The Mole's Secret Underground Empire

We gladly invited Fat-Tail, who had apparently planned to spend his time at sea by holding his breath in the hold and filching fish heads from the galley.

Tsubaki took a liking to Fat-Tail, who, unlike Dung the tiger demon beast, wasn't afraid of her fire and trotted along after her; Fat-Tail seemed to like the burning (glowing) Tsubaki, too.

The Gourmet Tribe spends nearly all its life in the dark underground. But they said they sometimes wanted to bathe in dazzling light, and when Tsubaki made the flames covering her body blaze fiercely and glow brilliantly, they clapped their forefeet together in delight. The sailors went pale and came sprinting over with fire extinguishers, thinking the ship was on fire.

Sorry about my kids causing a commotion.

After all that, we spent a week reaching Kuwait, a port city in the Middle East.

Kuwait was a small desert country where everything from the ground to the buildings was a whitish brown, with a population of 500,000. Its main industries were fishing and mercenary work.

Until fairly recently, it seems to have been a country where a witch enforced a brutally dictatorial, female-superior, male-inferior regime that made life difficult for men. Now, however, the second-generation witch demonfolk, raised to view their late mother as a negative example, were calling back their younger brothers who had been exiled from the country and working to rebuild the administration. They were also eager to normalize diplomatic relations.

They were pushing gender equality with punishments strict enough to seem excessive, and, as an outward demonstration that they had abandoned female supremacy, they apparently took considerable care to ensure the safety of foreign men who came to their country.

Even a quick summary makes it sound like a pain. If I asked for details, layer upon layer of even more complicated political circumstances would probably come spilling out.

But we don't have to get involved in all that complicated politics...