Royal Palace

The Royal Palace of Caelester is the traditional home of the city-state's monarch, as well as the centre of governance. As such, it requires a variety of facilities, from luxurious housing for the royal family and guests to various meeting halls and offices for senior advisors and officers.   The historic structure, having withstood two major fires and nearly 600 years of wear and tear, collapsed in its entirety in the recent earthquake, killing everyone inside.   Plans for a replacement has been in the works almost since the ground stopped shaking, and construction has been started several times. However, each time, the project is soon called off.   Several prominent figures putting up funds to pay for the construction have died: two died in their sleep, unusually young but seemingly peacefully, one was crushed by the collapse of a poorly made scaffold while inspecting the site and one fell from the window of his bedchamber in the middle of the night.   Other times the plans have been disrupted by shifts in the consensus of what the new government will look like. With every member of the royal family either confirmed dead or missing, people have proposed a variety of systems of governance for the city. Twice, the head of one of the city's few surviving noble families came forward with "newly discovered" documentation regarding a distant relation to the royal family, thus making them the heirs to the throne, each one insisting that they have final say over the palace's plans, delaying construction while their documents could be verified. Many of the merchants insist that, as they manage most of the trade that made Caelester so prosperous, governance should fall to a council of merchants, while masters of the city's guilds have proposed that leadership be handled by a representative council comprised of elected members from each city district as well as, of course, the guildmasters themselves as representatives of each of the city's major industries. Each of these have, in turn, proposed a highly modified design to the palace, one that significantly scales back on the size and opulence of living quarters to dedicate more space to offices and some manner of council hall where the entire ruling council could meet and debate important matters. Both of these proposals have waxed and waned in their popularity, resulting in regular shifts between both modified designs and the original plans that prioritized housing the royal family.   Recently, work has stopped altogether, due to laborours who have suffered through all these delays collectively deciding to turn their attention to other projects throughout the city. There are many more construction projects in the city than there are construction crews who can build them, and the teams working on the Royal Palace have finally decided that the construction of the palace, as important a symbol of recovery as it would be, will simply have to wait for other projects to be completed, since the city's elites apparently cannot agree on something as simple as a basic floorplan.   In its current state, the Royal Palace is a sizable but empty construction site, featuring solid foundations, a scattering of stone exterior walls (some reaching as high as eight feet), and piles of stone, timber and other construction materials.