Article 38: Watchers 2
The previous dump of information is the short version of what the galaxy at large knows about Watchers. As mentioned earlier, the occasional young Watcher will escape, and a small number of them have made it here to MSF High. Each one has brought a tantalizing bit of information, but none of it is enough to piece together the entirety of the puzzle. I'll list a few Watcher residents of Mahou City and explain their experiences and what they've learned during their time with the Watchers.
Professor Quom is a fourth-year teacher at MSF High, and among those that have arrived from their facilities was the oldest to escape. She managed to steal not only a functional ship but a large database of historical information. It's because of this that we know that the Watchers have been observing galactic history since at least the early ages of both the Angelic Protectorate and the Golden Alliance. Because of her relatively high age, she managed to obtain a higher rank than the students here, though the most this tells us is that the older generations of Watchers in large still don't know why they so meticulously preserve their data, and most do so without question. We also know from her experiences that in each Watcher research, archival, or observational station there are less than a dozen members who communicate with other Watcher stations, and most of this communication is merely to coordinate between other stations and keep their archives cross-updated. She also knows because of her own efforts that Altearths are, despite theories stating otherwise, not some sort of experiment by the Watchers. Though they are deeply fascinated by the phenomenon, they seem as in the dark as anyone else as to why there are so many near-identical planets.
Rainier Latham was an android purpose-built with the goal of spying on the student population, detecting anomalous behavior from the youths, and correcting as needed. His observations reveal that not only are the young Watchers effectively brainwashed into compliance under the watchful eye of a vaguely sinister big brother, but also that even an individual station is so tightly segmented that there could be multiple copies of him in that station without arousing any suspicion. Thankfully, it also revealed that not every Watcher in the higher ranks is completely on board with this style of management. Rainier's creator, an engineer named Latham, purposely crippled Rainier's sentience inhibition programs, allowing him to go rogue and assist a pair of young lovers in their escape from the facility. Given the incredibly tight security and sophisticated sensors onboard Watcher stations, it seems a distinct possibility that all escapees are assisted in some fashion by someone in the upper echelons of the Watcher command structure.
Tomoyo Patton was an incredibly bright and curious Watcher onboard a highly mobile station with a purpose not seen in other Watcher facilities. While most seemed to merely observe and keep away space adventurers that would stray too close to the planets, Tomoyo's station took a much more active role in keeping planets unaware of the galaxy around them. The duties this station performed included intercepting random chunks of space debris, cleaning wrecked starfighter carcasses off of planets' surfaces, jamming radio signals that were headed towards protected planets, and occasionally removing items that had somehow fallen into the hands of planetary citizens that might give away the existence of life elsewhere in the galaxy. Tomoyo's insatiable curiosity led her to a section of her ship that she had never even heard mentioned, a repository of artifacts lifted from planets around the galaxy. Included in this room were subspace receivers built by insane geniuses, crystal balls that by chance had attuned themselves to pick up holovid broadcasts, and one item of extreme importance: A single entry form for MSF High. It was using this form that Tomoyo brought herself to Mahou City, and given the danger she put herself in by poking into their secret storeroom, it's a good thing she did.
Suzuka is currently an up-and-coming battler in the arena circuit, but before that she was a watcher onboard a densely-populated observation station. Her duties entailed caring for a few hundred newborns that arrived from another location that would eventually grow into the next generation of Watcher children. All Watchers grow up without knowing their parents, but most weren't in a position to really think much on it. Suzuka's role put her in the position to think just a little too much, and her snooping found that each child was born from a pair of parents apparently chosen at random from disparate stations, and that each baby has a serial number with a number of prefixes that go unknown to them throughout their life. Their names are taken at random from historical figures from various planets, and other than that name the Watchers are expected to have little to no real individuality, with the biggest distinctions between them being their height, eye color, hair color, and hairstyle, all of which are randomly genetically engineered into the young Watchers. Her station suffered a catastrophic failure in its biowarp drive and was unable to warp away when the nearby sun of the planet they were observing went supernova as a result of the planet's scientific experiment. When her station's calls for help went unanswered, she disobeyed protocol to bust into the engineering section, found a considerable amount of sabotage, and with no time left for a BioWarp jump, redirected all of the facility's power to its shielding in the hopes that it could withstand the supernova's energy. Unfortunately, the saboteur or security, she's not sure, found her and knocked her out, only for her to wake up at MSF High.
While this is a large portion of what we know about the Watchers, it's possible that there's someone not part of their society that knows more. Perhaps there's another undiscovered faction that spends all of its time Watching over the Watchers, for a purpose even they don't know. Time will tell, I suppose.
