Foundation
Throughout its many eras Geba has operated under various systems of law shaped by periods of centralization and decentralization, by conquest and collapse, and by the practical realities of governing a planet of seventy-one billion people across eleven continents without a universal legal code. Most of these systems have changed or evolved so greatly depending on region that the same act can carry a death sentence in one clearing and no legal recognition at all in another.
In the modern era, most regions base their legal systems on what the Empire had in place before the Era of Fracture. That imperial legal framework was authored primarily through the Rite House of He Who Allows, the official faith of the imperial capital, which means the legal foundation of the entire planet carries an imperial theological bias that seven of the nine faiths did not author and several actively reject. The divergence after the Warlord Eras is extreme in some areas, but the core of what most regions agree upon descends from that Rite House framework whether the population acknowledges the origin or not.
A place where the law is unenforceable does not necessarily make it lawless. A law that exists on the books in every jurisdiction does not mean it is applied the same way in any two of them. What follows is the closest thing Geba has to a common legal framework, the crimes that are recognized across most or all of the planet, the areas where jurisdictions diverge sharply, and the mechanisms through which law is maintained and enforced.
The Custodians
The Followers of Maor, a community within Veyan Thought modeled after Prince Vaer'maor, hold disproportionate representation in the capitals across the planet where laws are reviewed and revised for their respective populations. They are the only group on Geba trusted with this task. The Followers of Maor carry no symbols, hold no gatherings, and do not announce themselves. They simply live the way Maor lived: patience over impulsivity, diplomacy over force, prosperity through connection rather than conquest. Most great and fair statesmen across the planet are assumed to be Followers of Maor, even when the assumption is incorrect, because that is the reputation the community has earned through centuries of principled governance.
The Unbound actively target Followers of Maor through various channels to undermine or cause physical harm to them. The reasoning is structural: the Followers maintain the legal framework, and the legal framework is the single largest obstacle between the Unbound's internal practices and planetary acceptance. The Unbound do not need to change the laws if they can compromise the people who write them.
Relay Law
The relay is considered more important than individual human life. This is not philosophy. It is legal fact accepted across every jurisdiction on the planet. A single relay going down puts the surrounding population at immediate risk, and depending on the relay's position in the network the number of people affected can reach into the tens of millions. Saving one person at the cost of a relay is not heroism. It is negligence at a scale the legal system recognizes as worse than letting that person die.
Relay Destruction
Criminal across every jurisdiction without exception. The relay connects civilization. Destroying one is treated as an attack on every person it served.
Relay Hijacking
Forcing unauthorized transmissions over existing relay infrastructure outside of the
Energy Wars framework. Distinct from corridor fighting, where two manufactories contest a relay through funded contracts on both sides. Corridor fighting is legal operational activity. Hijacking is seizing infrastructure without engaging the system that governs how it changes hands. The
Church of the Infinite Maw committed relay hijacking on a planetary scale during the
Infinite Maw Conflict.
Unauthorized Broadcasting
Using relay frequencies without authorization. Distinct from hijacking because the original signal is not replaced, but the addition of unauthorized content degrades signal quality and can interfere with emergency communications.
Distinction
Corridor Fighting vs Relay Hijacking
An open corridor where two manufactories fight over a relay is legal. Both sides have funded the operation, both have contractors on registry contracts, and the relay changes hands through recognized conflict. That is the economy working as designed. Hijacking is taking infrastructure outside of that framework, which is why the Maw's seizure of three mega spines was treated as an act of war rather than an economic dispute.
Crimes Against Persons
The following offenses are recognized as criminal across the planet, listed in order of severity as the legal systems of the governed world generally rank them.
Artificial Birth
The most severe offense on the current list. Created specifically for the
Engineered and is the reason all Engineered since the
Era of Fracture are born naturally. No Engineered individual has been artificially created since the law was enacted. It extends to the unnatural reproduction of natural-born humans as well.
Cannibalism
Involvement in cannibalism in any capacity, whether the act itself, participation in trafficking lines that supply it, or operational support of any network that facilitates it, carries a heavier penalty than murder. The
Unbound faith's subset structure includes cannibalism supply networks at the higher ranks. The
Sect of the Infinite actively hunts and dismantles these networks wherever they are found.
Human Trafficking
The movement, sale, or trade of persons. Carries consequence greater than murder. Distinct from slavery, which is the act of holding a person. Trafficking is the system that delivers them. The
Teytan operates the largest trafficking networks on the planet, justified under the
First Doctrine of Blood Royal, which does not recognize anyone outside of Teytan's 13 million citizens as having legal standing or protections of any kind.
