#or if not a Princep then some other legal body

[professorlegaspi]

So sad that we never saw anyone in Celia’s Journey get due process arrested. I wanna see them read the rights, I wanna know what that’s like in the Demesne

[piermanwalter]

Thief’s Apprentice: Civil Servant Triumvirate

What does it take to keep a city of immortal skeleton wizards functioning? These revenants are the antithesis of the bros: a semi-legitimate politician who won’t fall for petty scams, another large sealed container, and a guy who breaks into houses and attacks people but legally.

The Mayor of Veilheim

Although elected by the literate class as The Mayor, The Mayor isn’t a Veilheimer or even from Surenia. His outsider status is celebrated as bringing an end to cultural and political stagnation, but has caused some problems. Counter to Veilheim customs, he still treats his children and grandchildren as family even though he died decades before. The Mayor’s continued contact with them is seen as unnecessary interference with the affairs of the living. Integration between living and dead society has swung back and forth throughout history, although recently the living in Veilheim have gone from viewing the world outside the living district as another plane of existence to coming and going as they please (only if they are plaguebearers) within a few generations, as orchestrated by The Mayor. 

The Mayor’s political platform is normalising death so the living die happier and produce less madmen. Under his rule, living apprenticeship under dead Masters has increased, a few living businesses such as perfumers and the Rambush family distillery now serve the dead, and skeleton prostitution is decriminalised (for health and safety reasons it’s still illegal for anyone who’s not a skeleton to be a prostitute). The Mayor also implemented the infamous and controversial Destitution Inducing Tax Law, which reduced 1000 of the richest Veilheimers being taxed 0.1% of city budget per year to 100 of the richest Veilheimers being taxed 1% of the city budget per year. The repercussions of this law will be discussed later. With increased working population and ending a few monopolies, Veilheim’s self-sufficiency caused some diplomatic issues with other cities, such as Villa Princeps and Alhambra, which used to count on Veilheim for trade. The Mayor dealt with this by decreasing staple food and fabric imports, but increasing imports of luxury items from outside.

As well as being a functional statesman, The Mayor is also a great wizard. As covered before, magic is the energy derived from souls dying outside the body. Wizards can’t perform magic on their own, but can effectively use magic items, objects with pieces of mage souls in them. To use a magic item, a wizard needs to convince the soul piece inside to die for their sake. Thus wizards are all monstrously manipulative. The Mayor keeps a stash of magic items from his home country that nobody else can use because the souls inside all speak a different language. 

During the uncertain early years of his reign, The Mayor resorted to a lot of secret crimes to stay in wealth and power. After things stabilised, The Mayor has been able to stay in power via legitimate means for a long time and has worked to erase his history, but some elements of his criminal past come back to haunt him, including you. Some of his deals have gone on for so long with people so dangerous he hasn’t figured out how to end them yet. 

Noble Porter

About 10 years ago, a pirate crew attacked the city and were all arrested. While awaiting trial, some pirates died in the cell and went mad, killing and eating the rest, forming into one single creature composed of at least 8 pirates. Temperament stabilised by being made of so many people, the resulting being’s imposing size and treasure-protecting pirate instincts led to new employment. Noble Porter, most noble of porters, delivers state documents within Veilheim and also to other cities by putting them in the big cabinet. The key is delivered separately a few days earlier to the document’s recipient. Then Noble Porter finds you and kneels so you can reach the cabinet and unlock it. Noble Porter’s head is literally and metaphorically filled with state secrets. Noble Porter is constantly surrounded by guards and seems physically incapable. Despite Noble Porter’s helpless appearance, don’t forget the composition of at least 8 pirates who spent their lives killing and looting and died cannibalising each other.

Noble Porter has a very nondescript personality, can’t speak, and takes a very long time to make decisions. Noble Porter must always be referred to without pronouns, since Noble Porter lacks the mental faculty to comprehend anything other than the proper title. It’s easy to infer complete stupidity from this, but Noble Porter has a surprisingly good idea of the general vibe and often bails out of suspicious situations before they begin. How much Noble Porter likes you is determined by how long it takes you to unlock the cabinet. If you use the wrong keys too much or unlock the wrong drawer first, Noble Porter won’t like you. Noble Porter may also relock locks, change pin combinations, and shuffle documents into other drawers. It usually takes a few minutes to get the cabinet open, but you can use this to your advantage by robbing people while they are distracted. This has inevitably led to Noble Porter liking several specific nobles because they get delivered important documents a lot. This is about as fair and efficient as the standard workplace email. How has Noble Porter managed to accumulate the wealth and prestige prerequisite to being a noble without any language skills? Pirate hoarding instincts.

