Questioning Leadership (Dark Aether)

Scottie was in a foul mood. The evening had begun well enough but by the end he was stewing in his own thoughts. He sat in front of the fire at home, Sky sleeping safely next to him while he poured himself a drink.

These thoughts weren’t the first of their kind, but while they’d always nagged at him they’d never been so prevalent until just recently. And with the graffiti on the sidewalk in Port and Brother Lapis raising questions mirroring his own, he felt he simply couldn’t ignore it any longer.

“Tenk is unfit for office, and it’s anybody’s guess how the man got there in the first place.” Saying it out loud seemed to make it true, it resonated even more clearly.

It had started slowly enough. When he first arrived in town and noticed an astounding lack of police protection. When that vile temperance woman had burned down the burlesque theater she was merely handed over to the Church folks. And when he raised concerns about it he heard more than once that the mayor just “doesn’t like police” or “doesn’t like the idea of police”. “What in the hell does that even mean?” he thought.

However he’d been able to set that particular issue aside at the time. But now with everyone’s lives hanging in the balance, he had begun to question the leadership to whom their safety had been entrusted. And that led right to the Mayor’s office. Tenk’s doorstep.

But was it really Tenk’s doorstep it led to, or someone else’s? The graffiti asked who really elected Tenk. His previous conversations with Brother Lapis had both of them questioning how a man with little to no political experience and who had hardly ever shown his face during daylight hours had obtained such a high office.

Scottie had two theories on this. One was that the Church had helped him obtain that position. The other was that some sort of group of businessmen had forced their workers to vote for a puppet candidate. Lapis had admitted that one of the Fathers had become quite irritated when the brothers had begun digging into Tenk’s background, which would support the Church theory. A few select businessmen strong-arming their faceless drones into voting for Tenk would support a point Star had made tonight about the fact that the city had grown since Tenk came into office. Scottie now wondered at whose expense such prosperity had come.

Scottie took a moment to reviewed some of the more the spectacular failures that he could recall or had heard about. That mad scientist’s take over, all because he lured Tenk to be trapped within a bottle of milk. The temperance woman never saw justice for her act of arson and attempted murder and was instead handed over to the church only to be set free. There was the matter of Pip, who allegedly had tried to kill Star and had been allowed to run free only to come into the hands of the Church and be killed. At least there was an investigation, arrest, and trial for the perpetrator, Mr. Underby. And that same Mr. Underby, a man no one trusted, ended up working in City Hall with all of the Mayor’s power and authority while he was supposedly out sick.

Did this man really have anything going for him? In the brief and rather heated conversation with Star last night, she noted that apparently Tenk had avoided war with both Steelhead and Caledon. Scottie rather doubted either of those places really wanted a war with Babbage. And if Star’s point about the city’s growth was genuine, was that really a result of Tenk’s influence or merely the by-product of the wondrous age in which they were now living?

In fact, Star had had the audacity to claim it was all the citizens’ fault for allowing Underby to take up his duties at City Hall. While he didn’t feel that was necessarily fair since there was nothing amiss and death for everyone didn’t seem likely, he had to admit that she had a point. Perhaps a group of townspeople should have stormed City Hall, and taken the reigns of the city from both Underby and a corrupt or inept mayor

Jed had called him a seditionist and Star had called him a traitor. But was it so wrong to ask the questions? Wouldn’t it be negligent to not be concerned? If the Writer was really predicting the future, then the mayor, and indeed the entire city government, will fail them all.

((This is purely RP. Responses are welcome, but please know that I am not actually advocating the removal of Tenk.))