Writing duration: 9/22/23 - 4/25/24
Word count: 51,000

Individuality. It's something we as humans highly value, that helps the exceptional stand apart in a crowd of billions. But what if you were robbed of yours? What if there was someone nearly identical to you, that threatened your life as you knew it? That's the future Misaka Mikoto fears awaits her when she discovers the rumors of a top-secret cloning project in Academy City...aren't rumors at all.

But what she finds is far from what she could have possibly expected...

Remember when 26,662 words was a lot for me? Hi, would you like a story that's nearly double that in length, written in half the time? Well, welcome to the last 7 months of my creative life.

Prior to this, I estimated I had roughly 100K words written across all my acceptable by my current standards Railgun stories, and...yeah, I really just did half of that in a single one now.

That was not intentional, far from it. Besides adding more towards the beginning to flesh out Misaka's actions prior to the plot kicking off, and extending the ending after the original one I had in mind just wasn't satisfying enough, I did not purposefully pad this story out just to get an insane word count I can use to brag or whatever. I just wrote, and I wrote each scene, each conversation, as long as I felt they needed to be.

Now, this was an utterly Herculean task to undertake, don't think I just breezed through this thing. After all, it did take 7 months... This required a lot of external research and rewatching of certain episodes - particularly 4 and 5 of Railgun S, which this branches off of - and that's time consuming in its own right.

I love the concept of the sisters...not necessarily the arc itself they're attached to, but I wanted to do them justice to the best of my ability, especially 9982. Their speech, their personality, mannerisms, they're very particular about that, you know? So it'd be easy for me to tell if things were...off.

But I also wanted to get into Misaka's headspace before and during the meeting itself. I wanted to see what she thought about everything, explore those fears and insecurities in detail. After all, she's the main character, that's what you should be delving into, if you want the reader to care about her plight. And thankfully, I had a lot of material to pull from, both from the character herself, and from my own life.

For me, the core of this story is simple; to show two sisters meeting for the first time, and despite their different upbringings, managing to bond over their shared strengths. A lot of the emotion put into it is genuine, as this topic hits close to home for me. So beneath all the silly foodstuff and whatnot, their relationship is what I want to shine the most.

I've put so much time, effort, and energy into this, hell, it's even longer than some of the actual Index light novels... So, I hope it was all worth it in the end. I've done my best with it, and I did my best to get it out on my birthday. It's amazing I managed to finish in time, honestly. Had a lot going on in recent months that made this look impossible at times.

But that aside, if you've managed to get through this utter behemoth, thank you. It means a lot that you even bothered to give this thing your precious time in the first place. You've read the ramblings of a madwoman for far, far too long.

And happy 15th anniversary to the anime...without it, this story would not exist, nor would the obsession that fueled its creation in the first place.

So with that, I'll link my Ko-Fi, and get out of your hair. Until next time, everyone.

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