¶ Calad Bar Talent Bureau (CBTB)
Connectors. Contractors. Quietly Dangerous.
Slogan: "You need someone? We know someone. You need it done quietly? We don't know what you're talking about."
Unofficial Slogan: "Every problem is an opportunity. And we know someone opportunistic."
Motive: To provide essential services to the city while remaining completely unaccountable, helping both powerful clients and helpless citizens, and doing just enough good to stop anyone from kicking in their very tasteful front door.
Unofficial Mascot: A suspiciously well-dressed pseudodragon in tiny spectacles and a waistcoat, clutching a clipboard and a cup of tea, rumoured to have blackmail material on half the City Council and a fondness for lemon scones.
¶ Overview
The Calad Bar Talent Bureau is a respectable establishment with shiny brass plaques, velvet-lined waiting rooms, and absolutely no files labelled "Highly Questionable but Technically Plausible Operations." They specialise in "matching talent to tasks" — whether that's staffing a tavern, guarding an intergalactic diplomat, or "removing" a problematic cursed heirloom from someone's possession.
¶ Activities
Officially:
- Recruit talent for public institutions, private clients, and various factions.
- Staff short-term contracts for dangerous, dirty, or desperately inconvenient jobs.
- Offer career counselling, which often includes phrases like "learn to pick locks" or "you're tall, have you considered intimidation?"
Unofficially:
- Hire mercenaries for unsanctioned activities such as espionage, theft, sabotage, and the odd "retirement of difficult individuals."
- Run interference between the Khelda and representatives of the Big Four, ensuring plausible deniability, misfiled paperwork, and the occasional spontaneous lift malfunction.
- Bribe, blackmail, or bribe someone else to blackmail, depending on the client's budget.
No one can prove any of this.
Especially not in court.
Especially because the only judge brave enough to try vanished after slipping on a magically greased staircase.
¶ Customers
- Local businesses,
- The City Council (officially),
- The City Watch (reluctantly),
- The Khelda (completely unofficially and entirely unprovably),
- And occasionally to shady barons, smuggling rings, and pirate librarians, provided the forms are filled out in triplicate.
¶ Relationship with the Khelda
While both sides deny everything, it's an open secret that Khelda Braenna Wyrdsdottir has occasionally "lost contact" with the City Watch while the Talent Bureau mysteriously becomes very active. She tolerates their shadowy methods because:
- They keep things tidy,
- They avoid paperwork,
- And they never interrupt her tea.
¶ Public Services
To offset their reputation and avoid being thrown in a sewer, the Bureau provides:
- Pro bono investigations for citizens failed by the system.
- Evidence gathering for victims of crimes the Watch is "too busy" or "too compromised" to handle.
- And a shelter for orphaned familiars, offering magical creatures a second chance at life (or third, in the case of a very confused toad-phoenix hybrid).
As their pamphlet says:
"Why summon a new familiar when someone's best friend is waiting to bond?"
¶ Offices
The Bureau operates out of an ornate stone building in The "Other" Market with suspiciously quiet halls and an oddly large number of staircases leading nowhere. Their staff are impeccably dressed, alarmingly polite, and armed to the teeth in ways you don't see until it's far too late.
Known Cover Businesses:
- Talent & Tea – A café that doubles as a front office and employment agency. Try the lemon scones. Don't touch the menu under the counter.
- Fluff & Fang – The familiar shelter. Surprisingly wholesome. Staffed by at least one reformed pseudodragon and a talking goat.
¶ Director
Madame Kalquessa, enigmatic director of the Calad Bar Talent Bureau, is a parrot-humanoid of dazzling feathers, sharper wit, and absolutely no tolerance for inefficiency unless it's strategic. Wrapped in a perfectly tailored suit and the air of someone who could win a duel with a monologue, she rose from anonymous origins to command the city's most politely dangerous organisation — one that balances public service with private sabotage. Her leadership blends ruthless precision with unexpected mercy, especially for lost familiars and doomed bureaucrats. While she speaks softly, her reputation looms like a velvet guillotine. Whether negotiating with nobles, dismantling philosophical nonsense in the press, or babysitting a telepathic squirrel, Madame Kalquessa remains Calad Bar's most terrifyingly competent tea-drinker.
