City Of Mists: The Infrastructure

City Of Mists: Introduction
City Of Mists: The Law
City Of Mists: The Departments

City Of Mists proper is located on a northern side of its island, around a natural deep harbor, partly covered from the east side by a chain of smaller islands which really are tops of undersea mountains. The crescent shaped port constitutes the Old Town. It contains numerous piers, wet and dry docks, and an impressive array of warehouses, sprinkled with dozens of cheap hotels, bars, and bordellos for sailors. It also contains numerous custom offices and bureaus allowing for quick dealing with bureaucratic paperwork, as long as one does not irritate custom officers at least.

All the port infrastructure is owned by the City Of Mists and administrated (mostly) by the Department of Harbor. Warehouses are usually leased to corporations and private individuals, sometimes for short time but often for years or even decades.

All of the City is connected to a power grid, owned by the city and maintained and administered by the Department Of Infrastructure, which formally holds monopoly over providing electric power anywhere on the island but sometimes sells licenses for use of emergency power generators and small scale solar panels. Interestingly, the department keeps the location and exact type of power plant or plants powering the grid secret—gossip states that the power is generated in rather old nuclear plant or two build in the late sixties as a part of secret deal with American government.

The Department Of Infrastructure is also maintaining majority of the plumbing in the city, providing fresh water from the mountain springs. Its primary uniformed force, the carabiniers are acting as public security force and traffic enforces, and keep units trained in firefighting. Many corporations keep their own firefighting or rescue teams, though. Carabiniers' stations are spread through city, combining role of police precinct, firefighting stations, and minor courts, equipped with jail cells and retaining magistrates empowered to judge minor offenses.

Higher judiciary functions are held in the building complex of the Department of Justice, focusing primarily on legal arbitration between corporations, and to lesser extent with criminal justice. There is a large amount of overlap in law enforcement functions between departments, with investigation branches of departments vying to get their hands on criminal cases that can increase their reputation, gain influential corporate allies, or have high chance of including assets forfeiture, and at the same time try to avoid cases that have low chance of successful prosecution and political, social, or financial gains.

Lack of higher public education negatively influences the local pool of candidates for investigative branches of the departments. In fact, the various department offices often hire foreigners with law enforcement, military or investigative backgrounds, often overlooking troubled past of their candidates such as criminal convictions or disgraceful conduct.

There is no public health care on the island—there are numerous private hospitals, which are legally obliged to provide a basic ER care, but anything beyond that requires having proper health insurance. Some corporations keep their own medical facilities restricted to their employees and shareholders. Outside of the city, in the southern and western parts of the island lie two charity hospitals, formally private but sustaining themselves from voluntary gifts.

There is no public education on the island, either, with a small number of private schools in the city. Many corporations offer their employees some sort of high class tuition for their children, with small classes often providing education in a way favoring the corporate interests. Again, outside of the city the islanders have a few village schools maintained with local funding.

The city has very well developed cellular network with multiple companies competing over private and corporate customers with cheap phone services and high speed internet. All the departments are offered free phones and near-free services, a condition for communication company to operate on the island.