Enbies have magic powers?!
Foreword
This is the first installment of what I plan to be a light-hearted serial fantasy fiction. It is set in a world in which powerful magic has eliminated all but the mildest forms of violence. Wars still occur, but the battles are like prolonged football matches in terms of intensity -- the worst injuries are broken bones and concussions, and the worst fate is to be taken prisoner and held in an unpleasant but tolerable prison for a few months until you're traded back to your home country in exchange for other prisoners.
Throughout the story, both the characters in this world and the mechanics of the world itself will repeatedly single out nonbinary people (enbies) for unfair bladder treatment. I'm doing it because I love them. <3
Chapter 1: Enbies have magic powers?!
Slin was taking constant swigs from their canteen to try to keep cool, but it was no use: the summer sun beat down relentlessly, and the cloaks that they and the other recruits had been issued were of no use in blocking it. The group had been marching around for hours, only to end up right back where they started, in a large empty field outside their dorm building. The air was stale, the ground was cracked and dusty, and there was no shade in sight. The fabric of Slin's cloak was soaked with sweat and clinging to their dark skin.
Slin thought back to the class they'd taken on ancient history. Wasn't high melanin supposed to be an adaptation that made a bean more resistant to heat? Fat lotta good it was doing them.
Eight other recruits stood to their right, and one to their left. All were silent now, but before when everybody had been chatting, Slin had overheard that one recruit's voice, and known by his accent that he was a countryside bean, probably from some remote village with a population of twenty or thirty and a main export of naive ukelele-playing sad sacks.
Their instructor was a tall, thick, busty, caucasian bean who had introduced themself as Caroline at the beginning of the march, and then proceeded to say absolutely nothing for the next four hours as they lead the recruits around. Now they were standing across from them, arms folded over their chest, and had been staring them all down wordlessly for several minutes. Beside them was a tall, thin, unexplained cardboard box. If this whole routine was some kind of intimidation tactic, it was starting to work, if only because Slin could think of no other reason to be so weird about it other than sheer actual clinical fucking insanity. Their skin was crawling, partly out of wariness for the instructor, and partly because the wanton drinking they'd been using to combat the heat was starting to catch up with them direly. It was shaping up to be a long first day.
"LET'S START WITH A DOSE OF REALITY!" the instructor finally screamed. "HOW MANY OF YOU ARE NONBINARY?"
Nine hands went up, including Slin's. The only recruit not raising a hand was the countryside sad sack.
"AND OF THOSE RAISING THEIR HANDS, HOW MANY HAVE USED THE BATHROOM AT LEAST TWICE SINCE WAKING UP THIS MORNING?"
One hand went down, and eight stayed up, again including Slin's.
The instructor pointed a menacing finger towards the lineup. "YOU EIGHT ARE LIVING A LIFESTYLE WHICH WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE ONE HUNDRED MILES TO THE EAST, IN THE PRINCEDOM OF LAVES!"
(Reader's note: Laves is pronounced with a soft "a", like in "jaw".)
Ah. So this was orientation. Just in case anybody didn't know why they were here, in case anybody didn't know what was happening in Laves. In case they didn't know about Piss Fascism.
Caroline whipped out an object that looked like a credit card. It was silver with a green tint, completely blank on this side except for an insignia printed in deadly blue across its entire face: a thick solid outline encircling a shape that was ambiguous between a raindrop and a flame.
"WHO KNOWS WHAT THIS IS?"
Ten hands went up. It was impossible not to know.
"THIS IS A BATHROOM CARD!" Caroline yelled. "IF YOU WERE A CITIZEN OF LAVES, YOU WOULD HAVE ONE OF THESE IN YOUR POCKET AT ALL TIMES. EVERY TIME YOU NEEDED TO PISS, YOU WOULD NEED TO SWIPE THIS CARD FOR ACCESS TO THE BATHROOM. EVEN YOUR OWN PRIVATE BATHROOM IN YOUR OWN HOME! YES! EVEN YOUR OWN BATHROOM!"
Slin rubbed their legs together and resisted the temptation to roll their eyes. Say 'bathroom' one more time, they thought. Go on, make me piss myself. I don't mind.
"You!" Caroline said, pointing a finger at Slin. "You look like you need to pee! Do you?"
There was no point in trying to hide it. "Yeah," they said. "Kinda dying over here actually."
"Step forward. Stand beside me."
