The Campus Fire
About thirty years ago,
J Ferdinand,
V Leonard and
N Stanimir were members of a fairly radical left-wing student group at Violet City University named Violet Justice. The school administration mostly mocked them as leftovers who didn't realize that the 70s were over, but they were quite sincere.
One day in mid-1990, President Bush was planning to visit campus to give a speech. The group was protesting vigorously, claiming that Bush should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. In a burst of excessive enthusiasm one night (and more than a little high), Stanimir set fire to the campus administration building as a protest. When sie went back to the dorm and told the rest of the group, they were shocked -- they might be radical, but they'd never been violent. Ferdinand, in particular, convinced hir to not claim any credit for this, and that they should all just clam up; they did so.
The school investigated, but couldn't prove anything -- the fire wasn't terribly large, and while police labeled it "suspicious", it clearly wasn't a professional job and arson could not be clearly demonstrated. The school didn't want a scandal before the Presidential visit, so they basically hushed it all up: the members of the group all got reprimands on their records for the suspicion of being involved, but it went no further than that, and everyone kind of put it in the past. The student group quietly fell apart shortly thereafter.
However,
S Antonino had been working as a junior administrator at the school at the time, and hir office got burned out in the fire. Sie was pretty angry about the rumors that a bunch of students had been responsible, and nursed a grudge for many years. Sie didn't put the dots together when Ferdinand ran for Mayor, but realized sie was one of the members of the group a year or two ago. Sie leaked this to the Ronit campaign a few months ago, and they have been hammering Ferdinand with it, using
R Forrester to prosecute Ferdinand in the press. As a result, Ferdinand's approval rating has slumped from over 60% a year ago to only 35% today. (Vasily is
not getting involved in this story, and has rather deliberately steered the Fox team away from it, since he is quite nervous about possible blowback if his involvement were to become known. The Newbold campaign has stayed away for the same reasons.)
Ferdinand is very torn about what to do about this. There is a non-trivial temptation to throw Stanimir under the bus, but sie prefers to be more loyal than that, especially since they have remained friends despite Stanimir's conversion to the dark side. (Somehow, Ferdinand wasn't surprised that Stanimir started shilling for the weapons-mongers of the NRA.)
