The fire

This part of the story is extremely difficult to relate. Reader, if you think you may be distressed by depictions of death and fire, or depictions of police brutality, I recommend that you skip this account and move on to the epilogue.

On September 1, a crowd of Penumbra residents was screening a version of These Very Stars in an abandoned school cafeteria. The militia arrived on the scene, hungry for a raid. As they approached the cafeteria, a fire mysteriously broke out in a trash bin in the kitchen and spread rapidly through the rest of the building. At this point, the agents could easily have helped the audience to evacuate. But they did not. They boarded all of the exits shut, and they left the scene.

Eighty-three people died.

Immediately after the fire, the Tuxedo regime claimed, variously, that the agents had blocked the exits because their own lives were in danger (from the people trapped in the burning building), and that the agents had blocked the exits to protect the audience from itself, and--and this one almost defies belief--that the audience had locked itself inside the burning building.

What began as a vigil with nineteen shell-shocked neighbors became a protest with five hundred demonstrators calling for the immediate resignation of the Tuxedo prime minister, the reinstatement of the rule of law, and the holding of elections. Within a few days, it had grown into a massive wave of popular--and peaceful--protests, not only across Tux, but also among Tuxedo communities and their allies in Vetiver and Sel, as well as labor unions and communities of faith in all three countries. The Tuxedo militia responded with an initial flurry of violence, killing seven protestors. But they soon realized that they were hopelessly outnumbered, and they withdrew from Penumbra.

The pro-democracy protestors adopted "These very stars" as the rallying cry of their movement. This was a curious choice, given the rather circumstantial connection between the protest movement and the film. Perhaps there was something about the princess (or ambassador or fisherman) that the protestors related to. Or perhaps it was because of the multitude of messages that people read into the film's wordless theme song: that human lives were significant, that every moment mattered, that nothing was inevitable except death.

After fourteen days of protests, the Tuxedo prime minister resigned amid pressure from the public, from within his own party, and from the nations surrounding Tux. Tuxedo officials dusted off their constitution and held elections, in which the pro-democracy party overperformed but did not sweep.

And so began Tux's Ninth Republic.

NOTE: Many years later, historians uncovered evidence that Vetiverian operatives working covertly within Tux had also pressured the Tuxedo prime minister to resign. Vetiver's position back then was that Tux's devolving into a "rogue state" did not serve Vetiverian interests as effectively as a smoldering--but still rules-based--conflict did.