When she was done reading the SHAD Party charter, Danielle continued, “Now obviously, the charter would need some tweaks to work for a political party. For one thing, the rule about asking people to help out would need to take into account that most of us are members of hunting parties too. It probably needs some limits added to it, like spelling out that individual councilors can’t just make demands, it has to be agreed on by the council. There are probably some other things like that, where we would need to tighten it up to account for the fact that it’s a bigger group, and we don’t all know each other already. However, it was intended for a purpose that does apply to us all: to help a group of people trust each other and work together to make sure that everyone in the party survives, advances at a healthy pace, and gets back Inside in the end!”

  She had to pause there, because to her surprise, a round of applause broke out at that. She took a drink of water while she waited for it to quiet down again, tucking the canteen and the journal with the charter back into her satchel afterward. “Now some of the other political parties have some strong ideas about how the town council should govern. Last night, some of us were talking about offering our own suggestions to whoever got elected to town council. I want to make a suggestion to you now, and hear what you all think about this. It comes from a religious source, but it’s a time-tested set of rules to serve as the core of a society’s laws. It’s based on the second tablet of the Ten Commandments, for those of you who know what that is.

  “Basically, these are the rules I think we should transfer for a secular government: You shall not commit murder. You shall not commit rape. (The original said adultery, but we don’t have married people here, so I went with a more relevant crime along the same lines.) You shall not steal. You shall not destroy the property of others. (That’s kind of a form of theft.) You shall not present false evidence against anyone else, regarding laws or reputation – perjury, slander, and libel are all illegal. You shall not inflict property damage on the property of the government or of other residents. (That comes from the coveting one, for the record, and I think it also covers leaving stuff around to stink, because rot damages stuff.) At its most basic, it’s still just five rules: don’t murder, don’t rape, don’t steal, don’t lie to get people in trouble, and don’t mess up other people’s stuff. That’s my proposal for the core of what we should have in our town charter. I now open the conversation to other commenters; nobody will be able to hear if we all yell over each other, though, so please come up to the fire and get in line to say your thing, one at a time.”

  Moderating the discussion was trying, but it let Danielle fade back from the center of attention, which was a relief. The line seemed to be endless, though; everyone had something to say, it seemed, and many people got up for a second round. Whole debates happened in slow motion, with both participants getting in line multiple times, while other debates happened in between them. It was like the school messaging channels, except entirely verbal and in real-time.

  Some people wanted to talk about changes to the charter; others wanted to talk about the core laws proposal; still others wanted the core laws to be added to the party charter itself. There were proposals for who should become party leaders and who should be the party’s actual town council candidates and whether those should be the same people – Danielle argued “no” on that point, emphasizing the need for the party leadership to be the existing leaders of hunting parties that were joining as a group, and quite possibly more than five of them, while council candidates simply needed to be popular enough in a given building to win a spot. Plans for campaigning before morning were proposed and mostly rejected. (“How many of us opened our doors to a simple knock, when we were invited to this? Do you think anyone else we’d want in the party isn’t feeling the same way?”) Danielle took notes in her Planner regarding the suggestions and discussions about the charter and the laws.

  Dozens of party names were proposed, in between everything else; a lot of speakers tagged a name suggestion onto the end of an unrelated question or comment. Fortunately for Danielle, the interwoven debates mostly narrowed it down to three options: since the party was partly founded as a response to religion-specific parties, and had supporting freedom of religion (against the two parties that both wanted to support a specific religion) as one of its aims, a variety of names on that theme eventually settled down to support for “Religious Freedom Alliance.” Since the actual SHAD party girls objected to using their existing hunting party’s name for the political party, but a fair number of people wanted to reference the use of their charter (discussion of which had apparently gotten around more than Danielle would have imagined), Lauren proposed “Shade Tree Society – yes, with an E, Adrian,” as a symbol of “growing from the roots of the SHAD charter and spreading its protective branches over the wider community.” Since the party was founded mostly as a response to the feeling that the parties that had been campaigning were all crazy, there were another whole set of proposals around the theme of “the sanity party” or “the insanity resistance party,” which camp Zephyr finally united in support of the name “Light and Reason Party,” even though the name apparently had some Systemist connotations also.

