After everyone got off the boat towards the authorities, Hannah swung back to her hotel room for a warm shower and a warm bed. From all the energy she used today, she dozed off in the shower and slammed her head into the tiles. She cracked the tiles with her steely flesh but it still hurt enough to wake her up. California taught her that using too much energy left her vulnerable; the easiest way for that to happen was by overstraining her Waltz—the energy transmutation she used for rapid movement and long range transport. She learned to use conduits like clouds or wire for more efficiency, but that only went so far and wouldn’t always be an option. GalvanGal was supposed to be the fortress and the cavalry, a one woman army, but an overextended army can be starved into defeat. Absorbing local electricity could supplement but not replace the arcanity that was generated in her nerves.
Oh well, she had a job to do that demands her to get up early regardless. Hannah barely made it to bed when she collapsed into hibernation; for this heavy sleeper, exhausted from a long day’s work, it would take a war to wake her up.
Unfortunately, the heaviest sleep lasts only a blink; before she knew it, dawn had cracked out on the horizon. Sunglare and phone-ringing bore into her drowsy senses. Without moving from bed, she smacked her hand all over the nightstand for her phone to drag it to her ear, as it was definitely too early for patrol.
Turns out, work was cancelled, but what she heard over the phone jolted her awake.
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The Shaanxi, a Type-004 aircraft supercarrier under the banner People's Liberation Army Navy, carrying a complement of J-35 fighters and escorted by Type-055 destroyers. was parked in the Port of Kaohsiung. It had appeared overnight, virtually undetected and far faster than it should have been able to. Besides the thousands of aircrew and sailors, the supercarrier deployed the People's Armed Police Forces which had seized the port as a base of operations. They have refused to communicate save for the request to meet with one: GalvanGal.
She came out dressed in her costume. She was not given much information about who had requested her, yet as she descended upon the carrier’s flight deck to meet a man in uniform among the twinjets, it was without a doubt that he was another whose existence surpassed the fleet and armada around him. But deeper than that, she could sense something unusual from him. Electroreception can perceive the electrical stimuli that gives life to flesh and steel alike; right now, faint currents of steel flowed through Yimou.
“Yimou Zhang?” said GalvanGal.
“She speaks fluently?” said Zhang outloud. The translator next to him whispered into his ear before they scurried off. “Of course you let the Yaoguai brand you just for a translator, lazy and servile describes how we got to where we are.”
“Excuse me?”
“I will be blunt. Your very presence in this province, as well as abetting the Yaoguai, was provocation enough. But what has brought us here is your assistance in the escape of a dangerous Yaoguai fugitive, and this city will be under lockdown until the fugitive is retrieved.”
“I’m not here to help the Immortals if that's what you’re trying to say. The boat was about to capsize so I brought it to shore. They were being taken in as refugees the last time I saw them; now, I see what they were running from.”
“You really don’t know, do you? This whole province has been infiltrated by criminal gangsters that serve the Yaoguai. Saving those ‘refugees’ has delivered them as slaves and enabled this fugitive to ellude justice if we had not arrived.”
“Look, this is a lot to put on everyone’s plate all of sudden, but this is clearly important enough for you to do this. If you explain the situation, we can help you resolve it.”
“You aren’t listening. You’ve ‘helped’ enough. If you want this to be resolved amicably, then stay out of our way. That is our final statement to you and your handlers.”
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“He really said that?” asked Tony in an elevator.
“I know right? What was the point of calling for me if he was just going to tell me off?!” said Hannah.
“It’s a powerplay, they do it to assert themselves and humiliate you as if they are an authority scolding a subordinate. It’s a desperate ploy for small boys to feel like big men, which is all that parking their ships in the harbor is good for. Let’s forget about them and enjoy the moment we have,” said Tony who took her hand as the elevator gate opened to the amusement park on the roof of the mall. He was the expert so she followed his lead.
