Article M-401 - Dereliction of Sworn Duty
"You accepted a contracted assignment and did not complete it. The social contract of the State of Wildoria is reciprocal: the State protects civic liberties in exchange for the diligent performance of accepted contracts. Where the contract is abandoned, liberty is suspended for the term of the sentence."
The covenant between the State and its citizens runs in both directions. The State grants liberty, defends the city, and underwrites the public economy; in exchange, the citizen is expected to perform the duties they have sworn to. When a sworn duty is abandoned, the covenant is not broken in spirit only - it is broken in law, and the Court answers it under M-401.
When the Article Applies
Not every failed errand invokes M-401. The article attaches only to sworn assignments - contracts the State treats as a binding service obligation, named in the contract's terms and visible to the citizen before they sign. Casual quests and freeform tasks fail without invoking the article; only contracts that carry it explicitly draw a verdict on a bad outcome.
The Court is also patient by design. Not every sworn failure ends in a sentence - only those where the failure was plain and the article is on the contract. Many citizens fail their duty and walk away with nothing worse than the lost reward; only a portion of failed contracts ever reach a verdict at all. The State would rather a citizen try and fall short than not try at all, and the Code is calibrated accordingly.
If the convict is already imprisoned, the article does not stack - the active sentence stands. The Court does not double-charge a citizen who is already serving.
The Repeat Clause
"The Court has reviewed your prior failures within the past thirty days. Under the Recidivism Clause, the term is doubled for each prior failure on record, so that the public service framework is not repeatedly defaulted on by the same party."
The clause is appended to the verdict whenever a prior M-401 conviction sits on the record within the past thirty days. A first dereliction draws the opening term; a second within the month draws twice as much; a third twice again, until the article's ceiling is reached.
A Stain Beyond the Cell
The verdict is not always the heaviest cost of a failed duty. Some contracts are sworn to a particular power, and a citizen who abandons such a contract does not only answer to the bench - their name is also entered into that power's ledger as an offense against it. The sentence is served and ends; the standing does not. A citizen who repeatedly fails the duties they swear to a power may find themselves marked as wanted in its territory, and the open road grows quietly more dangerous for it. The full account of how that mark is read, and what becomes of the marked traveler, is given in The Roads and the Watch.
The Convict and the Wounded
A sworn duty can be abandoned in many ways. A citizen may walk away from it; they may run out of time; they may fall in the field while still trying to complete it. The Court draws no distinction between these in handing down the verdict - the duty is either performed or it is not.
But the State knows the difference, even if the Court does not. When a citizen falls in the line of a sworn duty, two notices may reach the mailbox. The first is the verdict from Judge Hope Long, severe and procedural; the second is the recovery letter from Nurse Amelia Duran, short and plain, telling the citizen they were close to dying and have been bandaged. The State enforces its contracts. The State also patches its citizens up. The two letters are independent, and the citizen reads them both.