This was a cute chapter, but I can't help but think that Natori handled this poorly. She realizes now that what's going wrong is because the vice prez was able to construe her words, and that Diana got manipulated with the "you're a hero, therefore what you do is good! Believe in yourself!" bit. But all that actually got resolved this chapter was them acknowledging that the vice prez is suspicious, and then at the end Natori goes "I just want a happy ending for everyone", without being willing to clarify anything else about the situation. Just seems ripe for causing Diana to get manipulated again, just in a less straightforward way on the vice prez's part next time, into doing something actually bad because she thinks it's good.
At least Lapis seems to be smart enough in her interaction to smell his BS and not have a kneejerk reaction to it.
Yeah, Natori really isn't handling any of this well, she just isn't the kind of person who can manipulate and connive. She really does just want a happy ending for everyone (with a focus on Lapis, because whatever she feels about Diana she's definitely in love with Lapis), and she's trying to find a way to get there, but she's just barely capable of keeping up with the run of the mill dirty politics because she has her "foresight" - once she started changing the plot of the game she had no hope. And now she's got the attention of
genuinely evil conniving dirty politics bastard everything will go completely downhill, and probably fast.
Diana is just as bad as Natori, only she doesn't have the benefit of either playing the game or more years of life experience; she has the added problem of falling hard for Natori while Natori is making it really clear that however nice she is to everyone else, Lapis is the one thing she's really focused on. She's going to be ripe for all kinds of manipulation by people like the vice prez, as well as anyone else who can pick up on how many things are pulling her in different directions, and that's just going to get worse as she keeps falling for Natori more and more.
And who knows what will happen with Lapis . . . she's definitely
not an easy person to manipulate, but that's as much because she's so totally set in her goals as because she's smart and able to resist manipulation. This attempt was really clumsy - the vice prez seriously underestimated her, or assumed she was at least roughly on his side and thus didn't need particularly careful handling. But Natori is a
massive weakness for Lapis, and as with Diana it's just going to get worse as she falls harder. Lapis isn't going to give up all her evil plans just because Natori asked her nicely . . . yet . . . but who knows what she'd do if someone decided to hold Natori hostage? I'd be taking bets on the blast radius - best odds being about 50km
outside the kingdom's borders.