No question Nardash is a big city. Some people might even call it huge. Those people had never been to Coruscant, or even Nar Shadaa. Those were huge cities. As it stood, Nardash was just big. Twenty million residents, a few hundred square miles of concrete and steel, and the heart of the Meraxis Empire, naturally they would have a massive and strict police force to maintain absolute order.
And without a doubt, the Nardash Police Department (on paper a civilian organization, in practice a subdivision of the Military) was the picture of discipline, ever ready to crack down on the first sign of a crime, felony, or minor misdemeanor (really, they were all pretty much the same under Meraxian law).
Disciplined, dedicated, unwavering. So, naturally, they were a major hotbed of corruption. That’s where the Wayward Officer Correction Tribunal, WOCT, (Watchers, as their nickname goes) sprung up a few decades back.
The whole group was founded just two years after the coup that put the previous emperor in power, and only lasted for about two more years after that. In the decade since, they’ve become a kind of a ghost story among the populace, mostly cause of the weird rumors surrounding them, and the increasingly more weird rumors that have been popping up since.
Officially, the Watchers were an internal affairs division. The MP’s kept the populace in line, the Watchers kept the MP’s in line. The weird stuff was in how. See, the Watchers, they didn’t have the authority to make arrests, or even to open investigations. If an officer was accused of breaking the rules they were supposed to keep, the Watchers would simply “ask” them to come in for an “interview”.
See, that was another weird thing, nobody knew where the Watcher operated out of. They had no official base of operations, at least not one that was listed on paper. They’d just show up, at your precinct if you were lucky, if you weren’t they’d be at your house. And you didn’t have the option to refuse either. No word on where those souls went, but when they came back…
Take this one guy I heard a story about, Jaxos Reed...or was it Reen? Sheen? No no, it was definitley Jason Reed. Yes I’m sure, stop interupting!
So, Jack, he’s you’re standard slimeball, right? Taking bribes, dealing spice on the side, than using that money to set his wife and kids up in the nicest penthouse he could afford. One day he comes home to find a Watcher in that penthouse, sitting at the table with his wife and kids.
Jaxos didn’t show up to work the next day. His kids didn’t show up to school. Not for a week. Then two. Then four.
When they showed up again, they were the picture of Meraxian propaganda, “Hail the Emperor” and all that stuff. Reed punched the next guy that tried to bribe, the spice dealing stopped cold, and a lot of his regulars weren’t heard from again. I even heard a rumor that one of his kids nearly killed a classmate who said some unkind things about the regime.
What happened to the Watchers? Got shut down. Official story was “budget cuts”. Course you still always got the rumors. That they went underground to do their work more “efficiently”, that bad seeds still disappear and come back changed, that they’re the ones really running the Empire, that they’re a Sith sect or a bunch of disguised Rakatans or some nonsense…
Me? Well I take the Empire at it’s word. Course they’re gone. Take my advice, you tell people the same if it comes up. Just, trust me on this one?