibility," Hilda answered, then shrugged, "So you.. want to do something.. to do with how the schools need each other to survive... like how insects depend on certain plants, and other animals depend on the insects?  Maybe something like 'Gilda Hohenzollern: President for LeRim, President for Astraea?  It might also help if you had a cool hat, just sayin'."

"I...what?" She'd followed her sister's thought until time warp and then lost her. Her sister was always spouting off that sort of geeky nonsense. "No, no no, I don't want to be president of all three schools." She paused and readjusted that sentence. "I don't want to be president of all three schools immediately." She walked over to her sister. "Let me explain this a different way." She wrapped one arm around her sister. "We are almost perfect, so we are perfect for each other. I can do many things that you are not good at and you can do many things that I am not good at. We are a near perfect couple. But we need a third sister or girl of some sort because there are a few rare things that neither of us is good at." She began to lightly rub her sister's shoulders. "It's like the schools. Miator makes perfect young women of utmost beauty and poise. Lulim has girls who are very flexible and fall into all the little niches. Spica lets loose the sporty girls with toned muscles and long legs." She sighed, thinking about the spica girls. She had a weakness for them.

"And so each girl is a sister with strengths and weaknesses. Each school releasing the same sort of girl again and again." She shook her head. "Sister, those girls could be our missing third. Imagine if we were split. You and I were torn apart and we had nothing but the dreams of each other's touch." Gilda rand a hand softly along Hilda's arm. How tragic that the two beautiful Hohenzollern sisters were parted. That is Astrea right now. Three sisters who need each other, who long for each other. Who dream of that soft touch that sisters deserve to feel from their other halves."

Gilda sighed slowly. "It's a tragedy fit for one of your plays. The sisters should become one again. Coming together to be one great family. A student could be a perfect lady, a flexible problem solver, a well toned athlete. It would be like those schools with classes from the books. I am Gilda and that matters, they are a Spica and that matters. But each student could be part of a perfect three. You, me, and a beautiful third girl who could satisfy that which we lack. Imagine Hilda, a perfect unity of three."

Hilda typically wasn't as receptive to her sister's ranting and raving as the more ambitious twin would have liked.  So much talk about what should be, could be and Gilda had a right to be went in one ear and out the other for the more casual twin.  One method of explaining things certainly did catch the bespectacled Hohenzollern's attention in a superior fashion.  Gilda knew it well as she walked over t Hilda and began to become a little more intimate in her explanation.  An arm wrapped around her shoulder as the girl explained the relationships between the schools as relationships between girls.  Hilda's attention was piqued early on as her twin detailed how they were the perfect couple.  For all the differences the two might have they filled each other's shoes nicely, filled in each other's voids perfectly.  She sighed at the light rub of her shoulders, allowing herself to forgive the earlier stuck-up nature of Gilda's perspective and melt into that relaxing feeling.  Hearing her sister's sigh at a well toned and long legged Spica girl made Hilda reminisce about her own ideal - the well manicured, almost doll like Miator girl.. or the cute, twintailed Lulim artiste.  Actually she wasn't that picky, though she could dream about meeting that dreamlike perfect girl.

"I don't  really  go for tragedies so much.. but when I do they must be absolutely perfect!  Every last detail must be written, conceived and directed to the perfect point where drama and reality blend seamlessly.  That is the sort of unity you speak of, isn't it?  We must never allow such a horrendous miscarriage of justice to continue, " Hilda responded with a concerned tone, stroking her sister's chin as she spoke.

Then she relaxed even more and tilted her head back to look at Gilda, "We absolutely must get that third girl involved.. to satisfy any desires which the three of us have.. to truly complete one another in a way that simple friends cannot... I will not be satisfied with anything less than what you've been discussing, sister.  I absolutely must have that third girl with us... to accompany us.. what must I do to make that a reality?"