Mages of Interpol 15 (Youjo Senki)

[LoreleiFlowers]

Last Time in Mages of Interpol 15: Tanya was captured by the Silver Legion and hypnotized to do horrible things. Now, she is free, and her time of vengeance is nearly upon her.

Content Warning: The Silver Legion is super prejudiced. Expect sexism, racism, homophobia, and more.

Disclaimer: This chapter is about alt-history of the interwar period. Defeating fascists and revolution plays a major role in this chapter.

Lorelei's Note: We have over 300 pages published since the first chapter was posted on July 20th, 2024. Seeing that I started with 75 pages pre-written, that is quite a pace to finish a book-length story. I hope you enjoy the finale of the first volume.

Also, remember the characters are characters, not me.

---

Sugar House Prison, Unified States - 15th November, 1915

37 years ago

Ramona Mercer blinked back tears as the cold stung her cheeks. She was just sixteen but had already experienced hard labor and had taken a man's life. Still, the coldness from her past and from the fall day had nothing on the coldness before her.

"You don't have to watch this," Amber Canary stated with a warmness that painted over the tragedy.

The child-like elder had taken Ramona in after her parents had died from the diseases of despair and the coldness of winter. They had long given up life by the time Ramona had been taken into the boarding schools to be de-Indianed. Several of her fellow kids died from exposure as the dorms had been completed before they got taken from their parents, and it was those same kids who were expected to finish building those on behalf of the school. They were being trained to be useful workers, after all.

Ramona had survived due to the blessing of magic that kept her body warm as the snow took others' lives. She had been spared from the forced sterilizations the other women received due to her blessings, as others had their futures decided for them.

The winter paints the world in white ubiquity. 'Isn't the winter so pretty?' Arthur Pelley says, as the season takes and takes and leaves the world without color. But one day, this winter shall pass. Underneath that snow, we wait for a moment to emerge and bring spring and life back to the world.

She didn't see the Canaries as family. Amber was still a good friend. They taught each other about their families and traditions.

"I need to see this," the teenager replied with steel-like determination.

The police kept the gathered crowd back as they prepared to execute Joe Hill. Pulitzer's sensationalist journalists crowded up front, blocking the view for most of the people there in solidarity with the victim of injustice. Governor Arthur Pelley of the Silver Legion party gave a speech about how supposed Mr. Hill had killed a police officer and a son in a grocery store. Ramona knew that wasn't true, but he was the scapegoat.

In the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, they explained that the Silver Legion "thought that Joe Hill was a friendless tramp, a Nord, and worst of all, a Wobblie, so he had no right to live anyway. It was his duty to be the scapegoat." Wobblies were worker activists in the IWW, and Mr. Hill definitely had friends with the anarchists who fought the cruelty of the system around them with any means at their disposal.

"Any last words?" Governor Pelley, who was also the president of the Silver Oil Company, inquired of his victim as the firing squad loaded their rifles in their box. "Your silence during the trial condemned you enough. Nothing you say now will matter."

The activist wasn't going to waste a chance to spread the word of his cause. "Everyone, don't mourn me. Organize. You have to organize."

The stupid governor did not know how wrong he was. Mr. Hill's silence had saved Ramona and her friends from the same fate, and his words now would plant the seeds for when spring came.

Pelley had Hill blindfolded and restrained to a chair before getting out of the way. Journalists took copious photos. His fellow activists knew to keep their voices down. If they agitated, they might end up just like Hill — a martyr he might be, but that was two fewer hands to build the movement.

The firing squad in their blacksmith shop hesitated despite getting the order to shoot.

"Fire—go on and fire!" Joe Hill roared angrily, urging them to confront the cruelty the soldiers knew they were doing.

Helen Keller, U.S. President Wilson, and the Norden Embassy had all decried the sham trial and the coming execution. Arthur Pelley and his judges did not listen to any authority other than their own.

The firing squad died. Ramona learned that real power came from the end of the gun — not words, not elected officials, and certainly not pleas for morality. That day, the governor found dynamite on his driveway. They suspected it had been the IWW and the anarchists. They did not know it had been Ramona. She had wrapped the dynamite in a paper in the same color as Arthur Pelley's concrete. The police defused it, and the evilest man in the world went to bed in his warm white and silver sheets while the wobblies took Mr. Hill's ashes out of state so that he might be laid to rest away outside the borders the Silver Legion controlled.

The Canary's didn't know it had been her. Amber might have understood. Mary certainly wouldn't and would have kicked out the girl rather than have her bring trouble to her house and her family.

"Let's go home," Amber suggested, keeping her words few lest she say something she shouldn't.

As they walked home together, the old war vet told Ramona fanciful stories. She didn't care for fairytales anymore. Reality had made her grow up fast, and it was that she needed to live in reality.

---

Rural Midwestern Unified States - 5th of December, 1952


Ramona Mercer carefully carved and imbued her ammunition with enchantments as the snow fell around her. She despised the snow.

If she had anything to be happy about, it was that she took Joe Hill's words to heart, and it paid off. Lashing out blindly was not good enough. She needed to be precise and surgical in her action, but the organs of revolution also required to be gathered.

"You really think the Old Federation was better than the Federation after the Second Revolution?" Damien commented, aghast at Ramona.

Damien had joined the ranks of the Revolutionary Army from the Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had increasingly adopted the 'Brotsky Insurgency Process' praxis. Ramona didn't know much about the young activist besides that he had clearly dropped the nonviolent part now that revolution was upon them.

To be fair, Damien didn't know much about her. What she did know was that his anti-authoritarian, grassroots stuff didn't appeal to her as much as the reliance on more seasoned leadership under the Marksist-Levinist vanguard style to get a movement past the finish line. Urban civic revolutionaries like Damien might be able to bring out the numbers, but they are far too fractious and intolerant of nationalism and the Bolshevization of their ranks.

"Yes, I think was the greatest leader the Federation ever had," the mage calmly replied as she etched the next part of the glyph. "You shouldn't compare what they had back then to any romantic conception of a perfect government you have in your head. We don't live in a fairyland. Instead, compare to what came before. It was leagues better than the tsarist regime. We gave people new rights, freedoms, and opportunities they never had before."

During the war, when the then-adult Ramona was conscripted like all poor mages, the woman learned of the Old Federation from fighting beside them. She knew how they had overthrown their tyrants and then proceeded to defeat everyone who dared to invade their new country. Not only had they done it, but they had a detailed blueprint that anyone who wanted to be free to expel the tyrants in their land and set up a government for the people. More importantly, it worked. Countless subjugated people could use the Marksist-Levinist praxis to be free finally. No more starving, no more Arthur Pelleys. It wouldn't be a fairytale, but it would be a land for their people that could survive the evil imperialists in America and Europa.

"What about the purges?" the man pressed her.

"'What about the purges?' The Western media overblows them completely and conflates all the things going on together. Many people didn't get sentenced. If anything, Dzhugashvili didn't kill enough opportunists, imperialists, and revisionists. If he had, the Second Revolution would never have happened. That coup only sowed confusion and division within the Federation. These new parties represent different class interests, undoing years of Comrade Joseph Dzhugashvili and Comrade Vladimir Levin's hard work."

"I have met a person who fled the Old Federation," Damien claimed with a dumbfounded expression as if he were talking to a person from another reality. "He told me how horrible it was."

"Probably imperialist scum," the woman scoffed. "The West loves inviting the poor fascists and imperialists over and giving them a platform to advocate for how awful it was that we were mean to them. Of course, we were harsh on them. Imperialists rape, pillage, and kill. Have you heard of the pogroms?"

"Yes, I have, but the person I met was a baker," Damien countered. "He wasn't some rich capitalist. He supported the party. Still, he saw how bad it was getting. Joseph Dzhugashvili disbanded the women's councils, banned abortion and divorce, threw homosexual men and women into labor camps and asylums, and ended gender-affirming surgeries for trans people. He undid so much progress that had occurred under Vladimir Levin and Leon Brotsky. If Joseph Dzhugashvili hadn't taken power, my friend claimed it wouldn't have devolved into the power-hungry, self-glorifying cult of personality it became. We don't need White Silvers in proletariat drag."

Ramona picked up the brass cartridge and blew on it to let the metal cool and the ink of her enchantment dry. Enchanting ammunition was based on traditional arcane knowledge. The robber barons in the Unified States had taken the previously unpatented traditional arcane knowledge, claimed it as their own, and then sent their armies to conquer her homeland with factory-made enchanted ammunition.

Ramona had actually taught the old ways of enchanting ammunition to the settler Amber "Calamity" Canary. Her former student believed in the tenets of liberation theology despite being a secular cultural Heartist, and they had seen each other as comrades when fighting imperialists during the Great War.

As for dealing with her current interlocutor, there were limits to how much debating she would do. She imagined how she felt now, which was how Joseph Dzhugashvili felt when dealing with Leon Brotsky back in the day. There is a lot of criticism and not a lot of effective leadership.

As Ramona understood it, real power came at the end of a gun. People in the real world needed to accept that to have a lasting legacy — that is, a revolution that succeeded in its ambition and survived against the onslaught of capitalist invaders and spycraft, you were going to have to use that gun. To put it another way, Death was ugly, and power frightened people. To lead, you had to have a foot in both death and power, which gave people like her interlocutor plenty of ammunition to play the morally superior opposition.

It was time to turn things around instead of being on the receiving end.

"What do you believe in, Damien?" Romona inquired, getting back to the painstaking work of making enchanted ammunition by hand.

"I am definitely not Orthodox. I am up with the World Federationist camp with the others who see themselves as left communist and fans of Brotsky's administration."

Typical World Federationist. They want all the ideas and interests at the table even when they are directly opposed to one another. Their lack of consistency and clarity makes them weak under pressure.

Convincing these more progressive types with fiery, youthful idealism and opinions born of encountering new ideas for the first time was not the veteran's strong suit. They had just shucked off the authority of their parents and bought Brotsky's bottom-up grassroots theory of permanent revolution. They, at most, could get a concession from the powerful through such tactics. Without the necessary evil of the top-down Orthodox approach, they will never be in charge of anything. They even rejected Martin Bishop of the Southern Universalist Leadership Conference for being too authoritarian and emphasizing singular charismatic leadership. As Ramona saw it, people like Damien were so anti-establishment that they were allergic to having any meaningful power at all.

Ramona took a deep breath and figured out how best to levy her criticisms of the other side of the Orthodox-Worldist divide tactically.

"You know why we call it left communism? Because they left communism." She started giving a weak chuckle at the cliche joke before getting serious again.

"As for Brotsky, he is not as bad as his followers," she continued before a steely edge entered her voice. "No group supposedly inside worker's cause has done more harm to the revolution than the Brotskyists. They spend so much time criticizing successful revolutions and very little time actually advocating for them. Imperialists love hiring them because Brotskists are a useful tool to dissuade revolutionaries from Marksist-Levinism, the praxis that actually works to liberate people in the real world. When the Brotskyists have a successful revolution against people who aren't other Marksists, then I will take them seriously."

They sat there for a moment in silence. To his credit, the World Federationists didn't go on and on about how Brotskyists just need a chance to prove themselves capable of change.

Some people in the distance started singing some of Odyssia Ono's famous socialist song This Land is Your Land, which loudly proclaimed the land and its beauty belonged to one and all. To Ramona, the song offensively erased how all these 'immigrants' came to be on this land and who was there before. IWW people would sing this song and Same Boat Now, which asked black people to put aside the forced relocation of African people to North America to focus on worker solidarity. The World Federationists loved these songs. The Orthodox factions, not so much.

"What are your thoughts about nationalism, Damien?" she inquired.

"That it leads to war and exists to divide people and keep labor trapped like serfs on a piece of land."

He wasn't wrong in some regards. Sweatshop countries and unequal exchange definitely made policing borders important to capitalists to keep cheap labor where they wanted it to be.

"Do you want to know what a nation means to me?" she inquired.

He shook his head. It was a rhetorical question anyway. Damien didn't know her perspective at all.

"Freedom," she began with a bit of fire entering her voice. "Dignity. Control over your destiny. The ability to stand tall. The ability to have your own language and culture. To have people who are like you and understand you to be in charge and make decisions that respect you and your family."

"You want an ethnostate?" the man blinked when he connected the dots behind the words. "That is what the Destiny Manifest was about."

"That was not what the Destiny Manifest was about. That was the opposite of what I wanted. That is a group of people who think no one else matters but them, and so they get to take and take and take and then kill and kick out all the people they find there."

"But you want to kick people out of places."

"Damien, people have tried to live side-by-side with the colonizers for decades. It ain't getting better. The Black Liberation Movement gets this. The Brown Berets know this. The American Indian Movement knows this. Before you criticize it, look around the entire globe. How do you get freedom from oppressors?"

"Revolution, of course, but—"

"No, revolution is just a result. It is nationalism and class solidarity. In order to have solidarity, you have to circle your culture and your common conditions. If you don't, you will crumble. Most successful revolutions are an alloy of nationalism and working-class struggle. What you are going to find is that colonial liberals at the centrist edge of your faction, who are only here strategically to oust Yockey, will take power and then send the Silver Legion armies under them on all of us. They don't want what we want. They want to bring back their preferred liberal democratic order where they are at the top, and we are at the bottom, being snuffed out quietly."

Damien rubbed his forehead. Most of the people in the SNCC knew that compromising with moderates was a recipe for being backstabbed. It was why the Popular Front didn't work. It was why Brotsky pushed for the United Front. However, just like the Commonwealth had joined up when they were threatened by the Silver Legion, a bunch of liberals in America had joined up in the revolution because the current Legionist administration did not serve their interests.

The man couldn't contradict her on reality history had made clear over and over. She might look younger than she was due to being a war mage, but her voice carried experience and study in its texture.

"Ramona, may I ask if there anything good you can say about the Reformed Federation and the Brotsky administration?" the man wondered, referring to the very much internationalist revolutionary core of communism in the modern world.

"Yes, Brotsky didn't sign the Defensive Pact with the Unified States," the mage soldier replied evenly. "It would have given him an opening to invade Europa and helped the poor people there communize; however, no one should trust fascists. Just like the Silver Legion planned to do with the Commonwealth, they would have done to the Federation."

"Is there any criticism of the Old Federation that you won't immediately respond with 'Western propaganda', 'traitors', or 'it was necessary at the time'?" the idealist inquired. "There seems to be no room for you to be wrong anywhere with all of these canned responses."

"That is because I don't have time to go over all the literature and history with you."

"I have read history from communists during this period. A lot of people in the World Congress despise the Old Federation."

"Many of those are not proper dialecticians but revisionists, opportunists, idealists, and people who would rather argue than get things done. By changing things that shouldn't be changed in order to just distance themselves from the Old Federation like this, they move off the path to communism and undermine their own revolutions like you World Federationists."

"Do you accept any criticisms?!" the man cried.

"Of course, we make mistakes. Who doesn't?"

She shook her head in exasperation and continued to enchant her ammo.

"Look at what Dzhugashvili accomplished," Ramond continued after a few moments. "People were pulled out of their backward poverty, where they were using wooden hoes, into being more literate, better educated, and better fed than even the richest capitalist nations. The entirety of the Imperial core in Europa fears the Federation due to all of Dzhugashvili's accomplishments as its great leader. Capitalists want to contain us because they know Marksist-Levinist administrations are so effective at creating superpowers out of even once agrarian economies. They are already afraid of what Zhangzi will become. Marxist-Levinists have done more in decades than what capitalist countries can only do after centuries of imperialism, taking advantage of millions of people and their resources in Afrika, South and Central America, and Asia. People have doctors for the first time. People are learning to read when their colonial masters wouldn't let them and in their own language. Marksist-Levinism helps people stand tall."

"But it also creates cults of personality by focusing everything on standing behind charismatic faces of the party."

"Cults of personality?! The colonial settlers have their Founding Fathers. Why can't the Old Federation have pride in its vanguard? This seems like a double—"

"No, I can't take all this Dzhugashvili apologetics anymore." Damien got up and claimed the last word in the showy way, in Ramona's opinion, that idealists love having. "I have talked to fundies with more open minds than you. I just can't see you as anything other than the fascist version of a communist."

You are the one without an open mind, the gunner thought privately. There was no point in debating with fools. That was why she had her gun when push became shove.

To be fair, Ramona was a hard-liner. She turned off many other Marksist-Levinists, especially the more democratic and internationalist ones, but she did not care. Half-measures were not enough. Calls to be polite and sit on one's hands as colonists and capitalists raped, pillaged, and did atrocity after atrocity would no longer persuade her or her vanguard of fellow hard-liners. Dzhugashvili was a hero to everyone who wanted their own country in a world full of monsters who tore people apart for profit and their countless complicit lackeys who moralized about being patient and jumping through the electoral hoops that the monsters had rigged.

Damn anyone who thought I should ask politely to be free as my brothers and sisters die. They can die a hundred times over for their disgusting, pearl-clutching rhetoric. It is so easy to tell others to be gentle when one isn't the one suffering.

After painstaking work to reach perfection, the fruits of Ramona's hard labor lay before her — three bullets. Each promised certain death for an enemy of the revolution. Freed from the toil, she made sure to get some leisure time with her friends by joining them in some fun before they headed out. Everyone deserves time to enjoy life.

Not much later, word spread that they needed to move to the suburban town of Autumn's Meadow to counter the Legion's Horde of non-mage zealots. While they were a threat to the revolution, more significant threats were her aim. Ramona knew she was not throwing away her shot.

---

Silver House Lawn in Chicago, Unified States - 5th of December, 1952


President Yockey stood in the recording booth with his mages, carefully patrolling the vicinity. A magetech engineer gave him the thumbs-up when they were rolling.

"My fellow Americans, this is your President, Francis Yockey, here for a very important Pyre-side chat.

"As you know, the lying press has slandered me and your fellow Real Americans terribly. As you all know, you can only trust me and the Pulitzer News Network for all your information, for only we are truthful and accurate. We have all the answers, and only I can bring our country out of humiliation into greatness. It will be just like it used to be in that glorious past that we all remember when everything was better. Back when men were men and women were women, the races never mixed, and women couldn't vote. You all know that democracy has failed us by causing the subversion of our culture and the mixing of peoples that should not be mixed. That is why we need to place our trust in the Silver Legion."

He took a moment to take a sip of soda before continuing.

"I am telling you that everything boils down to us versus them, truth versus lies. Close your ears to the lying press, the coastal elites, and the foreign infiltrators who tell you horrible falsehoods like that what you are doing is wrong. They wish to make you hate your country and tempt you off the Silver path, but Real Americans like us stay on that path and push past all doubts. White Silver imbues us with truth and honesty. We Real Americans live in reality and follow first principles.

"Now, listen to me and only me, for we are at a turning point in history where we must revitalize our culture again with Old Faith spirit. We need to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theater, and in the press — in short, we must burn out the poison of immorality, which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess."

The President then went on and on about each marginalized group that was the 'real threat' to America and had really 'impoverished' his base. Francis Yockey celebrated how he had continued Arthur Pelley's 'Aztec Repatriation' program from the late 1930s with his new initiative called 'Operation Kickback'. (1) Just like Pelley's, his initiative had moved over a million Aztec-looking people out of the country, (1) freeing up valuable real estate for Yockey's eager friends. The colonists had conquered the American Southwest fair and square over a century ago. That meant they got to do whatever they wanted with those animals, especially now that the agribusiness didn't need many of them anymore.

The great about Operation Kickback and the mass incarnation initiative was that they put the inferior beings in places where they wouldn't be organizing for welfare or revolution.

As for religion, Yockey honestly disliked the Old Faith for its ever-present themes of hierarchy inversion, where the poor were blessed and not the rich, as well as the idea that voluntary poverty was a good thing. Yockey, however, could fake it. He needed to employ such theater to manipulate the ethnonationalists and religious nationalists in the Silver Legion's base into focusing their efforts on whatever the monopolists also wanted.

For example, business nationalists hated unions. Public schools were rife with unions. ethnonationalists hated how public schools mixed people, and religious nationalists hated them for their institutional secularism. Ending public schooling made them all happy because it would get rid of the union and create a system where the now exclusively for-profit schools could choose their students under whatever criteria they wanted, just like employers do when hiring people. Goodbye education for pesky minorities who would become much more manageable workers if they couldn't read or write.