Child Soldiering
An ancient law originating during the
Geban-Thazvaari War when boys from both sides were learning battle drills before they could properly read or count and dying for it. The practice contributed massively to the gender disparity that persists across most continents in the modern era. The law was never removed because nobody has disagreed with it since it was written.
Slavery
The act of holding a person against their will and forcing labor or service. Distinct from
debtor service, which is a legal framework designed to retain the individual's agency. Distinct from trafficking, which is the movement rather than the holding. Universally criminal but persists in regions without enforcement capability, particularly in
Inland Thazvaar and unmonitored border zones.
Combat and Conflict
Killing and murder are legally distinct on Geba. The distinction is critical to understanding how the Energy Wars, the contractor economy, and syndicate operations function within the legal framework.
Murder
The purposeful taking of a life outside of recognized conflict. A manufactory contractor caught killing a fellow contractor outside of active fighting is committing murder. A syndicate operative who kills another operative outside of an operation is committing murder. A citizen in a major capital who takes the life of another citizen is committing murder. The context of active conflict is what separates this from killing, and the moment the fighting ends the legal classification changes.
Killing
Deaths that occur during active corridor operations, Energy Wars fighting, syndicate operations, and manufactory conflicts. Not classified as murder even when non-combatants die from the violence, because the operational context changes the legal classification. Once the corridor fighting ends and one side has established or defended the relay and stability returns to the region, any additional killing becomes murder because the operational justification no longer exists.
Warlordism
Completely outlawed. Any attempt to establish warlord-style territorial control through force. The
Warlord Eras produced the worst period in the planet's recorded history. The law requires no further explanation.
Piracy
The unauthorized seizure of vessels, cargo, or persons by actors with no territorial claim and no organizational structure beyond the crew. The
Children of Kharan are pirates. A syndicate can commit acts of piracy as one of many activities, but piracy alone does not make someone a syndicate. A pirate takes what is in front of them. A syndicate builds systems. The distinction matters because the legal response to dismantling a pirate crew is different from dismantling an organization with territory, governance, supply chains, and long-term operations.
Desertion
Abandoning service obligations. Under imperial doctrine,
Engineered individuals who desert are classified as unfinished state property.
Ash Kota deserted prior to the end of the Warlord Eras, and his reappearance inland led others still under term to abandon their posts and follow him.
Engineered Law
The legal framework surrounding the Engineered treats the Engineered body itself as a weapon. Existing in that body is enough to shift the legal burden of every physical encounter onto the Engineered individual regardless of who initiated it.
Artificial Birth
Covered under Crimes Against Persons. The reason all Engineered since the Fracture are born naturally rather than created. No exceptions.
Self-Defense Restriction
An Engineered citizen cannot legally defend themselves unless being assaulted by an armed natural-born, in which case they are expected to respond non-lethally. An unarmed natural-born can assault an Engineered individual and the Engineered is expected to absorb it, because their natural physical response would be lethal. Even when the attacker is armed and the Engineered is legally permitted to respond, the law requires them to calibrate their strength precisely enough to stop the threat without killing the person posing it. An
Assault-Class individual being attacked with a weapon is required by law to control a body capable of killing with a single strike while under active threat.
Hiding Tactician-Class Heritage
A
Tactician-Class individual passing as natural-born operates with a cognitive advantage that nobody around them can detect or compete with. In commerce, negotiation, or legal proceedings, they have processed every possible outcome before the other party finishes their first sentence. The law recognizes this as a crime. It is completely unenforceable because the ability to pass as natural-born is exactly what makes detection impossible.
Sporting Restrictions
Engineered individuals are banned from most natural-born sporting events because the physical gap is so severe that competition between them is meaningless. The
Severan is the only sporting event on the planet that evaluates hybrids individually through trials rather than automatically classifying them as Engineered.
Vessel Law
Vessels are natural-borns who have merged with a Velcrith or Seraveth. They are not Engineered. They are their own category entirely, numbering fewer than 20,000 on a planet of 71 billion. The laws governing Vessels were written by people who do not understand what Vessels are or how resonance functions, and the laws remain because no Vessel has been able to mount a defense in terms the lawmakers are capable of understanding.
Abuse of Vessel Resonance
Incorporated under the false assumption that Vessels can read minds and alter the behavior of others through resonance. This is completely inaccurate. Resonance does not function the way the law describes it. The law punishes an ability that does not exist in the form the law imagines, and removing it would require explaining what resonance actually is to people who cannot experience it and lack the framework to comprehend what they are being told. The law misunderstands what it is trying to regulate, and because the misunderstanding cannot be corrected through the legal system itself, the law stays.
