Open Government

A little meta note on worldbuilding, inspired by - well, okay, it's January, so you can guess what the annoying discourse has been for the last four? - four - days.

Now there is a thing that while it's hardly been a major theme, here, is made plain in various spots.

You can walk right into the Imperial Palace.

It's got ten gates in the outer wall that surrounded the Celestial Garden: the Supreme Portal right up front which is used for major parades and progressions, and the nine minor and extremely thematic gates, which for those of you who love the details, are:

1. The Gate of Beauty Luminous as Moon-Struck Marble
2. The Gate of Dignity Unyielding as the Mountain's Heart
3. The Gate of Freedom Soaring as the Hawk at Play
4. The Gate of Glory Empyreal as Solar Flame
5. The Gate of Honor Clear as Mountain Water
6. The Gate of Loyalty Solid as the Most Beloved Hound
7. The Gate of Progress Shaped by Hammer and Anvil
8. The Gate of Wealth Abundant as the Forest's Bounty
9. The Gate of Wisdom Writ in Tomes Stacked High

None of these are ever closed. Well, okay, that's not strictly true. They are closed once a year, for an hour, to test the mechanism and to demonstrate that they can close, because leaving a gate open has little symbolic value unless you could choose not to.

So yes, walk right in. Visit the public gardens. Enjoy the art in the Empress's Gallery and the Imperial Couple's private museum collection. Walk the Long Hall and drink the most expensive esklav you're ever likely to consume in one of its balcony cafés. To the best of my knowledge, the diarchs of the Empire have never had a big block of cheese, but if they ever did, right here outside the Hall of Illumination would be where it would be served.

Much the same applies to the Great Hall of the Senate. The public are welcome to walk Temple Circle (that surrounds the Great Hall of Convocation and contains many of the senatorial townhouses), observe the proceedings from the Defenestrative Gallery, or visit the gift shop and buy their very own platinum-iridium Sortition Die.

Even the Seat of Judgment is open to the public. It's too austere to be a popular destination, but if you have the urge to be awed by the icy majesty of the law or need to look things up in the definitive law library, you need no-one's special permission so to do.

Now, there are certainly guards (the Imperial Guard, the Guardians of the Senate, the Hand of Justice) dressed in their best ceremonial uniforms with their very real ceremonial weapons. (Yes, that's an anti-tank lochaber axe. Don't ask.)

Their job is politely redirecting people away from private areas and responding to people doing Actual Bad Things in the same way that the Watch Constabulary would do elsewhere and private security might do in other elsewheres.

But their job is explicitly not to turn public buildings into some sort of fortress and ensure that the public can't get near them except in extremely limited checkpoint-controlled groups.

Because if you need to do that, you've got one of three problems:

1. You're running a tyrannical regime that the people hate; or
2. Your people are a bunch of assholes who can't be trusted to comport themselves in a civilized and respectable manner; or
3. Most likely, both.

And that means you've got trouble.

Trouble, with a capital T, and that rhymes with B, and that stands for Barbarians.