If Noble Porter doesn’t like you, documents will take much longer to be delivered. If Noble Porter likes you, documents will be delivered quickly and sometimes Noble Porter will deliver extra handwritten nonsense letters and random objects. These nonsense letters are starting to become a currency in high society. Noble Porter is also married to Cylinder Locksmith, who has an unfair advantage because she installs the locks into the cabinet. Is she purposefully being exploitative? It’s hard to tell.

Tax Collector

Despite being rich and influential, Tax Collector is seen as being on the same level as other Collectors, such as Rag Collectors, Dung Collectors, Ash Collectors, etc. Tax Collector has been around for at least 500 years and thus has cultivated an extensive legacy of terror. As per Veilheim’s traditional tax policy, if someone can’t or won’t pay taxes, their share will be paid by increasing taxes for other taxpayers and also Tax Collector will drag them out into the street and stab them, after which they are ridiculed by the general public and reviled by other taxpayers who had to pick up their slack. It’s possible to regain some clout by stabbing Tax Collector back. This happens often enough that it’s legal to stab him as he’s stabbing you (it’s still illegal to stab him at any other time). If you are a chronic tax evader, instead of stabbing you in front of your house, Tax Collector will drag you into the judicial district and stab you in the main square. It’s considered a great honor if Tax Collector stabs someone with the same thing you stabbed him with. Sometimes there are multiple rounds of tax collecting, where Tax Collector collects taxes from those who can pay, stabs those who can’t, then calculates how much extra needs to be paid, collects that from those who can pay, stabs those who can’t, and so on until he reaches a monolith of riches who pays for like 18% of the city budget.

Aside from tax collecting, Tax Collector is also involved with antiforgery, crime scene investigation, and tracing the origin of stolen goods. His giant soul from old age and also work experience makes him an excellent alchemist. Alchemy is the study of how souls affect chemistry. For example, if a chunk of limestone is mined by someone and put on the back of a donkey and unloaded by someone else, then burned into quicklime by a different person, the resulting calcium oxide still carries tiny fragments of the souls of three people and one donkey. Not nearly enough to be a magic item or affect its physical behavior, but still enough to be detected by an alchemist. If you touched something, Tax Collector knows. 

After his workload of 1000 people a year was reduced to 100 people a year by the Destitution Inducing Tax Law, Tax Collector is much more involved in normal law enforcement, turning him from an annoying figure among high society to widely reviled by all. As intended by the law, 1% of Veilheim’s yearly budget is enough to drive someone to destitution. Because productive property (things like food, tools, buildings of labor, working animals, and industrial materials) are counted for tax purposes as much less than other things like leisure buildings, precious metals, and jewels, people on the verge of being in to top 100 rush to convert their riches into raw flax, iron bars, and live sheep. Those unfortunate(?) enough to still be considered rich after this often have their life’s work erased. If revenants don’t die, to maintain a functioning economy they must be killed financially. The young by comparison are still afraid of this, but old revenants driven by greed to accumulate as much as they can often lose the will to live after they can no longer grow their wealth as fast as they used to and even the biggest diamonds makes them feel nothing.

Tax Collector! Render me destitute and give my life meaning again!

Then there are people like Noble Engineer and Sporadic Miner who are so absurdly rich that paying 1% of the city’s yearly budget doesn’t significantly affect them.

[duhragonball]

So, who do you suppose Frieza was actually "selling" planets to for all those years, given his whole identity was built on a foundation of "I am the most powerful being in the universe and can therefore take whatever I please?"

In some cases, he might have sold them back to the original inhabitants, or maybe charged them rent.   At least, I could see him doing something like that.   That might be how he got the Saiyans working for him.