Mandatory Self-Reporting
Vessels are legally required to identify themselves to local authorities. This law is completely unenforceable because there is no reliable external method for confirming whether a person is a Vessel, and historically the law has led to genocide. Populations accused of harboring Vessels have been targeted for mass killing even when no Vessels were present, because the accusation itself was enough to justify action under the law's framework. People who were not Vessels at all were killed because someone suspected they might be. The law remains on the books despite the fact that it has produced more death among innocent natural-borns than it has ever produced compliance from actual Vessels.
Financial Crime
Financial fraud is treated as a serious offense on the Geba continent and Coastal Thazvaar. In other regions the financial systems are too informal to produce a framework for prosecuting it. Two specific forms of financial crime define the modern era.
Ghosted Varens
The creation of
currency that never existed by exploiting gaps between relay tracking points. Point A and Point B can both see a number but neither can verify where it originated because the space between them does not ask that question. It reads the value and accepts it. The varens are real to the system even though they were never produced. The crime is theoretically detectable because ghosted varens never leave the system and can be traced back indefinitely by anyone who becomes suspicious. In practice, the generated currency is distributed across so many legitimate channels, split through so many real accounts and real transactions, that no single point in the chain looks unusual enough to trigger a search. Nobody follows the trail because there is nothing to trigger the search in the first place.
Registry Fraud
Operating in the governed world without a
registry identity, or altering an existing identity within the system. Once completed, registry fraud leaves no evidence and cannot be retroactively corrected. The identity simply exists as though it always did, and the system has no mechanism to question something it cannot see is wrong. This makes it the more dangerous of the two financial crimes because by the time anyone could suspect it, there is nothing to find.
Case Study
The elected representative of the
Unbound built the largest portion of her personal fortune on ghosted varens generated through exploits in imperial financial systems by Unbound operatives. The currency was distributed so thoroughly through legitimate maritime contracts and construction projects in
Kela that the origin was never suspected. Nearly every economist on the planet finds it unusual that the Unbound's assets regularly appear to materialize from nothing. It remains officially unproven. The public face of a faith pushing for planetary centralization is funded by the exact financial crime that the governed world considers among its most serious offenses, and the system that validates legitimacy is the same system the fraud exploits.
Weapons and Technology
Intent to Deploy Weapon of Mass Destruction
The most severe weapons charge on the planet. The
Church of the Infinite Maw holds three
Recursion Bombs and debates deployment daily. The charge applies to intent, not possession alone, which is why the Church holding the bombs is not itself criminal but deploying one would be.
Possession of Unknown Explosives
Carrying explosive ordnance that cannot be identified or traced to a known manufactory.
Individual Possession of High-Yield Explosives
A single person carrying ordnance that exceeds any reasonable individual operational need.
Possession of Unknown Technology
Carrying or operating technology that cannot be identified or attributed to any known manufactory or research program. The
Red Raptor's charge sheet includes this.
Possession of Experimental Airships
Operating airships that have not been registered, tested, or cleared through any recognized authority.
Speed Violation Near Population
Flying above a designated speed within 20 kilometers of a population center. At the speeds the fastest airships achieve, the pressure wave alone causes structural destruction on the ground. The 20-kilometer distance is the legal safety margin.
Loaded Weapon in Population Center
Having a weapon loaded and drawn within a population center outside of recognized conflict or authorized enforcement activity.
Repurposed Drones
Accepted across the planet as wrong because repurposing a drone makes its behavior unpredictable, removing the safety guarantees the original programming provided. Not actively enforced.
Institutional Crime
Syndicate Domination
Syndicates owning territory is not illegal. Forcing their influence on surrounding clearings and regions where proven is illegal, though unable to be enforced. The
Jerhit Syndicate and the
Teytan both operate territorial control that technically violates this law. Proving the influence is the problem.
Manufactory Domination
When a corridor closes and one manufactory has established or defended the relay, they are expected to allow other manufactories to contribute to the development of the surrounding region. Instead, many attempt to dominate the entire region, locking out every other manufactory from contributing to the new clearing. This defeats the purpose of the corridor economy, which is to produce clearings that function, not territories that serve a single manufactory's interests.
Corruption of Governance
Officials participating in criminal activity through intermediaries, including the purchase of trafficked persons. Several officials have taken their own lives upon discovery, indicating the severity of both the legal and social consequences when exposure occurs.
Vigilantism
Performing enforcement work without authorization. The
Red Raptor's entire charge sheet is built on this principle: doing the state's work without the state's permission, regardless of how effective the work is or how many kidnappings and trafficking networks are dismantled in the process.
