When everything is for sale, even life itself has a monetary value attached.

The city has an old history I’m not going to get into, but almost everything is built by hand, so the buildings last forever and just get repurposed again and again. Everything has been recycled with hardly even a dash of paint to cover the old purpose. The temple district is the best and worst example. The grand cathedral at the top of the city, originally devoted to some old god a thousand years ago at the colonization of the planet, is the most popular brothel in the city. When you’ve got humans roaming the stars with powers to rival any of the gods of old Earth, few people still want to pray to some distant and vague deity. The cathedral fell out of use and smaller temples to the various galactic super-powered Saints sprang up all over the city. The new owners painted the entire cathedral bright red, from the bell towers up top right down to the massive carved stone entryway, and you can see the damned eyesore from anywhere in the city. Great marketing, they say. The road leading up to this Red Cathedral, which blushing brides once walked to take their marriage vows, was called Maiden Lane. Well, it still bears that name, because the folk are too cheap to throw away a good carved sign. Instead, the prostitutes of the city have taken to calling themselves maidens. Their clientele, which is a good ninety percent of the city at least, both male and female, have fallen in line with this naming, and see no irony in it whatsoever. If that doesn’t illustrate this city, I don’t know what does.

It also costs a lot of money to train a force to keep the law, so Tiers hires mercenaries. In a sparkling galaxy full of starships and giant combat mechs and every technological convenience one can imagine, who would choose to move to a medieval world like Sivern? The type of people who come to Tiers are usually the ones looking to be forgotten, to be as far off the grid as possible, and Sivern is the only place in the Inner Cluster of planets where this is possible. As such, very few people who immigrate here use their real names. Like the prostitutes in the streets, the law folk create false identities to escape their past lives, to create distance from what they’re asked to do, to protect their families from shame or retribution, or to conceal their activities from those same families.

The law folk are divided into two groups. The first is the Watch, responsible for making sure standard laws are enforced throughout the city. The Watch is under the direct command of the First House. They also keep the riffraff of Low Town out of Upper Town whenever possible. Once in a while they’ll get a mercenary who still has a conscience and a sense of civic duty who gets it into his head to try to protect the common people of the city. And the people are grateful for it, don’t you doubt it. Some of them, anyway.

The second law group is the Peacekeeper force, known locally as the Keepers. They are not responsible for maintaining laws in the city and don’t usually bother making arrests even if they see a crime in progress. Their task is exactly what it sounds like: keeping the peace at all costs. You see, a city that runs on money finds itself ruled by the organizations with the most coin. In Tiers, that means the Houses; merchant organizations consisting of allied families who form one House to consolidate their business ventures. The Houses rank themselves by number based on who has the most money and power in the city.