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Charles sat in his private viewing room, with Matilda right beside him.
“We’re outside of time, right?” asked Charles. “The viewer shows us everything that happened this year, but it’s not actually the end of the year yet. How does that work?”
“We extrapolate forward,” said Matilda. “We take the world as it was and simulate the whole thing forward from the moment that we left time.”
The next morning, the very first stop that Charles made – after another enormous and varied breakfast – was to the List Room. Matilda stood by his side. He’d asked for Kelvin as well, but had been told that he was unavailable. He hadn’t actually thought that elves could be unavailable, but it was another data point to add to his model of how the North Pole worked.
Charles awoke in the morning feeling more refreshed than he had in years. The bed was soft and fluffy, and he experienced a moment of confused bliss as he lay beneath the warm sheets, until he remembered that he was Santa Claus, and that the previous person to wear that mantle had been a monster.
Though he was tired, he immediately went to the viewer. The controls were mechanical and extremely tactile, though smooth and polished. Charles supposed that there must be a team of elves which built and repaired the devices, unless they were simply conjured from grey blobs like the toys were.
Charles wore the red and white suit, which didn’t fit his thin frame. The old man had told him that it would, with time, but Charles had always been as skinny as a stick. Still, if he grew fat in the coming weeks, it would be far down the list of miraculous things that needed solving.
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