Slin looked to either side, then walked over to Caroline and turned around to face the lineup. They bent one knee in front of the other, and grimaced. All the other recruits were staring at them, and the attention was making them seriously need to pee... as though they weren't bursting already.
"Your name?" Caroline asked.
"Slin."
"Who here thinks that Slin has a right to use the bathroom?"
Nine hands shot up. Everybody did. Of course.
"Take this." Caroline gave Slin the silver-green bathroom card, then picked up the cardboard box beside them and upended it. Out slid the folded legs of a tripod, which Caroline grabbed, unfolded, and set down on the ground between the two of them. There was a card reader mounted on top. "Go on," Caroline said. "Let's see if Prince Ben agrees with us."
Slin's bladder was throwing a temper tantrum inside them. Their need had tripled in the last five minutes, and at this point they were barely keeping their composure. Their feet wouldn't stop shuffling, and their free hand was glued to their thigh, but they slid the card through the reader as requested. The reader immediately buzzed an unmistakeable sound of digital rejection. No, the sound said. You are not authorized to do whatever you just tried to do.
The recruits looked on solemnly. They knew.
"This is a real bathroom card," Caroline said. "And a real reader. They were smuggled out of Laves in working condition by a refugee who managed to escape the regime, and turned over to us for demonstration purposes." Caroline turned to the bursting enby beside them, whose face was starting to turn red from the embarrassment of needing to pee as badly as they did. "Slin, you are nonbinary. So am I, and so are eight of your fellow recruits in this group. We are dramatically overrepresented in the war effort against Laves because of what I'm about to say next. These cards..." They took the card back out of Slin's hand. "...do not operate fairly. Beans in the princedom are allotted bathroom breaks with different frequencies based on arbitrary demographic information. The rules are complicated, and they get changed all the time, but one thing has always been constant: enbies get the worst of it. This was the card of an enby, and at the time it was smuggled out, it was programmed to allow for just one bathroom break per day. It is currently outside the range of the broadcasting towers they use to send updates to the cards to change their rules, so we don't know what the rule would be today if it was still in active use. But evidence suggests that things are getting worse, not better."
Absolute silence. Quiet rage was boiling in the minds of the recruits. The information wasn't news to them, but Caroline's intonation and body language had a way of rallying people anew around flags they already hailed.
"Thank you, Slin," Caroline said. "Back in line."
Slin hated to ruin the moment, but they were going to piss themself if they didn't do something. "Can I go to the bathroom first, please?" they asked.
"After," Caroline said. Slin stepped back into the lineup, and Caroline turned their attention to the countryside bean. "Step forward," they said, and he stepped forward. "Your name?"
"I'm Simon," he said.
"Simon. You're the only recruit here who isn't nonbinary. Are you a cis male?"
"Yes."
"Where are you from?"
"Loveland," he said. "It's not far from the coast."
"Have any hobbies out in Loveland?"
"Yeah, I like to play guitar."
There it is, Slin thought. Ukelele-playing? Check.
"What brings you here?"
He shrugged. "I was bored, I guess. I dunno. I wanted to try something different."
Slin was fuming. Their buckling bladder had to be contributing to their irritation, but mainly it was the dumbfuck responses Simon was giving. He was the only one in the lineup who could possibly be here out of "boredom". Sad sack? Check.
"We appreciate that you're thinking of joining the cause," Caroline said. "Human rights are a human fight." Simon nodded. "Back in line."
Caroline addressed the whole lineup once again. "Rest up this evening, all of you," they said. "Tomorrow you will begin a training regime more intense than you can imagine. Simon, you will spend all day in physical training. For the nine of you who are nonbinary, you will spend half the day in physical training and half in magical training. If you have a ritual you use to refresh your mana, perform it tonight. You are dismissed."
Simon was looking around in shock. "Enbies have magic powers?!" he blurted out.
Caroline whirled around to face him and threw their arm up in the air. A brilliant turquoise bullet shot from their fingertips into the sky, emitting a piercing whistle as it soared higher and higher, until finally it shattered with a deafening boom into a thousand glimmering shards of shrapnel, which floated gently down over the course of more than a minute, clearly visible even against the awful sunlight. Flare: easy to cast, hard to cast as well as they just did.
"I didn't know that!!" Simon cried. His tone and expression made it obvious that he was starstruck.
Slin just rolled their eyes, and hurried inside to look for a bathroom, casting Wind again and again to blow some fresh air in their face and try to cool down now that the lesson was over.
Naive?
Check.