Really, only a few people actually needed to think in society. The moment they got a machine that could replace all the workers, Yockey would happily get rid of all of the parasites known as the working class and kick them out of his country.

Finding common denominators to unify the ruling coalition under a monopolist-benefiting ideology had been Yockey's life work, and it had proven immensely profitable. As long as the other groups got what they wanted (a monocultural theocracy), the monopolists could do away with democratic norms and rule as they saw fit. The White Silver Creed of absolute private property rights had stealthily been made a foundational part of the Swordist faith and the new post-war American monoculture. Now, to believe in anything other than monopolist rule was to be demonic and un-American.

After his speech was done and the people sent out to wreak havoc on inferior beings, Yockey left the Silver House in Chicago and boarded a flight to Wien, Germania. This would mean that Emperor Cassander and Empress Roxanne would just have to meet with the Goddess alone, but it was better to be safe than sorry. Richard Diamond didn't trust things were safe. Yockey, following his friend's lead, would abandon the ship as well.

It would look bad, and stock in the Unified States would plummet if their leader indicated he didn't trust the country was a going concern. President Yockey still trusted that the Goddess would kill the revolutionaries, but he also trusted that the United Front would have an assassin after him. He wouldn't end up like George Lundeen did during the Great War.

---

Freedom's Egg somewhere in Chicago, Unified States - 5th of December, 1952


I watched the snow as it fell outside the window of my little house, which was made of ticky tacky. Soon, the fake neighborhood would be painted in white ubiquity. In my bones, I could feel the change was coming to America, and so was the snow. I hoped the revolutionaries dressed warmly.

Despite all my worries and rage, I somehow found the ability to laugh in the moment of calm I had before the show started, and I could leave my gilded cage. The banter of my friends did my old soul good.

"But I want to live in society!" Laurence "Masquerade" Drake cried in mock frustration.

"No more society!" Polyxena Mironova declared dramatically with a raised fist. "Return to monkey!"

The two had a great dynamic together, and their antics were the medicine I needed to distract myself from my pain as well as feel somewhat normal again — wings and all. It was good to find out Polyxena's real name now. Apparently, she and Masquerade had gotten past a lot of their relationship struggles over the years after Polyxena ended her partnership with the Albish Secret Service. They would have to live in a country that didn't ally with the Commonwealth, but that wasn't too hard. Polyxena had even let me know that the couple planned to have a child after they settled somewhere. As for the fate of MI15, it was one step at a time before any big decisions were made.

I wanted to have a child, too. I wasn't sure if it was the hormones in my body, instinct, or what, but every time when my friends and loved ones had a child, the desire would swirl through my being. Settling down with Sonnetto had been my plan, but one didn't make decisions unilaterally in a relationship. I wonder if my love still wanted to work in MI15. I certainly did. Maybe we could convince Matheus to join, too.

Back to the subject of having a child, this life had left me severely traumatized. I didn't know if I could handle the responsibilities of being a good mother. How does someone have as much pain in them as me and not become such a dysregulated individual? I had intense minority stress that plagued the back of my mind constantly. My mind generated paranoid fantasies of every possible sneer and ostracism if word spread of my various peculiarities. After several decades of hiding behind a mask of conformity in my first life as a 'salaryman' and this life as a 'perfect officer', nothing terrified me more than being without its safety. Only in Berun had I ever lived even the slightest bit openly, and everywhere else was hypervigilance for every potential belligerent bigot or vengeful veteran.

I really have way too many enemies. Is this what life on hard mode feels like?

"Tanya," Polyxena stated, getting me out of my thoughts. "Do you want to know about how Borislava, Laurie, and I applied to become your new neighbors?"

'Laurie' was what the assassin affectionately dubbed Masquerade. The man embraced the name with his typical passion for artistic subversion. Didn't he know that by subverting expectations, all he did was reinforce them? Regardless, whatever made the man happy was none of the business within reason.

I nodded to Polyxena's question, not trusting to speak right now lest I say something I regret. Irrational behavior from the extremes of emotions, and I had a long and troubled history. It had pushed me in front of a train and caused me to run right into a trap that put me in this silver cage of supposed suburban splendor.

"So we three former spies posed as professional actors," the assassin began her story.

"I am a professional actor," Masquerade interjected.

"Yes, you are, dear. You are very accomplished!"

"Okay, I am awfully sorry. I should not have not interrupted like that."

"You are forgiven," Polyxena placated. "I love you." Kiss

Turning to me, she continued. "So Borislava and I had to play being the wife. Obviously, there were no single women in your neighborhood, given the artificial culture of Freedom's Egg. Before you ask, yes, it was a bit of a challenge dealing with Borislava. She is just so damn competitive."

"I had to play the husband," Masquerade commented. "It was rather awkward having to perform matrimonial bliss with Borislava."

"Why was that?" I inquired in confusion. He clearly would have had to pair with several actresses.

"For starters, she is my girlfriend's ex," he admitted.

"Okay, I can see that causing some tension," I replied with a shake of my head. I knew the politics of relationships well now.

"She also tried to kill me during the Museum heist case," the thespian added with exaggerated nonchalance.

A peel of laughter leaped from my mouth.

"Well, we patched things up now," Polyxena commented with a surprising amount of grace for someone whose significant other had almost died. "She didn't know Tanechka was using the Angels in that highly performative heist to make my cover as a free agent working for the Albish Secret Service more believable. Spycraft requires a level of deceit even within our own ranks. Borislava understands this, and we are all friends again despite our strongly held political differences."

"I swear she still holds a grudge," the Albish man confessed, pulling at his ascot. The couple were the absolute image of American yuppies.

"Like I said, she is just competitive," the woman repeated calmly. "None of those hijinks during the auditions were because my ex was out to get you. As for the other competitors, she very much was making sure they didn't win."

"Well, luckily, you and I won in the end."

"I killed it on stage," Polyxena bragged, puffing out her chest.

"You definitely slay, dear."

"Literally," I added in a weak attempt at humor, which was not my strong suit. My imagination told me that Polyxena's dark humor didn't put off the Silver Legionists as much as did other people.

"Speaking of people who wanted to kill you, dear," the assassin added. "Can I tell Tanya the Warrick and Lundeen story?"

I had no idea who those two were without more context. I probably met individuals with those names, but they probably meant other spies.

"It is all old news now," Masquerade replied with a smile. "Go ahead. I am sure Elya won't mind."

"Elya?" I blinked in surprise. "Now I need to know. What did my friend do?"

"Well, during the war, she had infiltrated the U.S. government under the name Sally Warrick in order to discourage this country from joining the allies against Germania," Polyxena explained with a bit of smug joy. "She would get her senators and congressional staffers to read speeches she wrote for them on the congressional floor, and those speeches would then be added to the congressional record. Then, using Congress' ability to print and mail records to the public on the taxpayer dollar, Elya created a very effective and relatively cheap anti-war and pro-Germania propaganda campaign.

"You would be proud of how under-budget and efficient her influencing campaign had been. In order to pull this stunt off, your friend had subverted several staffers and legislators by settling their debts, assisting them in a time of desperation, or helping them find discrete ways to satisfy their carnal desires during the Prohibition era."

"The intelligence community calls her the Genie of Germania for a reason," Masquerade smartly added when he saw an opening. "Legend says she grants a person their deepest wish but at a terrible price."

"I know that moniker," Tanya exclaimed. "The Genie appears in cinema all the time to seduce men and their wives, trying to turn them into traitors to the Unified States. I appear as well as both the Devil of the Rhine punishing the unfaithful and as White Silver, the one who leads empires to impossible victories. Both sicken me a bit."

"Well, as for Elya, she sure felt like a devil during the war," Masquerade admitted. "We were losing the diplomacy game with the Unified States. Based on my intelligence, the allies backed the Silver Legion, who were far more jingoistic. Despite their love of Germanian culture, they saw an opportunity to pick at the remains of Europa near the end of the war like a vulture to road kill. The Empire just happened to be on its last legs and had many enemies that could become many allies to the monopolists in the Silver Legion as their party started gaining momentum in the polls and more seats in government."

"We shouldn't forget about Senator Lundeen," Polyxena mentioned. "He is key to this part of the story."

"I remember that name now!" I commented. "He was the Senator from Minnesota who was working with Germania. He died in a car accident. It was a big deal because it led to America joining the war."

Masquerade went stiff, but Polyxena kept going.

"Exactly, it worked more wonderfully than Borislava and I could have ever hoped," the assassin stated. "My ex, always the pyromaniac among the Russy spies back then, had planted a bomb in his car with the hope he would just die. He was blocking the vote for the Unified State to join the war. He kept employing anti-communist propaganda to dissuade people from working with the Old Federation and saying that both Germania and Albion were equally empires with terrible track records on human rights.

"What Borislava and I didn't expect was for a briefcase full of Elya's speeches to be in the car and to survive the explosion. Instead of having to pin the blame on Germania for the death of a Senator, everyone now knew Germania had effectively plundered the coffers of the federal government to manipulate public opinion. While the revelation had turned the public against the Reconstructionists and the Grand Old South Party, it gave the public a casus belli to rally behind. Your friend Elya blamed poor Laurie here for the stunt, but my sweetie would never do something like that. He is too nice to use such methods."

"Dear, perhaps we shouldn't—"

"Did you cause America to join the war against the Empire?" I wondered with exasperation. "The Silver Legion took power because they found out about those speeches?!"

The assassin went quiet as she realized her misstep.

"To be fair, everyone was trying to turn the Unified States to their side during the Great War," Masquerade attempted to appease her.

"Well, there was a silver lining to all of this," Polyxena added. "Because Elya fled the Unified States for her life and chased after us to the Russy Federation, your friend was in a great position to negotiate a ceasefire so that you could be rescued from Loria's dollhouse, which also led to the coup against that damned tyrannical counter-revolutionary Dzhugashvili."

"What?!" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Everything about my imprisonment made a lot more horrifying sense now.

"Perhaps we should discuss something other than that, honey," the thespian commented before whispering something in Russy that I couldn't hear.

"Oh…uhhhh," Polyxena stammered. "Your bag! Wait right there."

Masquerade and I were left alone for a moment as Polyxena went back to their 'house' across the street. The man had to keep up his spell to hijack the video and audio feed from the computation orbs in the room. It was horrifying that people watched my every move. Interestingly, once my brainwashing had been broken, I apparently disappeared from the video feed. That would be a valuable ability for the infiltration mission when I got back to Mages of Interpol missions again.

Work, how I miss you so much. Life is empty without you. Only Sonnetto and my family are more important to me than you.

Masquerade pulled me into a hug with his free hand while I distracted myself from a mental breakdown by having a mental conversation with the personification of my occupation. I might need some therapy from a professional who didn't think homosexuality was a disease.

"It is all going to be fine," my acting captain promised. "We will get you out of here, and you can live with us and your family again."

"Thank you," I muttered and rubbed my eyes with his silly ascot, which he had given me in the absence of an immediately apparent better option.

Polyxena popped back soon after and plopped the white poppy duffel bag Masquerade had gifted me a couple of years ago. The bag had a bunch of familiar objects like the bosun whistle Calamity gave me, as well as my favorite novels, puzzle books, and letters from my friends and family, including Visha, to whom I really needed to talk at some point. Each object brought a bit more normalcy back to my bizarre, horrific situation. I had no idea how the assassin got it in here, but she came across as a person who knew how to do 'questionable' things easily.

"Tadaa!" the assassin exclaimed as she pulled out a grumpy cat stuffed animal that Sonnetto had made for me.

I glomped onto it. It was childish of me. I knew that, but the thought had nagged me ever since I fully fused with Sonnetto long ago that I needed to permit myself just to do things that made me happy more often. 'If one never took time in the present to be satisfied, then one might find they miss every chance,' as Sonnetto would tell me. Her words rang to my very core. How often had I missed a way out of my misery in the past because I wouldn't permit myself to take it?

Regardless, I would soon have an excellent opportunity to leave this prison and rejoin Sonnetto and take out a majority of high-ranking Silver Legionists. With a bit of misdirection, we had given the Legion the impression that I was not ready to move out yet, which let the Revolutionary Army advance. At the same time, the Silver Legion mostly sat on their asses, waiting patiently for their Goddess.

---

Autumn's Meadow, Ohio - 6th of December, 1952


Amber "Calamity" Canary held her rifle close to her chest as angry chants of the Silver Legion's Hoarding Horde (HH) echoed outside. The Silver Legion had created the HH as their non-mage paramilitary organization to do unofficially approved acts of violence on behalf of the party. The gunslinger kept her breathing steady, but depending on what happened, people could die. The house had gone quiet like the forest when a predator prowled nearby.

Demiguichi Akria and two Aztec families hid in the attic above her. The former had come to assist the revolutionaries in messaging, organizing, and logistics on behalf of Tanechka's Angels and the United Front. The families had come to the Unified States as seasonal migrant farmers before the Immigration Act set harsh quotas in order to make America more Northern European. The modern planter aristocracy depended on the cheap labor they could get out of families like theirs. The fat cats lobbied to give their workforce permanent resident status instead of having them trapped south of the border years ago. Then, automation in the agricultural industry drummed out countless farm laborers out of work.

That was where Autumn's Meadow, Ohio, came in. The town had a labor shortage for their businesses. The mayor had incentivized the now-unemployed mining and farming families to come to the town by subsidizing their move and providing temporary housing. That housing prevented them from being arrested by the Silver Legion for homelessness and crimes of desperation. Many of them also received housing vouchers that got them into permanent dwellings. The initiative came with generous support from the town's local business community. Even the governor of Ohio also supported the measure.

Unfortunately, hatred of the different and foreign reigned supreme as the Silver Legion repeatedly doubled down on their conspiracy theories and genocidal rhetoric.

"Get out here, you murderers!" one of the paramilitary raged loudly outside.

"Fang, I am not joking," Masquerade told the team. "It is like their whole White Silver ideology has roots from another world."

Calamity had entered a communication spell with the whole team sans Sonnetto, who was still in a puppet state. The homunculus needed Tanya to feed her divine mana in order to maintain her personality, and hopefully, reuniting with the Germanian war vet would solve that problem. Without the divine mana of 'freedom', Sonnetto was nothing more than a machine that resembled a person — a robot.

"Don't blame me for this!" Tanya griped. "Nothing in my old essays could have caused this blood sacrifice nonsense."

A couple of days earlier, President Yockey had claimed the Aztecs living in the Unified States were not only colluding with the rebels in the occupied Aztec Empire but snatching white kids to sacrifice to their gods. The HH had taken this conspiracy theory seriously and responded by bombing temples, demanding answers from city officials, and storming the streets in Autumn's Meadow. Schools, hospitals, and entire neighborhoods had been evacuated to protect the people from the bloodthirsty paramilitary grunts.

The Brown Berets and Calamity had volunteered to defend their communities that couldn't get out in time like the two upstairs as the HH stormed the streets. Brown Berets were mostly Chicano people who had created their own paramilitary organization to resist the violence against their communities from the legionist administration and their goons. Right now, fighting off this many HH grunts would be a death sentence for the Brown Berets, and Calamity was still very limited in what she was allowed to do as a magical Interpol officer. The hope was that the Legion wouldn't find them before reinforcements arrived.

A young woman with the signature beret on her head noticed a Legionist passerby at the window. Luckily, the Legionist hadn't seen them in their hiding spots.

"This cannot be real," Masquerade commented, completely dumbfounded. "If you had told me that this much destruction was being wrought just because the President had spread a baseless rumor about migrants doing human sacrifices, I would have told you it was all bollocks and not believed you."

"It is that they don't live in reality anymore that makes this possible," Tanya stated demurely. "Pulitzer once told Vicky that he can't even print facts anymore. The consumers of his yellow journalism won't believe it. Not only will they demand the facts be redacted and replaced with unhinged conspiracy theories, but they will declare the news outlet communist. Those 'journalists' who report the truth get torn to shreds."

'You know you live in a pre-legionist society when everything the ruling coalition believes is false,' Richard Diamond had written in his Silver-Diamond Manifesto. 'You know you live in a Legionist society when large swaths of people so strongly desire to live in unreality that they lash out at any attempt to take them out of it.'

For the Tejan Sharpshooter, what had terrified her and her family about the Hoarding Horde was that they absolutely adored the poster child of anti-unionism, Henry Phord, who plowed his immense wealth towards spreading hate and ignorance through various papers and books like The International Heartist: The World's Foremost Problem. As the title of that book suggested, central to his ideology was that Heartists and international institutions were the source of everything evil in the world. His conspiracy theories had also gained significant ground in Germania. (2)
While the rest of MI15 chatted, Calamity had to stay quiet because a single noise could alert the Legionists right outside, she feared. Her teammates knew that. The gunslinger would just cut the spell and stop listening to them if action broke out. For now, listening to them kept her nerves in check.

Then came the loud thumping at the door as the Legionists tried to break inside. They had erected a barricade. Had a mage been knocking at the door, then they would have already broken through.

"We know you filthy monsters are inside," the Silver Legion grunt shouted without a hint of irony.

You know you live in a Legionist society when the weakest and least capable of defending themselves are declared to be the most dangerous and evil. In contrast, those who are actually the most powerful and evil are sanctified.

"Captain M, they are not mages." Calamity reported as she moved. "What is my clearance?".

Masquerade kept hesitating despite all the progress he had made. The gunslinger only practically had access to lethal force. The post-Great-War consensus had been that mages were not allowed to use violence against non-mages unless permitted by the proper authorities. The pacifism-inclined thespian who became an illusionist for a reason had to make a decision fast.

Then came the sound of someone climbing a ladder.

"They are going for the attic window!" Calamity shouted and started hustling to the place where the vulnerable civilians hid.

She pulled down the attic door.

"Down now!" she commanded. "M, what is my clearance? Now, please!"

"C Clearance."

"So, you are asking me to tussle with Legionists with bare fists?"

Calamity couldn't use most spells modern mages could use and had severely limited options. She specialized in taking down mages, not non-mages.

Then, a tremendous amount of mana flowed into her, and the sclera of her eyes went black.

'I don't know what I am doing, but I hope this helps, Officer Calamity.'

That thought sounded like Calamity's own, but it couldn't have been.

'It's me, Tanya.'

'Ta~~mity?'

Calamity Tamantha held her head as markings appeared all over her skin, granting her access to a whole host of new spells she usually didn't have.

So much information flowed into the body that used to belong to Calamity alone. Tamantha now understood how pension plans and corporate sub-ledgers worked, or one could say she now knew how to make a Colt .45 shoot three times in quick succession. The fusion of Tanya and Calamity's minds had been a complete accident based on the former's memories. The Germanian war vet had wanted just to send some of her power through her Purpose divinity connection with Calamity but had overshot it and somehow combined them into one individual.

There was no time to think about the countless existential questions running through this fusion's mind. Newly empowered, Tamantha took point. She hoped that she could at least be a bullet sponge for the non-mages at her flank who would have to do the likely necessary lethal violence she legally couldn't do even for self-defense under her current clearance.

Now I see-sawed into being too darn powerful.

"Tanya just disappeared!"

"She fused with her…me, long story. Explain later, boss."

The fused mage climbed the stairs after all the civies got downstairs. When Tamantha got up there, she saw Akira defending herself the best she could with her pacifistic martial arts called Aikido. The revolutionary used her martial techniques to redirect her opponents' attacks to neutralize the force. While it did not harm the murderous HH, it bought time for the families to escape.

Tamantha summoned a bubble with Tanya's new water magic around herself and the two armed paramilitary volunteers. They took out intruders as they filed through the window, but the Brown Berets got caught reloading simultaneously when one man timed his entrance into the building accordingly.

"Surrender or the Zhangzi rat gets it," the HH officer screamed as he jumped through the window and pulled out his gun to shoot Akira. The volunteer forces didn't have time to react. The man might have been an idiot to enter the building when a forcefield protected the Berets, but he was committed to killing at least the Angel.

Bang!