Harboring Known Fugitives
Sheltering individuals with active
bounties or outstanding warrants. Complicated by the jurisdiction problem, where a person wanted in one clearing may be legally innocent in the clearing providing shelter, meaning the person offering shelter may not recognize that they are harboring anyone at all.
Grey Areas
Debtor Service
Debt on Geba is normal. Anyone can owe varens and simply pay them back over time. The problem is not having debt. The problem is when the debt is severe enough that the person cannot be trusted to leave and earn elsewhere, meaning they must stay and work directly under the person they owe until the labor they perform clears the amount. They cannot leave to take contracts. They cannot find better-paying work. They are locked to that person and that location, and if the value of their labor is low, the timeline stretches into something indistinguishable from a life sentence.
The law was designed to retain the individual's agency while ensuring the debt is paid. In practice, the distinction between legitimate debtor service and effective slavery depends entirely on the size of the number and who is enforcing the terms. It is very difficult to end up in this kind of debt without understanding what happened, and most people who become aware of the terms choose to face criminal consequences rather than enter open-ended unpaid service.
The Funnel
The debtor system creates a funnel toward the
contractor registry and syndicate work. Manufactories do not hold debt over contractors. Anything given to a contractor is deducted from final pay or written off as a loss. The contractor economy is the cleanest relationship a debtor can enter. Syndicates will lend or create situations where a person owes them, but the work is so profitable that the debt clears quickly even though the work itself is unlawful. A civilian farmer with a large debt faces years or decades of unpaid labor because the value their work generates is too low relative to what they owe. A contractor clears the same debt in a few contracts. A syndicate worker clears it faster but now owes something other than varens.
Unlawful Containment
The most grey area in the legal system. Unlawful containment is the holding of a person without legal authority, and the planet uses it, agrees with it, and acknowledges simultaneously that it has no consistent legal basis across jurisdictions. The bounty system depends on containment in some regions because capturing and holding a person is containment regardless of what the board calls it. And then there are the individuals who are too dangerous to release. Their sentence ends, their time is technically up, but nobody opens the door because what walks out poses an existential threat to everyone around it. The Ghosts of Thazahd handle some of this within Maw territory. Clearing governments handle it independently everywhere else. Everyone agrees these people should stay locked away. Nobody has a legal framework that permits it indefinitely. Every case is technically illegal, and every person enforcing it considers the alternative worse than the crime of holding them.
Smuggling
The movement of prohibited goods across clearing boundaries. Smuggling is where the entire clearing system shows its contradictions, because the thing being smuggled may be completely legal where it came from and completely illegal where it is going. The crime exists only because a border was crossed. A substance that is publicly and legally used in Jeyrha becomes contraband the moment it enters the Geba continent. An animal product that is a normal export in Kela and Ngorrhal becomes evidence of poaching the moment it enters Yuvaar. The same item, the same person carrying it, and the crime is determined by which direction they were walking.
Airship Theft
Treated as especially serious because airships carry special trackers tied to their owners' identities. Stealing an airship means either flying with someone else's identity broadcasting from your position, which creates false tracking data across the relay network, or tampering with the tracker, which is a separate crime on top of the theft. Either way the system knows something is wrong almost immediately, and the combination of identity fraud and stolen property elevates what would otherwise be simple theft into a significantly more severe category.
Faith and Law
The legal framework of the governed world was authored primarily through the Rite House, and maintaining it in the modern era is the work of the Followers of Maor. Each of the nine faiths interacts with that framework differently, and several operate legal systems of their own that either supplement, contradict, or entirely replace what the governed world recognizes.
The source of most planetary law. Their theological framework became the legal framework, and the bias is embedded: what the Rite House considers criminal became what the planet considers criminal, even in regions that never accepted the Rite House itself. Their understanding of
He Who Allows is imperial-biased and does not acknowledge the
Velcrith or the
Seraveth, which means the legal framework they authored carries the same blind spots their theology does.
What most of the planet actually believes. The Followers of Maor maintain the laws in capitals across every continent. They are the custodians of a framework they did not author but have refined through centuries of principled governance. They are actively targeted by the
Unbound.
Their legal framework in
Yuvaar predates imperial contact entirely and owes nothing to the Rite House. Everything derives from the harmony code. Poaching is criminal not because the Empire said so but because the Saodeh relationship with the natural world treats the taking of life without need as a violation of something older than any government. The laws they carry are more complete within their own context than anything the Rite House produced.
