Meridian Combine
Meridian dug the Deepworks and wrote the registry. Its answer to the Legends is to license them, and its offer is a place inside the system.
Who they are
Meridian is the corporation that built the Deepworks, wrote the registry and keeps the count of every Legend in the city. The Licensed board sits at the top, Meridian Security enforces the middle, and an audit function underneath answers to nobody the street can name.
Joining it means being licensed and keeping the licence current. In return a Legend gets a chair, insurance, a canteen and a supervisor who remembers the date of every incident.
Answer: Collaborate
- Colour
- White and gold
- Ground
- The Coil
- Board
- Reconciliation Contracts, at the contract annex in the Coil
- Ranks
- Unfiled, Provisional, Contractor, Vetted, Adjunct, Principal
- Comic
- Sixty Percent
- Status
- Partly built The creator pick and the rep tiers run in the dev build. The rest is design.
We're the reason there's a city to complain about.
In the creator
In the dev build The faction pick runs in the development build.
The creator's second screen asks "Whose city is it?" The answers are Meridian, the Undercurrent, Scrapline, or Unwritten, which declines.
A pick gives you standing with that faction at its first tier, and nothing with the others. Standing has tiers for each faction, comes from quests, contracts, war and events, and is never lost, so one Legend can reach the top with all three. Almost nothing earns standing yet.
It also gets you the faction's banner, a shelf of its costume, and its channels and halls. Crews can mix factions, so friends on different sides still play together. The pick is set once, and the intake record is permanent.
A head start, not a rank.
Argument: Purge, or licence? Adeyemi lost that vote in 2090 and has never accepted it.
Intake: A registration kiosk in the Coil. The clerk is kind, the chair is warm, there is a canteen, and the form already has your name on it.
Ground
The Coil is the one district Meridian runs outright. Its contract annex posts the Combine's board, and the registry's intake desk and the audit floor sit inside the spire.
Life on the apron is a queue. At the Renewal Line you hold places, you don't jump, and you don't talk about what you are renewing. At the Ninth Window sits the one clerk who is known to be kind, and her queue is always much longer than the others.
Like the other two factions, Meridian keeps a vendor front in Market Row, and a contract board in the Wick a short walk from theirs.
How it is organised
| Organ | What it does |
|---|---|
| The Licensed Board | Sets doctrine and approves charters. Its members are never seen in public. |
| The Recovery Desk | Dive charters and asset recovery. |
| The Reconciliation Desk | Reclassification, and bringing people back into the paperwork. It shares a counter with the Recovery Desk. |
| Audit | Ledger's office, on the audit floor in the Coil. |
| Meridian Security | Enforcement and detention. See Meridian Security. |
| The Licensing Tribunal | The court for registry cases. See Law. |
Ranks
Lowest first. The rungs double as forms of address.
Unfiled
Where every Legend starts, with the field left blank.
Provisional
What people call a new Legend behind their back, and they mean it kindly.
Contractor
The first rank that gets you a chair.
Adjunct
A person the Combine will publicly stand behind.
Principal
A rank almost nobody meets. Ledger holds it and does not use it.
The argument inside
Meridian argues with itself about what to do with Legends. Hale moved the Combine from the purge doctrine to the licence doctrine after he looked at a breach scar. Commander Adeyemi lost that argument in 2090 and has never accepted the loss.
She enforces Hale's doctrine correctly and resents every hour of it.
The registry isn't a leash because I like leashes. It's a leash because the other doctrine was a purge.
I'd have done it in one bad year. He's doing it in twelve. Count the two totals for me sometime.
A leash you cannot enforce is a lie you are telling the people it's supposed to protect.
The registry
Meridian's count of every Legend in Catena.
Every Legend in Catena is licensed or confiscated from. The registry sorts them into three standings, and the names describe legal status and say nothing about character.
Scanners at the checkpoints read a Legend's alloy and report a standing. Clarity Systems makes them, and its plate on the approach says what the company thinks a reading is.
The Licensing Tribunal takes over any case that touches alloy discharge. How that plays out in court is covered with city life.
| Standing | What the registry says | At a checkpoint |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed | Registered and current. | Relief. |
| Ghost | Not on the registry, and not wanted for it either. | The scanner flickers amber and the officer has a decision to make. |
| Blacklisted | Outlawed under the registry and hunted in the field. | The scanner reds out. In a hub nothing happens. |
| Cleanskin | Outside the standings: a Cleanskin's power has no alloy in it to read. See Cleanskin. | No return at all, which officers find the most unsettling reading there is. |
Morning. You're current. Have a good one.
...Scanner's slow today. Go on.
Don't. Whatever you were about to say, don't, and I'll say the scanner glitched.
...Next.
CLARITY SYSTEMS ยท SIGNATURE READER, MODEL 4.
Detection is not determination. A reading is not an allegation.
You may cross. Crossing is not consent to anything, and consent is not required for the reading.
What it offers a player
Designed Vendors, war doctrine and deployables are the game's design.
Meridian's vendor sells hardware blueprints and mods for the two main gear slots. Its Deadband doctrine is on the war page.
How it treats you depends on your standing. It sees a Licensed Legend as the ideal customer, a Ghost as a filing error to be corrected with incentives, and a Blacklisted Legend as an asset with a lien on it.
Partly built The standing screen carries a title for each tier as client content. The first reads:
A title with an expiry date printed on it.
The story
Designed Faction questlines and side stories are written and not built.
Act 1 is called "Asset Recovery". You join Captain Hale's Licensed board and run sanctioned asset-recovery contracts. The work is clean: order, pay, a badge and a mentor who means it. Then one of the assets turns out to be a person.
Your standing changes how the story reads. A Licensed player gets the pull of belonging, and the horror of it. A Ghost gets the deniable hand, and Ledger prefers a Ghost. A Blacklisted player negotiates the terms of their own leash.
| Side story | What it is |
|---|---|
| Reconciliation Contracts | The day job, with a hidden meter that is read back to you late. |
| Billboard | Escort Halcyon's ad shoots, which end in a rival duel. |
| Warrant vs Signature | A Blacklisted Legend auditions for their own licence. |
| Clean Sheet | Ledger courts a Cleanskin. |
| The Honeypot | Log who gets spliced at Doc Splice's Clinic. |
What the others say
Meridian is impatient with the Undercurrent, the way a clerk is with a form filled in wrong, and badly hides its relief that Scrapline exists. It treats the Chrome Dogs as a pest problem.
He keeps a better record than we do. Ours has more fields.
He keeps a book. I keep a register. His has fewer fields and better attendance.
Half this cell has somebody in a gold lanyard. Nobody mentions it. That's the actual leash.
