AKEAN

Name: Akean (ah-KEEN)
Type: Secret
Original aim: Reformation
Original membership: Aristocrats, intellectuals, artisans
Current aim: "Progress and education"
Current membership: Intellectuals, teachers, beaurocrats, civil servants, scientists, spies
Headquarters: Seele, Braichotte and Aurore, Aurore (both Allayne, NLR)

Although the revolution is taught as a black-and-white struggle of good against evil, the forces that were actually involved were all shades of grey; few illustrate this fact as much as AKEAN, the society centered around the cafés, private schools, and hostesses of pre-revolution Neoliliana.  Many intellectuals, inspired by fresh ideas from Lendia and beyond, wanted not to overthrow the king, but rather to reform the monarchy, changing it from the inside to be more responsive to the people, more flexible in adversity, and more oriented towards the future and new ideas and forms of thinking.

AKEAN was one of the most fragmented of the societies.  About the only thing the cells had in common was a mistrust of the Liliani Church of Cruis, which made it difficult for the other societies to trust AKEAN members.  AKEAN cells often bickered over the exact reforms to be made, and there was a distinct split among democratic republicans (the 'reactionaries'), mostly peasants, and monarchist reformers (the 'reformers'), mostly aristocrats.  They were accepted into the Republic with misgivings, both because they had an aristocratic element in them, and because they were anticlerical.

When the First Republic was formed, AKEAN made up part of the first government, and immediately began to bring in new ideas and theories into Neoliliana, importing books and teachers from Lendia and Estontetso and attempting to educate the people.  They were directly responsible for the spread of newspapers in Neoliliana both before and after the revolution, but have little if any control over the media today.  AKEAN has often been criticized in history for trying too hard; the mass influx of ideas mostly bewildered and confused a largely illiterate and uneducated peasantry, and kept AKEAN divided.  New ideas spurred growth; the four-fold system of farming, the cotton gin, the water wheel, the leap year, standardized teaching, the first census of Neoliliana.  Their attempts to reform also included the calendar, the hours of the day, the time farmers should plant their crops, measurements and lengths, standards and weights, and other ideas, such as requiring priests to swear allegiance to the state first, which roused the population against the government.  Some ideas were welcome additions to Neoliliana that spurred forward an era of industrialization and freed up hundreds of thousands of farm workers; others caused unnecessary civil strife, and that, combined with their anticlerical outlook and the chaos caused by the influx of rural folk travelling to the cities for work caused the massive social changes that led to the disastrous war against Estontetso and the Second Republic.

Today, the ideal of AKEAN lives on in the distinct and unusual education system in Neoliliana, as well as several key departments: the Department of Standards and Measures, the Department of the Arts, the Department of Culture and Heritage, the Department of Education, the Department of Statistics and Information, the Department of Intelligence, and the Department of Science and Technology.  AKEAN may or may not exist today; if so, it is a far cry from what it once was.  However, their virtual control of information in Neoliliana would make them impressive dictators, if short-lived ones.