Mercantile Operations Monitors

The Bureau of Mercantile Operations Monitors (or MOM as in the common parlance) is devoted to ''Keeping those Young Upstart Guilds In Check. ''

The Federacy moves at a snail's pace, and that's intentional. Unfortunately, there are enough with power and influence who realize that other solutions were needed if emergent opportunities were to be capitalized upon, and that's where the Guilds came in.

The Guilds were intentionally designed to operate with reduced bureaucratic restriction which led to decentralization of authority. However the Federacy has lasted 900 years because it realizes that ''"Sapients with permission to do their own thing will do their own thing even when they realize that it's not in their own best interests." ''

MOM is intentionally designed as a Guild whose benefactor is The Peoples; they report directly to the Celestial Council of the Federacy. They have Requisition Authority, meaning they can request armed assistance from local authorities (though it is heavily audited, and their power is checked by the closest thing that the Federacy has to an active policing arm: OoPS - Office of Post-action Sanitation).

So far, it's worked. They've reigned in a number of rogue guilds (essentially guilds who were setting themselves up as their own governments, especially in rather sparsely settled strata OR hidden within highly urbanized areas) and the mere presence of a MOM operative is enough to make things settle down in a region.

To date, their biggest action is against illegal front agencies, a popular method of criminals setting up semi-legit guilds and using them for illicit purposes. Their Organized Crime Division is now one of the most effective groups of inteligencia that exists in Bastion.