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  Danielle wasn’t sure what time, exactly, the meeting had started, but she was pretty sure it was sometime between two and three; when she noticed it was after six o’clock, she finally announced, “OK, time is pressing, not many of us have had dinner, and my party at least needs to clear snares before bedtime and still get in bed in time to get a decent night’s sleep before the Now Hear This alarm goes off at – six am was it? Seven?”

  Several people in the crowd shouted “Six!” or “Seven is when the meetings start!”

  “Thank you, six am. For any of you who aren’t aware, if you wait for full dark, you won’t have eight hours to sleep before the wake-up call. Thus, I want to pause all the rest of the discussion now and vote on three things. First, the party name, so we can put it on the charter. Second, the starting leadership, because those are the people who need to actually incorporate the org and spend most of the rest of this evening voting the rest of the members in. Third, once we have a name and the founding leadership, I want everyone to vote on the actual core charter. We’ll let the core laws of town stay a separate thing, at least for now, and we can discuss that more; I’ve been taking notes as everyone’s been speaking, so it won’t be forgotten.,” Danielle promised.

  “So here’s the plan! Anyone already in line who feels their comment is still crucial gets to go, but quickly please. Then we’ll take a short break for hunting parties with leadership groups to vote on who to send to the new party’s leadership council. Then I’ll put the three most popular names so far mentioned up to vote, and we’ll name this crowd!” She paused a moment for laughter to die down. “Then we’ll do a quick thing with just raised hands for people who want to nominate leaders whose prior leadership experience is from sources other than hunting parties, and we’ll vote on the starting council; then I’ll propose a starting charter. Then we do supper, and then the new council will approve other members in groups. Next speaker, make it quick!”

  To Danielle’s relief, several people got out of line. One person made an annoying but brief plea for Zephyr to be nominated to the leadership council. One person asked for clarification about the “no hostile Skills” rule – again. Danielle patiently (she hoped she still sounded patient) went over it again. Three more final suggestions about the party charter were a bit less quick, and only one seemed important to Danielle, but she tried not to let on – and she did adjust the wording of one line in the charter she’d been writing. (“Editing” might have been a more accurate way of putting it, since it was so heavily based on the SHAD Party charter that hardly any of it was truly new.)

  Finally, everyone but Danielle was seated. She was uncomfortably aware that the crowd had quietly grown over the course of the afternoon, and now contained an unnervingly large number of people – easily two or three times the numbers of the specifically invited crowd at the beginning. Still, some of them had been making some very helpful contributions to the discussion. In a way, the discussion itself had become the new party’s campaign. Besides the crowd at the fire, there were people gathered on the balconies of building six again, and even the near corner of building two – even though nobody lived in building two.

  “All right, this is the part where hunting parties that are planning to join together have a few minutes to choose who to put forward for leadership – you can choose a specific leader, or a representative if you have a group-leadership thing going. I’m going to step aside with my own party to do the same thing.” That got a laugh, which Danielle didn’t appreciate, even if she had to admit the outcome of that seemed pretty certain. “Don’t go too far; I’ll call us back for the name vote in ten minutes. If you have three or fewer members joining the new party, you count as independent members for purposes of starting leadership issues. Remember, every member of your hunting party makes their own decision about whether to join the political party!”

  She glanced at her watch, stepped away from the fire, and looked around; her party had moved around some, partly because their original seats had been taken over by the speakers’ line. Gideon and Zephyr had each been pulled out of the group a couple times as well. Even now, she could see Zephyr approaching from somewhere else, another boy following him and talking a mile a minute, though she couldn’t hear what was being said. Zephyr seemed annoyed, though. As they converged on the others, she was just close enough to hear Zephyr finally say, “Granite, I need to talk to my hunting party now, go away!”

  Granite (was that really his name?) looked offended. “I’m just trying to – “

  “To tell me what to do, like Lithios and Belle and my dad and every other Systemist hypocrite out there who teaches the principle of holy determination and then tries to shape my System and my life for me!” Zephyr interrupted. “The answer is no! My dad is not the System, the Most Elevated Six together are not the System, the Elevated Six of this camp-town are definitely not the System (they’re not all even Elevated yet), and you, Granite Martinson, are not the holy System! Back off!”

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