After nearly two weeks of waiting (or so he estimated; such measurements had little meaning now), it was time to go. At his rank, he was allowed just enough vacation time to serve his purposes without raising any suspicion. He had been concentrating intensely on his private Force training every spare minute he had, discovering -- or was it creating -- powers never seen before.

He practiced some of the more useful ones before he left. The rough, unrefined look of the moves, with form and style totally subservient to functionality, felt more alien to him than the advanced sweat-redirecting Tarelle sei-weave body glove under his expensive cortosis armor. He was used to having much more finesse and much less substance in his dealings.

He knew he shouldn't misunderestimate this mission. There were so many undecided factors. He knew he could succeed, but he would need to stay incredibly focused. There was no time to worry about, say, whether the robot double had gotten the latest economic information packets properly installed on his own. This was so much bigger than that. He'd have to leave that one on autopilot for now. Channeling one of his more offbeat powers, he folded a pair of TIE Interceptors up, inexplicably reducing them in size and weight by factors of thousands, and placed the backup vehicles in his pockets.

***

"Thank you, Mr. Vice President. The premier will be very pleased with these developments."

"No problaaaaymo, Mr. Puppy Chow."

"My... uh... my name is Li. I thought we established that."

"Heh heh! Whatever! Listen, tell ol' Gigi I said hi, all right?"

"You mean... Mr. Jiabao?"

"Oh, you! Always a kidder, eh? Come over some time, we can get some take-out or something. And I'm sorry Barry couldn't be here today... said something about getting more oil."

"Right." The ambassador bowed, then quickly left, muttering something about how Li and Puppy Chow sound nothing alike.

Well, that meeting had ended pretty early. Finding himself with over an hour to kill, Joe started absent-mindedly playing with the drawers in the desk. And there it was again. That silly notebook he had taken from the lopsided gum-laden shelf. The one that claimed to be able to kill anyone whose name was written in it. Well, there were some rules about it, most of them involving numbers, but Joe didn't concern himself with things like that. "Number" was a three-letter word to him.

He was, however, pretty intrigued by this whole thing. What was such a thing doing in the White House? Had some very resourceful prankster put it in here, or was it another of those presidential secrets that the janitor on the second floor would eventually get around to telling him about?

This called, as so many things do, for experimentation. But he mustn't be reckless about this. There were, after all, quite a few buttons scattered throughout various rooms, apparently placed by the previous administration, ready to launch nukes at twenty major nations at any time, among other things. There was a very real chance that this was legitimate. He needed to be discreet about this.

Dammit, why hadn't he asked someone how to do that when he had a chance? He had no idea how discretion worked. Was it a type of cheese? Was it bigger than a breadbox? Was it something you wore? Hopefully that one; he was good at wearing things. But what could it be? Perhaps it was that bucket in the corner of the room. Hell, no harm in trying; he lifted the bucket up and placed it firmly on his head. There. Discreet was now his middle name. Well, actually, his middle name was Robinette, but now that he thought of it, he should probably change it to something a little sexier now that he could do that kind of thing. Not that he didn't love his Aunt Robinette, of course; just that the name wasn't very fitting of him. But man, could Aunt Robinette make a good boysenberry pie. With those long-gone days of his youth still on the tip of his mind, he absent-mindedly scribbled a note to remember to get that name changed. My Robinette... seriously, mom? Yuck. I could really go for some pie now.

Suddenly, a wonderful thought occurred to him -- he was the vice president! He could get pie whenever he wanted to! He stood up from the desk and stretched out a bit, then put on his tweed jacket and walked outside where his '55 Chevy, colored a bright beige, waited faithfully for him, just as it always had. He had seen a great pie store on his way in here.

Later, a piece of the puzzle would fall into place. His bulky Reagan-era cell phone would finally get some reception, and a call would come through from a hospital in Oregon that had been trying to reach him all day -- his Aunt Robinette had died of food poisoning, muttering something about pie and mothers as she suddenly dropped to the floor. Putting that together with that nagging suspicion that his poor handwriting made his lowercase Ys look like Rs and Ss and the memory of an announcement he had heard in the family letter a few Christmases ago that Aunt Robinette had recently married a nephew of Yahoo Serious had to mean... something.

TO BE CONTINUED?!?