“Miss! This one has been studying politics,” the figurine doll carried with it a textbook at least three times its size, making the witch wonder how it had the strength to not simply topple off the table. “It has questions!” https://twitter.com/humvadev/status/1558212392793808896

“Okay, sure, I guess.” The witch blinked a few times, looking at the textbook. “…Is that my contemporary politics book?”

“Yes, so Miss should know everything in it.”

“I would have failed that class if not for my Matriarch keeping me up all night.”

“Surely Miss has gained worldly experience?”

“I really don’t like participating in these things, I’m never going be on a council or anything.”

“But this one met a doll the other day at a tea party talking about how important it was to be involved in politics! It even gave this one a flier for its campaign.”

“…dolls have political campaigns now?”

“Yes, for the doll council! It was started a few months ago. They advocate for dollsrights.”

“Huh. See, this is what I mean, I’m just not in the loop of these things.”

“How do demon politics work then? Miss has his demon girlfriend now, he must know how that works.”

“We don’t really spend our nights talking about the intricacies of demon lord hierarchies, you know.”

“That’s one of this one’s questions! Why do demons have lords but humans don’t? Demons are free spirited things, why do they have an older form of government?”

“I- I don’t think ‘older’ is the right word for it. I mean I guess it is, they have a very old way of doing things, but that implies a newer way would be better for them. Demon lords don’t work anything like how old human kings did. For one, a lot of them are actually elected.”

“Then why are they a lord?”

“Demons get up to a lot of trouble if left to their own devices. They collectively agreed that the best way to handle this was to place central control in a lord -or lady- until someone challenged them. It’s more like pirate rules, basically.”

“This one doesn’t know what pirate rules are.”

“Uh, well, if they aren’t currently waging a war with another faction, any demon can challenge their lord in combat or a vote or both.”

“See!” The doll flipped the book open, looking for something new. “Miss knows a lot!”

“I mean I know a little but it’s way more complex than that, I don’t want to act like I know a bunch about something I’ve never really studied.”

“Then how do witch politics work? Miss’s Matriarch is a member of a council, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s on one of the advisory committees to the Sisterhood, yeah.”

“What’s the Sisterhood then?”

“It’s, well it’s two things I guess? I’m part of the Sisterhood but then there’s *the* Sisterhood, which is the governing body of witches everywhere.”

“How many are in it?”

“Gods, who knows. It’s not really a set system, and not every witch recognizes it. There’s life time appointments and elected representatives and witches who just sort of show up and no one tells to go away… it’s not like there’s a constitution or anything.”

“Then how do they have any power?”

“Witches put a lot of emphasis on tradition and drawing connections between their magic and its roots. The Sisterhood maintains that continuity, and so we respect it for that. The rest is just common sense.”

“Common sense?”

“The Sisterhood doesn’t really set witch law or anything, but it does enforce some of the oldest standards, like never killing a human in our fights.”

“Why’s that?”

“If witches started massacring humans in their power struggles, those witch hunters that visit us would quickly stop looking for tax violations and start raining holy fire down on manors.- “-Humans tolerate us so long as we keep to our own worlds; heaven would not hesitate to help them wipe us all out if we gave them reason.”

“Who rules humans, then? Demons, angels, witches, fae, they all have things that rule them all. What about humans?”

“Humans don’t really do well with one group speaking for them all. The secret is the rest of us don’t either, but it’s better than the alternative. Humans are the loudest to fight amongst each other but the quickest to form a bulwark against others.”

“If Miss knows these things, why doesn’t he care about these things more? Couldn’t Miss change things?”

“I can’t change the world and I can’t change how people are, but I can and did change my little corner of it.”

“How’s that?”

“Folks in the town ahead of us like me well enough, and leave you dolls be when you’re out for errands. I may have violated the code a few times to make sure some more difficult human leaders didn’t get anywhere in their careers. But I don’t care for the machine of it all.- “-I’m not going to get involved in governance or sit on councils because that’s not who I am. Would much rather just… change the world right where I am, and let folks who know their part of it better change their parts.”

“This one understands. Can it still attend the doll council meeting?”

“Yeah, go for it, take some pictures too, I want to annoy my coven sisters with it.”