¶ Calad Bar City Watch
Collectors of Parking Fines. Protectors of Pavement. Champions of Absolutely No Nonsense.
Slogan: "Keeping the peace."
Unofficial Slogan: "We serve justice and bottled-up rage."
Motive: To keep the peace, enforce just enough law to keep the city from imploding, and to look busy whenever a diplomat walks past.
Unofficial Mascot: A watchman's helmet with a bite mark in it, balanced on a fine notice pinned to a wildshaped otter.
¶ Overview
The Calad Bar City Watch is a ragtag collection of peacekeepers, beat officers, and heroic pessimists pulled from across the galaxy and stuffed into uniforms that rarely fit and almost never have enough pockets. Their job is simple: maintain order in a city that treats order like a suggestion written in disappearing ink.
They serve the people of Calad Bar, follow the laws set by the City Council, and ultimately answer to the one woman nobody argues with — Khelda Braenna Wyrdsdottir, who occasionally offers guidance via raised eyebrows and ominous tea invitations.
¶ Activities
The Watch handles:
- Enforcing the Khelda's upper limit on viking (which mostly involves convincing Hielan Coos that technically "just a wee pillage" still counts),
- Monitoring smuggling activity — though the Sons of Hothar are very good at staying juuust under the limit and offering thank-you pastries when they don't,
- Breaking up bar fights, which are considered a local evening pastime, especially on Three-Ale Tuesdays,
- Discreetly wrangling the Big Four's representatives, who are regularly caught doing Very Questionable Things, but can't be arrested due to diplomatic immunity — a legal status the Watch refers to internally as "Get Out of Jail Free and Onto Our Nerves",
- Handing out parking fines — including to ships docked sideways on rooftops, goats tethered to mailboxes, and magical constructs with poor spatial awareness.
¶ Challenges
Working in the Watch requires thick skin, quick reflexes, and an ability to look like you're writing something important when you're actually trying not to laugh. The city is home to:
- Space vikings with longboats and short tempers,
- Smugglers who think bribes are a polite greeting,
- Spies disguised as florists,
- Robots who turn into panthers on their day off,
- Diplomats who start wars over wine selection.
And yet, the Watch keeps things more or less standing.
¶ Culture
The Watch doesn't run on fear or discipline — it runs on sarcasm, strong coffee, and a worn-out sense of civic duty. Despite the chaos, most Watch officers are honest folk trying to do their best in a city where the laws are few and the people are armed.
They are often underfunded, underappreciated, and entirely unkillable through sheer spite.
¶ Commander
Commander Frmwottr, a 500-year-old plasmoid and reformed enforcer of the Glorg Empire, now serves as Calad Bar's unyielding watch commander — an amorphous embodiment of justice with a police hat, a citation pad, and the sort of stare that makes bricks reconsider their alignment.
Silent, incorruptible, and deeply allergic to nonsense, Frmwottr keeps the city safe not through charm or spectacle, but by trudging stoically through chaos like a sentient cautionary tale. Whether fining diplomats, ignoring bureaucratic foolishness, or filing memos that shame entire departments into compliance, he believes in real justice, actual law, and the quiet satisfaction of making even the most powerful think twice before double-parking their airships.