Their internal code around combat is simultaneously stricter and more permissive than planetary law. They train children in tasks that map to corridor operations from birth, which borders on child soldiering under the ancient law, but no jurisdiction has ever applied it because the training is faith practice rather than military conscription. Their warriors look each other in the eyes at the kill, demanding a personal accountability for taking life that the planetary killing-versus-murder distinction does not require. A Severan who kills outside of combat has violated both the law and the faith simultaneously.
The faith's actual practice at the higher ranks directly violates the planet's most serious laws. Structured serial murder, cannibalism supply, death groups disguised as contractor teams, and infiltrators claiming other faiths. The fifteen-rank system means the public face of the faith can appear generous and positive because the base and the subsets are connected only by how far individuals choose to go. A Rank 3 member may genuinely believe in allowance as philosophy and have no knowledge of what happens at Rank 11.
Deia reached Rank 11. The planetary laws on murder, cannibalism, and trafficking exist in direct opposition to what the Unbound practice at their highest levels, and the faith's response is that allowance is not measured in intent or subjective morality.
They follow whichever legal framework requires the least from them at any given moment. In a clearing governed by Rite House law they comply with Rite House law. In a clearing governed by something else they comply with that. They are not opposed to law. They are opposed to effort.
Not in opposition to planetary law but operating in a space the law does not address, because the law was never written with expansion into the
Uncharted in mind. The information they release about
Vessels, the
Velcrith, and the
Seraveth directly challenges the Rite House's theological monopoly on how He Who Allows is understood, which means the legal framework built on Rite House theology may eventually have to account for the fact that its theological foundation was incomplete from the beginning.
Operates its own complete legal system within Maw territory through
Zairen's Counsel. The
Ghosts of Thazahd handle defense, policing, and containment. Maw cities run cleanly and function better than many governed-world clearings, which creates the uncomfortable fact that a faith built around annihilation governs its people more effectively than most of the planet that considers it a threat.
The Teytan applies the
First Doctrine of Blood Royal as law. The Law of Tribute governs their own citizens. The Law of Victory governs everyone outside their borders. Under this framework, the 13 million people inside Teytan are the only people with legal standing. Everyone else on a planet of 71 billion has no protections, is not recognized as having rights, and is not classified as having the same standing as a Teytan citizen. Their trafficking operations are not criminal under their own law because the people being trafficked do not qualify for protection under the doctrine. The planetary laws on trafficking, slavery, and murder do not apply under the Blood Royal because the people those laws are meant to protect do not exist within the Teytan legal framework.
Regional Divergence
The laws above represent the closest thing the planet has to a shared legal framework. The following areas represent the sharpest divergence between jurisdictions, where the same act is treated completely differently depending on which clearing or continent a person is standing in.
Substance Use
Legal and public in
Jeyrha. Criminal on the
Geba continent. A person wanted for substance distribution on Geba can relocate to Jeyrha and operate openly.
Justifiable Revenge
Not considered a crime in the white zones of
Inland Thazvaar where proof of retaliation results in dismissal. On most other continents the same act is classified as murder regardless of what provoked it.
Poaching
A major crime in
Yuvaar tied to the
Saodeh harmony code. Frowned upon on the Geba continent. A normal export industry in
Kela and
Ngorrhal. A person wanted for poaching in Yuvaar can relocate to Ngorrhal and operate legally in the same profession that made them a criminal.
Financial Fraud
Serious crime on the Geba continent and
Coastal Thazvaar. In other regions the financial systems are too informal to even identify the offense.
Wage Exploitation
The wage gap in
Berinu is extreme, with some workers earning almost nothing for sustained labor. In
Jeyrha this kind of disparity is considered structurally impossible because their economic systems do not allow it to develop.
Enforcement
Two parallel systems enforce law across the planet. Neither was designed to work with the other, but at the highest levels of severity the gap between them closes because the alternative is allowing threats that no single system can contain.
The
Solarn registry operates with tier gates, visibility restrictions, and qualification requirements that prevent unqualified operators from entering situations that will kill them. A Tier 8 contractor cannot see or accept a Tier 2 contract. The system filters by capability.
No gates, no qualifications, no restrictions on who can accept a bounty. Anyone can pursue any target. At Low and Standard designations, hunters are encouraged to bring targets alive for significantly higher pay. At High and above it becomes dead or alive. At High and above, local authorities globally cooperate with hunters regardless of whether they recognize the original offense, so long as there is no collateral damage and no local laws are broken. High-profile Extreme threats and nearly all Absolute threats graduate to the contractor registry as funded contracts when manufactories or syndicates recognize the target as a priority.
For full detail on risk designations, escalation mechanics, live capture rules, jurisdiction complications, and the registry crossover, see
The Bounty System.