Female Truant officers unload their captives at the Ministry of Truants
- Main article: Torean Ministries
One of the inter-ringdom institutions on Torei is the Ministry of Truants. On Torei, agents known as truant officers pursue runaway slaves and indentured servants who are in violation of contract or otherwise need to be captured and returned to their masters or mistresses.
In addition, some ringdoms empower their truant officers to enforce curfew laws and perform other police duties.
Independent Truancy Enforcement[]
In some ringdoms, particularly the less wealthy and/or those whose capitols lie further from the Elevator (or Beanstalk), the Ministry of Truants allows private concerns, commonly known as headhunters or reacquisition specialists, to hunt and recapture escaped slaves. Generally, such headhunter organizations receive a standard bounty from grateful owners, and then are allowed to sell any unclaimed slaves after a standard reclamation period. Truant slaves of this type are usually sent first to the Ministry of Improvements for punitive and behavior modification implants before being placed back on the market.
Though these headhunter organizations are hardly endemic to Torean society due to slaveowner fears of unscrupulous "reacquisiton specialists" actually kidnapping slaves for the bounties on them, in those ringdoms where they do exist, they serve a valuable function. And their influence is growing; several of the more ambitious headhunter corporations have begun hunting the Badlands for escaped bands of "freedom fighters." When they capture members of such a band they can, from their bases in the ringdoms where they are allowed to do business, charge standard bounties from owners wherever they are, or sell any slaves captured if their owners do not wish to pay the bounties determined by the ringdoms in which they operate.