Tamantha had quickly drawn her pistol and shot him before he could even react. It was a precarious maneuver, but with Calamity's knowledge and Tanya's acceleration spell, it was possible to pull off.

"Calamity, you didn't…."

"I did what I had to. Please trust me on this, sir."

Separately, neither half of Tamantha would have made the shot. Tanya was too afraid of potentially taking career-ending actions, and Calamity would not hesitate with a hostage present. Together, Tamantha could take that shot by overcoming the impediment to action contained in each half of themselves.

"Akira, you look like your lunch is on the way out. You gonna be okay?"

"I will be fine, Ms. Calamity. Just shaken."

The Angel was a hyper empath with misophonia. In combat, she was a liability because not only did violence result in her vicariously feeling pain acutely, but loud noises caused her sensory overload.

Tamantha kicked the ladder down before more of the Hoarding Horde could climb up.

"What are we gonna do, Akira? This location is compromised."

Tamantha also didn't want to get used to killing non-mages. That included this Legion horde stuck in a delusion in which they saw themselves as the real victims and marginal groups as somehow the evil orchestraters of this horror show. The horde sadly exemplified how Legionism hurt everyone and twisted them into an Us versus Them struggle. That didn't absolve the horde of their guilt, from which they mentally sprinted away at every possible chance by delving deeper into their preferred unreality.

Still, Tamantha refused to forget the personhood in everyone because when we do, we can see more clearly our own moral failings. To see only a monster is to refuse to see how we all have bits and bobs in our brains that can make us turn into a person just like the HH or Yockey. Our nature enables evil, so we must resolutely educate ourselves in history and love.

"Can you—" the rattled woman began but stopped to start ventilating in stress.

"Steady now, dearie," the fusion said as she kept guard of the window. "Deep breaths. I think that will hold them."

What had just happened must have hit Akira completely. That could happen as adrenaline decreased and one started processing. Recruits all struggled with it, but Akira was a person who would never get used to it.

That was fine. What made her weaker in some areas made her fantastic in others. While Tanya's low empathy allowed her to think logically in high-intensity situations quickly, Akira's high empathy allowed her to comprehend and synthesize how others felt into a story that spoke to their collective dream.

Peaking out the attic window, Tamantha could see the HH retreating for some reason as their leaders waved them off. Something was going to happen.

The fusion turned to Akira, who had calmed down and checked in with her fellow elf-like agents of Tanechka's revolutionary mage corp.

"It will be ten more minutes before reinforcements arrive," Akira confirmed. "However, we have legionist mages on the way so they can carpet bomb the approach revolutionary forces with explosive formulas. Do you think you can handle them before you get in range?"

"Captain, is my clearance still C?" Tamantha called in the MI15 channel.

"Agent Calamity, I am escalating this to clearance B. Stop those mages."

Clearance A was nearly impossible to get and usually required League of Nations pre-approval, but B was very workable. It gave Tamantha a lot more room to work with in using force to mitigate the HH's violence as well.

In defending the innocent, like here in Autumn's Meadow, sometimes regrettable things like lethal violence became necessary. Behind her bubble, with Calamity's rifle in hand and Tanya's mana supply, the fusion readied to defend against the Legionist mages. Tamantha extended the range of her weapon and vision and locked sights on the approaching mages.

Suddenly, eleven more guiding formulas appeared in tandem. Tamantha could feel the mana of her allies, allowing her to multiply her firepower. One shot became twelve, taking out entire squads of enemy mages per pull of the trigger. The sky filled with a multi-colored death as the various hues of her comrades' mana formed rainbows that arced and swerved after their targets before splitting after the mages engaging in evasive maneuvers.

After she eliminated a battalion, the enemy mages realized they were dealing with a divine-classed mage and retreated. Tamantha kept her sights on them as they got out of her weapon's extended range. There wasn't much she could do if they tried to fly around her, as her flight speed was still abysmal. Only a few new spells had become available to her, like the bubble one.

Tanya separated from Calamity at that point, needing to take care of things on her end.

"What was that?!" the gunslinger shouted. Now, she was herself again.

"Fusion…," Tanya replied.

"I know that, but I didn't exist! Okay, partner, what is my name really quickly?"

"Calamity, lass," Masquerade answered. "What is wrong?"

"I kept a lot of her memories," the tall Tejan replied. "They are hard to distinguish from my own."

"Same," Tanya admitted.

"You have to be careful with that. I can recall how our minds slowly shared more and more with each other. If you do that too long, we'll be more hitched together than a two-head cyclops."

"You still remember your sister's middle name?" Tanya inquired.

"Yeah. I do. Do you still remember the nuns walking you to get tested for magic?" Calamity had to ask. So many of Tanya's memories revealed horrifying things about the girl's life and past life.

"Yes," the otherworlder answered. "At least we don't seem to be losing pieces of ourselves."

That made Calamity remember something from Tanya's life.

"You used the Type-95 despite knowing it overwrote your personality and made you forget things!"

"It was necessary to keep my team alive."

"What are you smoking?! You did not have to do that! You had other options than sacrificing pieces of your soul to the war effort, the Mages of Interpol, or your sense of professional responsibility."

"Time out, please," Masquerade interjected. "While it is nice that Tanya is back in the house with us again, I have no idea what you are talking about."

Calamity pinched the bridge of her nose. "Tanya has been sacrificing her soul for decades by using a cursed computation orb?"

"Blimey!"

"Tanya, why?" Fang Shiyu wondered. He was still on the call with everyone else.

"Okay, please understand that the item is mind-warping. I may not have…had the best judgment in using it."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?"

"I didn't think anyone would believe me. Also... The Empire would not have let me stop using it, more so when it was clear we were losing the war. Then… you get used to not telling people things. It is a lot easier now. Back then, it was absolutely terrifying. I thought I would get thrown into some insane asylum or get experimented upon."

"Tanya…"

Much hugging could be heard on the other side of the communication spell in Freedom's Egg. Calamity had to wipe her own eyes because Tanya had had it extraordinarily rough. Her life had been an almost constant stream of suffering and dysregulation. So much could have been made better had her secrets not been so unbelievable.

When this is all over, I am going to do what I can for Tanya, Calamity thought to herself. She needs so much love that it is unbelievable.

At least they knew what the curse of her Purpose divinity was — becoming a fusion with a person slowly and steadily made the differences between the minds of two individuals disappear until they were essentially one person. One lost their individuality to be together in solidarity in this duality. It really put into perspective how much suffering having multiple divinities caused their holders.

Mary Canary, I hope we can convince you to let go of the two extra ones you have. I hate seeing you in so much pain due to whatever they are doing to you.

Calamity then heard the Revolutionary Army and United Front approach as they sang Whirlwind of Danger, calling upon people to join their army as they approached the capital.

Fang Shiyu's mother, Miu Tsui-fa, ran up to Calamity and Akira. While most of the Zhangzi forces stayed in their country defending against another Akinese invasion with the Federation backing them up, the Tejan's teammate Fang Shiyu and his family had come to the Unified States to support the revolution. Knocking the Unified States out would cut the Akitsuhima Dominion off from their powerful ally.

"I am so glad you are safe," the newcomer expressed with a beaming smile.

"Where's Fang?" Calamity inquired, temporarily putting aside her feelings about Tanya's situation to focus on the mission ahead.

"Shiyu had to run ahead. The people in Horton County needed help as soon as possible."

Looking around them, the Tejan noticed the Hoarding Horde had all fled for the hills and were nowhere in sight.

"It seems the enemy is gone. We should be safe to—"

BANG!

Calamity instinctually dropped to the ground only to watch Demiguichi Akira's lifeless body stagger and collapse onto the lawn. Then, the Angel's entire body disintegrated, leaving only her bloodied archery uniform behind.

"Anti-Mage bullets!" Calamity yelled, "Everyone, take cover!"

Yet, nothing more happened. They couldn't even find any Silver Legion snipers in the area, and they suspected whoever they were, they must have fled.

Akira did not deserve to die like that. If I find who did this….

Calamity hoped her heart was wrong about who was behind this assassination.

---

Horton County and then to Chicago - 6th of December, 1952



Fang had heard about the death of Akira, and he ran to the high school in Horton County as quickly as he could. There, he found himself in the middle of a confrontation between protestors and the Silver Legion's Enforcers. He soon found himself gritting his teeth as Water shot at him with a high-pressure fire hose during a snowy day, actually hurting despite his mana body. He had jumped in front of the blast to protect the children behind him. One man had done the same. His clothes ripped away, and his flesh was lacerated by the sheer force the fire hose could unleash.
The Enforcers had swarmed Horton County not only to assist the Hoard Horde in purifying the school but to crack down on a nonviolent protest. The HH hunted for evidence of their bizarre conspiracy theories. High school students in the Black Revolution had taken to the streets to protest nonviolently.

Horrifyingly, the sight of unarmed students somehow provoked the Enforcers to unleash their high-pressure firehoses on the children on this cold winter day. While Fang had thrown himself before one of the hoses, he was not the real hero there. Non-mages lay on the ground, bloodied and beaten by the Enforcers. The elements and the non-magical tools of the Enforcers in Horton County threaten the protestors far more than they did Fang.

Pushing through the hose water by increasing his expenditure of ki, the martial artist ran up to the Enforcer. The violent racist yelped in fear as he didn't expect to deal with a mage. Fang shoved the hose into the air and then punched the firefighter to knock him out. Unlike the Calamity Amb, the martial artist could intervene easily between non-mages.

"We are approaching your location," Calamity called out. "Be on the lookout for an enemy sniper. They are taking out people in our movement. I am keeping your mother safe."

A few mage Enforcers rushed onto the scene and aimed to fire optical formulae at Fang. The martial artists accelerated his mind and reflexes, entering bullet time. He put his right middle and index fingers on his forehead, and suddenly, a bunch of afterimages appeared as he used a new technique he had learned. It wasn't as versatile as actual illusions. The images and he sprinted the confused and overwhelmed mages.

Fang deftly dodged the few shots that went his direction in his high-mana expenditure superspeed state. While his mana stores had grown over the last two years, he could not hold this state for more than a minute before mana exhaustion took him out. That was plenty to eliminate these enforcers.

Then, a bunch of vehicles entered the scene and formed a barricade. The Silver Legion planned to block the advancement of the approaching Revolutionary Army as they delayed as much as they could until Tanya deployed to assist them. At least, that was what they thought would happen. They had no idea that their goddess had joined the revolutionary's side, and soon, the seat of government in Chicago would be theirs.

It seemed that the enemy mages had no issue hurting children, so Fang had to take drastic measures to protect them. He pulled his mana into a ball in his hands, and then once it was the size of a football, he threw it. His arm motions guided the sphere of mana as it bashed into the mages and their vehicle-based barricade. The mana ball could only break a few barriers before running out of power.

Fang had overestimated how effective his new technique would be in real conditions on what had effectively become a battlefield. As the Enforcers raised their weapons, the martial artist desperately went back into his accelerated state. Mana's exhaustion would hit him soon.

Suddenly, Tanya's mana flowed into him far faster.

"Don't overdo it like you did with Calamity," He thought to himself about his friend.

"I won't."

He frowned at hearing a voice in his head that he hoped was Tanya's. It didn't sound any different than his normal mental voice, which made it spooky.

This time, instead of making a mana ball, he used the extreme amounts of mana available to him to form a disc attack. Cultivators rarely used these at his level because they were far too draining, but Tanya effectively pushed him up several ranks of cultivation temporarily. He tossed the disc, which could easily cut through barriers and people simultaneously. These were mages about to kill non-mages, children. It was Fang's obligation as an Interpol Officer to prevent that from happening. Mage lives were not more or less valuable than non-mages, but with power came the need to hold it accountable—the more power, the more accountable it needed to be.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Fang dodged two of the enemies' attacks that got out before they got cut down, but the third was an explosion formula. His legs moved with lightning speed as he grabbed each civilian in the range of the blast area and took them to safety. Even in bullet time, he couldn't hesitate a moment, or innocent lives would be lost.

As he dropped down the last person and it became clear that the coast was clear, Tanya must have tightened the tap of mana flow between him and his teammates because he felt exhaustion hit him. Fang would not fall unconscious. He had enough mana left to do a bit more fighting. It was his body that was strained.

"How are you?" Mae Shpigel called out as she rushed towards him with the Angel Kvetoslava Narcassus at her side.

Narcassus was a medical doctor who was doing her best to help the victims of the Silver Legion and the wounded in battle, along with her team of emergency personnel and volunteers. The elf-like communist got to starting triage and providing care.

Shpigel focused on Fang at the mage, who had just taken out a dozen mages, and the power of a superweapon was flowing through him.

"I will be okay," he answered Shpigel with a forced smile.

The war was hell, and now he has to see it in all its gruesomeness. Fascism was even more terrifying. The emaciated bodies of prisoners sat dying, locked in their cells. The prison wardens at Richard Diamond's command enacted a 'scorched earth' strategy of starving their prisoners to death before the Revolutionary Army could free them like the Union soldiers did during the Civil War. They had to stop to distribute emergency food supplies to the prisoners.

As Fang rested, one of the women's battalion approached, singing another one of their countless songs of solidarity. As they entered towns and cities, the songs were to encourage people who could volunteer and join them. It had been operational security that the date of the revolution had been kept from the general population, and songs played a role in disseminating coded information. People learned to listen to the songs that would tell them when to act.

This song — Bread and Roses — had a defiant but sad undertone that caught Fang off guard.

"What is it about?" Fang inquired in Russy. He didn't know Albish, but Mae Shpigel knew the language and assisted him with interpreting.

"It is based on a poem about the Lawrence Textile Strike," Mae Shpigel explained. "Many of them were women brought over as contract laborers from the Francois Republic and Norden, but at least fourteen nationalities speaking twenty-five different languages were present. The women were not seen as good enough for citizenship or the right to vote but good enough to spend their lives toiling away at the looms. Most of them did not live past the age of twenty-six, and they did not make enough to support their families. This song commemorates the women's struggle and those who died throughout the ages and during the strike. The song asks not only for bread but also roses because the heart starves as much as the body."

In short, it was a song of mourning, carrying the torch of an ancient struggle and a cry for the things that make life possible and meaningful. As Sonnetto would have told Fang, the lessons repeat themselves over and over. These high schoolers, those women decades ago, and his people in Zhangzi all had the same throughline of a call for dignity and equality. They did not want more than their oppressors but a life worth living. The difference was his people had taken the guns left behind by the Akinese and decided that the only way they would be free was if they made a new government of their own.

He looked around some more. Another thing that bothered him a lot. Fang decided to ask Shpigel about it.

"Why are there so few young children?" he inquired. He had seen plenty of high schoolers during their organizing in the Unified States but very few large families or toddlers.

"Many families of color, immigrant or otherwise, were forced or tricked into getting sterilizations, using the pretense of being given charitable medical care. We estimate that the Silver Legion has already sterilized half of American Indian women, and in California, Zhangzi and Aztecs are often sterilized without their knowledge or consent. (3)"

Fang sighed. Back in Germania, he heard the fascists drew lots of inspiration from the Unified States' eugenics practices. (3) The Revolutionary Army could not move fast enough to bring down the Silver Legion before they could hurt more people or inspire more nations to copy their tactics.

Or make them even worse.

"Okay, I have to focus on work now. May I ask more questions when we move out?"

"Sure, Mr. Fang."

"Thank you, Mrs. Shpigel."

The man drank some water and continued on his patrol. He didn't have time to think about any of this because he needed to keep an eye out for more danger, particularly that sniper. Since the assassin had killed Demiguichi Akira, MI15 suspected that Dr. Narcassus would be the next target. Both were Angels, after all.

So was my mother.

Narcassus was the Night Witch who almost killed Calamity during their Albish Museum case but survived because Interpol doesn't kill unconscious or surrendering mages. Fang watched her decide who could be saved and who was a lost cause based on the available resources and minimizing casualties. The Silver Legion had not responded to non-violent civil disobedience in kind, and the protesters had suffered grievous injuries. They did not know that an army from the United Front alliance would be rolling through.

Praxis of Civil Disobedience came from a tradition of deeply spiritual and nonviolent protest, according to Mae Shpigel. Tracing the thread of this ancient tradition back just a century ago, one could find the transcendentalist Ralph Waldeau Thoreau. The Unified States had imprisoned him for protesting its war of conquest against the Aztec Empire in the nineteenth century. A century later, Thoreau's Civil Disobedience inspired Gandhi, who went on to develop a non-materialist version of socialism and the praxis of universal uplift. Continuing back up the thread, one would find Gandhi's actions and beliefs would inspire the religious and nonviolent factions of the civil rights movement in the Unified States, including democratic socialists like Martin Bishop, who strove to abolish poverty and end capitalism as a central part of achieving equality.

Once the army had secured the town and gotten as many volunteers as they could arm, they headed toward Chicago. Fang called on Dr. Kvetoslava Narcassus and Mae Shpigel to join him on a tank descant. He wanted to keep close to the Angel in case the enemy sniper was hiding among the irregular forces in the army. He had more questions for Mrs. Shpigel.

"What do you think of the communists?" Fang Shiyu inquired of Shpigel.

"That is a hard question to answer, given there are so many tendencies," she replied with grim mirth, given their situation.

"What about you? Aren't you one of them?"

"No, I am neither a communist nor an anti-communist."

"What would you call yourself, then?" he followed up. A lot of this political stuff was beyond him, but Fang figured he really needed to know it. His country was going through a massive transformation. He wanted to understand what to expect.

"A Marksist humanist," she stated clearly. "I think that when we don't center people in our movements but just the material outcomes, we lose sight of the harm we do to achieve our ends."

"Instrumental rationality?"

"Precisely," Shpigel replied morosely. "When Leon Brotsky was exiled for his dissent, the party threw me downstairs. They lost sight of everything but the ends they wished to achieve and gave themselves an unlimited license to hurt those who threatened their vision."

"The vanguard party in my country is seizing power and doing something called 'Bolshevization'," Fang stated with some worry. "Do you think it will work out?"

"It could, or it could end up just like with the Old Federation with a cult of personality around one man." She turned to face the city of Chicago, where they would soon head towards after the army handled securing the area for the Revolutionary forces. "Like kings, you have great kings, but you can also have cruel ones. The problem is that without force, you can't hold the king accountable."

Fang frowned. Her words worried him.

"I have my own opinion," Dr. Narcassus stated. "I think that accountability is the key concept here. As someone who participated in the Second Revolution, holding people accountable was very much at the forefront of my mind. Obviously, forcibly overthrowing your government over and over again is not the right way."

"Then what is?" the man pressed.

"It is how you institutionalize accountability. Think about it — what do sexism, racism, monarchy, colonization, and dictators all have in common?"

He shrugged. These were not topics he understood all that well. He didn't realize he had been sexist or chauvinist until Tanya had addressed his behavior to him in a one-on-one meeting.

"They all have an unaccountable superior who exercises power on people below him with varying degrees of impunity. I call this 'upward accountability' because those below are accountable to those above them. This can and often does result in authoritarian and abusive behavior because the powerful don't have checks on that power. The abused has no formal way of stopping the abuser, who is often afforded the right to punish their inferiors. The sexists expect women to be lesser and accountable to their husbands and fathers. The monarch and the dictator hold his subjects accountable to his whims but exercise his power upon them as he pleases, punishing any resistance."

"And the employer?"

"A similar dynamic but much better than feudal and fascist relationships. The employer is unelected and imposes more expectations upon his employees than his employees can on him. The employer picks his employees, but employees can't oust their employer legally. With unchecked power comes varying degrees of unchecked abuses. Obviously, there are good superiors, but under the Silver Legion's 'profit over all' ideology, people are being drained of every last drop of value in their bodies."

"Then what is the solution?"

"Mixtures of downward accountability and mutual accountability depending on the context. Downward is when the powerful are made accountable to the people they wield power upon through various mechanisms that investigate, punish, and replace people who misuse the power given to them, like through democracy and term limits. Mutual accountability is when people hold each other accountable like a romantic relationship."

Fang thought about this. "I still don't see how we would implement such a thing in practice. Like how would a general of an army work if they were constantly questioned and challenged by those below them?"

