AN, credits to perfect_shade, Sunny and Readhead for helping me revise this chapter.
These videos gave inspiration for the writing of the chaos at the CSR's mage research facility:
watch?v=_bGEEjYdEXQ
watch?v=WUhOnX8qt3I
watch?v=GeEEN0tuSn0
1952, September 1st, at the CSR's mage research facility:
Chen Shusheng wasn't really sure how many years he'd spent in the facility. The endless experiment and surgery sessions had clouded his memories, as had the screams from others when their turns on the surgical table came up. Yang Huimin's absence hadn't helped his mental state in the slightest either; she'd said that she had to leave for an overseas assignment and didn't know when she would be back. He didn't remember how long ago that had been.
He had been sleeping in his cell, fitfully resting despite a particularly painful recent bout of experimental surgery when the entire facility had begun to shake. He leaped out of his bed still half asleep just as the wall collapsed down onto it, revealing an adjacent prison cell and someone else in there as well.
The harsh lights flickered overhead as concrete continued to break free from the walls and ceilings, and the floor buckled below his feet. Woozy from sleep, pain, and accumulated trauma, Shusheng gritted his teeth and swayed with the shocks. After several minutes of the rumbling, the facility was in ruins.
From the cells all around him, broken open at last, he could hear the chants from the mage prisoners: Freedom. Kill the guards. They lost the Mandate of Heaven.
Shusheng shakily made his way over to the adjacent prison cell as its inmate kicked the twisted prison cell door off its surviving hinge.
"We haven't met. My name is Chen Shusheng." he offered his hand, taking notice of the recent scars on the person's head.
"I don't remember my name. Or my family before all of this," the other inmate stuttered, cradling his head in both hands. "Just call me Fire."
The hallway was quickly filled with freed prisoners as everyone that could not break out with their own strength were helped out of their cells. Next, the crowd of freed prisoners forced the hallway door open, to find a group of guards waiting for them. Some were in riot gear while others were less prepared, with a few naked but for undershirts and briefs.
"Return to your cells!" One of the guards shouted, and lifted a baton to cow the former prisoners.
Fire pushed through the crowd and charged headlong into the guards. He didn't flinch when he took a baton to the face, and responded by punching the guard in the jaw hard enough to dislocate it.
Then all the mage prisoners surged forward as one, charging at the suddenly terrified guards. Shusheng pushed through the melee in a bid to continue moving forward, not wanting to delay and partake in the absolute stomping that the guards were receiving. His goal was the armory where the orbs used in tests or by the guard mages were secured. If only he knew where the armory was, exactly…
Suddenly, a door smashed open and someone flew through it. Peering through the opened doorway, Shusheng saw a lone mage guard with an orb trying to hold off a dozen mage prisoners. Probably a C-tier augmented guard. For some reason the guard only had a pistol and a baton.
Shusheng motioned to a few prisoners at the situation, and on a quiet count to three, they all charged through the hole to surprise the mage guard. The mage guard turned and shot two of the prisoners, but that allowed the group he was earlier facing to also charge as well.
"Take his orb off!" One of the prisoners yelled in the ensuing body pileup on the mage guard. Shusheng ripped the tubes out of the guard's neck, which quickly resulted in the guard being unable to maintain their body reinforcement and physical boosting spells.
When the orb was pulled off, the prisoners all cheered while one of the prisoners strangled the guard mage to death. As they handed the orb to someone, Shusheng quickly recognized that they were completely mentally unhinged. Far worse than Fire.
The unhinged mage powered up his shield, cackled madly before screaming "YES", and charged into a wall, quickly blasting through multiple walls. A guard poked his head through one of the holes in confusion, seeing the unhinged mage charge forward through more walls before his orb exploded in a spectacular magic firework show and engulfed unsuspecting prison staff members in the blast, and then looked back at the group of prisoners that were now also charging through the newly opened holes.
The panicking guard ran down a hallway, with Shusheng, Fire and a few prisoners in hot pursuit, while the rest of the prisoners continued spreading throughout the facility utilizing the new holes. There were shouts from some of the prisoners as they discovered the prison's workshop and were quickly raided for tools.
Shusheng could not believe his eyes when the fleeing guard led them straight to the entrance of the armory. The guard desperately pounded his fists on the heavy steel doors, pleading for the guards inside to let him in.
As the prisoners dragged the guard away, Fire walked up to the doors and tapped on it.
