K-055: Live Session Summary Part 5, Gateway, Toran City
Oliver has recreation time, and decides to use some of it to take a couple trips out to the city to see what kind of food and other things are available and gain a sense of what life is like in Electorate space outside the confines of the government building he is living in. Accompanied by a plain-clothes Ground Militia escort, he finds that it is the same and different to the Dominion.
One thing he notices is that it is visually striking compared to his experience in the Dominion; clothing in particular. In the Dominion people like uniforms. If one goes to a café all the staff will be dressed the same. There are a lot of government workers and they tend to have uniform looks and wear Bureau badges showing which Bureau they work for, sometimes even wearing Bureaucrat uniforms. Whereas here in the Electorate, even though the clothing is often of much worse quality, it is much more vibrant. There is colour, there are different styles; it is visually more confronting.
He has a general sense that people here might be a bit worse off in terms of living standards than their Dominion counterparts. Life is not as comfortable in the Electorate as it is in Dominion. They don’t have the same industrial capacity; the technology – everything is a little bit clunkier, a little bit more difficult. Yet, there is a sense of vibrancy in comparison, in the Dominion the workers might exist in a sort of quasi-comfortable drudgery, here in the Electorate, even if someone is doing it hard, there is a sense that opportunity could be just around the next corner.
Economically, the Electorate is very different – people haggle; in the Dominion, one enters a shop, someone tells you the price, you pay the price. Here, people argue over the price, and in any one of the multiple currencies in circulation. So acquiring goods and services feels a lot more chaotic than Oliver is used to. But that said, there is also a sense of camaraderie. People might haggle over prices, but it’s not nasty, just how things are done.
Also, things that the Bureaucracy runs in the Dominion, here it is run privately, and there are big organisations to do that. In the Dominion, private enterprise is mostly allowed for small shops. There are a handful of big private partnerships, such as a few big private shipping firms and industrial organisations, but almost everything is actually run by the Bureaus. Whereas in the Electorate, there are companies of more than just three people in a shop. They have big buildings that they own and apparently, the land under them; whereas in the Dominion, no one but the Overlord owns land. One can own a building, but not land. If one wants to buy a building, a permit to use some of the Overlord’s land to put the building on is required. But here, private ownership, well that’s no problem if one has the cash.
They take their politics very seriously – it’s reflected down to the salutation, Oliver is a Stranger, but most of the people he meets are Electors: They can wield democratic power and elect their leaders. Here there is choice, and people are talking about elections and candidates. Oliver has some familiarity with political process in the Dominion – he saw the process that an Overlordly Envoy used to elect who to recommend as the new Governor of Mundo Zargo to the Overlord.
For all that chaos, he finds Gateway is busy but not overcrowded, because that there are fewer Separatists than there are people in the Dominion, though his escort says that if he were to take a trip to Neargate, orbiting the companion star, he might form a different opinion.
Something else he discovers, spying a government official in a crème and red uniform, is that while the Electorate Ground Militia tend to do the official government security stuff, such as looking after spaceports and escorting defectors from the Dominion sightseeing, there is a group called the ‘Proctors’, who serve the role that the Legion Public Safety Officers serve in the Dominion preventing and apprehending criminals, here in the Electorate they’re a separate organisation to the military.
“How weird,” Oliver comments.
On one of his trips out into to Toran city, he and his escort are returning to his big government building in one of the ‘pool limousines’, which, it is still not clear to him exactly what its function is.
His car pulls up, and there are a couple of big, black limousine cars, a level of opulence above his own, stopped ahead and apparently also disembarking official passengers. Oliver and his escort get out, and then the occupants of the car in front also get out… and that, is a Naki, green-skinned and lizard-headed.
“Naki’s balls!” Oliver exclaims quietly.
There are some humans around them, looking to be a mix of diplomats and security, but protective and not guarding the lizard-like aliens. Another Naki gets out and they walk up the steps and go into the building ahead of Oliver.
His escort says, “we’ll just give these guys some space. They can get a bit twitchy.”
“Sure,” Oliver says, eyeing them carefully.
“Not seen one before, huh?”
“No. First time.”
“Well, we’re not at war with them, like the Dominion is.”
“Fair enough,” Oliver says.
“That’s one of their, um ,what would you call them? Kingdoms, nationalities. It’s one of their ambassadors from one of their nation states. We have a few different groups of representatives here.”
Oliver flashes on the censored vid he saw with the Naki characters in it – a pretty accurate portrayal, he thinks now. He wonders if it was just really good CGI, actual Naki, or whether it’s socially acceptable to do scale-face.