She wanted to be able to stop thinking about the situation all day but had to wear her GalvanGal suit even on a night out. There was an arcade with some 5D motion thing with a spaceship but each of those jets were carrying an array of missiles. They went on to play carnival games, some familiar like skee rolling and ring tossing, some less familiar like frog catching with dissolvable nets, but there were six destroyers on the coast with armaments of their own. It’s not like she thought they would destroy the city or anything, but all those munitions made her wonder what she could do. If it was a barrage, from a fleet, from a nation, she would never be able to intercept every missile so she would have to destroy the missile launchers, but here that would mean sinking ships and downing planes. Anything less would waste time…
‘When they hold up the ashes and ask you why, will you be able to tell them that you held back?’
Zimou said that the Immortals had taken over the gangs on the island, but was that really reason enough to bring an army? In California, the problem was the distance going all over the state, but here they have much higher numbers. What happens if a gunfight starts in the city? If the gangsters are really affiliated with the Immortals, they may have magical equipment. Would the Immortals perceive it as an attack on them? Who would America side with? Would it escalate from here? What would Zimou do? What would she—what would GalvanGal—do?
“Hannah!” Tony snapped her back to reality, where a dinosaur was in her face for some reason. In front of them were the open doors to a blue, cat cabin of the Kaohsiung Eye, a ferris wheel on top of the mall, “I guess I shouldn’t have asked more from you when you already had alot on your mind.”
“No, it’s fine, let's go,” she said as she pulled him into the cabin. The doors closed, and the wheels turned to begin their ascent, “I’m the one who’s been spacing out all day, that’s not fair to you.”
“You have a lot to pay attention to, so I’ll just be happy with the attention I’m worth getting,” said Tony. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him closer, their foreheads.
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“You deserve all my attention, don’t accept anything less,” is what she tried to tell him, but he noticed her eyes wander. Behind him was the view outside where a bridge led to the skyscrapers of the city proper, lit up like a beacon in the night. To the side was the port, occupied by the Police Forces and the carrier strike group, surrounded by the dark of the sea. She let go and slounched into the corner of the seat.
“Like I said you have alot to pay attention to. But I guess you can make it up to me another time.”
“Do you think I did anything wrong,” asked Hannah.
“By saving hundreds of people? What could be wrong with that?”
“What if more people die because of it?”
“That would be the fault of whoever does the killing.”
“Would it matter to the dead who’s fault it is?”
Those last words stifled the discussion; near the top of the wheel, all the sound left was the groan of metal and the wind that battered against the glass. She didn’t mean to be such a downer, she was just saying what was on her mind but that was no excuse; with how blatant Yimou was, it was certainly on everyone else’s mind too, and Tony was trying to help her. Maybe trying to date (fling, be real with yourself girl) while on a sortie was a bad idea. The sailors said to enjoy shore leave when she could, but Captain Force told her that the Navy only had bad ideas when he taught her about the military. Even if this was a bad idea, it was now her responsibility to salvage it.
Hannah tried to open her mouth to speak but was intercepted by her phone ringing its most serious ringtone. Hannah was not a hard girl to read, so Tony certainly understood what this meant from her reaction.
“It’s alright. We can do this another time. It’s not like you have a plane to catch,” he said.
Hannah grabbed his hair and pulled him in for a deep, long, thorough kiss, before waltzing out of the cabin and bolted into the skies above. Sparking shimmy, the near invisible energy field that protects her steely body, can also be spread to carry and protect other things, like this phone so that she can hear and speak through it even amongst the clouds, even when she was upside-down.
“You got something for me?” asked GalvanGal.
“First, a full report on the situation,” said Garrick Iolcus, “it’s as Zhang said: the Immortals aided a triad called the Heavenly Way Alliance in taking control of Taiwan’s criminal network before linking it with other allies in the region. China was fighting for as long as they could but they didn’t have the tech or the magic to put up any resistance. The Immortals were about to cement their hold on Taiwan when they pulled out which just left Heavenly Way. One name kept coming up: the bull demon, an unusually sadistic and bloodthirsty gangster who used Immortal equipment for slaughter beyond any possible operational goals. We in the Pantheon had a fighting chance only because we had trained mutants and developed technological countermeasures; everywhere else, the mutant war was completely one-sided in favor of the Immortals. I would say that this show of force has more to do with that than this fugitive. They likely want a field test of whatever counter-measures that Wanmei Technologies has developed for them, or rather, Wanmei Tech wants a field test and got the strike group sent out carelessly.”
