Sheriff of Pavacho
"A lawman on Pavacho doesn’t carry the weight of a government. He carries the weight of every trigger pull he ever made. And if he flinches, if he falters, the whole badland goes with him."
The Sheriff’s Mandate
Unlike the orderly Technocrats of the Pan-Solar Consortium, the Sheriff of Pavacho is an elected lawman chosen by trial of arms rather than ballot. On New Pavacho, where ghost architecture and harsh badlands make survival tenuous, the Sheriff is the closest thing to a planetary government the settlers allow themselves. Their mandate is simple: protect the frontier towns from outlaws, smugglers, and slavers, and coordinate the defense of the planetoid when foreign raiders descend. Yet this is no central authority. The Sheriff does not issue decrees or govern budgets—those are the business of the towns. Instead, they are an armed arbitrator, a walking deterrent, and a professional duelist whose authority exists because they proved they could outdraw and outfight every other candidate.
Election by Gun
Elections for the Sheriff are peculiar even by frontier standards. Each town sends its best gunfighter, who duels under strict rules with D-HEWs set to stun. Each round sees losers sent home, winners moving on, until one final champion stands. That champion becomes Sheriff. Once appointed, the Sheriff selects their deputies from the best of the defeated, ensuring that their posse is forged entirely from proven fighters. The Sheriff’s pay is not consistent; towns pool bounties, and the Sheriff’s posse lives off the takings from Criminal heads claimed or raids thwarted. In practice, this means the Sheriff is as much bounty hunter and mercenary as lawman. Yet despite the chaos, the system works: on Pavacho, every outlaw knows that somewhere in the wastes rides a faster draw, backed by a posse of killers just as sharp.
The Current Sheriff
The current Sheriff of Pavacho is Ressa Kaito, a wiry woman with sun-scorched skin, silver eyes, and the calloused hands of a spider rancher. Kaito earned her badge the hard way, surviving a five-hour gauntlet of duels without taking a single stun bolt. Her reputation was cemented when she shot down a slaver gunship with a jury-rigged harpoon satellite during her first year in office, then led her posse across the wastes to recover every captive. To her people, she is the embodiment of Pavacho’s defiance—laconic, stubborn, and unflinching. To outsiders, she is a nightmare in a brimmed hat, an unbending figure who treats treaties and titles as less binding than her own judgment. Kaito rarely smiles, but when she does it is in the midst of battle, her D-HEW still smoking as another outlaw hits the dirt.
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