“Right now, the Chamber is split into a few parties of varying strength and positions.”
Wille jotted the basics down on his notepad.
ROYALISTS—hard conservatives who support rule via royal fiat, mostly nobles and clergy, 185 seats
RATIONALISTS—moderate conservatives who push for a stronger constitutional monarchy, mostly capitalists and disgraced nobles, 170 seats
LIBERALISTS—reformists who want democratic governance, mostly lawyers and legal scholars, 75 seats
“This is what the power balance looks like,” he said next.
355 seats (Royalists, Rationalists) vs. 75 seats (Liberalists)
The Royalists and Rationalists didn’t see eye to eye on all the details, but their beliefs were fundamentally compatible. Neither of them wanted radical reforms, and they were perfectly happy for the king’s reign to continue. As the mouthpiece of the masses, the Liberalists had some objections, but they lacked the power to actually do anything.
After she stared at the numbers, Suzie’s expression soured. “I don’t know what to say… Maybe there really is no hope for Lylat…”
“In a way, things were better back in its Imperial days,” Wille explained. “At least then, things flourished domestically. But when there was nothing more to conquer and empires starting turning on each other, the good times stopped rolling pretty quick. War reduced their land to rubble, and the colonies started going on strike after getting squeezed for every able body they had. It took everything the aristocrats had just to keep their own fortunes intact.”
“Turns out, getting invaded sucks.” Lukas chuckled.
The fact of the matter was, the Lylat Kingdom had been in a bad way ever since the Great War’s end. They’d suffered the most casualties out of any of the Allies, and their financial situation was in shambles. Over-drafting of soldiers from their colonies during the war had given rise to resistance movements, and many aristocrats had lost everything. A big part of the reason Lylat had seized Galgad’s industrial zone was in order to bolster their flagging economy.
However, it was the masses that suffered the brunt of the strain.
“The cabinet—the government’s beating heart—is packed full of Royalist deputies.” Wille snapped his notepad shut. “Now, what do you think we can do to beat the Royalists?”
Suzie covered her mouth as she sank into thought, then enthusiastically raised her hand. “Help out the Liberalists!”
“Incorrect, little princess.”
“Aww…”
Suzie slumped her shoulders, and Lukas laughed. “Look, you aren’t wrong, but if changing the government was that simple, our jobs would be a lot easier.” Suzie getting overexcited and the twins having to gently guide her in the right direction had become a pattern for them lately.
Lukas flicked Wille’s notebook with his finger.
“The right answer is, we give the Royalists all the support they could ever want.”
To beat the Royalists, they were going to help the Royalists.
It sounded like a contradiction, and Suzie cocked her head in bewilderment. “Huh?”
For the next two months, the twins worked their butts off for the Royalists.
They hadn’t been kidding when they said that their sights were fixed on the Chamber of Deputies, and they did everything in their power to support their chosen party. When some Rationalist deputies pushed back against the king’s proposed tax hikes, the twins dug into their backgrounds and blackmailed them into submission. For some of them, they leaked the information they gleaned directly to the Royalists. The Rationalist deputies, who’d been taking hefty bribes from the United States of Mouzaia, quickly changed their tune and stopped fighting back against the Royalists’ nastiness.
One time, the twins found out about a Rationalist who’d fallen for a foreign honey trap and used that information to force them into giving the Royalists their unconditional support. Another time, they laid a devious trap for a deputy who’d used their government connections to secure a monopoly on tobacco.
All throughout their machinations, they continued giving Suzie her lessons.
“In fairness, this is what we’ve been doing all along,” Lukas explained while he wrote up letters of complaint to the newspaper. “Taking disgraced aristocrats and capitalists—Rationalists and the electors—and hoisting them by their own petards. The whole reason I met you was because I was taking down that Marquis Watteau guy, remember?”
At the time, Lukas had been working at an illegal casino run by an aristocrat.
Wille nodded in agreement as he plugged away at his task as well. He was in the middle of writing love letters to Rationalist deputy secretaries. Each and every one was packed full of passion and sweet nothings. “This nation’s upper class is a real piece of work. They cover up everything from murders to rapes. It’s like a million scandals just waiting to happen.”
Suzie watched them seal up the mountain of envelopes and cocked her head. “But how do you know who did what?”
“As soon as I look at them, I just do,” Wille replied.
“Don’t try to make sense of it,” Lukas suggested. “My little brother’s a freak of nature, that’s all.”
The twins’ schedule was filled with guests they needed to entertain. They’d gotten a number of cops and judges to act as their informants, and they spent just about every night having conversations with them behind closed doors to gather gossip and blackmail material on the deputies. Whenever their coffers ran dry, they made trips abroad to illegal casinos and raked in the dough. Once the twins got through two or three meetings and had drunk themselves stupid, it was Suzie’s job to bring them water.
When she did, the lessons continued.
“…Huh?” she said. “You find out the dirt, but then you cover it up anyway?”
“That’s right…… Ah, thanks for the water…Princess…”
“But if you’re just going to cover it up, then what’s even the point?”
“We can sell the info to other members of the upper class… Take dirt on the Rationalists, give it to the Royalists…”
“Oh, I get it. Because the Royalists are the ones with strong ties to the judicial branch!”
“It’s not like they’d actually lock the Rationalists up, but it sure stops them from opposing the Royalists. That makes the Royalists more powerful, and it gets easier and easier for the king to push his bills through… Ugh, my head…”
They also devoted quite a bit of effort toward making new allies.
Unlike the secret societies that had to operate covertly, their position as Royalist backers let them operate completely out in the open. By getting cozy with bureaucrats, they were able to find out ahead of time what laws the king was trying to pass and what citizen groups opposed them, and that knowledge let them plan out their schemes in advance.