Other planets, he kept for himself, like Planet Frieza 79.   I could imagine him using some of these for business purposes (like housing his private army) or for pleasure.   Or maybe he only holds on to planets until he can find a buyer.  Or he could lease them to tenants.��

Mostly, though, I assume he sold planets to the galaxy’s mega-rich.  Most people don’t need to buy an entire planet, and refugees will take whatever they can find.  I have to assume the planet trade is mostly about people rich enough to afford that kind of thing, and anyone who’d buy a planet would want a really good one.  

So the planet trade business is all about exploration.  If you can find a really nice place, you can claim it for yourself and sell it.   There’s probably a lot of laws about claim jumping, and respecting the rights of indigenous life forms, which makes it a tough business to get into.    You have to invest a ton of money into starships and navigational charts, maybe consultation fees with astronomers, and that’s all before you can even find out if there’s really anything valuable out there.  Joe Telescope might notice a little gravitational wobble around a particular star, but it might turn out that the planet is too cold to support life, or its crust is too poor in valuable minerals.   Or maybe someone else on the other side of the universe already colonized it before you could get there to stake your claim.   It’s high risk/high reward work. 

The reason Frieza’s so successful at it is because he can just sidestep those pesky regulations by hiring out mercenaries to conquer inhabited planets for him.   Officially, he’s just claiming planets whose populations were wiped out by invaders, so it’s all perfectly legal.   Unofficially, everyone knows he’s go the mercenaries in his back pocket, but space is too big and he’s too powerful to be stopped.   I think that’s how he operates.    I know later stories prefer the idea of Frieza directly ruling an interstellar empire with a military organized under his direct command, but I think his earliest appearances suggest something more subtle. 

I mean, I think what you’re driving at is: Why does Frieza bother selling anything when he can just take everyone’s money, or print his own money, or just outlaw money?  And yes, he could do that, and he could seize control of all political bodies in the universe, like some kind of outer space Alexander the Great.   But I see him as more of an outer space Caesar Augustus, using his power to manipulate the system to his advantage, rather than overthrowing it entirely.   

Most people know Augustus as the first Roman Emperor, but the key to his rise to power was that he worked very hard to keep his absolute power under wraps.    Before he took over, the Roman Republic was already in decline, and the people were accustomed to being ruled by an oligarchy of rich and powerful elites.   Culturally, the Romans despised monarchy as a concept, so it was politically dangerous for anyone to set himself up as a king.   A lot of ambitious people tried to get as close as they could, though, and Augustus happened to be the last man standing.    His secret was to position himself as a “First among equals” in the Senate, and while he compelled the Senate to give him vast, unchecked powers, he still kept them around as a figurehead institution, and paid lip service to the rule of law.   Factually, Augustus controlled like half of the wealth in the Empire, and enjoyed direct control over the legions and key provinces like Egypt, and he could pretty much make anyone do whatever he wanted.   But by pretending he couldn’t make anyone do whatever he wanted, it kept the people from revolting against him.   You can still see this sort of idea at work today, in autocratic countries that still hold elections even when there’s no chance of anyone toppling the party in power.   It’s also what Palpatine did in Star Wars, because George Lucas took a lot of inspiration from Augustus’ rule.    Palpatine crowned himself emperor in Episode III, but he waited almost twenty years to dissolve the Senate in Episode IV, because he still needed the Senate to keep control over his domain. 

Augustus’ model of imperial power was called “The Principate”, and it worked pretty well for a couple of centuries, until his heirs botched it by failing to ensure smooth transition of power.   There were so many succession crises and assassinations that people started too see the office of Emperor as a title to be bought, sold, or taken by arms.   Things finally settled down when another emperor, Diocletian, seized power and changed the system again, this time taking a less subtle approach to his authority.   That was called “The Dominate”, where he basically acknowledged that his was the sole authority in the Empire, and no one could take it from him.  

I see Frieza as more of a princeps kind of guy, concealing the lion’s share of his power behind a veneer of a respectable real estate tycoon.   He’s content to be powerful regardless of whether it’s explicitly recognized.   And that’s why he sells his conquered lands instead of demanding tribute from his clients. 

But I suppose you could fit him into the Diocletian model just as easily.   Maybe his “trade” is actually a facade he forces wealthy subjects to participate in.    Diocletian tried to impose a lot of economic reforms during his reign, but he didn’t understand how supply and demand worked, so a lot of his edicts were based on sheer political will instead of sound planning.   Maybe the planet trade in DBZ works the same way.