Watch-Captain Sera Coldwater

Sera Coldwater is the elected head of Ravensburg's Watch Council, which means she is the closest thing a city with no formal government and a blurry line between merchant and opportunist has to a chief executive. She has held the position for five years. Before that, she was Watch-Captain for seven years. Before that, she was something else, which the official record notes as 'merchant intermediary' and which several of her current Watch members know was not exactly that, and which she has neither confirmed nor denied.

Ravensburg's law is described in its location entry as 'resembling' consistent law. Coldwater takes this as an accurate assessment and governs accordingly. She does not try to make Ravensburg into something it is not. She tries to make the version of Ravensburg that exists work better than it would without her, which is a more demanding standard than it sounds because the version that exists includes several competing criminal organizations, at least three factions with outside patrons, a mercenary population that turns over completely every few years, and a physical layout that was designed by no one and expanded by everyone.

She is effective at this job. The Watch Council members who initially regarded her as a placeholder have, over five years, stopped saying this in rooms where it might get back to her. The ones who said it in rooms where it did get back to her had educational experiences that they generally do not discuss publicly.

She is aware that Ravensburg is the kind of city where a sufficiently motivated outside organization could establish significant influence without the Watch necessarily knowing about it in time. She is aware that 'sufficiently motivated outside organization' describes several current candidates. She prioritizes accordingly, which means she knows things about Ravensburg's actual power dynamics that the official Watch record does not contain and that she does not intend to put in it.