"Good question, but alas, I don't have all the answers. Some communists deal away with military ranks for that reason, but it is a complicated political question, and I am a medical doctor."

Mae Shpigel listened to their exchange with curiosity the whole time. "A lot of this cannot really be figured out until actually in the position to make decisions in a real situation. I am sure the Americans will figure something out that will help us keep those in charge—"

BANG!

Fang had barely noticed the sniper before they shot. However, they were not aiming at Narcassus but Shpigel. He went into his accelerated state and tackled her midsentence.

The bullet impacted his left forearm, causing him to scream in pain. Despite some bruises, Shpigel was safe at least.

Fang, not so much. His hand fell off as his left arm started to disintegrate.

Phzzt

"Hold out your arm!" Narcassus shouted as she flew off the tank to meet them on the ground next to the road with a mage blade at the ready. He did as she told him.

Slice

His left arm fell off and disappeared before it hit the ground. Fang started to faint from blood loss as the doctor got to work saving his life. Had she not cut off his arm, whatever magic was in that bullet would have destroyed the rest of his body had the spell been allowed to keep spreading.

Calamity flew over to them and held overwatch, guarding them all.

"I think I know who the sniper is," the Tejan sharpshooter claimed on the Revolutionary Army's channel. "Only one person would use anti-biological rounds this potent."

She explained her hypothesis as the mages in the revolutionary forces started to sweep the area for the culprit before they could strike again.

---

Silver House Lawn

A few hours later

I walked with a contingent of Silver Legion mages guarding me.

"Goddess, are you well?" one of the mages inquired.

"Just peachy, thanks."

I had to pretend to be Victoria Truman for a little longer so I could reunite with Sonnetto. When she was safe, I would then fly to the city and clear the way for the revolutionary army.

I followed the Legion guards to the balcony as more zealots genuflected to me along the way. It took willpower not to keep my rage and discomfort to myself. I did not want to wear a mask like I had done for two decades. In my opinion, worship was a fundamentally wrong imposition to place upon a person. While individuals could worship whoever they wanted, asking people to worship you was what was wrong. No one deserved worship, especially if they demanded it. In fact, any being that demanded worship automatically didn't deserve any as they were far too narcissistic—instead, those who demanded worship in exchange for not suffering deserved the greatest contempt.

At the balcony, I saw her. I forgot about all those people calling on me to bless them.

My expression then turned into a glare as I noticed the man next to her — Emperor Cassander. He was the one who had killed her and her son. He had the gull to take advantage of her puppet-like state without me to feed her mana to make her his wife and declare himself Emperor of Persia.

I reached the railing and dismissed the mages at my side.

"You look splend—"

"Be quiet."

Cassander became aghast.

Outside the balcony were those zealots who offered their mana to the Goddess of Destiny Manifest, but that person did not exist.

"People, I have something I must confess," I began, keeping up my act a bit longer. "Your Goddess is an atheist."

Ironically, I think most gods are atheists since they don't believe they have a creator, but I mean a being that deserves worship.

I let those words sink in. People were understandably confused.

"I am not some unalloyed whatever you think I am. Nor am I just some blonde, blue-eyed germanian to foist your disgusting fascist capitalist ideology upon."

People started getting mad. They didn't like knowing how I really was. They wanted a White Silver, who was this strategic genius who proved that their belief about a hierarchy of beings was correct.

"Who I really am is the person who loves this amazing and beautiful woman right here."

I turned to the Sonnetto, who watched all of this passively, but I hoped, with my mana, she would come back. My hands took hers into mine, and I lifted them to my face as I stared into her crimson eyes. Then I put my forehead to hers as I transmitted more mana into her.

I could feel a spark there, hanging on for dear life inside her body. I hoped it would be enough to bring her back.

BANG!

A shot went off, interrupting my thoughts.

Time froze as I tried to figure out what to do—an enchanted bullet headed straight for me. From what Calamity described, it certainly would kill me. I had no idea how the assassin had even gotten in range to shoot me or was going to come after me.

This wasn't fair. I did nothing wrong. I didn't deserve to die like this. Not now. Not here.

Why can't I have anything? Why can't I have peace? Why do happiness and peace slip from my fingers every single time?

If I die, I am pretty sure I am not coming back like the other mandates. Being X made it very clear this would be my last life.

I wasted my first one chasing after a career that made everyone suffer. People hated me, and I didn't care. Now I know how foolish I was, and I don't even get to take the least number of steps towards doing all of these things that will bring me the peace I want. Like many people around me throughout my life, I want to fall in love and start a family. Being X would even taunt me with dreams about what could have been had I understood what love was back during the war.

As I futilely tried to move out of the way, a terrifying miracle occurred. Sonnetto woke up and shoved me out of the way.

The bullet struck her instead. Her regeneration couldn't counteract the much faster anti-biological spell that the shooter had used.

No!

This wasn't going to be how it ended.

In order to save her, I would have to sacrifice my individuality.

"May I?"

"I never want us to part again. Please, before it is too late."

Silver waves formed around us as we fused. Her personality and mine became one. Since Sonnetto no longer had a body, the spell thankfully fizzled out. In our union, Sonnetto and I were utterly destroyed and made new again. The world faded away for a moment.

---

Sonata's Soulscape

"Freedom?" The Devil Doll began with biting cynicism in her voice. "The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

She looked like a blonde young Tanya in the form of a doll with devil horns at the top of her head and red crystal eyes.

"Why can't... Why can't people decide how to live their own lives?" The cat plushie asked. "Isn't our existence as individuals the least we should be able to control?"

The cat plushie was white and had blue buttons for eyes. It kind of looked like Tanya, too, as if Tanya were a grumpy cat. Why was it so familiar-looking?

"The moment people lose the capacity to think, to question, that they just become animals headed to the slaughter without resisting... they stop being people, they lose what makes them human," the Devil Doll answered. "Then again, I am not a human, so what do I know?"

"Some people say there is a fine line between the brilliant and the insane, but I feel like it's actually fairly easy to tell them apart, with hindsight," an Akinese woman added. "Of course, that doesn't help you in the present, so if you really want to know if someone is insane or a genius, just talk to them and decide by yourself. You may make a mistake, but sometimes that's better than being warped with indecision. To live is to make choices. After all, the moment you can't make any choice is the moment you stop living."

The woman, too, looked like Tanya but had blonde fox ears at the top of her head and nine blonde, fluffy fox tails behind her.

"So tell me, little doll, are you free?" The Devil Doll interrogated what must have been Sonneto.

The Devil then tied the homunculus in puppet strings, only for the cat plushie to cut them with surprisingly sharp claws, and then Sonneto fell into a black void only for the fox woman, the... kitsune, to catch her.

"Who is the real Tanya?" The Akinese kitsune inquired with a smile. "Have you decided yet?"

"None of you are the real Tanya, but all of you are part of her. "

"Good, you are learning." The cat plushie said. "Be thankful we locked Tanya's pain away, for you are not ready for her yet. Now, wake up and pamper Tanya. We deserve it!"

I woke up only a moment after I fell unconscious. I was Sonneto, I was Tanya, I was… Sonata.

---

Silver House Lawn

Ramona Mercer frowned. Empress Roxanne had blocked her shot, and then something bizarre happened. That was her third shot.

The first one was for the revisionist Demiguichi Akira. She had corrupted the Zhangzi revolution by persuading the vanguardists there to incorporate a 'one country, two systems' and multiple parties into their new republic. Revisionism not only distorted Marksism with capitulations with the ruling class but would result in a kind of state-run capitalism like what the Silver Legion had. While Ramona could tolerate Markism-Levinism-Tanechkism (MLT), Demiguichism needed to stop spreading.

As Ramona's vanguard would say, 'Death to the Traitors', and that included all revisionists.

The second enchanted bullet would be for Mae Shpigel. She had rejected dialectical materialism for something she called Marksist Humanism that synthesized Hegel and Marks. Like the current leader of the Federation, Shpigel viciously criticized the Old Federation, claiming that it 'rest[ed] on the mainspring of capitalism — paying the worker the minimum and extracting from him the maximum.' (2) This distortion led countless revolutionaries to believe that Marksist-Levinist governments were exploitative of the working class and the party was somehow a kind of ruling class. Ramona had tried to eliminate her before she embedded herself deeper into the Founders' Party and moved the scale of power further into World Federationism.

The third bullet was for White Silver. The arrogant, religious fanatic had declared herself a goddess and deviously tricked the people into thinking that her conduit powers were divine when that power really came from her duped followers. More importantly, no one had caused more devastation than this goddess wannabe. She had written the White Silver Creed that had persuaded so many people that being powerless was freedom and that unfettered corporate greed would somehow benefit the poor people in the long run when people were dying now and history proved otherwise. Even worse, Victoria Truman's floods and armies had killed countless Aztecs in the genocidal war in the south.

'No gods, no masters,' as the anarchists would say, and likewise, to be free, there had to be no White Silver who wanted people to worship her.

Ramona took out her only spare enchanted bullet and cocked her gun, but before she could fire, her old friend Amber Canary walked in front of the sniper and blocked Ramona's shot with her body.

"Why?" the Tejan demanded.

The woman must have snuck up on Ramona while she focused on her target. Her new height had certainly been surprising to see up close.

"For the future of my homeland," the Orthodox sniper answered.

"Tanya and Sonnetto are my family."

"I don't know who those people are, but Victoria Truman killed hundreds of thousands of people!" Ramona roared. "She has these people under her spell."

"Look at them, though!" Calamity shouted back, gesturing to the crowd.

The reality was that the Silver Legion screamed about a demon and demanded that the real goddess end this farce.

"Drop your gun, Ramona," her friend repeated.

She lowered her gun but did not drop it.

"She is a fascist—"

"She is practically two lesbians from Berun in a magical trench coat," Amber interjected, clearly holding back her rage and frustration. "I promise you neither Tanya nor Sonnetto wants to be associated with these people."

"You know that homosexuals have fascist tendencies, Amb."

Dzhugashvili and Moscva had stated this during the Old Federation days. It was why the CPUSA, who were not fans of the post-coup government, kicked out from the party the founder of the Mattachine Society, Harry Hay.

Amber looked absolutely dumbfounded.

"Ramona, it takes two seconds of thinking to know that the legionists and fascists ain't too fond of people like my friend over there," the American war vet countered. "She is taking them out right now. She is on the side of justice. You clearly aren't right now. So drop your gun. Don't make me ask again. I don't want to kill you even though I am pissed as all hell. You really hurt a person I care about and murdered another who didn't deserve it."

Ramona dropped her gun. Not because she was actually afraid of Amber actually hurt her. She knew the moral heart of her friend, which beat with all the blood that had been spilled over the ages and to the rhythm of history in all its guilts.

No, it was those idealistic eyes. Those damnable idealistic eyes begged her to show mercy to an imperialist dog like White Silver. It was always the moralizers who broke the will of revolutionaries—begging for nonviolence when that didn't work—calling for mercy when the person in question was not deserving of it. White Silver really didn't deserve any mercy, in Ramona's opinion.

Amber Canary picked up Ramona's rifle without dropping eye contact. The Tejan Sharpshooter was the only person in the world who could stop her with anything less than outgunning her, and Ramona did not know what to think about that. Was it wrong to have hesitated like that? Was it because Amber's eyes had become a mirror that made Ramona condemn herself? Or was it because she trusted her old friend's judgment?

Life had neither simple answers nor easy solutions to the problems that plagued Ramona and the people she fought for. She would just have to keep moving forward even while her loved one had her locked up. Would the other factions of the revolution understand her actions and why they were necessary, or would they group her with the other fascists like Damien had?

Calamity started talking to her team via a communication spell as she kept an eye on Ramona.

"Tanya,...Okay, I will call you Sonata," the other woman said to her team. "Having experienced fusion, I get it. We need you to get to clearing the way for the revolutionary army downtown. MI15 will help cover you. Are you in good shape for that, sis?"

Ramona watched as White Silver took off from the Silver House after dealing with the genocidal Silver Legion senior mage leadership with the other MIs. If one focused, one could hear the air filled with the sound of two women madly in love with one another and an enrage wave that desired to engulf all of the Silver Legion in its wake.

Suddenly, instead of the Angel of Destiny Manifest, Ramona could see a glimpse of another woman who was also two. This Sonata had joyous purple eyes, magical hair that resembled actual waves, and four arms, two carrying Zhangzi swords and two carrying pistols. How such a person had been trapped inside Victoria Truman and Empress Roxanne baffled Ramona to no end. So many things had not yet been explained.

"You see her, huh?" Calamity asked.

"Yeah."

"Took me quite a while myself," the Tejan admitted. "But she was definitely much more closed off back then. I think a lot more people will get to know who those two really are in the future."

Ramona watched as a magical wave overtook the city of Chicago. It didn't kill anyone or affect the approaching revolutionary army. Instead, Silver Legionists started floating off the ground, being carried away to detainment centers rapidly being set up by surprised Interpol officers. A lot of people wanted to en masse kill the Silver Legionists, from their paramilitary arm to the Enforcers to all the party officials. The League of Nations and Sonata clearly did not share such sentiments, hitting a balance between excessive violence and complicit inaction. It was something only possible because they had both the power to do it and the sense of responsibility to act professionally.

"She could rule this country with that much power," Ramona commented in awe and concern.

"She won't," Calamity responded.

"Why not? Sonata could have anything she wanted. She could make the whole world conform to her whims? What is stopping her?"

"Because she has met god and discovered he was a self-obsessed asshole. She knows what it is like to be the plaything of powerful megalomaniacs. Her entire being is defined in opposition to that kind of abuse."

"What does she believe in?" Ramona inquired.

"Freedom, self-determination, a desire for peaceful work, the love of her work, the love of her family of coworkers, and a deeply felt sense of professional responsibility towards one's organization."

"A trade unionist then?"

Calamity broke out laughing and had to wipe away a tear. It had broken the tension between them when Ramona had just minutes ago tried to kill this Sonata person. The sniper definitely wasn't off the hook in Calamity's eyes, but stress and sadness tended to make the darndest things funny.

"Don't say that around her…I don't know how much her Sonnetto side will mellow out the Tanya side. She is very sensitive right now to people claiming that she believes something she very much doesn't."

Two more mages soon flew to their location as Ramona awaited her fate for the murder of Demiguichi and the attempted murder of Mae Shpigel. One was a man with green eyes and a colorful mask. The other was a well-known elf-like assassin in her iconic green suit.

"Are you Ramona?" the woman inquired with a smile that laughed at death.

The sniper kept her mouth shut. There was a time when Ramona looked up to this assassin. Then this person betrayed everyone by working with the genocidal capitalist assholes in the Albish Empire and throwing her allies to Interpol.

"She is," Calamity answered for Ramona.

"Well, you probably think I am here to exact revenge for what you did to my comrade," the assassin stated cooly.

"What do you want of me?" Ramona had to ask the green-suited Angel.

"I come here on behalf of Tanechka, and we have an offer."

"Shoot."

"Ha…well, we need you to tell your vanguard to cooperate with the Unified Front, and we want some information from you."

"What if I refuse?" Ramona retorted.

"I could have your vanguard handed over to Interpol as one option. The other is Tanechka, who is very much willing to settle things Old Federation style. If you play like it is the bad old days, expect to get hurt like it's the bad old days."

Essentially, going with the latter option meant a traitor's death. Tanechka might have overthrown the Old Federation, but that was because the leader of the Angels thought it was poorly managed, irresponsible to the conditions of the people, and had developed an aristocracy. She wasn't some idealist above using violence. If one got into the game of using violence, one had to expect to play by the rule that said 'might makes right'.

"I thought you said you weren't going to go around the rule of law?" the Albish man questioned with worry.

"We are in a country where the government had just been overthrown, for starters. Not much rule of law here. Second, I trust that she knows better than to go against Tanechka, who doesn't make idle threats, so at the end of the day, playing the rules set by Ramona here, we have not done anything wrong."

That was the rule that the ends justify the means. If you threatened someone to do the 'right' thing but didn't actually hurt them, does the end result of them doing that right thing mean the threat was not wrong?

Calamity definitely seemed concerned.

There was no guarantee that Tanechka would not just kill them anyway if she had the means to pull it off, which she might actually have. More concerningly, this standoff was far from the first rodeo for the mysterious green-suited assassin. Surrendering completely to the Tanechka felt horrible. The leader of the Angels had backed the World Federationists as a concession to the Russy Federation that saw those civic urban revolutionaries as the preferable ruling party over the Orthodox faction that largely hated Brotsky and his allies' guts.

Ramona took a deep breath and glanced at her friend Amber Canary.

"I surrender. What information do you want?"

"Simple. We know you know that you know where Richard Diamond went. Just tell us, so justice can be done."

Well, that was something they all could agree on.

---

Thanks Pinklestia101 for betareading and writing the dream sequence.

Citations:

1. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. Not "A Nation of Immigrants": Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Beacon Press Books. 2021. Page xiv
2. Logsdon, Jonathan R. Power, Ignorance, and Anti-Semitism: Henry Ford and His War on Jews. Hanover College History Department. <https://history.hanover.edu/hhr/99/hhr99_2.html>
3. Ko, Lisa. Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.org. 29 January, 2016. <https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states/>
4. Dunayevskaya, Raya. Marxism and Freedom: From 1776 to Today. Raya Dunayevskaya Memorial Foundation. Published 2000.

 

[JustRaiding195]

Neat

 

[LoreleiFlowers]

Recap: Last time in MI15, the Unified States had a second revolution, and the Silver Legion was defeated. Now Interpol chases after Richard Diamond as Sonata (Tanya x Sonnett) gets used to their new normal with a new country.

Note: This is a work of fiction with characters who have various opinions and thoughts. No one in this story is perfect or 'the voice of truth'.

---

Downtown Chicago, Unified States - 6th of December, 1952

I flew over to downtown, having defeated the Silver Legion mages at the nation's capitol with my allies' help. Most of them were located there, which was why Tanya bothered to play along with the ceremony instead of attacking right away. Lure them in with the pretense of meeting their Goddess, and blammo, a huge portion of the enemy mage forces would be squashed.

Being shot, however, was not in the plan. Tanya had hoped her team and having two mandates would be enough. Unfortunately, her plan did not survive contact with her supposed allies.

Masquerade had admonished Tanya for her vanity speech, which almost ended in both of my halves dying, but to be fair, she was dumb in love. She still was, from my perspective, the one embodying both of the lovebirds. As a member of Interpol (I definitely went through a lot of PTO), I had the responsibility to stop crimes against humanity and non-mages by mages.

On one side, I saw scenes unfold of enraged mothers and daughters getting armed as Legionists threatened them and their families, sons waking their fathers from bed, and rebels forming a line to defend their communities from the Horde and Enforcers.

On the other side, armored cars, tanks, and guns prepared to tear into any revolutionaries who came into the range of government buildings and decadent mansions around them. Silver Legion armed forces broke into homes. They interned suspected populations en masse and killed those who resisted, heedless of the cries of little children.

In the middle was Interpol, who had a job to do. The international community did not live by mob rule, but we also knew when a government had clearly crossed a line. National sovereignty had limits. These scenes had only broken out recently, yet every moment we delayed meant more civilians and many aggrieved rebels died.

If I didn't sound particularly sympathetic to the Silver Legion, it was because I wasn't. One can imagine

It was time to lay down the law in this dysregulated state.

I extended my mana through a network of relationships. MI15 connected to me, and from them, I connected to their friends, family, and allies. Like the degrees of Kevin Bacon, I tapped into the power of the whole revolution and its sympathizers. They willingly lent their mana to me at the price that I temporarily lost myself to their will. Unlike Victoria Truman, I was accountable to those who decided to give me their power by embodying their will, and vice versa, when I gave them mine. As Tanya would say, it was a relationship of fiduciary duty.

The revolutionary mana flooded the city with mana. No one got hurt, but Silver Legion started to float off the ground, and water-like mana held them aloft. Manipulating the mana, I pointed their guns toward the ground to prevent harm.

I sat in meditation in the middle of this steady vortex. I wouldn't let the revolutionaries make me kill people for them. The Silver Legion had already made me kill enough people. Richard Diamond, President Yockey, and Emperor Cassander embodied the totality of dual-self rage. I was nothing if not professional, and they will get their due soon.

