Valerie Jackson has lived fifteen years being completely ordinary. And she is perfectly fine with that. Some people live the adventures and others read them. Valerie was perfectly happy being an innocent bystander, until the tables turn and she find...
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Valerie POV:
For a couple of weeks, we saw similar reactions to the ones we had witnessed before. Countries offering an 'alliance', like Russia, the US and Cina. Other countries were more accepting, specially those that had Riders from there.
The ones most affected by the power struggle for the control of our order were Diana, Jin and Raven. Two of the countries that wanted control over us were their home countries, and we could all tell that they weren't very happy about it. Both of them were dissappointed in their government and were the ones that pushed for more action on the topic. We had decided to wait and see what happened before doing something about it. We didn't want to get into trouble internationally, so waiting was the best choice.
Raven was affected because she had already had bad experiences when it came to people who wanted to use others for their own benefits. Like Diana and Jin, she wanted to put an end to all this as soon as possible. Amethyst tried to calm her down, but Raven wouldn't. She refused to stand there and do nothing about it. We tried to tell her that we would do something, but she really didn't seem convinced.
On my part, I was somewhat worried. Yes, the United States, my home country was involved, and that made it personal, but I had realized that there had been no way to avoid it, and we should have been able to predict it would happen. Hadn't history taught us? Even if people claimed not to be looking for power, it ended up happening. That is how revolutions and other social revolts started. Look at Stalin, Napoleon, Robespierre; they all ended up betraying their own ideals.
Now that I knew this, I would do my absolute best so that would never happen to our order. It would be a sad day indeed if it did. It would go against all the Riders' ideals and our purpose. It wouldn't be promoting peace but dictatorship, making the situation ironical, because that is exactly what we were trying to prevent in this moment. A form of dictatorship over the Riders.
All this political drama was affecting everyone in more ways than one. Obviously we were all affected as Riders, but as ordinary people too. The stress produced by the situation made school a lot harder. Not only did our classmates keep away from us, because of potential fear or no tolerance, but the grades of each and every one of us slipped. If this kept going on, we wouldn't achieve any of the things we were looking for. Independence from the control of the governments that were arguing over us, or good results so we could eventually get into a good university and achieve our dreams, at least those that weren't related to the Riders.
For me, grades were extremely important because I had big dreams. I want to be a published author one day, and maybe even win a Newbury Honor Prize. It would be a dream come true, but to be able to study literature in a good university This slip because of the political situation worried me deeply because it put a lot of pressure on me because I was trying to get the grades back up at the same time I was trying to figure out how to act about our problem so that it could be solved as soon as possible.