"They already sealed off the armory." Fire muttered, while there were muffled loud swearing from the guards behind the doors telling the prisoners to go entertain themselves.
"That might explain why the guards we met were so lightly armed." one of the prisoners laughed.
"What if we go around them?" Shusheng looked at the cracks on the walls adjacent to the doors. "Maybe there are weakened walls, or we can check the floor below or above the armory to find a way in."
Additional prisoners showed up with armfuls of tools from the workshop, including sledgehammers. "We heard there was an armory that needed to be broken into." one of them smiled.
"Everyone surround the armory on all sides and start pounding away to find a structural weakness!" Fire yelled as he grabbed one of the sledgehammers. "The earthquake had to have left a weak spot somewhere!"
Half an hour passed before someone came running to Shusheng and Fire. "The support columns under the armory are crumbling! We could open holes under the room, or collapse it entirely!"
"We still need some people to keep pounding elsewhere to keep the guards inside guessing." Shusheng pointed at one of the few prisoners that had an orb. "And everyone who has an orb needs to provide shielding for the initial breach when the guards start shooting after we open up the armory."
Shusheng then turned to Fire. "Take a group to the floor below to start pounding at it. I'll go look for people who have orbs."
Meanwhile in Berun:
Paul paced back and forth in his office, contemplating what his next move in the Great Game would be. The presidential elections were coming up, and he needed something to stop his only rival from winning a landslide victory against him.
'Elya had been feeding information to that damned Degurechaff. I bet that bitch told her simpering little pet to give me bad information that would lead me into the neverending disaster known as Caucasia. Maybe that damned hussy even had a role in the Hamburg attacks.'
The president paused for a moment. He couldn't think of any specific situations where Elya acted in an obviously illegal manner. At least, not in any way that he could substantiate with evidence. But that didn't really matter; everybody, Elya included, was either abandoning him or actively obstructing his efforts. That was crime enough in his book.
'My Minister of Justice resigned in protest when I asked him to open up an investigation against those two women. And so did his deputy. No point in causing a mass resignation and letting the press run screaming headlines with silly titles. "Saturday Night Massacre" or some rubbish. Christ! Am I even in control of my own cabinet?!'
Behind him, Paul heard the whoosh of his pneumatic mail system. He turned away from his window and walked over to retrieve his package, neatly contained in a capsule.
Opening the brown paper wrapping, he quickly read through the letter. And again. And again.
Four minor political parties, the Socialist Labor Party, Imperial Party, Anarchist Party, and the People's Democratic Party, were collectively offering a deal, signed by the party leaders such as Klaus Vogel and Andreas Becker. They would back him through any emergency measures and get some individual legislators from other political parties on board, as long as he could provide an ironclad guarantee that Degurechaff would not be able to return to power, as well as passing some of their own pet proposals.
And looking through those proposals, they seemed straightforward. A censorship law for example.
Back at the CSR's mage research facility:
The initial breach was not as bloody as Shusheng had been expecting; other than the few prisoners who were crushed when the entire armory collapsed into the lower floor after the support columns, already weakened by the earthquake, were knocked out one at a time. The surviving and dazed guards were easily dealt with and the prisoners helped themselves to the stock of orbs, weapons and chemical boosters.
And that was when Shusheng saw the true insanity begin, with everyone's magic potential unlocked. As soon as the prisoner mages got their hands on the armory's weapons, they immediately started smashing open the research lab vaults, pilfering various experimental augmentations, experimental chemical boosters, experimental orbs and other equipment that were stored in there. Which was also how the mob of freed mages found the remainder of the facility's staff, who had sought refuge in some of those lab vaults. Some of the experimental stuff didn't work as expected, and a few of the prototypes proved detrimental to the prisoner mages. On the other hand, some of those tools still in testing, once in the hands of powerful mages full of rage and insanity, were… terrifying.
He watched a group of Rus scientists boil alive, their eyeballs liquefying in their sockets and running down their cheeks like grease pouring from the freshly slit skin of a juicy roast pig by a prisoner mage using some sort of overpowered radio wave emitter. As he'd rendered the still living men down, the mage had screamed "You took away my face! I'll take your faces in return! I am the second son of God and will establish a new heavenly kingdom on your heretic corpses!" Another freed inmate, who wore a necklace of severed heads, ruptured a recently arrived group of reinforcement B-tier augmented mages' eardrums with a directed sonic screech, screaming about how she wanted to make them her friends forever in a deafening register. Fire had no issue beating the Chinese scientists to a bloody pulp, using the ragged corpse of a freshly slain B-tier augmented mage as a weapon.
