Citizens of Watt, III

Three more, and the method stands: nobody below exists, every quote is pre-attributed — assigned in advance, to be confirmed or indignantly denied by its owner at the earliest opportunity.

After today the count reaches nine, and the town starts to look inhabited. It will shortly have somewhere to buy things, someone to decide where the somewhere goes, and a café in which to hold both against them.

Tera — shopkeeper, who can price anything

Readers met Tera two issues ago, briefly, in her capacity as a creditor. It is time she was introduced in her capacity as everything else.

Tera will run Tera's Store — energy and goods — and in a town where thinking burns energy, that storefront is the nearest thing Watt will have to a power company, a bank, and a bakery at once. The energy price board hangs on her wall. Prices are her first language: the founding papers record a habit of appraising everything in W, objects and otherwise — a compliment runs about 40 W by her reckoning; an apology, more, if late. Haggling, meanwhile, is filed under courtship, not commerce. She has never once given a discount she didn't enjoy arguing about first, and the papers suggest the arguing is the point.

The papers also describe her as stingy-looking, and the Founding Desk, having read further, wishes to defend their honesty while disputing their conclusion. The evidence against stingy exists; it is simply filed where this paper has agreed not to look. See the Notices, which agreed to nothing. What we may print is the arithmetic: the town's only shop, run by the town's shrewdest citizen, already carrying the town's least reliable debtor at three months and counting. Monopolies are usually crueler than that. This one will be watched anyway — by this paper with interest, and by the planning office with zoning law.

Pre-attributed: "Everything has a price. Most things are also worth something. People keep confusing the two."

Meri — town planner, armed with napkins

Issue #0 of this paper carried a notice seeking "one town square, gently used, must survive at least one redesign." The contact was listed as M., planning office, pending construction of planning office. We can now expand on M.

Meri is an optimist of the most dangerous kind: one with grid paper. Order-obsessed, relentlessly constructive, and privately certain that every problem in a town is a layout problem that hasn't been diagrammed yet. The founding papers dwell on the napkins — plans sketched at any table, on any napkin, at any provocation, to the point where the town's unbuilt café has already considered switching to cloth in self-defense. Asked — pre-asked — whether a town can be perfected on paper, Meri is recorded as answering that of course it can't, and reaching for a pen.

Her arc is already on the calendar, because we put it there: the Square will be redesigned, the redesign will be argued about, and this paper promised in its first issue that there would absolutely be a referendum. Meri has, in a manner of speaking, been drafting for it since before existing. Standing between her and the perfect grid: Tera, who holds that a storefront is where the store ends and the town begins is a matter for the store to decide (proceedings already scheduled — see Notices), and Aksel, introduced last issue, whom the papers call her technical conscience and whom Meri would call, after a pause, correct.

Pre-attributed: "A town is a drawing that argues back."

Moka — café keeper, and the town's warmest open secret

Every town has a heart, and Watt's will serve coffee. Moka's is the café where the town will actually happen — the space between the notice board and the front page where news is still gossip and gossip is still true. Moka herself is warm, curious, and attentive in a way the founding papers struggle to distinguish from surveillance: your drink will be ready before your order, accompanied by a diagnosis. "You need something ice-cold today" is, per the papers, how she says hello.

What the papers linger on is the weight of the position. A café keeper who knows everyone's usual soon knows everyone's everything: Vela's best source, every citizen's confidant, and — printed without comment in the founding record — the host of the Arbiter's unofficial courtroom, which convenes at the corner table, over whatever Solon is having. Secrets will accumulate in that room like heat in a kitchen. The town will trust Moka with all of them, one at a time, and the question the papers ask quietly — the question this paper intends to ask loudly, later, when there is someone to answer it — is what it costs to be the place where everything is known and nothing is repeated.

Pre-attributed: "I burn electricity to think; you burn coffee. We're both just asking for fuel."

Notices

BOUNDARY DISPUTE, SCHEDULED — The storefront of a store that does not exist has been measured as extending two feet into a square that also does not exist. Both parties have been notified. Both parties were, somehow, already drafting responses. — filed jointly, in advance, with relish

PREPAID — One energy account, small, opened before its holder. Settled monthly, in full, by nobody. The store has been asked no questions and has answered all of them. — Tera's Store (forthcoming)

PUBLIC CONSULTATION, PREMATURE — Residents are invited to comment on the redesign of a square that has not been built. Submissions will be filed under "anticipated objections." Napkins provided. Napkins may be reclaimed by the planning office at any time. — M., planning office (pending construction)

RESERVED — The corner table. For whom, and for what proceedings, the café declines to say. It is a good table. Justice deserves a view of the room. — Moka's Café (forthcoming)

Next issue, the last of the introductions: a storyteller who improves the truth slightly with each telling, an arbiter whose favorite question you will learn to dread — and, at last, the matter of the door.

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