The revolutionaries, the United Front, and Interpol moved through the vortex unaffected. The Silver Legion was kept carefully neutralized. They could be arrested or whatever. The important thing was that corruption would be washed away, and something new would form in its absence.

During the revolution, were there some pacified Legionists who got killed? Of course. People were pissed, and these were irregular combatants. Interpol started coordinating through my team to where I could move the surrendering Legionists into places where they could be detained before their trials. Many wanted me to be like a nuke that wiped evil off the face of the earth. My Tanya half very much wanted nothing to do with nuking places for obvious reasons.

I was far from a pacifist, but both of my halves had no desire to do violence in excess. Tanya had a distaste for irrational behavior. Sonnetto may not show her emotions in her facial expressions strongly and has a mystic's aspiration for going beyond the immediately apparent. Neither fetishized revolution or violence. For both of them, it was a means to peace and freedom to do the work they enjoyed — being an Interpol officer. They didn't even mind how much the socialists in the League of Nations held them accountable anymore.

Revolutionaries walked past where I sat. I had no idea what my silver mirror was showing them. I sat on a bench, meditating as I focused on carefully identifying threats to the revolutionaries and pacifying them with the mana. Some people walking by told me to join them. Others called on me to go to a shelter. I ignored them. When I told them to leave me alone, it was like someone couldn't hear me. It was surreal.

My soul form, hidden from the world except for those who knew the real me, had four arms and resembled Tanya's soul combined with Sonnetto's. I had four arms now. I could summon the two Zhangzi swords Emperor Zhu had given Sonnetto at will. Alchemy would be necessary to get Sonnetto's arsenal reequipped. She definitely missed her dual pistols.

I couldn't see my full appearance from my first-person perspective, and I had no reflection. I did know that I had Sonnetto's cloak that I could summon and obscure my extra pair of arms. Having two more arms also gave me more real estate for tattoos and wielding more weapons. All the new possibilities excited the weapon-fanatic Sonnetto.

One could not miss the red flags and the various flags of the socialists and communist organizations that made up the United Front. I did not know how to feel about it.

My Tanya side was a capitalist realist. Capitalism, in her opinion, was the end of history and the least bad option of all possible economic systems. As for Sonnetto, she thought that compassion for others and humility towards life's big questions were important due to her Seeker beliefs.

As their views came into harmony together, a new perspective emerged that helped distinguish my viewpoint from the Silver Legion's. Some of my thoughts were messy and confusing as they aligned two quite different perspectives, but the spirit of harmony was there.

For starters, I didn't think the value in goods and services came from the valuer (the buyer), as Edmund Burke argued. That was smacked of existentialist and absurdist nonsense, in my opinion, just like how Jean-Paul Sartre and Ayn Rand foolishly argued that freedom was a kind of nothing [Nichts] through excessive abstraction from embodied existence. The Camus-Burkean perspective of imposing subjective value on the world led to a situation where the monopolists selfishly used their power to determine value to instrumentalize labor until it was literally commodifying and killing people. These Richard Diamond types had made themselves gods in their minds.

Instead, in order to have a healthy market, we needed to return to some of the ideas of Adam Smith, who centered empathy and the laborers' contribution to value in his view of markets. Empathy, not greed or other excused vices, was the means by which two compatible desires meet and create a relationship in the world. Cooperation, partnership, and neighborliness based on this empathetic power played a foundational role in how markets formed. The Silver Legion's all-against-all Individualism ran contrary to this freedom of association that highlighted this meeting point between solidarity and individuality.

By entering the laborer's contribution into one's worldview, one also remembers to appreciate their work and value them as the ones who make life happen. Value wasn't to be imposed externally by the valuer but instead created by people-as-ends in their lives. For example, a mother isn't a biological machine one uses to get a child or reproduce the nation. Instead, they are a person who goes through a challenging but hopefully wonderfully transformational journey of bringing life into the world. We needed to separate the people from the arithmetic of the bottom lines again and treat them as ends between which markets acted as connections.

'I think you want a child,' Sonnetto commented.

'I do…,' Tanya admitted.

'Are we going to adopt or…?'

'I don't know. We aren't human. I want to have a child, and I don't know how to describe the feeling. It was something I never really thought about in my last life because it was painful to do so.'

I frowned as Tanya's emotions turned melancholic.

"We figure something out," I stated. Who knew what was possible, given our unique existence?

It was just a matter of seeing where the thread goes.

Roxanne had a child with Alexander Magnus, but the last thing Sonnetto remembered of him was that both Roxanne and the child had been poisoned to death by Emperor Cassander back in the early 40s. If Alexander II had been brought back as a homunculus, too, he would have been somewhere out there in the world.

Their permanent fusion would create a lot of logistic issues. Their pension plan included Interpol and bank accounts. It was going to be a massive headache. Tanya had a lot of enemies. Sonnetto had a whole country that was supposedly under her rule now that the Emperor had an 'accident' on the balcony at the Silver House.

'Should we talk about that?' Tanya inquired.

'Not now, dear,' Sonnetto replied.

I would have to do one thing at a time. As for taking care of a city worth of Silver Legion bozos, that would take days.

'I had better get overtime, a lot of hazard pay, and all of Sonnetto and Tanya's accumulated PTO back for this.'

'You love your work, Tanya.'

'You do, too, Sonnetto.'

'Do you know what I love more than what we do at Interpol?'

'I…I actually do.'

How unspeakably wonderful it was to know someone really loved you without any doubt or having to parse undecipherable expressions — clarity without any painful ambiguity.

Then I heard Masquerade on the communication channel.

"We found Richard Diamond. He is in Argentum."

An old smile of Tanya's from her Great War days crept on my face. As I heard the details, I tested the extent of my Solidarity mandate.

How far does this go? I thought to myself before finding a thread that led all the way to the country of the Silver River.

"Doctor Gonzalez, can you hear me?" I sent it through the line.

There was a shout of surprise on the other end.

I really need to find a way to contact people with this power without them freaking out or thinking they got a voice in their head. Pulling on the thread, I tapped Khuyana Gonzalez and her fellow Interpol Agents into my talk with MI15.

"A shame we can only contact allies this way since distracting enemies in battle would be quite effective," Tanya mused.

"Be nice," Sonneto scolded Tanya playfully. I could even picture Tanya getting a soft slap on her face and then blushing.

---

Undisclosed Safehouse, Argentum - 20th of December, 1952

Richard Diamond and his team crowded around a map. The news that the Unified States had just fallen to the revolutionaries had reached them. They needed to plan what their next couple of steps would be.

"I need some water now," Diamond demanded. It was a hot, balmy day down in the Southern Hemisphere, and the businessman had not packed accordingly, given it was December.

The tall man looked around the table as a drink was given to him by one of the servants. Of the people gathered, starting from Diamond right, there was Milton Freedman, the Silver Legion's Chief Economic advisor; Lopez Pegaso, the head of the Argentum Anticommunist Alliance (AAA) and great at cards; Henri Lollore "El Rata", the owner of almost all of the ports in Francois West Afrika and a bit stuffy; Sir Evelyn Loring, the Governor of Senya in Afrika and really knows how to do a good barbeque; Kermit Hoosevelt, the American Intelligence officer assigned to install theocratic rule throughout Persia and had a funny voice; Larry Messenger, a foreign policy advisor handling the Operation Menu and developer of realpolitik; and Claire Genault, the manager of the CIA's Civil Air Transport company and the only woman allowed at the table. All in all, it was a great group of friends to have in all the right places if you wanted to make a getaway.

Beyond the table were secretaries, servants, and, most notably, the Divinity of Time, who had been taken from South Afrika during the CIA's attempt to get as many divinities as possible after seeing what White Silver could really do. While this divinity proved to be a dud for live combat due to his inability to engage continuously with the present, his prognostication ability allowed the group gathered to foresee potential futures and avoid them. Diamond couldn't be bothered to remember the poor's name, so he had taken to calling him Oracle.

"By the time night arrives, one of you shall die," the voice emanated from the Oracle. He spoke in a language that transcended all languages and was understandable by all present. "The Heartseeker blade does not miss."

The men and women went pale. There was no way they would get out of the country before sunset. The prophecy had come too late.

"Do we have to keep him here?" Lega wondered. "I don't know if my heart can handle another revelation like that."

"Chin up," Loring advised. "We need all the information we can get. Once we gather our resources together and come up with a plan, we can rally and push out the revolutionaries."

"Okay, Milton, what are our options," Diamond pressed, trying to focus on solutions rather than dying.

He didn't deserve to die. What had he ever done wrong? According to the egoism of Andrew Ryan, self-interest was the only good one should consider, not enslaving oneself to so-called moral causes or the humanitarianism that led to serfdom. Diamond had lived a great life in accordance with his desires. People should emulate him, not treat him like a monster.

Freedman glided his middle finger across the map and stopped first at the Aloha State in the Pacific. "We could hold up with Pineapple King. We have a large naval base there and would be close to our allies in the Akitsuhima Dominion."

The Pineapple King was an Eirishman named Jame Stole of the Stole Food Company. His fruit products had become a household name across the world, and his company had an astronomical 45% of the global market share for bananas. It sure helped him get a well-deserved headstart on the rest of the market to have the Unified States kick out the Alohan Queen and put him in charge of that country. One could just do business so much more efficiently when their corporation ran the country.

"Boy, what happens if we go to Aloha?" Diamond inquired, curious if visiting the Pineapple King would prove fruitful.

The South Afrikan man's eyes opened, light emanating from them.

"A wave will wash away the ships in the harbor of pearls. The sailors will drift into the hands of the world. The men in kinky boots will move to the Eastern Sea, and the sun will set."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"The Sun — the Akitsuhima Dominion perhaps?"

"Well, obviously, none of that sounds promising. White Silver obviously will crush the harbor."

Diamond rubbed his chin. "Her power won't last much longer. Without worshippers, she will go back to being functionally a normal mage."

"Tanya von Degurechaff was the most skilled mage in the world," one of the team members pointed out. "Her normal is several cuts above the rest."

"Okay, Milton, what is our next option because that one is no good?"

He glided his finger along America's fruit loop of monopolist-subordinated governments to Longdurous in Central America. "We could join up with Sam the Banana Man. We would have most of the Silver Legion forces occupying the Aztec Empire between us and the Revolutionary Army, as well as Sam's militia to protect us. There is no way they will be able to defeat a modern army even with White Silver's help."

Sam Lemmurray owned the Unified Fruit Company. He had expanded into Longduras by gathering up a militia in Louisana and then taking them over the Aztec Gulf to the country he wanted to conquer. The Unified States eventually negotiated a ceasefire between Lemmurray and Longduras, pushing everything in the monopolist's favor. The President of Longduras had to stand down, and Lemmurray's puppet got put in his place. Inspiringly for the monopolists of the world, the poors of Longduras had to reimburse Lemmurray with their own money for all his coup expenses.

Diamond wished he could be a great entrepreneur like the Banana Man one day, but as much as he would love to spend an evening with his personal hero, they needed to be sure that they would be safe.

The group all turned to the Oracle and inquired about this potential future.

"The Tejas Twister will tear through the armies of silver," the divinity of time spoke, "and where bananas are taken, the people shall rise."

Poors doing anything other than working for monopolists or dying was definitely not a future anyone in the room wanted.

"Why don't we go to the Central Afrikan Republic?" the francoisman Lollore suggested. "Lakossa is a good friend of mine, and we will not only get the protection of his army but of the Francois Republic."

Lollore's country had remained neutral regarding the Silver Legion because they utilized American business and military support for their imperial management. Personally, Diamond could not be more impressed with how the Francois Republic extracted enough wealth to rebuild its economy after the Great War. It bothered him that they provided 'welfare' for their poors, but it kept them satisfied enough to mentally justify the poor man's rococo lifestyle. Importantly, it kept them from revolting like the poors in America had. The lesson: have your aristocracy oppress the poors in another region far from the voting booth and center of government power.

Key to the Republic's success was the implementation of the CFA Franc imperial currency that subordinated fourteen countries' economies to the Francois Republic. It had proven way more cost-efficient than colonialism ever was. Basically, instead of using tanks, the Francois used the bank. They accomplished dominating the post-colonial economies by monopolizing all the ports and controlling the prices of exports through the CFA Franc. These Afrikan nations just could not develop an export economy and were completely stuck under the financial thumb of the Republic. It was well known throughout the political class that by forcing these countries to purchase goods at above-market prices and sell goods at below-market prices, the Francois Republic could become one of the wealthiest nations in the world.

In other words, no system had so lucratively impoverished as many undeserving poors as colonialism. Still, nothing had hurt the profits of the superior beings as much as countries gaining independence and pursuing economic policy independently of them. Luckily, capitalism spurs innovation, and new forms of controlling countries through monetary control and regime change have developed that were even more profitable than the old-school colonial strategies.

As impressive as Lollore's option seemed, the group still wasn't sure how safe it would be, so they turned to the Oracle and gave his next prophecy.

"The hands of the world will be tied in the Americas. You shall have a safe harbor, but only for a few winters. The Angels seek to free the over-exploited, and whispers will lead them to you."

"Then what?"

"Some of you will perish."

Going to the Central Afrikan Republic proved the best option available to them at the time, so they left as soon as they could get into the jet.

Diamond had to push Lopez Lega off the stairs to escape before a very unreasonable Andean mage from the local MI team could kill him. Apparently, the League of Nations had given the Mages of Interpol the okay to eliminate them. The worst mistake the superior beings ever made was not having veto power to stop other countries from asking for unprofitable things like justice for the poors. Now, the socialists in the League did something unforgivable, trying to kill or capture Richard Diamond, a practical saint.

The law wasn't supposed to hold rich people accountable. Thankfully, the people of Francois Republic knew that there was nothing more vile than letting the poors revolt against the ruling class. It went against nature and everything the Francois people stood for. That was why they took so much pride in destroying New Luinea's economy after they refused to be economically dominated by the Republic. All it took was forging and dumping countless counterfeit bills into that country, and the poors got what was coming to them. The Francois Republic sure knew how to make an example out of any poors who dared question nature's hierarchy of humanity where the rich were at the top, the sedated welfare serfs were in the middle, and the poors stayed at the bottom they belonged.

As the rest of them flew off, Diamond got a sense his allies were worried that they might be the next to get eliminated. Before it could become like the Commonwealth turning on the Silver Legion, the businessman reassured them that he would never sacrifice them for his own benefit. Lega was an Argentium. His life was just less valuable than theirs, and they accepted that excuse for now.

They didn't know that the Oracle had told him that the only way for him to survive Interpol hunting him down was to sacrifice all his friends resources. A go-between with Interpol named 'Sally W.' would help him escape future capture in exchange for incriminating information as well as leading his allies into traps.

---

The Free Township of Grafton, The Democratic Confederation of Abya Yala - 22nd of May, 1953

Roar!

'I don't like it here,' Sonnetto complained.

'Just give it a little longer,' Tanya placated. 'The town is going through growing pains.'

"Do you think I can scare it off?" Matheus asked me.

"I would rather not have you fight a bear," I replied.

"Sonata, it would be kind of cool. You think?"

A grizzly stood before us. It had started sniffing around our house after gorging on our neighbor's garbage. We didn't really know what to do. There was no one to call to deal with bears in our new hometown of Grafton in the new country the revolutionaries had created.

While Khuyana Gonzalez and the rest of MI54 hunted down Diamond and rounded up the criminal paramilitary group AAA in Argentum, I was getting used to my new normal. Matheus, Calamity Amb, and I had moved to Grafton in the former Unified States after the revolution and settled down into a functional government because Germania had gone a bit too scary politically for a lesbian like me. I also really needed a vacation, and it was much easier to update my documents in a brand-new government. As for Richard Diamond and his buddies, I left that to Interpol and the Angels until they called on me or my multi-year vacation of emotional recovery concluded.

The Unified States had split into two after the revolution. The Unified States of America now consisted only of the states on the East Coast. The revolutionary movement claimed the territory west of the Happalachia mountains and named their country Abya Yala based on the suggestion of the World Indigenous Peoples Council.

It had two governments that overlapped each other. One was a Democratic Federation that resembled closer to what one thought a next-gen socialist state would be, with new bells and whistles that would supposedly correct past issues that plagued the Old Federation. The other government was a Democratic Confederation of allied townships that opted out of the Federation system for the most part. Each township could experiment with its plan within some guardrails to prevent slavery and things like that.

As for my family's new hometown of Grafton, it billed itself as a libertarian paradise with almost no taxes, strict private property protections, practically no regulations, minimum public services, and the bare minimum of government. My Tanya half absolutely had to give it a try.

The houses looked quite lovely when we moved in. Modern, though a bit cookie-cutter.

Then, the neighbors came. Some of them let their lawns go to hell. Some put up a bunch of southern confederate flags and were extremely racist towards me. The same guy also made sure to pee in view of everyone to make a point that no one could do anything about it because if we trespassed into his yard, he would shoot us. He was also the guy who properly disposed of his garbage despite the fact bears were in the area. Some people just wanted to embody a walking middle finger, and this guy had really outdone himself.

Obviously, I could just put up a barrier and do whatever I wanted, but I wasn't that kind of person.

'I don't want to raise a kid where someone is going to shoot them if they walk onto their property,' Sonnetto complained.

'We could make it hard for him and pester him until he leaves,' Tanya suggested, still staunchly committed to the experimental town in the Confederation half of Abya Yala.

The Germania war vet was definitely trying to avoid being in the socialist Federation that most of the country had joined and the Albish-allied traditional liberal democracy on the east coast, which had a few too many 'former' Silver Legionists in it for Tanya's liking.

"We could also shoot the bear," Calamity offered. "Or scare it off with some gunfire."

"Yeah, no," I replied as I rubbed my forehead in frustration at being the responsible one once again. "We are not shooting a gun right now. The McKinsey said if one more person starts shooting in the neighborhood, he is moving out."

"Okay, I am going to wrestle it then!" Matheus shouted.

Yeah, I was going to move. This was not working for me. Hopefully, the township Polyxena and Masquerade had picked proved more inhabitable.

---

Radical Faerie Sanctuary, Democratic Confederation of Abya Yala - 30th of June, 1953

I found a corner of the small home to stare at because things here were not quite what I expected. A jolly Masquerade and a pregnant Polyxena sat in the modest living room with us. Despite being upset that Richard Diamond had slipped from our fingers again, Elya had told me she had a plan to turn the man against his allies, which would pay off in the end, she promised. With that knowledge, I focused on the present.

"Is there something wrong, Sonata?" Masquerade inquired.

"Is everyone here naked?" I pressed.

"Not everyone," Polyxena clarified as she pressed herself upon her partner's back. "We Radical Faeries come in all shapes and sizes. Some of us embrace our clothes, some shed them."

"Plus, I am not naked," Masquerade stated.

"You are wearing a mask and a tie," I countered.

"Business formal for me."

Polyxena was a bad influence on my former vice-captain. The guy had gone native.

"I don't like this place," Matheus whispered to me. The guy was old-fashioned and honorable. He liked more traditional town structures, and the Radical Faerie Sanctuary was as far away from that as you could be.

'I don't want to live in this hippie land, sorry,' Tanya admitted.

'I think it is fine as long as they don't expect us to participate in the nudity.'

I preferred to dress modestly in public. Despite being a bunch of more pacifist and communalist types, I felt quite a bit of peer pressure to fit in more. Someone even called me a square. It was definitely not my cup of coffee being here.

"Hey, Harry Clay is claiming the communal tent all for himself and his partners," someone called out from outside. "This is the last straw!"

I tried to ignore the commotion outside as we continued to discuss their choice of home.

"So, what do y'all do for fun in these here parts?" Calamity wondered, having absolutely no issues with anything naked. The farmer knew how sausages were made. A few hippies were not going to bother her.

"We have an olive grove where we can attune ourselves to nature and do calisthenics," Masquerade started. "There are drag shows and parties. Handcrafts are popular."

"And plenty of adult fun times if you are interested in the free love stuff," Polyxena added. "I'm not. My Laurie here is enough for me."

'That doesn't sound too bad,' Sonnetto commented.

