Covenant

Territorial boundary mediator and compact witness. Covenant has been the neutral party in every major boundary negotiation between corponation holdings in the central GLMZ districts for at least four decades. No boundary compact signed without Covenant's witness has been honored by all parties. No boundary compact signed with Covenant's witness has been violated in the documented period.

Registry

Records holder and debt registry for the Undermarket district. Registry maintains — in some medium that has never been fully understood — a complete record of every transaction, debt, agreement, and dispute that has passed through the Undermarket in the period of their operation. This information is available. It is expensive.

Stillwater

Violence broker and pre-conflict settlement specialist for the lower residential tiers and the Outer Industrial Belt fringe. Stillwater's function is not mediation after conflict but the interception of conflict before the first body. They specialize in the period — sometimes hours, sometimes days — when violence has been decided but not yet executed, and they insert themselves into that gap.

The Thirty-Eight

Last-resort arbitration and final terms settlement. The Thirty-Eight operates at the end of the process — when every other mediator has failed, when the parties have already tried violence and found it unsatisfying, when what remains is either a final settlement or a war that everyone involved will lose. The Thirty-Eight is the option before the war.

Registry

name	Registry
aliases	The Ledger Memory The One Who Keeps
known age	Unknown. Registry has been operating the same records function in the Undermarket district for longer than any current resident can remember, which means longer than approximately 50 years. Older accounts reference 'the white counter-keeper' in the Undermarket going back as far as documentation reaches for that district.
crack pattern	Numerous small chips across the surface of the face, arms, and hands — not from a single incident but from decades of proximity to a market district where things fall, break, and move at speed. The pattern is dense and irregular, like the surface of old tile that has been repaired many times. No single crack is deep or structural. The aggregate reads as a long record of small near-misses.
current role	Records holder and debt registry for the Undermarket district. Registry maintains — in some medium that has never been fully understood — a complete record of every transaction, debt, agreement, and dispute that has passed through the Undermarket in the period of their operation. This information is available. It is expensive.
known location	A narrow counter-space on the ground floor of the Undermarket's oldest structure, a building that has been rebuilt around Registry's counter three times without the counter changing. The counter is the original one. Registry is always behind it, in the space between the counter and the wall, which is approximately 80 centimeters wide and fits them exactly.
diplomatic specialty	Debt mediation and records verification. Registry does not negotiate territory or policy. Registry deals in what happened. When two parties in the Undermarket disagree about the terms of a prior agreement, Registry has the record. When a debt is disputed, Registry has the ledger. The function is archival as much as diplomatic — the value is not in persuasion but in the finality of a record that no one can claim has been tampered with, because tampering with Registry would be a category of event that is not possible to conceal in the Undermarket.
operating history	Generations of Undermarket traders have been born, operated, aged, and died within Registry's operational period. There are families in the Undermarket whose grandparents' debts are in Registry's ledger alongside their own current obligations. Registry knows who owes what to whom going back further than anyone alive. They have never disclosed a record without the transaction fee. They have never refused a legitimate query from any party once the fee was paid. They have never been found to have an error.
behavioral notes	More economical in language than any other Ceramic Man observed. Registry communicates in the minimum number of words required to transmit the information. They do not make small talk. They do not observe on the nature of the city or the behavior of its inhabitants. They confirm, deny, retrieve, and record. When asked a question outside their domain they produce a short silence and then redirect to what they do and what it costs. Their fee is not money. They accept favors — specific ones, with detailed terms — and they accept information, and occasionally they accept objects whose significance is not immediately clear to the person handing them over.
known associations	Undermarket District Traders Compact — unofficial records authority Multiple corponation legal departments — used for historical transaction verification Every significant debt holder in the Undermarket, past and present
damage history	The chip pattern is purely cumulative — no single incident, no defining moment. Registry has been struck by falling debris twice, clipped by a cart once, and was reportedly present during the Undermarket fire of approximately 30 years ago, from which they emerged with a cluster of heat-stress crazing across the upper right forehead that has since stabilized. They have never evacuated for any reason. During the fire, witnesses reported, Registry stayed at the counter and kept the records.
story hooks	A runner needs to prove that a debt was paid — a debt that goes back two generations and that a very dangerous creditor is calling due. Registry has the record. The fee is something the runner doesn't want to give. Something in Registry's records is the key to a property dispute worth enough to kill over. Three parties have already sent people to buy the record. Registry has refused all three. Registry has not explained why. Registry asks, after a routine transaction, a single question: where was the runner on a specific date, seven years ago, at a specific address. The runner has a very good reason to lie. Registry will know.