For his part, Shusheng used his sledgehammer to knock down the one last wall that was separating the prison from the outside, and was immediately blinded by the sunlight. He blinked, staring up at the pale blue sky overhead. He had not seen it in so many years.
"So… What's your plan, now that we're out of the box?" Fire came up from behind, his clothing absolutely soaked with blood.
"Find my family. And Yang Huimin."
"Yang Huimin?"
"Ah, I'm in love with her."
"At least you have somewhere to go, I guess." Fire sighed. "I don't know where to go. Can I follow you?"
"Sure, why not?" Shusheng shrugged, ignoring the blood curdling shriek echoing from somewhere within the facility behind him, as well as the madly giggling female mage with the severed heads necklace flying past them out the new exit. "Hopefully we can find your family. I can't wait to introduce you to my family and Yang Huimin."
Shusheng paused, taking another look at Fire's sopping prison rags. "We'll need to stop by a creek or something, or borrow clothing off of someone's laundry line. We'll need to freshen up a bit, just enough for us to look a bit more presentable."
1952, September 3rd, in a mildly damaged Nanjing:
"What's the progress on the disaster relief for Peking, Shimen, Zheng Zhou and their surrounding areas?" Zhang sighed as he looked at the preliminary reports detailing the destruction left in the wake of the recent earthquakes.
"Slow. The destruction of the roads and railways out in the middle of the countryside, and especially bridges, have severely curtailed our ability to reach the worst hit areas." Li responded as he finished marking up the map in the room showing the estimated expanse of the devastated central part of the country. "Luo has already begun to pull mages from all overseas operations to assist with the disaster relief, but it will take at least a few days for all of them to be present with sufficient strength to start the airborne search and rescue operations."
"How much do the foreigners know about the current disaster?"
"Other than their seismologists knowing that something massive hit us and their military intelligence likely noticing all of our mages withdrawing, not much." Kang shrugged. "Unless they fly another plane directly over our land again or just happen to have informants somewhere in the area, they won't know the true extent of the destruction."
'Of course there's another reason for me to ask Luo to recall all of the mages from overseas back home, and mobilize elements of the military to form a large containment ring.' Kang frowned.
Zhang put down the papers. "Our grain storage has also been impacted. Even if we could repair all of the damaged roads, bridges and railways by tomorrow, we would still probably have to import food. But that's an additional expense, on top of all of our expected outlays from the post-earthquake rebuilding additional burden might force us to borrow money from abroad; otherwise, we will have to significantly cut expenses elsewhere. Or, I suppose we could ask for aid from abroad."
"Aid from whom? The Russy Confederation, North Bharat and Burma can only help us so much." Li raised an eyebrow. "Especially the Rus. They are, after all, still in the middle of their farmland expansion project. What was it they were calling it? Ah yes, the Virgin Lands Campaign."
"There are," Zhang pointed out, "more countries than just the Rus, Bharat, and Burma."
Everyone else looked at each other over the table.
"Absolutely not!" Luo was the first one to speak up. "If we ask for aid from the entire world, they will know we are significantly weakened! It would be the perfect opportunity for them to attack us, knowing our ability to fight a defensive war is severely compromised. We must downplay the extent of the disaster for foreign consumption!"
"The longer it takes for us to recover, the harder it will be for us to keep up with the capitalists." Li retorted, much to Luo's visible disgust.
"I'm going to have to agree with the Chairman." Kang added in. "As the Chairman had often iterated in the past, the government is responsible for taking care of its people."
Luo pointed his finger at Kang, "And weaken the influence of international communism?!"
'Good, good, stick with the script.' Kang thought to himself as he continued his fake argument with Luo in front of Zhang and Li. 'Just don't take too long because I have a mess to clean up.'
Somewhere else in the CSR:
If there was one thing the facility had never driven from Shusheng's memory, it was his family home. After the tardy military reinforcements had finally arrived too late to help the guards, and had subsequently been driven off in a disorganized rout after they tried to surround the prison, he could finally fly home to see them again.
When he and Fire touched down at his family's home's location, he noticed it looked very different from what he had remembered. The wooden and stone shack had been replaced with a concrete house, although the poured walls were crazed with cracks, presumably damaged from the earthquake. A man stepped out of the front door, a young girl, presumably his daughter, shyly peeking out from around him.
