Eskandar Aljabari was the polar opposite of former Sekundas Poppet Drumpf.
He was kind, progressive, and most of all, a philogynist. Years ago, a very,
very small group of men got together and formed an organization.
Though organization was probably a strong word to use.
Club might have even been too strong for it. Friends. They were
friends. More to the point, they were like-minded friends. They all loved
women, and not only in the way it sounded like. They believed women ought to
be treated equally, just like they were on Earth. The Thicket was great as a
rebellious force that was trying to change things by making a lot of noise.
People needed to hear dissenting opinions, or they would just go on
believing that their opinions—if only the ones indoctrinated into them by
the government—were the correct ones. A rebel faction wasn’t the only way to
make change, however, and this group of friends believed that their way was
what was best for them. They were men, after all, so they didn’t need to
fight against oppression if they managed to infiltrate the system, and tear
it down from the inside. The first attempt at this was Neifion Summerfield,
but he frightened people with his radical ideas about the treatment of
women, so they recalled him. His downfall was what led to Drumpf’s regime,
and this group didn’t want to see that sort of thing happen again. If
Eskandar wanted to win the special election following Drumpf’s removal, then
he needed to learn from Summerfield’s mistakes. He needed to be smarter,
slower, and far less conspicuous. They had to play the long game, and though
it would start with Aljabari, it wouldn’t end with him. The plan was to
replace him with someone else in the next election after this one, so people
could gradually appreciate the idea of trusting women without even realizing
it.
There was a problem, though. One of Poppet Drumpf’s conditions for agreeing
to step down as Sekundas was that his successor be a mage remnant. It didn’t
matter what weak power the next leader of Durus would have, but he couldn’t
just be a regular human. Though Aljabari was smart about concealing his true
intentions regarding feminine policy, there were those who saw through his
façade. They couldn’t prove who he really was, so they figured they should
take him out of contention some other way. Then they never needed to try to
oppose him at all. Aljabari was no mage remnant, so it seemed there was
nothing they could do to qualify him for office. But there was. Most men had
been denying the existence of female mage remnants since the very end of the
Interstitial Chaos, and this obvious lie was the Republic’s official
position. Some even denied that there were ever female full mages during
the Mage Protectorate. The bottom line was that, if your daughter was born
with powers, and you didn’t want her to be locked up for her entire life,
you had to keep it a secret. You had to teach her to keep it a
secret, and you couldn’t trust a soul. Fortunately, though Aljabari and his
friends didn’t even reveal to their own wives that they were secretly in
favor of women’s rights, his wife did confide in him about her time power.
And so she gave them their loophole. She was an empath, so she had the
ability to sense other people’s emotions. She could also send emotions to
others. Now, this might seem like it didn’t matter, because Aljabari himself
obviously had to be the one with powers, but all they had to do was use the
Republic’s stance on wives against them. His wife had to be with him
literally at all times, because the wife of anyone in a political position
was more dangerous than the wife of a regular guy. She wasn’t allowed to
campaign for him separately, because she would probably screw it up, or
undermine him on purpose. So she was in the room when Eskandar was asked to
demonstrate his empathic abilities. When prompted, she sent him a given
target’s emotion, let him claim he was the one who sensed it himself, and he
was able to pass the test. People were suspicious, since he wasn’t openly
remnant before, but there was no law against that, and there seemed to be no
way around his demonstration, so that had to let him through. He won
handily, and began the long con towards equality.
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