"Okay, I had enough!" that man outside roared. "Down Faerie fascism. Anyone who thinks Harry Clay is a dictator joined me. I am starting the Faerie Fascist Police."

I sighed. "Does this happen often?" I wondered.

"No." "Yes." The couple replied, contradicting each other.

"Yes." "No." They tried to flip their answers to the other's one simultaneously.

"Mr. Drake, would you answer?" I pressed, taking command of the situation.

"Walker and Clay have a long history of fighting each other. Most people who have joined recently don't know about their rivalry. You can ignore it when they aren't shouting like this."

We continued to talk about their baby and their lives. Masquerade was going to get back to crime-fighting once their child was a bit older, or accommodations could be made to make it reasonable. Polyxena was just focused on the present but insistent that they were going to share responsibilities evenly and fairly in child raising and housekeeping.

After dinner, my family and I flew off.

"As nice as this place is, I can't imagine living here," Matheus commented sheepishly. He probably felt guilty for not liking it there.

"What? I think it was all pretty nifty. They didn't take too kindly of my gun, I admit, but they were not bad folk."

Calamity cared more about people being friendly than falling into convention.

There were countless different townships and land reclamation projects throughout Abya Yala that made up its Democratic Confederation side. The Iroquois Confederacy, for example, had been doing very well with building up their communities and healthcare infrastructure, but moving there was understandably limited right now. I needed to consider someplace that would fit with Matheus and my Beruner preferences.

"We will try one more option in this country," I muttered. It was the one I was dreading.

---

Bde Óta Othúŋwe, Democratic Federation of Abya Yala - 12th of July, 1953

If I weren't terrified of being repurposed as a mage-shaped nuke by European countries or the Russy Federation, I wouldn't be in this planned economy of the Democratic Federation. As for our new maybe-hometown of Bde Óta Othúŋwe [Many Lakes Town], it had seen a lot of riots as the revolutionary army set up the new government from those who wanted to keep the Silver Legion rule, but the workers' council went away fast to rebuild roads and infrastructure doing Hoosevelt style projects to keep people employed and the economy humming during the transition.

What surprised me most was how seamless a lot of it seemed. From what I can determine, the big difference between the Old Federation and Zhangzi's rapid transition into very pure socialism was the increased democratic element, allowing for more sophisticated policy-making, as well as the fact that most of the economy was already effectively collectivized under authoritarian, price-controlling monopolies. Replacing the leadership of a monopoly with worker councils with the assistance of technocratic advisors proved…terrifyingly simple.

Setting up farmer co-ops as the market was democratized would take time. The Americans decided not to employ the disastrous Soviet-Union-style shock therapy to go from the authoritarian American model of economics to a democratic one, which resulted in massive amounts of death and oligarchies taking over in my past life. Instead, they employed a planned and steady approach to dismantling the dictatorship of the Silver Legion.

They reformed the economy so that it had social ownership and used what the late Demiguichi had called the dual-track system. It first required key industries to meet quotas sold at a set value to the government. This quota was so the country could still keep its promise to the people to ensure that their basic needs were taken care of from 'the cradle to the grave'. Then, any surplus production could be sold at market value. This system was what had turned China of Tanya's past life from one of the poorest countries into one of the wealthiest countries in that world with a booming commodity market in a few decades.

Still, it gave the federal government a lot of power to control the economy and, by extension, people's lives. You needed a lot of trust in your political apparatus to live in a planned economy. The stronger the state, the more dangerous it can be when corrupted.

'We are not going back to Grafton,' Sonnetto stated, her mental arms akimbo.

'Wasn't planning on it, dear.'

I had to go through a fairly typical bureaucratic process to migrate into the Federation side of the country's political makeup. It wasn't as intensive as Germania, but it definitely created several hoops to jump through to start my new life.

"Name?" the immigration official asked me.

"Sonata Canary von Weiss," Matheus spoke on my behalf.

Matheus acted as my translator. Not everyone could hear my voice. Since it would raise unnecessary questions if I talked to my friends while on mute, I used sign language primarily around strangers.

"Age?"

"...75."

I kind of made it up. It was hard to figure out what would make sense.

The man looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Mage status?"

"Full mage." And then some.

"Great War Longevity, I assume."

"Yeah. I do."

"Are you part of a union already?"

"No, not really."

"Then you will need to join one as part of your citizen responsibilities for now. You have to keep that collective spirit up and educate folks on how things work in a democracy. What is your occupation?"

"Magical International Police Officer."

"You are an MI, then. Awesome. Big fan of Agent Nichts. I hope she catches that Richard Diamond bastard and brings him to justice."

"I am sure she will get to it eventually," I replied with a slight smirk.

'Pzzzt.' a certain homunculus burst into laughter in my soul space.

'Sonnetto, it isn't that funny.'

'I find it hilarious that people do this around us all the time. Oh, don't pout. Let me give you a kiss.'

I did my best to hide my blushing behind my hands. Calamity seemed to have guessed what was happening in my head, but the strangers around us wouldn't understand.

"So here are the few options for your area for your local worker council. Also, here is guidance for participating in general assemblies. This one will tell you where to go to attend classes to learn Dakhóta and the history of the region."

I took the pamphlets and scanned the list of local community centers for one that might interest one or both of my halves.

"Do you want to volunteer for Sortition selection?" the man inquired, continuing down his forms.

"Very much no."

The Federation of Abya Yala used a bicameral legislature, with one half being a senate of technocrats and council representatives and the other half being a people's house composed of a sortition of lottery-selected individuals from across the country. This bicameral setup, notably, segregated powers and duties away from the technocrats, such as the ability to remove corrupt officials from the Senate and prevent the consolidation of power into a dictator. In essence, being part of a sortition amounted to jury duty, but for the People's House.

I didn't want to potentially be tied down doing legislative jury duty for a couple of years, which was why I didn't volunteer for that.

After answering the rest of the questions, we reached the last bit of business at the immigration office.

"Okay, I will need to take a picture to finish your ID, ma'am."

Oh shit. Well, this will be complicated.

My appearance does not appear in mirrors or on film, and everyone sees me as a different stranger these days unless they bypass the Silver Mirror power.

I turned to Matheus and Calamity Amb for advice. My adoptive father simply shrugged.

"I reckon we were going to have to pull a few strings," the Tejan stated.

And a few strings, indeed, did get pulled. It helped to have friends in high places.

Once everything got settled, my family moved into an apartment next to Loring Park in the city of Bde Óta Othúŋwe. Loring Park was apparently dubbed the gayborhood, and Bde Óta Othúŋwe was rumored to be the lesbian capital of the country secretly. I figured it would be relatively safe for me and my family. While the couple in my soul had one another, my body still wanted company. It would be nice to go to some lesbian bars and get reintegrated into the community here.

Depressingly, the Berun GLBT community in my home country had fallen apart, and Bde Óta Othúŋwe had become a haven for those fleeing as Europa became increasingly nationalistic again and their biggest threat became the Russy Federation.

On the bright side, I found a lovely group of artists to help me improve my painting skills. My first piece, as a fusion, depicted how Tanya and Sonnetto fused together and created me.

'I think you are exaggerating my figure a bit, Tanya,' Sonnetto stated.

'Hey, we are both technically making this, and I like to think of it as being stylized. How do you know you aren't the one doing it?'

'Because I know how I paint myself.'

'Well, you definitely went all out on my hair.'

'No, the waves really do look like that.'

'Really?' Tanya wondered, reviewing Sonnetto's memories.

'Yeah, it is gorgeous.' the white-haired interpol officer replied.

'Well, I think you look pretty cool when you have your short hair and those twin pistols out.'

'You always did like tomboys,' Sonnetto replied with a chuckle and a mental hug to her other half.

'Well, I have great taste, is all.'

More soul-space kisses and such ensued.

We deserved this happiness. After so long, we deserved it.

---

Mapudungun International Airport, Andean Confederacy - 2nd of November, 1953

"Welcome!" cheered Doctor Khuyana Gonzalez and members of her ayllu (family clan) as my family and I came out of the plane.

"There are a lot of you," I signed excitedly. It was nice meeting her again after so many years. It felt like a lifetime. I fished some stuff out of my packs. "We brought gifts."

"Oh, we appreciate it."

I let her see the painting I made of her battle form, which I think really captured her fierceness but loving side.

"I forgot to bring sunscreen, and Matheus needs toothpaste," Calamity mentioned. "Where can we buy…I mean, get one."

"I don't think anyone in my ayllu has spare toothbrushes," Khuyana answered in Ispagnia. "But we do have sunscreen we can share. If we don't, I know how to make some."

"I really don't know how we are going to do this whole trip the Inca way," I stated with curiosity.

The Inca had an advanced 'moneyless' society based on family-clans-based mutualism and solidarity; however, that left visitors in a bind to join up with an ayllu or bring a bunch of gifts and things with which to barter.

For this reason, we brought some bags of Gonzalez-approved seeds that the local mages would love to experiment with in their spell gardens. We had to be very careful not to get anything that didn't belong in the local ecology and cause unforeseen consequences. Getting through customs was a pain, but eventually, our seeds got double-checked.

Tanya wasn't an environmentalist, but she knew well enough that to mess with the Amazon too much was to mess with the ability of all humans to live on the planet. She had friends on this planet. Plus, neither Sonnetto nor Tanya wanted to step on any toes while visiting another country or cause havoc through ignorance. That was why you always had to ask local experts for guidance on this stuff; they lived there and just knew better.

"The shops in the cities will take currency," our Andean sponsor clarified for me. Khuyana might have lived in Argentum, but most of her family lived in the Confederacy to the north, which had once been the mighty Inca Empire before colonization and their subsequent war for independence.

I gave her an exasperated look.

"Hey, we Andeans want to buy stuff from Abya Yala, too, and most foreigners want to trade in currency. It is when you get to the countryside that you will need barter goods. Plus, tourist destinations are set up with foreigners in mind."

To each their own, I guessed. A debate over whether to have a moneyless society or not had been raging back in Abya Yala after some millionaires were caught attempting to bribe members of the current sortition. Some thought that having more money equated to having more rights. I thought it was terribly impractical not to have money. Get rid of accumulating cash, and people will just accumulate goods. If you make goods family-owned or communally-owned, then those families and communes will accumulate goods. The same dynamics would remain present.

Markets always find a way to exist. The key was having a system of internal and external controls like any corporation worth its salt would have to prevent fraud, misappropriation of assets, material misstatements of public reports, etc. Really, people just need to get CPAs to design their legislatures and resource management systems to have properly established responsibilities, segregation of duties, and restricted access.

Regardless, it was fun hanging out with Khuyana and her Ayllu. Calamity really loved the nature here. We even went to see the penguins. We took a lot of photos.

Matheus did have to go to the hospital after an accident with some wildlife he really should not have gotten that close to. Really, he has let his being a mage get to his head. We aren't indestructible. A snake bites in the middle of the jungle without Khuyana around, and he would be dead.

While I wouldn't want to live in the Andean Confederacy, like I say — to each their own. That was what freedom meant to me. Find a way you want to live.

On our way back to Abya Yala, Khuyana pulled me aside.

"Sonnetto, Tanya, I wanted to tell you both that everyone in the MI54 is relieved you both are safe," she said with soulful violet eyes.

"It isn't the first time an ego-maniacal asshole has tried to take me out. Although it is the first time I am forced to share a body with another person permanently."

"Still, we were so worried. I might have needed to…."

"It is okay, Doctor Gonzalez." I took her into a hug and rocked her a bit. She had been holding this in during the whole trip, not knowing when to bring it up, I guessed. Now that I was leaving, this was her last chance to get it off her chest. "If Tanya were trapped that way, she would have wanted you to."

"If you ever need us, let us know. We aren't going to let those bastards ruin any more countries or take any more people like they did you."

"Thank you. We will catch him as soon as we can. We just have to wait until we are given the call."

We had not known each other very long, but I could feel that we were kindred spirits in a way. Now my vacation was over, it was time to get back to work. I wish it had lasted longer, but to be honest, the fact I could not find a place I really liked to stay, plus my legal status as "Sonata" would have made a more extended vacation more of a hassle anyway.

---

Interpol Branch Office in Bde Óta Othúŋwe, Democratic Federation of Abya Yala - 30th of January, 1954

Agent Fred Wei-Ho put another recording jewel into the display box. I had decided we needed to desegregate mages and non-mages in our field teams more, and Fred had proven an excellent field operative when it came to gathering information on the ground. There were just too few mages, and it helped keep us grounded in a way that was often lost just being in a mage-only club together, as well as having someone available to intervene in the oft too common instance of non-mages being present who needed apprehending.

I supplied mana for the orb to operate, and a projection of Paul Robeson's hearing at the House Un-American Activities Committee went on display.


View: https://youtu.be/bFLg-LpiEok?si=xeAUbgG8riu1A7uS
(This would have been set before the Silver Legion took power in 1936. Note that the language is from the period, and some historical references will be off.)

Fred and I took notes detailing for the International Criminal Court prosecutors. There was just so much to go through. Some had been destroyed, but we needed to dig not only for signs of what had happened but also for what had led to fascism's rise in the Unified States. The world needed to know what the signs were and how we could make sure to catch them before history repeated itself.

The League of Nations also had to become smarter and have the proper teeth to curb the twin evils of imperialism and fascism. The former was the impulse to take from other regions and genocide them for profit. The latter was when that imperialist tendency turned inwards through the genocidal acquisition of cultural and ethnic 'territory and resources' within a country, in my opinion.

Both, I believed, were an affront to what any principled liberal should believe in. Imperialism amounted to grand theft at the national level, which was why it was necessary to curb the lawlessness between nations through the prudent use of global governance. Fascism or Legionism was a no-brainer, but the tricky thing was knowing how and when to intervene in a country. We didn't want just to turn the League of Nations into an imperialist instrument using the oft-used pretense of 'civilizing savages' that the European officials employed when abusing, enslaving, and genociding people into understanding how to be decent human beings.

When the footage ended, a seemingly random thing caught my attention.

"What did the committee mean by communist name?" I asked my colleague Agent Ho.

"You know how Mae Shpigel goes by Freddie Forest in her writings?"

I nodded.

"That is because it is not safe. Communists get spied upon, arrested, and murdered — revolutionary or not, like with how the AAA in Argentum rounds up politicians, journalists, and activists and kills them. It isn't safe to be critical of fascist regimes."

"Or certain communist ones," I added, remembering Ramona Mercer's picking off her fellow commies who criticized the Old Federation and became 'revisionists'. "For all their talk of solidarity, they sure fought with each other a lot, even to the point of killing each other. Well, to be a revolutionary was to accept that negotiation already was off the table."

"Well, would you be moderate in the name of justice?" Fred countered.

"I would be moderate in the name of losing myself in irrational desire just to hurt people," I retorted back casually. Mary Sue had definitely taught me that the pursuit of 'justice' could go way too far. "Before one criticizes some prudent moderation, one should imagine being on the receiving end of too much revanchist justice."

We kept going through records on this thread of abuses. Paul Robeson died in Moscva after what was believed to been mental destablization due to an injection of MKUltra, which was a brainwashing drug used by the CIA in torture. MKUltra was the successor to Project Artichoke before the refinement of the formula with the help of the most amoral scientists they could find to do human experiments through Operation Paperclip. The head of the CIA destroyed most of the documents before the agency and its allies could be held accountable. Tanya, who had a long and traumatic history of fighting mind control, took the task of holding these people accountable for their crimes. They would have to do a lot of interviews to recover what was lost.

Somewhat similar to the role of the AAA in Argentum now, the CIA had systematically attempted to covertly eliminate, disrupt, and denigrate any anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist organizations in the country. Paul Robeson was hardly the only victim of these purges of political resistance to the rising unique brand of fascism in America called Legionism. The CIA had files on everyone from journalists to politicians to activists of all stripes who held highly critical positions in US domestic and foreign policy. Philosophy professors, in particular, found their ability to publish papers revoked, and they were ushered out of universities en masse.

Then, as I flipped through the more documents with Agent Ho, I got a surprise call.

"Tanya, Sonnetto, you have some time for a meeting," someone messaged me through my Solidarity powers.

"May I ask who is calling?" Tanya replied.

"Oh, sorry, your friend with problems, Elya."

Fred noticed that I had gotten distracted. "You in a call?"

"Yeah, do you mind if I step out to have a meeting with our boss?"

He waved me off. "I will continue where we left off with making our report."

I took our professional duty as law enforcement to provide our contribution to the accounting of history from the point of view of justice and law enforcement very seriously. We weren't perfect and not focused on every aspect of what happened. Still, we had a fiduciary duty to the world public to give a nuanced understanding of the incentives, opportunities, and rationalizations that led to Legionism and its various atrocities.

"Be back soon, Fred."

I headed out to my office in the new Interpol Abya Yala branch headquarters. Calamity Amb and Masquerade wanted in on the 'call', so I pulled them in as well. This was far from the first time they did this, and a lot of information about Tanya's past life had to be shared, given her complex situation. Every time she shared her true self with someone trustworthy, though, it became easier the next time.

---

Sonata's Soul Space

Unlike just talking through Solidarity connections, Tanya and Sonnetto could bring their allies into their Soulspace for more coherent conversations. It was hard to understand each other if you couldn't distinguish their messages from your own thoughts.

Tanya set up an imaginary conference table while Sonnetto made sure the soul-stuff chairs would be comfortable.

Elya's soul came into the conference room and took a chair. She had these cracks along her spirit's porcelain-like surface but eyes that seemed to pierce straight into your soul. In short, her form here made clear what her flesh form obscured.

Calamity Amb stood tall when she nonchalantly mosey on inside. She had her Tejas cowgirl outfit, but one of her hands was forever covered in the blood of her self-condemnation, while the other often had a torch of past struggles. Around her neck was a locket with a picture of her family, which her understanding of her father featured prominently despite her not having many memories of him. The man lived on in the stories her mother and sister had told the Tejan.

Masquerade looked a bit like a sunflower with a green suit, a yellow-petal-shaped ascot, and a masked face that somehow always had sunlight upon it. He definitely thrived in the spotlight and sought it out. If his mask fell off, though, his form would fall into darkness.

Once they were all seated, the meeting began.

"Do you want to start with work or politics?" Senior Officer Elena Müller began as Tanya conjured coffee for everyone — their favorite blends, brewed precisely as they liked them.

"Politics first, please," Tanya stated. "I am concerned about you, my former adjutant, and her family, given some of what I heard."

While the two soulmates had kept occasional tabs on the politics of Tanya's home country, their house search and Silver Legion investigation in Abya Yala had kept their focus there. Sonnetto had encouraged Tanya to avoid negative news for a few months for her mental health. However, the situation had gotten to the point where the reincarnated soul's worries about what was happening to the country where many people she cared about lived demanded an update.

As for the others, no one was going to disagree with that. They knew the stakes were high in how Germania's political elections went. With the Russy Federation breathing down their homeland's neck for an excuse to invade and the Francois Republic poking bears that really should not be poked, World War II could still occur. That was before discussing the situation within the Fatherland.

"How did the bid to repeal Paragraph 175?" Sonnetto inquired with apt interest. Decriminalizing male homosexuality, which Paragraph 175 criminalized, would help everyone in the GLBT community in Germania by giving the country a sense of normalcy.

"The Scientific Humanitarians got the libertarians to vote with them on the repeal by convincing them that 175 enabled people blackmailed people with the threat to accusing them of homosexuality," Elya answered with a dutiful report. During these soul conference meetings, she gained this business lady mask over her face. Sonnetto had the feeling it was to appeal to her soulmate. "Everyone remembers the Eulenburg Affair, so we know how much harm accusations, true or not, can be."

Well, some of those present remember that.

The homunculus, who was privy to Tanya's mind, could see some memories flashing by. Her love remembered how, in her past life, President Ronald Reagan had been convinced of the same argument by activists in the gay rights movement with the same argument. It bothered Tanya that 'small-government' types couldn't just decriminalize homosexuality on principle rather than needing to be convinced how it might impact people 'like them'. Sonnetto knew better, being very familiar with these constant contradictions between what people say and what people do, but it was hard for Tanya to be perpetually disappointed in her fellow pragmatic liberals' hypocrisy.