“That’s what I didn’t want to hear. What about the fugitive? And-and the boat? How’d they even know?”
“On that, we don’t have much to go on. The reports indicate that there were incidents involving water magic, but nothing on the scale of New Orleans. The boat left Hong Kong, so they could have tracked it from there, but the strike group was not detected in the area. The problem is that the story is incoherent. The Immortals would not conduct aimless attacks, and they can extract agents through their portals so it makes no sense for them to smuggle one alongside refugees into territory that’s practically theirs. Even if they couldn’t extract in Hong Kong for whatever reason, this fugitive would be long gone by now.”
“Have we… ugh, have we asked the Immortals what this could be about?”
“Just based on what we’ve learned about demonology, from both Victor Deimos and the Immortals, I would say we’re looking at a monster host. Both monsters and demons are capable of using humans as hosts in order to invade the world. The host receives magical power and agelessness, while the hellspawn gets to come to Earth and hide in plain sight. Monsters make for more unstable symbiotes, which would explain the erratic attacks. It’s likely that ‘Charybdis’, the codename we use for whoever was responsible for the New Orleans flood, is escalating their capabilities from the monster we saw before. This fugitive hasn’t been extracted because the Immortals want its head too.”
“Why would Yimou lie about it?”
“Maybe they don’t know the full story; they refuse to cooperate with the Immortals like we do; they say we capitulated to being a vassal, though they buy up the cheap mana crystals they can ge. Or it could be that they don’t want our help: to keep it simple, the matter of Taiwanese sovereignty was a difficult matter that has been made much worse. At this point, it is also about the future of police enforcement against all hellspawn, including the Immortals. The way I see it, China wants a win to prove that they can deal with hellspawn without Immortal interference and assert dominance over Taiwan at the same time. The Immortals will want to assert their authority over magical affairs and punish China as an example for those that resist them.”
“Ok… I think I follow. Can they even be doing this stuff? Where does this put us? Where does this put me?”
“We have it relatively stable in America; for the rest of the world, the mutant war has shaken pillars of the global order, and where many try to regain their footing, others see opportunity to expand their own. As for us… it’s complicated. You get the easier part. Outside of Imperium controlled regions, we still have treaties to provide assistance on ‘mutant’ concerns. The local officials may not act against you directly, but with the Triads puppeteering them they won't be helping either. If you could catch this fugitive, that would ease most of the tension.”
“And allow us to reassert our authority abroad too huh?”
“...that would be a by-product, yes. Is there something wrong?”
“Seems like it’s about having something to prove more than anything. Even picking up trash was an excuse to have our fleet patrol. Maybe that is what really matters. I thought I could change it, but all I’ve been doing is going where I’m pointed. If this is all it is in the end, then I wonder what the point of stopping Tyler was. All I wanted to do was help those people, but I somehow made it all worse, but if I just go along following what other people tell me, then what was the point of ever trying to be a hero?”
“Let me stop you there: you’re right.”
“...Really?”
“All power has only been accumulated through ruthless and relentless self-interest. All power, except yours. You aren’t beholden to anyone or anything, any special interest beyond saving as much life as you can. That’s why I want you to be the one at the forefront. Let me worry about the fallout while you do what’s right.”
“Wow… uh, thanks for the vote of confidence. Well while I have you, I got a strange read on the Police Forces. There was metal inside their bodies, it was… dissonance among the orchestry of organs.”
“I don’t know about that last part but WhiteOut mentioned that some countries were pursuing cybernetic enhancement to combat mutant threats. I guess the war pushed that idea through and this is the test run. That’s one more reason for a fight, and one more reason for you to stop it.”