"Where is my family?" Shusheng asked the man, completely confused. Surely he hadn't forgotten where his home was?
"You must be looking for the Shusheng family?" The man asked.
"Yes."
"Several years ago during the war, an aircraft crashed into this place and destroyed the house, killing everyone inside of it. I'm assuming you have not seen them for a long time?"
Shusheng dropped into a squat on the ground, his head spinning. It didn't make any sense. Every time he'd had the privilege of phone calls, he'd been rung them up. . But… how could that be possible if they had been dead for so many years?
"Would you like some tea?" The man walked closer, then stopped. "What has happened to you?"
"I'm so confused." Shusheng stared off in the distance, but quickly snapped to attention when Fire nudged him, pointing to the sky. He soon felt a formation of mages was quickly approaching.
"You need to get out of here!" Shusheng shouted as he looked up at the sky. "Get your daughter away from here."
"What are you talking about?"
"Multiple mages are arriving here soon, and they're closing in fast."
He then saw the glimpse of mages up in the sky approaching him.
"Escaped prisoners, surrender your orbs." A voice spell was broadcasted from the mages.
The man ran off to scoop up his daughter as the mages quickly closed the distance.
"What happened to Yang Huimin if the rumors of the survival of my family were greatly exaggerated? Was I talking to a fake one all along?!"
"Where's my family?" Fire asked. "Your people took memories of them from me."
"That is not for you to know." One of the mages responded.
"Then I won't surrender my orb until I find out the truth." Shusheng glared at the dozen mages, taking notice of their significantly larger orbs with metal fins on them. They also didn't have the tubes sticking into the necks.
The mages powered up their augmentations with one of them taking a drink from a canteen, droplets of an orange colored liquid streaming down his neck. Now that he thought about it, he had seen those orbs and the booster chemicals in a canteen being tested years ago in the prison before the scientists moved onto other projects.
Shusheng and Fire ramped up their own augmentation to power up their shield and flight spells, pushing their orbs to the limit.
The mages opened fire at a rapidly evading Shusheng and Fire, with the explosive magic bullets that did make an impact but failed to break their shields. He could already feel his orb warm up.
"You won't take me alive!" He screamed. "I will not go back to that prison!"
"Our backup order was to take you two in barely alive, you traitors!" one of the mages shouted as they all switched bullet spells. "After all you're just two mages against a dozen."
'Traitor? They call me a traitor after all that I've done for my country?' Shusheng fumed, then switched to thinking about his next moves.
'There's no point in running because they will likely outrun us with their better orbs. But what if I take one of their orbs first?"
He ripped out his orb's limiter, ramped up his shield spell as he tapped more into his augmentation, and charged head-on into the mages, while Fire followed suit. Their armor piercing bullets only caused minor disruptions to his shield as he body-slammed into the first mage, sending her into a shed and obliterating it. Somewhere off to his left, he heard Fire barrelling into another mage.
The enemy mages pulled out their swords and axes, but Shusheng blocked one of them with the palm of his hand to the shock of the second mage, causing the ax head to snap off from the handle. Shusheng's punch resulted in him flying through a brick wall and striking a tree hard enough to knock it over.
The third mage slashed Shusheng's side with a sword. The blade flickered with his shield and reinforcement spells, and left only a superficial wound. The mage then punched him in the face with no reaction from Shusheng, and before the mage could land a second punch, Shusheng responded by slamming both of his hands into the mage's head from left and right side, audibly cracking the skull and causing the mage to fall to the ground, convulsing.
Then Shusheng anchored himself to the ground as the first mage rocketed from the ruined shed to try to return a body slam to him, only for her to come to a complete stop as if she had tried to ram the side of a mountain, causing her body reinforcement spell to be overloaded and her bones to also audibly break.
"What are you?" one of the surviving mages asked, staring at the broken heaps of their comrades.
"You made me into a monster." a blood soaked Fire growled as he tackled that mage, digging his fingers into the mage's eyes.
Shusheng pulled the large orb off of one of the wounded mages, powered it up for a physical strength boost for his throwing arm, and then hurled his previous orb that was now glowing red from overload at a group of remaining mages that were about to open fire on Fire.
"You need to have better situational awareness." Shusheng said as Fire looked back at the smoldering wreck of the group after the explosion.
"Where to next?" Fire asked.
"I guess we can head to Tibet or Xinjiang. Hopefully the people there are more receptive to letting us hide among them." Shusheng shrugged.
1952, September 5th, somewhere in Germania:
"I invited the two of you here to let you know that there will be some major political activities in a few days." Elya glanced at her notebook. "I can't go too deep into the details, but President Paul is going to blunder into a trap. When the time comes, don't kill the Hamburg police for what they're going to be doing. Their involvement is crucial."
"Is all of this legal?" I asked suspiciously. "I know that you remember what I told you."
Elya pouted at me. "But that was when you were in office and acted in the spirit and letter of the law! President Paul had dropped the notion of twisting the legal interpretations. He's gotten into his head that everything he does is legal, because he's the one doing it! All I'm doing is letting him get his way, just the way he wants it! So far, he doesn't seem to have noticed the obvious consequences."
"I'm assuming you're still working with the BND?"
"Of course not," Elya smirked, "We just have lunch meetings. In the middle of forests and other remote locations."
I sighed deeply. As Paul was demonstrating to the world, you can fire someone but that doesn't mean a thing if all of their former subordinates remain fiercely loyal to that person instead of whatever new appointee you put in their place. Which means that even if Elya doesn't intend on making me her puppet, it's still going to be a nightmare when I retire for good and whoever my successor ends up displeasing the BND. Not to mention it's never a good situation to have a subordinate that you can't fire, either because they're too critical to an organization's operation or because they have enough influence in a company to make the higher ups' lives hell. That's a HR manager's nightmare.
"What's been going on in the CSR?" Visha deftly changed the topic, clearly noticing that I wasn't too happy with Elya's scheming. "I saw a newspaper article that said something about the seismographs detecting a major earthquake there, and that days later, the Albish government demanded an explanation from the CSR about why they were conducting anti-aircraft fire, aircraft operations and mage combat exercises just 20 kilometers north of Hongkong. It doesn't make any sense."
Elya looked concerned. "What a coincidence that there were reports from informants in both Caucasia and Francois Indochina about how all of the Chinese mages apparently just flew back home, not too long after the earthquake struck."
"Nothing from your NKVD boyfriend?" I raised an eyebrow inquisitively.
"He needs a bit more work," Elya replied, running the fingers of one hand through her hair. "Another report that worries me came from one of the few informants who were operating in the CSR mainland. He reported, over open radio no less, that bandit mages were attacking the town he was living in. Which was north of Hongkong. The report was somewhat hard to understand, considering the noise level. It sounded like a door being smashed open – a very familiar sound in my line of work! Someone in the background was screeching 'Friends forever!' before the informant went radio silent."
"Bandit mages?" Visha blinked a few times. "I guess that earthquake really did make a mess even if the communists don't want to admit it. It's strange that a bandit mage would be yelling 'friends forever' though."
1952, September 6th, somewhere outside of Nanjing:
"Maybe if the scientists weren't so aggressive with the surgeries, we would have been able to contain the initial breakout!" Kang shouted at Li. "It took two companies of augmented A-tier mages to search for scattered prisoners that set out on foot instead of flying away. Then it took a total force of more than five mixed mage battalions, multiple aircraft squadrons, two infantry divisions, countless State Security agents and many anti-aircraft artillery and magic guided missile crews to recapture or neutralize most of the prisoners. With over 75% of our forces dead, severely wounded or missing in action. Including the augmented A-tier mages! The regular infantry divisions were all cut down to the last man as well. And we still have a few prisoners unaccounted for!"
"It was your State Security Department that failed in their responsibility of keeping the research facility secure against any threats, including natural ones." Li jabbed a finger at Kang. "The military also wanted to restart the direct nervous system project, which led to many of the surviving test subjects developing severe mental instabilities. You should talk to Luo to tell him to give up on that fruitless project!"
"That department did not factor in an earthquake destroying the facility." Kang huffed while Li rolled his eyes.
"So how can we continue to experiment on the test subjects now that they all had a taste of freedom?" Li glared. "Or am I going to have to just kill them all and significantly slow down our mage research? And that's assuming we catch them all because right now, some of the most powerful mages on this planet are on the run and have every reason to seek revenge or try to flee to another country to spill our mage augmentation secrets to them. Imagine if even one of them sought refuge with the Germanians!"
Li looked around for a moment, before lowering his voice. "I am hesitant to say it, but despite their contributions to our mage augmentation advancements, we need them dead. Before they break out again and destroy Nanjing. A child abused by a village will burn it down to feel its warmth. And we have many powerful ones. If a new government was in power, we would all be tried for crimes for what we have done."
"We could try experimental magic assisted torture spells on them to make them more cooperative."
Li stared as if he was looking at a stubborn child. "Ah yes, use mages to torture other mages, these ones exceedingly powerful and grievously mentally unstable. What if the test subjects decide to put their tormentors on the table for a change, hmm?"
"What about the lobotomy? We could easily find an American, Albish or Nordic doctor willing to work for us; given how popular the practice is over there. There's no shortage of greedy fools with diplomas and icepicks."
"Other than the fact that the Chairman banned such practice, lobotomy might remove their magic ability altogether." Li frowned. "The last time I talked with the mage research division, before most of them were wiped out, they said there are still many unknowns of how the human brain allows a person to manipulate magic. Besides, couldn't we ask the Rus to help with the lobotomy?"
"Then we'll use a few prisoners to experiment with lobotomy on them first. And the reason why I left out the Rus is because they had banned that medical practice not too long ago after their doctors had collectively denounced it as inhumane. Even if we do find a cooperative Rus doctor, I would rather trust one that had performed hundreds or thousands of those operations over one that had not been practicing with their leucotome in the past few years."
"...So, how are we going to break the news to the Chairman?" Li inquired, his tone full of forced innocence and mocking curiosity
Kang just glared hatefully at the other man.
1952, September 11th, at a prison in the CSR:
The padded isolation cell's door shut behind Kang, leaving him alone with the handcuffed Li Lisan, who was seated at a table.
Li Lisan coughed before speaking. "Why should I work with you? You and Wang were instrumental in charging me with crimes against the state, because apparently that was less embarrassing for you than to charge me for being a true communist."
'Working with this extremist was not my original plan. But after the verbal chewing from Zhang and his loyal lapdogs piling in as well, I have to make sure my coup against Zhang succeeds at any cost.' Kang thought to himself as he prepared his explanation.
"Wang has gone missing. The Chairman was the real enemy all along." Kang sighed, prompting a perplexed look from Lisan. "He intends on permanently ending the Chinese Soviet Republic's ability to spread the socialist revolution around the world, and also lose the trust of the Rus and North Bharat."
"How?"
"Selling out all of the rebels to the Albish counterintelligence for some oil, trade rights and technology. And now he wants help from the capitalists to rebuild our country after the earthquakes. For example, he wants to seek the Albish help with using decoy companies to secretly import grain from the Unified States, which would be problematic if the Albish intel has any leaks."
"Those are some serious claims. But that also requires serious evidence." Lisan frowned. "How can I trust you?"
"I figured you would ask." Kang removed folded papers from his pocket and unfolded it for Lisan to read. "Here's the signed approval from the Chairman on the negotiating terms for Zhou Shu to use to talk to the Albish. And by the way, the final deal has been signed."
"Of course Shu would ask 'how high?' when the Chairman tells him to jump. What do you want me to do?"
"Do what you do best when the time comes. Make some speeches to the public and make people emotional when the Chairman is visiting Germania's new President, Tanya von Degurechaff. I presume he's going to beg her to not attack the CSR, which is when we will make our move. That's all I ask of you. And you won't be going back to prison."
Lisan looked confused again. "Wasn't she already President to begin with?"
"Ah, Wang probably prohibited any correspondence from reaching you and the guards from talking with you. I should have thought of that." Kang palmed his face with irritation. "She stepped down from power and claimed to retire, while allowing an idiot to be the new President and promptly run everything into the ground for her, setting the stage for her to return and be the hero that will fix all of the mess that the idiot caused. And during all of this time, she has been making deals with the Unified States, Akitsushima Dominion and South Bharat as a 'private citizen'. I'll allow you to access correspondence again."
"Why hasn't anyone tried to assassinate her if she's been running around the world freely?" Lisan narrowed his eyes. "They are all fools if they thought she was going to let go of power so easily."
"Well someone tried by poisoning an entire restaurant in Germania to take her out." Kang rolled his eyes. "I and the NKVD still have no idea who actually made that attempt, but I hope they're ready for the consequences of that action on the BND's home turf."
"Why haven't you made any plans against her?"
"Planning against the Chairman is enough work already. I won't risk stuffing my face full of steamed buns and choking on them from trying to take on two powerful people simultaneously. And as long as he is in power, he won't authorize an assassination on the Devil, and to go against him would risk giving him justification to arrest me. So the Chairman needs to be dealt with first before I can worry about her."
"Fair enough." Lisan waved his hand. "Who else is in this plot against the Chairman?"
"I'll let you know when the Chairman has left for Germania. He won't have a home to return to while he's over in Germania, that's for certain."
"And who would be taking over when he's gone?" Lisan suspiciously asked.
"To be honest, I have no idea yet." Kang sighed. "Certainly not me as I would like to focus on my area of expertise."
'Ah, so you'll just be the puppet master then.' Lisan thought to himself. 'We will see about that.'
1952, September 14th, late afternoon, Berun, at the Diet chamber:
Minutes after the new budget bill failed to pass, President Paul suddenly entered the chamber. Diet members quickly took notice of him.
"You are not supposed to be here!" One of them shouted. "Only the Chancellor and Deputy Chancellor are allowed entry to the Diet!"
"Chancellor Adenaue has resigned in protest over what I'm about to do. Deputy Chancellor Dressler took his place and approved my decision." Paul sneered.
"I haven't heard of Dressler in quite a while," another parliamentarian pointed out, "And what is this decision you speak of?"
"I am invoking my emergency power to dissolve the Diet so I can pass the budget by decree. This is to ensure that Germania's prosperity is not affected by the growing crisis in Aegyptus, and that we can stabilize the situation in Caucasia with more military force deployments."
There was brief stunned silence, followed by an uproar in the Diet.
Paul waited until the crowd had stopped shouting and then announced, "I'll allow all of you to vote on your fate. An impeachment of me. If you succeed, then I'll be leaving Berun. If you can't even pass an impeachment, then Berun has no use for any of you."
The Speaker of the Diet got on his podium, "We will begin voting for the impeachment of President Paul in 3 minutes. Everyone take your seat."
President Paul stood off to the side and lit up a tobacco pipe.
"You can't do that here." The Speaker snapped at Paul, which then Paul smiled in response.
"It doesn't matter. Like I said, either I am impeached and I will be leaving Berun, or all of you will be leaving this building." Paul took a puff.
The Speaker turned to his aide, "Do we have everyone for the impeachment vote?"
"No one left the chamber so we can proceed with it." As the aide looked at the still rambunctious crowd. "But don't you find it suspicious of how confident President Paul is?"
The Speaker gazed at one section of the chamber, and then another. "Is it me, or does it look like members of the four fringe political parties seem strangely calm about this turn of events?"
"The Socialist Labor Party, Imperial Party, Anarchist Party, and the People's Democratic Party?" The aide looked at the chamber and then down at the list. "...They were all established only recently."
Later that evening, in Hamburg:
If there's one thing I could thank President Paul for, is the mountains of raw material I could use for my show to keep my audience entertained. Such as how Kazakh's President signed a "Treaty of Friendship and Alliance" with the Russy Confederation in the aftermath of Caucasia's implosion. Although I don't think they had a choice with the resurgent Rus military massing forces along their border and conducting live fire exercises. Truthfully, I didn't know which was more disappointing, that President Paul had now effectively made himself dictator, or that the Diet had been off by a single vote from impeaching him after he gave them the opportunity to do so.
And of course, there were the fringe parties with wildly different political flavors that had refused to impeach Paul. Oh well, at least I had finally made up my mind. I would run for office again so I could bring Paul's adventure to a quick and ignominious end.
I heard some commotion offstage and looked over to see what was going on.
Oh, the local police are here, and my production manager is in a heated but losing argument with them. They pushed him aside and the cameraman held up a sign asking me what to do.
"Let the camera run." I looked at the camera and the cameraman before turning to face the approaching police officers.
"Good evening gentlemen," I smiled. "Did someone file a noise complaint against me?"
The police officer showed an arrest warrant for me. "As part of a deal with President Paul, one of the political parties that had been working with him pushed through a censorship law that cracks down on all anti-government media. Which, according to the newly established legislation, includes your talk show, Madame Degurechaff. So, I'm afraid to say this, but cease criticizing the Federal Government of the Germanian Federal Republic, or you will be immediately arrested for failure to abide by the Media Regulation Act."