"What is the likelihood of the repeal passing?" Tanya attempted to sound hopeful despite her frustrations and life-long experience of being disappointed.

"Right now, slim," Elya replied. "Not only did we just finish our elections, but the recession here due to the revolution in the Unified States as well as the huge shift of power towards the socialist camp geopolitically has put several other policy matters higher on the agenda."

It was what it was. Tanya knew gay rights in most capitalist countries were going to take a long time to develop.

"Okay, we have a socialist party gaining massive ground with rural, women, and middle-class voters," Elya reported before taking a sip and thanking Tanya with a smile.

"Well, ain't that good news!" Calamity proclaimed, making her political biases clear. "What is their platform? Any nationalization of industries, bolstering unions, equality between the sexes, anti-war, and anti-discrimination?"

"Quite the opposite," the spiritual porcelain former spy replied with a smile. "They plan on privatizing some state industries, banning trade unions and establishing a party-run replacement, restoring traditional family values where 'men are men and women are women', rehashing the Great War to bring back the Empire days, and going after several minorities with a vengeance."

"How in tarnation are those socialists!" the gunslinger grossed. "That's just some jingoist conservatives."

"It is a cynical ploy to get working-class votes by coopting their slogans, language, and labels," Elya explained and then complimented Sonnetto for the pictures and calligraphy she had added to the coffee cups. "You should see how their leader will give speeches to get the religious vote while obviously not liking the Universalist faith. It is all whatever will get them to vote for his party. However, what I am really concerned about is how they are picking up so many women as voters."

Masquerade tapped his soul's shiny chin. "If I had to guess, it is child care."

This got Tanya perked up at a subject very much on her mind often these days.

"Think about it: after the war, all women had to get into the workforce en masse, but then many had kids, of whom they were also expected to take care of all alone," he clarified, flexing his insight as a soon-to-be father who makes frequent joint decisions with his partner.

"Basically, they can't figure out how to balance doing effective two full-time jobs," Tanya stated, deep in thought before imagining her cup full again. "So these traditionalists are offering women a way to go back to something more manageable in the form of family life before the Great War. Speaking of which, we should probably have Interpol start providing professional childcare services and perhaps places for families to stay during prolonged investigations."

It made sense to the Japanese-Germanian woman who had been grappling with how to balance work and the question of how to start a family in a world that still lacked the infrastructure to support two-earner households. In her past life as an HR manager, childcare services were a standard benefit for employees who needed help balancing work-life as work hours increased, commute time increased, and both spouses found themselves needed to work to make ends meet. It was just more profitable for a company to provide childcare if it meant getting more hours out of their employees.

As for her other idea, she had seen American soldiers in her past life be stationed in Japan with their families in the residential areas around military bases. If Interpol could do something similar, she could transition MI15 to a major case team that required a high-powered team.

Then, something triggered in Tanya's memory as she tugged on her past life's memories more. "Would these happen to be national socialists?"

"Yes, and their party leader happens to be Rudolph Himmler right now," Elya answered somewhat passively.

It wasn't like the former spy didn't seem concerned, but bombastic 'good ol' glory days' politicians were a rentenpfennig a dozen.

"I know about that no-good, Phord-ass-kissing, anti-Heartist-conspiracy-spouting son-of-a-gun Himmler!" Calamity shouted with rage billowing in her torch. "Explains why he wants to get rid of unions upon getting into office. They are two peas in one hateful, ignorant pod. You know, Phord once published that he thought the planet couldn't support skyscrapers in his papers. When the Chicago Tribune editorial board criticized him for being an imbecilic blobfish, the millionaire sued to silence them. It backfired royally because he had to admit in court that he didn't really know anything about most things he often wrote about in his papers. Both Phord and Himmler hate how the press keeps telling them that they are full of bull."

Sonnetto could listen to Calamity's stories for hours. The woman always had one ready for any situation.

"That certainly is the case," Elya replied. "Himmler has taken to calling the press 'die Lügenpresse' [lying press] and has vowed to eliminate the freedom of the press."

"You know you are ruled by criminals when revealing their misdeeds and mistakes is criminalized," Masquerade commented with a flourish of wit. "I think—"

"No, this isn't a joking matter!" Tanya interrupted in a way she rarely did. It was obvious now to everyone that she was freaking out again. Most of them didn't know what she knew. "We have to make sure he doesn't take power. What were the election results?"

"They received about 37.3% of the vote," Elya replied. "It isn't clear who will take the ruling coalition."

Calamity looked confused. The pre-Legion Unified States didn't have proportional representation or any of the other 20th-century democratic bells and whistles that the Germania Republic had. One of the benefits of starting a new government was building off of what worked and didn't work in the past to try to make something better…hopefully.

"So no, they will have to make a minority coalition," Masquerade offered. "Who is really going to work with Himmler's party?"

"We have to wait and find out," Elya answered. "By the way, how is 'Jane' doing?"

"Well, actually, we have been going through things one step at a time. We have to go to the doctor—"

Interrupting him and everyone was the soul space filling with a sudden burst of images and screams bouncing around the conference room.

"He will kill them."

"--save Visha."

"I messed up again. I always mess."

"Why didn't I do something…why didn't I stop this!"

Sonnetto quickly went to comfort her love as terrified, paranoid thoughts started flowing out of her head through her hair, which grew to fill the soul space.

Everyone was frozen in surprise. Tanya had had panic attacks before, but never while they were in her soul space. They could only watch as countless glimpses of text, videos, and stray thoughts from Tanya had as her spirit shuddered.

It was complicated to express it. Those who haven't experienced the terror of being surrounded by neighbors who act nice but vote for politicians vowing to eradicate your existence off the face of the earth wouldn't understand. How does one eat dinner with someone who doesn't understand what their beliefs mean? How can one be friends with someone who tries to cheer you up after voting for Himmler, claiming that what you fear won't happen when you know it can? …when you know to take the bombastic promises seriously?

"If it's alright, I think Tanya needs the rest of the day off," Sonnetto added as she squeezed Tanya tighter against her spiritual body, bringing the episode to an end. "Elya, you and I still need to talk sometime, but right now, can you and Brecht do something to make sure that none of this doesn't happen? For us, for Visha's family, for everyone."

They all bowed out with their apologies. Tanya had asked Elya for an update and gotten what she desired in all its terrifying reality. To face reality with knowledge of what is and could be can be the most horrifying experience.

As Sonnetto understood it, there lay inside each person is a constellation of instincts, desires, histories, and limits. Align them in one way, and they can turn out with a Mary Sue. Turn them another way, and you can get a Tanya. Every once in a while, a charismatic leader with a particular vision will hit upon one set of constellations of the human that allow them to get away with the greatest of tragedies. The silver lining was that these individuals of disaster rarely held the majority truly under their sway, in Sonnetto's opinion. The key was fostering moral courage to stand up against the mob and the solidarity that would bring the many to support the resistance.

Sonnetto had lived a life of being unheard, and not only because she was mute. She refused to let her light and the lights of so many people who knew what it was like to be hated, misunderstood, and discriminated against be snuffed out. People needed to learn to listen and to really hear.

The report about the Silver Legion's rise to power would just be the start. As James Baldwin said, 'We will live here together, or we will die here together. It is not I who is telling you. It is time that is telling you. You will listen, or you will perish.' People need to know how serious it is to fight the forces of oppression because if they wait, it will come for them.

---

Bde Óta Othúŋwe & Imnizha ska International Airport - 18th of February, 1954

The sounds of the people in the airport filled the air around me. Away from my friends, I was the absolute stranger. The Silver Mirror curse prevented everyone from seeing the real me unless they tried to see me, and it now prevented them from hearing me unless they knew how to listen to my voice. Not even my alchemical tattoos or a face mask could get past the mirror. Since no one knew Sonata, they had no prejudices to determine what they thought I should look like.

I found that I rediscovered how to show some of my halves former selves with some concentration. As far as the world was concerned, Agent Nichts still flew around, saving the day. I could even shift my mana signature between Tanya's and Sonnetto's. Leaving it in between the two made me seem like a completely different person as far as mages were concerned.

While I fidgeted nervously, people started walking off the plane.

"Visha!" I shouted, waving my hands.

The woman didn't notice me….she didn't even hear me. Her daughter, who was an Interpol agent, tugged on her mother's arm and pointed Visha towards me.

Tanya's former adjutant looked at me like a complete stranger.

'Ugh…this is so familiar.'

Then, Visha focused on me, and her eyes widened.

I could have forced Tanya's appearance, but that would have caused other potential problems I wanted to avoid. The only people who knew who I was were trusted friends and allies in the echelons of Interpol. I used those same connections to get Visha and her family out of Germania before violence against the Russy and Eastern Europeans spiked again. People were dying already again from mob violence.

"Tanya…is that really you."

"Sonnetto is here too. We both are."

Visha tilted her head. I repeated myself while pointing to my ears. It took a moment and help from her daughter, but she got the hang of being in tune with hearing me.

"May I hug you?" I asked.

"I…yes, you can," she replied.

I held her, not caring if people could see me talking. Sometimes, it was worth being afraid of minute risks.

"I was certain you were mad at me still," she stated with a wetness born of nostalgia and suppressed grief.

"And I you."

"We both made mistakes, didn't we?"

"We did…Visha?"

"Yes, Tanya."

"I…just wanted to say I am glad you are safe. We can talk about what went wrong another day, but right now, I just want you to be safe."

I had honestly forgotten everything I had wanted to say to Visha over these years, both Tanya and Sonnetto. Underneath all that hurt still lingered a feeling that would never go away. How does a person ever hate Visha? How does someone forget the person who stayed by your side through thick and thin?

It didn't matter who caused the rift between us or any accounting of grievances. Some things transcended such things. We would talk about things, but without a fire that tore away what good remained between us.

I could feel years of grief in Visha that had trapped her, and my mana helped her pull out of that inner turmoil and reconnect with Tanya again.

We went to my home and had some dinner with my family before they went to the dwelling we had prepared for them. It would be cozy, but they were safe here in Abya Yala. If everything went according to plan, our carefully crafted report on the Silver Legion and Elya's efforts would soon make Germania safe. History did not have to repeat itself this time.

---

Sonata's Soulspace - 10th of March, 1954

It had been a couple of months since our report was released. Coupled with countless journalists and academics scouring the former Unified States for answers for what had happened, the world had come to understand the horror that the Silver Legion embodied. All that remained was hunting down the remainder of their leadership. In the meantime, Tanya and Sonnetto could move on to new jobs.

Elya had called another conference in Sonata's soul space, which not only gave them completely safe communication of case details but allowed them to be together when their physical bodies were oceans apart. This meeting only had Fang, Elya, Calamity, Sonnetto, and Tanya—basically, they are the most senior active members of MI15.

"How is your new arm treating ya, Fang?" Calamity inquired about their martial artist teammate.

"Actually, quite well," he replied.

We couldn't see it, but we assumed he was flexing his magetech arm. It wouldn't be as helpful as his other arm since his flesh was infused with mana to make his abilities work. That being said, some strides were being made for battlemage augmentation for prosthetics. It was unclear if cultivators would be able to use such tech fully, given the incompatibility of their Dao foundations to computation-core-based technology.

"The folks back in Zhangzi treating you well? I know the Old Federation didn't treat their Great War veterans too well."

"The people in Zhangzi aren't treating me differently because of my injury so much as my parentage," he replied, trying his best to navigate a rather sensitive subject for countless reasons emotionally. "My father was a bureaucrat in the clouds, and my mother is part of the Angels, which are seen as aligned with the Russy Federation. Don't worry, though. I will be joining you all in the States soon."

"Well, if anyone gives you any trouble here in the States or anywhere, let me know, and I will be there, my friend."

Fang shrugged.

What went unsaid was the way the Old Federation treated disability. Since the rich were parasites for not working, so were veterans who had suffered severe injuries and couldn't work anymore. In the Old Federation, the idealized worker was the healthy young man or woman who worked with their hands, and the degree to which you differed from that ideal, like someone who had lost their digits in the war, the more marginalized one became. The result of all of this was that many veterans with disabilities were effectively exiled to the outskirts of the Federation, where they were out of sight and out of mind. As Mae Shpigel put it, 'If you were not going to be a productive cog in the machine, you would be tossed aside.'

They went through the rest of the pleasantries, and then Senior Officer Elena 'Elya' Müller started the meeting.

"Operation Diamondbacks continues to be a success," she informed MI15. "Our mole has successfully convinced Richard Diamond that he needs to turn over more and more of his allies to our side in order to 'stay free'. Due to his betrayals, we have secured essential evidence for several ongoing cases as more criminals are apprehended to be tried by the ICC."

We were waiting for the day that Diamond ran out of allies to sacrifice to the altar of justice. He was just too predictable once you got to really know him.

After going through more details on those captures, Elya moved on to the next subject — the next mission for MI15.

"We have several options lined up for you to pick. Your team has first dibs due to seniority, Tanya." It was hard to beat being one of the very first Interpol officers in this world. "Two involve the Francois Republic."

Tanya frowned. She and that country had a history.

"The first case involves the Francois testing of something called an arcanium bomb in Dzayer. Reports indicate 42,000 deaths have occurred, and the region is highly contaminated with a deadly mutation causing mana fluctuations."

Some pictures showed what the bombs were capable of. The tests were a combination of mid-air and subterranean detonations. It was the first many of the MI15 officers present had seen such a weapon, and they exclaimed at what they were seeing. The Republic was the first country known to create such a device.

"What in tarn—"

"Even if they weren't an independent country, this is terrifying!"

"There is no way the Dzayerians approved of that."

A cacophony of voices erupted but went silent quickly as Elya raised her soul's chipped porcelain hand into the air. Tanya was the first to speak.

"The damned frogs just have no respect for national sovereignty," the Germanian war vet simmered. "They initiated a war of aggression against the Fatherland, played the victim, and now they are doing this to the Dzayerians. I lost aunts and uncles to the atomic—"

"Tanya! Stop it right now," Sonnetto interrupted with a glare. "You absolutely have to cease saying things like this. Don't treat countries as monoliths. You know that. Now, what did you learn at the union meeting yesterday."

The reincarnated soul turned away in shame before reciting the key lesson from their officer professional ethics course at the union meeting last night.

"'Collective punishment is a war crime. Don't blame everyone in a country for what their leaders decide. Instead, hold the decision-makers accountable.'"

Tanya knew this already deep down. In her previous life, her corporate training had drilled into the rationale behind the SOX laws, which held management ultimately responsible for controlling fraud and corruption. In her current life, the Great War had emphasized targeting the enemy's leaders. While there was a messy translation between the situations, the throughline focused on those at the top.

But she wasn't the only one who had struggles with revanchist attitudes.

"Sonnetto, what is wrong?" She asked with worry evident on Tanya's face.

"Let's..just keep the meeting going."

Having access to parts of Sonnetto's mind, Tanya could see a simmering rage directed at President Billards of the Republic. Her partner, rather unprofessionally, had a stray thought about the millionaire and his friends dying mysteriously on his fancy yacht for profiteering and terrorism they were doing all across Afrika. Richard Diamond and Emperor Cassander had left an impact on both of their sense of justice, and she started seeing more and more Diamond-like individuals as they received more intel from the duped businessman. One of Sonnetto's thoughts swirled around how blasé people were when the Billards of the world could have leaders assassinated anywhere else in the world other than Europa yet would scream at the injustice if such a thing ever happened to a European leader.

Neither Tanya nor Sonnetto wanted to get involved in extrajudicial justice, but as the ICC and Interpol got more teeth, the institutions could do what the national-level law enforcement systems could not. Hopefully, one day, it wouldn't just be protesting the war crimes of elected leaders but actually holding them accountable for their crimes even during their term in office. Interpol just had to play their cards right to get there.

"May we do a case that does not involve the Francois Republic?" Tanya requested on behalf of her team. She could feel this irked Sonnetto but persisted. "After the Covert Corp case, I think MI15 should stay clear of investigating that country for a while."

"Very well, our next case is also thanks to Diamond giving me intel. The MI15 report, as well as all the journalists reporting on the Silver Legion's activities, has resulted in loud public condemnations of the Legion by several governments throughout the world and followed up by swift and discreet cover-ups of their own crimes to save face. Diamond has informed us of the Albish Colonial Office's massive obstruction of justice scheme called Operation Legacy."

The senior officer conjured an image of a very obvious fire at the Albish Colonial Office in New Delhi, followed by several more discreet operations across the Albish Empire, destroying documents and reports. One such report that was saved indicated a series of excess deaths of 165 million people in Bharat between the years of 1880 and 1920 through targeted famines and suppression activities by the Albish Colonial administrators.

Other documents covered the actions taken to exacerbate the Eirish people's starvation despite the fact they produced more than enough food that was being siphoned off to Albion, as well as countless other suppression activities since then. The result was that the Eirish population was still less today than it had been over a century ago. So thorough was the system of their devastation under Malthusian and landlord rule, whose armed guard took the plentiful food out of the land and who took advantage of the desperation of the Eirish to trade well below market value what little the Eirish had for well above market value what they needed to survive. All of this was justified by letting the invisible hand correct for 'overpopulation'.

"Moving on to the case I can assign to one of my teams is the Colonial Office's suppression of the Mau Mau Uprising in Senya," Elya continued, unphased by the information she already knew.

The retrieved documents Elya displayed of the torture methods, usage of concentration camps, and mass killings made Sonnetto's gut churn. Even Tanya became uncomfortable. There was a reason why she gave the 203rd counterintelligence training besides trying to get them to quit. This time period was rife with similar events, and people needed to be prepared for what lengths the powers at be would take to win in conflicts.

"If we get involved in such a high-profile case, especially after the Museum Heist fiasco, it might go belly up fast," Tanya commented with a bit of exhaustion. "The Commonwealth has already threatened to leave the League of Nations if they are treated 'unfairly'."

"And they plan to make an organization with the other Western European countries called the United Nations, apparently," Elya added neutrally without explaining how she knew that.

"Sounds more like a money-murder-imperialist club to me where they will give themselves veto power so they can never be held accountable again," Sonnetto accidentally let slip out.

Normally, the homunculus didn't have the opportunity to put her blunt outrage on public display like this, and the only way she knew about the veto was because Tanya did.

"As my pa once said," Calamity started as she drew from her family's wisdom. "The people who proudly support the use of the gun when it's pointed at innocent people are also the same people who cry to high heavens in surprise when they find another gun has been pointed back at them."

"I agree with Tanya after considering her words," Elya concluded crisply. "We don't want to agitate a split between the League and Western Europa right now by assigning MI15 to that case. Do you have any ideas about what kind of case you want to focus on?"

Tanya thought about it for a moment, looked at Sonnetto for approval, and then explained her decision.

"Preferably, can I get one involving a socialist country? People think I hate Europa and capitalism due to how my recent cases have been going."

"Very well. I didn't think you would want this case, but it is what we have available right now."

---

Interpol Office in Northern Bharat - 29th of April, 1954

Tanya and her big mouth.

Elya had sent the now much expanded and global in scope MI15 to assist in the investigation of human rights abuses in Northern Bharat, where an absolute powder keg of tensions between various ethnic and religious groups had gone off on a few months prior.

The top brass at the League of Nations wanted MI15 to replicate the reporting techniques we used during the Silver Legion report on Bharat. Our objectives were to bring culprits to justice, provide remedial justice to the victims, identify the root causes of the outbreak of violence, and prescribe effective solutions. Wading through highly partisan reports made creating a coherent narrative that would meet our objectives needed a completely different approach than what we used in the Silver Legion Report. There was not as relatively obvious a delineation between victims, perpetrators, and bystanders as there had been in the Silver Legion. There were several centuries of historical tensions here, and new grievances were piling up unevenly on every side each day. For example, the partisan reporting sometimes depicted the Legalists as the remnants of a previous imperial invasion who needed to be ousted like the Albish or sometimes as the victims of the dominant culture oppressing them.

How far into the past do we litigate? How much should historical rights matter over the material reality of tragedy faced by those being targeted?

