Article 37: Watchers 1
Between Professor Darkrider and Miss Nightbreacher, it's likely that by the end of your first semester you'll have a good general knowledge about the Golden Alliance, the Angelic Protectorate, the Galactic Anarchists, the Elemental League, the Castaways Treaty Systems, and Legion, as well as a number of large racial groups or sub-factions among them. Yet one corner of the galactic map, the eastern rim of the Milky Way, remains largely undiscussed, at least as far as the students know. This region of space is controlled by a group called The Watchers, and though we have more than a few of them in attendance at the school, even they have precious little information about the faction. What we do know of them only brings up more questions, and very few of them have answers that are satisfactory to most of us.
Firstly, it is known that the Watchers are the oldest known galactic civilization to still exist. While artifacts from the pre-Golden-Alliance Nekopotamians have been dated back thousands of years, the Watchers have been observed to exist with their same hyper-advanced ships since the earliest years of of the Humans and Mythics' space travel. Because of this, it's surmised that the Watchers were contemporaries of the Nekopotamians, but none of the escaped Watcher residents of Mahou City recall any mention of the old Nekos in any archived material. Whether this is because the Watchers and Nekopotamians never interacted or they are privy to knowledge that the younger escapees could not have been granted access to is the subject of numerous debates. In any case, due to their incredible level of technological advancement, Watcher equipment, including personal weapons, armor, and starships, are better than their non-Watcher counterparts by orders of magnitude. A refugee Watcher at MSF High carrying with them something as innocuous as a datapad or a stun gun are in possession of the equivalent of a powerful relic, and the ability to unlock additional functions of this device without approval from their old officers is often a large part of how they progress in their studies. Because of clearance-level locks on their equipment, it's difficult to gauge the actual power of any Watcher technology, but it's known that Watchers can appear suddenly at nearly any point in the galaxy, at least when one of their edicts has been broken, and this is likely due to some combination of their own use of subspace frequencies too minute for the rest of the galaxy to detect and starships with BioWarp drives that outclass modern top-of-the-line GA models. When they're not firing warning shots, their lasers can obliterate warships in moments and even their communications gear can physically shake their targets in such a way that it plays out their audio messages. What equipment is captured has strict biological locks and tamper-proof designs that self-destruct rather than allow even standard scans to affect them. As an aside, one of the few tactics that does seem to work well against Watcher tech is to hit them with a penetrating scanner--the machines will lock up and prevent their use temporarily, affording you time to escape. The bottom line when it comes to Watcher tech is a pair of equally disheartening truths: It's better than what you have, and no, you can't have it.
With such ridiculously powerful ships, one might be mistaken in thinking that these Watchers would be a dominant faction in the galaxy, having played roles in every major conflict and kicking butt in each war. Oddly, however, the idea of political power seems to be completely foreign to them. They have had no interest in taking part in galaxy-spanning wars, they take part in no trade with the rest of galactic civilization, and they don't engage in any real forms of diplomacy. That isn't to say that they're completely without spines, however, merely that their interests seem to be laser-focused on a specific goal: The observation and recording of all of galactic history as it unfolds before them. In most cases, this means that if they're spotted, which is a rare occurrence, they will make it known that they are not to be attacked and not to be scared off with any show of force. However, in the case of a number of pre-spaceflight or early-spaceflight planets, they will bark out a warning to any that might approach that the planet is under their protection and therefore off-limits to the rest of the galaxy. The reasoning behind this, according to the Watchers among us, is an almost cult-like reverence for the ascendance of a society from their early history to the moment they take to the stars. This, however, is wildly inconsistent as they often allow younger spacefaring civilizations to make contact with nearby planets. It seems more that they want the largest space factions to stay out of the way. In any case, these planets will be given one of three levels of Watcher Protection. Those that study the various Watcher Protected Planets claim that the first level of protection is assigned to planets that have no technology or magic that could detect nearby spaceships, and thus getting close without actually landing on the planet isn't likely to do much harm. The theory continues that the second level is smart enough to realize what a spaceship is, but not yet advanced enough to do anything about it or observe it in a meaningful way. Getting near one of those might inspire a few lucky stargazers to proclaim that aliens do in fact exist, but this would get lost in the mess of kooks making false claims about exactly the same thing. Third-level protection appears to be granted to planets that could easily detect and observe nearby spacecraft (except for the Watchers themselves, who have incredibly advanced cloaking technology) and therefore even getting into the same solar system as these planets is not going to fly with the enigmatic Watchers. This classification is supported by a couple of our watcher students, as well as the fact that planets which are dropped from the Watcher Protection lists are almost always third-level status beforehand. Keep in mind if you ever plan on Watcher-dodging that the level of protection really only amounts to how close they'll let you get before they chase you off or disintegrate you, not what level of doom they'll bring to bear on you. The latter will always be "enough to reduce you to your component atoms."