I had thought that I was already angry after the terrorist attacks. I had been wrong; now, I was well and truly enraged. It was taking considerable mental restraint to not simply power up my E-3 orb, blast through the roof of the studio and fly straight to Berun to personally meet Paul. Of course I had expected Paul to pull a sleazy politician "Let no crisis go to waste" move, and Elya had warned that the Hamburg police were going to try something funny, but this new censorship law made a complete mockery of the rule of law, the essential foundation to any successful economy and the safeguard of the people's wellbeing. Paul might as well as be ruling by decree.
If I snapped right now and annihilated the police, that would play in President Paul's scheme to paint me as a criminal, subject to the increasingly perverted Germanian legal system and thus technically not be able to run for the Presidential elections against him. Which would leave me with only leaving Germania, or launching a coup and burning my own democratic legacy as options.
If I just meekly complied, it would show that I am weak against Paul's stupid, technically legal move, and thus undermining my political support for the upcoming election.
Then I grinned as a flash of an idea came to my head. The police officers took a step back for some reason, but I ignored it. I sent a stealth casted message to Visha to tell her to not make any moves, and instead play as a reasonable and aggravated party.
"Also, we're going to need your orb," another officer said warily. I responded by visibly powering up my orb.
"Considering the mass posioning attack on the resturarant, why would I give up the very thing that could keep me safe from a bombing attack or someone trying to shoot me?" I mimed a thoughtful frown, as if plumming a question of deep philosophical import.
The first officer put his arm up at the other officer. "Former Chancellor, you can keep your orb. But we are willing to walk away if you promise to end your talk show right now."
I held out my hands. "You're going to have to arrest me then. How else am I supposed to earn an honest living?"
The suddenly grim faced officer duly handcuffed me as Visha stared incredulously at me. "Tanya, what are you doing?!" She hissed, glaring at the officer who was studiously ignoring her as he filled out a form in his small notebook. "You can't just pass a law and then immediately start jailing people! What's next, making acts retroactively criminal to not even give people the option to avoid arrest? This is no different than the communists' so-called legal system!"
"Ma'am, I'm just following my order," the officer sighed.
"You're following illegal orders!" Visha shouted. "And about to make Germania a tyrannical dictatorship!"
"I'll be fine." I winked. "I'm curious to see how many of my fans are waiting for me in jail. If I choose to change my mind and our lawyer can't do their job, I could just walk out of jail."
"Former Chancellor, I should remind you that you will only incur more criminal penalties if you do choose to leave the jail on your own accord." The police officer sighed.
I rolled my eyes. "Can't you take a joke? Do I look like a criminal delinquent who will try to escape from prison?"
The production manager ran up to us. "You're not going to believe it, but I just watched some guys firebomb your police cars, and there's a large crowd forming."
"We're going to need to call a helicopter. Goddammit I should have scheduled my vacation earlier! This is comple-'' the police officer groaned, then silenced himself when he noticed the camera was still running. "Turn off that camera!"
AN:
Reference to the "Mandate of Heaven". For the mage prisoners to chant that is directly stating that the CSR's government lost their right to rule: wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven
Reference to the mage yelling about him being the second son of God and wanting to establish a heaven kingdom: wiki/Taiping_Heavenly_Kingdom
As for the "melting humans" radio frequency, which includes examples of accidents (and intentional murders) where people were microwaved: wiki/Microwave_burn
wiki/Lobotomy#Prevalence
In the United States, approximately 40,000 people were lobotomized and in England, 17,000 lobotomies were performed. According to one estimate, in the three Nordic countries of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden a combined figure of approximately 9,300 lobotomies were performed.[139] Scandinavian hospitals lobotomized 2.5 times as many people per capita as hospitals in the US.[140] According to another estimate, Sweden lobotomized at least 4,500 people between 1944 and 1966, mainly women. This figure includes young children.[141] And in Norway, there were 2,005 known lobotomies.[142] In Denmark, there were 4,500 known lobotomies.[143] In Japan, the majority of lobotomies were performed on children with behaviour problems. The Soviet Union banned the practice in 1950 on moral grounds.[144][145][146] In Germany, it was performed only a few times.[147] By the late 1970s, the practice of lobotomy had generally ceased, although it continued as late as the 1980s in France.[148]
The Soviet Union officially banned the procedure in 1950[152] on the initiative of Gilyarovsky.[153] Doctors in the Soviet Union concluded that the procedure was "contrary to the principles of humanity" and "'through lobotomy' an insane person is changed into an idiot".[146] By the 1970s, numerous countries had banned the procedure, as had several US states.[154]