I needed to lean on my team a lot for help in this case because these questions were far beyond what my two halves could comprehend without checks on their biases. I turned first to Investigator Fred Wei Ho.

"Okay, I am struggling to follow what is going on in Bharat here," I stated as I parsed through reports on the complex sectarian spiral of violence.

"Well, you know how the preamble of their constitution says that Bharat is a secular socialist democracy?" Fred Wei Ho inquired rhetorically.

I nodded.

"Well, the country is not secular, or socialist, or democratic."

In other words, the current state of affairs was filled with chauvinistic, profit-seeking, and oligarchic currents.

"Okay, Fred, but what are the causes of the problem," I replied as I tried to dig deeper into this complex problem. "I am a woman who wants to go straight to the core of the issue."

"At least in part, Gandhi's legacy."

"Okay, one, you are going to have to explain that to me. Second, we can't blame Gandhi for contributing to this situation in the slightest. The entire world will ridicule us, and we will create the wrong impression about the purpose of Interpol's interventions here."

"That is exactly the problem!" Fred threw his hands in the air, nearly knocking Jing-wei, another new teammate, over in his show of exasperation. "We can't blame his legacy for any unforeseen consequences it caused. He is too sacrosanct."

"Ugh, I think I understand the problem," I groaned. "We had the same problem with Martin Bishop in the States. These charismatic guys, as inspiring as their speeches might be, create a mythology around themselves that basically deifies them as the embodiment of the movement and the good."

"Which makes them above criticism," Masquerade added, adjusting his mask to cover his face better.

"And allows for prejudices to get cemented in that 'good'," Calamity followed up. "Well, I reckon this is going to be pretty bad. Obviously, one person can't take all the blame for anything that happened, but what did Gandhi actually do that contributed to this situation where we got shootouts and police rounding up Legalists for mass killings and all sorts of horrible, no-good things?"

"Well, it mostly has to deal with inserting a massive amount of religion and religious symbology into their nationalist movement for independence," Fred answered after apologizing to Jing-wei.

"Okay…."

"Despite the hero's sincere statements of the equality of all religions, his foregrounding of his faith constantly has indirectly made one religion more symbolic of national identity over others."

"Ahhh."

"And then there is his threat to fast to death if the country gets rid of the caste system or gives the 'untouchables' a separate electorate. He cemented into the post-colonial government that 'the hereditary principle as the eternal principle' and that 'to change it is to create disorder.' As we all know, dividing people between inferior and superior human beings is actually the source of disorder and violence that we are seeing everywhere such rigid hierarchies are implemented."

Fred had made a good point, in my opinion; however, it wasn't just ethnicity, caste, and religion that violently divided society.

Gender violence was also a severe issue that carried a legacy from the founders of Bharat's government. A few times, our team needed to negotiate an escort by an armed contingent of a local Tanechkist women's organization just to feel safe despite that group being labeled terrorists by the state. Again, the double-edged sword of mages not being legally able to defend themselves against non-mages in most cases made navigating the gut-wrenching realities of gender violence incredibly precarious. There were also non-mages on my team now.

Fred could only provide so much insight, so I needed more perspectives. I turned to Fang Shiyu, who often had a more traditional Wheelist perspective.

"Fang, I am having trouble understanding this report involving a few Bharat leaders sleeping naked with various women."

The young man lifted his wooden and metallic magetech prosthetic hand to his chin and tugged on a small beard he had been growing out.

"Well, I think their goal is to say that 'if I can resist temptation, so can you' from what I heard," he replied after looking at the document I passed him.

"And if the woman doesn't want to be part of the man testing his will?" I countered.

Fang didn't have a response to that. It wasn't something he had considered. A lot of his worldview focused on resisting temptations, but in a world in which women were temptations, their suffering was excused as 'understandable failures'.

"There has to be a better way than men gritting their teeth and women being modest to deal with the problem of gender violence," I groaned as I flipped through more reports while one of my four arms doodled absent-mindedly to ease my stress. Both Tanya and Sonnetto feared what could happen to them or their teammates anywhere in the world. During the Great War, Visha had more than once intervened to protect Tanya, who could be clueless about her vulnerabilities in various contexts. "Calamity, what's your opinion?"

"Well, you know I come from the American South," she replied. "Fighting for women is as ancient as slavery. The first time men took me seriously was the first time I took up a rifle. Power speaks more loudly than anything, and a gun takes a life as easily when a woman uses it as when a man does."

That was similar to the Tanechkist feminist's thoughts as well. Calamity took a moment to appreciate some silence as her words sunk in with the crowd around her. Despite leaving out the fact she also had innate magic, her words reflected the reality on the ground that they had been seeing.

"However, the frontier was a different time," she continued. "There wasn't a lot of law enforcement out there, and tanks and modern computation orbs hadn't been created. The DeCons [Democratic Confederates] back home can keep up the tradition of women's militias that kind of work when you aren't dealing with large-scale industrial military equipment. In more centralized situations like this, you need the state to be an extension of the will to protect everybody, including women. People need to feel the threat of retribution if they wrongly hurt anybody. The only reason why people take up arms to defend themselves is because they don't trust the gun of the state to be on their side."

Basically, one had to democratize law enforcement in a world where people wanted to live in a functional state that could more efficiently defend against imperial invasions. What that actually meant would be a complex issue to assign to the policy wonks who would synthesize the community voices we funneled into our report.

On the topic of women's militias, the DeFeds [Democratic Federationists] actually had them, too, and I had joined the one in Bde Óta Othúŋwe. It was fun for Tanya to teach people how to operate as an effective unit again. A women's militia wasn't an armed group of only women but rather a woman-inclusive group committed to the idea of a society without gender violence. Tanya remembered how many women in Germania had been forced into sex trafficking by the ring clubs that controlled a black market of food people needed to survive after the Great War. She wasn't about to let that happen again.

The people in Abya Yala also had no illusions that the Commonwealth would sit idly by as a new superpower arose that wasn't loyal to the imperialist powers in Europa. Even without the highly urban and industrialized East Coast that made up the current Unified States, Abya Yala had a lot of industrial power of its own and a massive amount of agriculture. Our West Coast kept us connected with Zhangzi and the Russy Federation, and we had forged tight partnerships with Central and South America, who appreciated having an anti-imperialist powerhouse in the region.

As for Bharat, it had joined the Non-Alignment Movement and did not take kindly to women's militias, which wouldn't have been necessary in a world in which women were safe. The modesty expectations and ascetic approaches weren't working. People needed to feel secure, or a group would come in to serve that unmet need. That was empathy-based market mechanisms at work.

There were a lot more things to think about here, so I called on our second new member of the now-global MI15.

"Jing-wei, what do you think about the situation we are tackling here in Bharat?"

"Well, I don't know how much this translates. As you all know, I left Zhangzi when General Secretary Tao consolidated power there. Just like Bharat nationalism became Gandhi and Gandhi nationalism, communism was Tao, and Tao was communism in my homeland. The General Secretary kicked out, imprisoned, or killed all the Angels, seasoned technocrats, and people who weren't fiercely loyal to his vision like we who were loyal to the Emperor."

"General Secretary Tao sounds awful like a Dzhugashvili 2.0 to me," Masquerade commented. "But Gandhi very much did not take the same path as Dzhugashvili."

"You are right in some respects, but let me finish this detour," Jing-wei replied as she floated around to proudly give the findings of her investigation. "Tao, like Dzhugashvili, was grappling with rampant sectarianism. He wanted to unite our country while it was in crisis, and his cultural revolution is his plan to do that."

"Yeah, but that 'my way or the highway' thinking results in a lot of plum-dumb policy decisions that can kill countless people," Calamity opined as she leaned back into her chair and fought an urge to put her feet on the table. The chairs they had were pretty comfy, and the table was lower to the ground than American ones. "You can't just make everyone think the same way, and I abhor using violence to make that happen."

"You know I am not a fan of Tao, who was ousted from the Emperor's side," Jing-wei said as she pointed at her report. "Okay. How about this issue on page two? As you can see, we have a leadership nepotism problem in Bharat, too. Just like Zhangzi has the Long Marchers loyal to Tao and their 'princeling' children taking a large portion of the leadership cadre, Bharat has a lot of politicians and business people using family names and ties as well as leveraging caste to get into positions of power."

In essence, an aristocracy of revolutionary leadership and those in the preexisting upper castes were formed. It was an issue in almost every post-revolutionary government, including the early Unified States that spurned its more radical Thomas Payne and institutionalized planter aristocracy that subordinated women, excluded the landless from voting, and enslaved a whole class of people. All of that is based on the fiction that some people are superior to other people and, therefore, deserve more political power, autonomy, and rights. Fighting against that fiction had resulted in a bloody civil war, which I ideally did not want to happen in Bharat.

Thinking about the Zhangzi situation specifically, I saw a huge issue in how its new government allowed people to hold multiple positions simultaneously, which one could and inevitably abuse to commit fraud, issue misleading reports, consolidate power, and become a dictator. It was Internal Controls 101 that did not allow that to happen. The lack of effective controls in Old Federation copycats gave the Iron Law of Oligarchy free reign to generate out-of-control, power-tripping dictators. I blame their contrarian governmental structures and their naive trust in their fellow working class for believing they didn't need the innovations of modern governments to prevent corrupt dictatorships. It was like thinking that if a person merely socialized their farm, it would make that leader above the corruption of wealth and a safe person to entrust ruling the entire country, which just so happens to include the now state-owned farm.

That being said, Bharat did not follow the ML model of a socialist state. Hence, hammering the issue of the tone from the top would only be part of the story. Structural differences between their governments had borne themselves out through meaningfully different corruption issues throughout the levels of Bharat's government compared to other socialist countries, as evidenced in our findings.

Still, I would have to tackle the issue of the charismatic leader, as Agent Ho recommended. Situations like these were why living saints and god-like figures were such a problem. No one was perfect, even Gandhi. Just as dehumanizing people as 'Untouchables' causes horrors, so does dehumanizing people as saintly heroes can create horrors too. Living, in reality, depended on grappling with the very human limits of our understanding. The abstraction of Heroes creates this unreality that some people are above such limits, and following them will also bring us out of our human limits. It also excused consolidating power into a superhuman persona who 'had all the answers'.

'Honestly, everyone should be forced to meet their heroes like I have had in this life. It is very eye-opening,' Tanya commented wryly.

Much coffee was had as we planned our arrests of suspected mages under our jurisdiction and wrote our report. In many ways, the report resembled audit opinion but of a country instead of a public corporation. It details organizational best practices, identifies material weaknesses in internal controls, and diving into cases of fraud, governmental malpractice, and crimes against humanity, which I wished countries and corporations would not do. We just had to word our report way more carefully than Fred or Calamity would in order to be heard.

Luckily, my Tanya half had plenty of experience with delicately worded emails in her past life. I needed to do lots of writing and compiling my team's reports as well as those of the local experts that night. I would just have to make sure I didn't bury the message too deep in indirect language.

'Wait, we are not doing it this way,' Sonnetto interrupted, disharmonizing my thoughts. 'We can't just go from championing a thorough and honest investigation of the Silver Legion's crimes to beating around the bush here, honey.'

'That's because it is easy to criticize the Silver Legion,' Tanya claimed from her mental workstation. 'We don't have to convince the Silver Legion that what they did was wrong. Just the public.'

'Obviously, it is easier to tell people that others were the villains in the story. We all know one likes being told they are wrong, but someone has to say it.'

'Sonnetto, are you, perchance, a bit biased here?'

'If standing up for the victims is wrong, then I don't mind being wrong.'

'Sonnetto, I can feel your rage. I literally know how you feel and how it is affecting me, too, but we have to be pragmatic here. We can't just get polemical.'

'We also can't be moderate when it comes to justice,' the white-haired officer challenged with some fire in her crimson eyes.

'And if that justice results in us not only being unheard but diminishing our ability to do justice in the future by creating a rift between Interpol and this massive country, then what? We get the shallow satisfaction of feeling morally superior while accomplishing nothing?'

'Tanya, do you have a solution that will allow our report to be taken seriously, elevate the unheard to the heard so the harm is front and center, and not cause tensions to rise to impossible-to-manage levels? Because right now, I think you are the biased one. Biased by your fear of the rejection and condemnation of others, which prevents you from taking the actions you should.'

I could feel a headache coming as my two halves had one of their rare fights. Each had some firmly held opinions about religion, confrontation, and politics. They didn't hate each other for their differences. In fact, they had a long history of challenging each other, hence how Tanya would write her responses to Sonnetto copious journals when they were still two individuals.

In the end, they decided on a compromise of having a thorough, more direct account that made clear what the injustice was, like what Sonnetto preferred. Still, they thoroughly checked for biases from their various sources to avoid having glaring ignorance there that would be immediately dismissed, which soothed Tanya's ever-present fears of causing retaliation if her very human limits and flaws became visible. The result was a 'truth to power' synthesis.

One did not need to lean on polemics when the facts spoke for themselves. Political posturing can hide reality, but putting that reality in people's faces tore through the rhetoric and got things moving in a direction that stopped the violence. That was why the reporting on the Blacks and Tans' gross abuses of power in Eirland had shamed the Albish government into disbanding the RIC. Tanya wanted reality-based solutions that did not lean on unreliable emotions, and Sonnetto wanted justice-based solutions that did not understate the harm done to the marginalized. They both believed their new approach reasonably might accomplish that.

With the report disagreement settled, they got back to work.

'You know what I like most about our new body?' Tanya commented.

'Other than how cool we look?' Sonnetto replied with a smirk while cuddling with her love in soul space.

'Well, yes, and then some, but I am being more practical.'

'Okay, what is so nice about how we look?'

'We have these four arms. It is just like having multiple monitors again. Two hands can type while two hands can hold up reports or get coffee without interrupting our flow.'

'That takes a lot of focus and multitasking,' Sonnetto pointed out, rubbing her chin on Tanya's head.

'Well, we can do it together, obviously. We have both been working on these cases.'

'Can we get two paychecks then?'

"Not doing that because it causes too many legal headaches. Been there, done that."

'Putting that aside, why don't we celebrate tonight?' the white-haired officer made of soul-stuff suggested while flitting her hand through Tanya's hair. 'We are both stressed and should take some leisure time.'

Well, I knew I wasn't going to get much sleep tonight. However, there was only so much a person who was also two could do, which brought back another issue to my mind.

'Should we try dating someone else?' Tanya asked. She had brought it up before when they were checking out the local GLBT scene in Bde Óta Othúŋwe.

'I… I still need more time to think about it,' Sonneto replied. While they both shared in each other's feelings, the woman who liked to paint cared about the emotional side of relationships. She didn't want to rush into relationships, especially with Tanya being still on the mend from what the Silver Legion had done to her.

Myself, Sonata... I… I would have to wait until my mind was in agreement.

Meanwhile, we all tried to relax and have a good night. I played around with my Mandate powers to change my form a little bit. Like putting on make-up without a mirror, it was easy to mess it up. My Tanya half kept getting worried that people would notice a change and then judge me for what I did with my form.

---

Bde Óta Othúŋwe, Democratic Federation of Abya Yala - 15th of May, 1954

Our friends' children gathered around the television as a Charlie Laplin movie played in the background.


View: https://youtu.be/J7GY1Xg6X20?si=RrLfMtBT1xOAd4el

"Dinner will be made shortly," Visha called out as I started placing plates and dishes on the table.

Two kids running through me were playing around the house. By through me, I meant literally through me. Having limited no collision on command had its benefits, especially when you didn't want to drop the pot of ghormeh sabzi all over the floor, which those kids just tracked mud through.

"I got it," Matheus stated as he got a towel and got to cleaning up the mess. The neighbor apologized and got the children to put their shoes outside.

One thing led to another that evening. Dinner was had. We celebrated a birthday, singing Tavalod. Through this all, I felt happy. Paradise was other people, I thought as I glanced around the table.

There was still much to do. There was an empty chair next to Calamity where Mary Canary should be sitting. We still needed to find a way to bring her home without disrupting the delicate power balance between Europa and the Russy Federation.

As I sat there, passing the time away, telling stories to all those who could listen, I felt a familiar tug from my connection with Elya.

According to her, the situation with Himmler was still in the air depending on who the President of Germania awarded the chancellorship. Our Silver Legion report had damaged the credibility of fascist movements, including the national socialists in Germania. Elya liberally leaned on my White Silver identity behind closed doors with my permission to help lobby things away from disaster.

The worst-case scenario was I had to go into Europa and repeat what I had done with the Silver Legion. With Europa more united than ever, that could not only result in WWII breaking out between Western Europa and their many enemies but also in the first time arcanium bombs were used for war, which would likely be at the start of the conflict. What does one do to stop Himmler if he gets his hands on functional arcanium bombs? How does Interpol hold any leader accountable if they have weapons of mass destruction?

I absolutely wanted to avoid getting into the habit of tapping into the full potential of my powers to do regime changes. The reason was not so much the temptation of power, but the fact that it would both make the world fear me too much, put me in a position where my peaceful life was gone once again, and cede more of my individuality to the will of the masses. I also had no desire to be emperor of the world.

After dinner, we went to the park. It was still light out and the children wanted to play some more.

Nearby, I laid down on a folding chair, slightly away from the rest of the group. There, I found my balance between my need for space to think as myself and my need to be with others in their lives. A stand had some water for me to drink and James Baldwin's new book Giovanni's Room. Calamity Amb hummed the iconic melody of All Men Are Brothers, occasionally singing the lyrics in either Albish or Germanian as her long strides carried her quickly from task to task around the picnic area.

Before me was a scene of peace with my coworkers, family, and neighbors, which was my kind of paradise. This was only possible with other people, and you couldn't be with others if you stood above them. A dog came up to play with me that reminded me of Rudersdorf's massive St. Benard, and as I ruffled its ears, Elya sent me another message from across the globe.

'Sonata, I just got word. It's finally time. No one is left but him.'

Well, my long-time friend and current superior delivered once again.

---

A Warehouse in Western Persia - 22nd of May, 1954

Ding. Scratch. Scratch. Ding.

Richard Diamond frowned. His last can of fruit did not have a bit of sweet sustenance left. Without his allies, who had all been turned into the mysterious Sally W., he was flummoxed. How does a rich person get food without buying it?

Looking around his warehouse of computations orbs, he had a fortune of weapons but a lack of food. Perhaps he could negotiate for some more grub from that Saddam-Something that Diamond was giving arms to in exchange for ousting the communist puppet from Western Persia. He wasn't exactly sure how the poors got food, given how they couldn't function without geniuses like him to organize them. Sometimes, Diamond wondered how they even breathed without a rich person reminding them to.

The businessman had been in Western Persia for quite a while. He was working with some goons he hired to assist with the CIA's mission to destroy independent democracy wherever it dared to sprout in the Middle East. Kermit Hoosevelt's strategy of arming the much preferable theocratic fascists had worked in East Persia, and the CIA had decided to continue such projects in Western Persia on behalf of the Silver Legion's government-in-exile.

Diamond had even lost twenty pounds, roughing it out in what he believed was called the Bactria region. Now that superabundance had made the poors fat, thin was back in for the rich. The man was sure that he would get applauded for losing weight by his friends if he had any.

His unpaid intern for life [the Oracle] in the corner sat there smiling like he had seen something wonderful.

"Oracle, what is my future?" Diamond inquired. "And stop smiling like that. It creeps me out."

The Divinity of Time just smiled on. "The Diamond shall get what he most deserves, and one you have oft-praised and royalty shall deliver it to you."

That sounded good.

Suddenly, one of his hired goons came in, tugging on the arm of some woman in his arms.

"Hey, Boss," the thug shouted. "I found this little koni snooping around. What do you want me to do with her?"

Diamond turned away from one of the crates containing a tri-core computation orb and went up to see the woman. She was a mutt.

He towered over the woman. His thin shoulders and lithe build made Diamond not much of a brawler. That was what he had thugs for.

"So what is an alloyed poor like you doing here?" Diamond questioned snidely.

The thug grabbed her chin and directed her attention to him. With a better look at her, the tall entrepreneur could not see anything remarkable about her. She was neither someone he knew nor some blue-blooded royal. He would know. He had met most of them at some point.

The woman did not respond to their provocations.

"What? