Counting By Twenty (W-A 2017)

September 12, 2001: Wednesday

It took a day. That was when I landed in New York. Many other people were attempting to visit relatives. It would only break my heart to tell you how many women I saw rushing around, yelling out for names that could have only been their children or grandchildren.

That made me realize that barely any of us might get our loved ones back. - Arthur Kirkland

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All the Nations were tense as fuck.

With our backup leader gone to a country where he could possibly never return from, there was no one to tell us what to do. That's when I decided that we would make the next major nation a leader. After much debate, we finally decided on Ludwig.

Ludwig was the bossy type, but that was only because people (like Feliciano) could be kind of demanding sometimes. If you were the HBIC (it normally stands for Head Bitch In Charge, but for the Nations, we'd probably have a Head Bastard In Charge) in the room, then you were at the top of your game, along with every one else's. And Ludwig completely sold that point from top to bottom.

He told us all to stay calm. To continue with our duties. However, we had to set aside a complete hour in our day to pray for Alfred and Arthur's good health and safe return.

Yào prayed to the Chinese gods and asked them to give protection to the brothers. Honda just lit incense sticks in his burner, and stayed silent until the entire stick had burned out. And Eduard came up with a brilliant notion– we all had to do the Pledge of Allegiance and stand for an entire minute during the Moment of Silence every morning (at 9:00) upon Ludwig's announcement over the Nations building loudspeakers that we never used, because we didn't need to.

Now, we had a set of rules.

1) Set an hour aside each day to pray (in any way or form) for our leader Nations

2) Do the Pledge of Allegiance and stand silent for a minute for the Moment of Silence

And we weren't breaking them under any circumstances. - Francis Bonnefoy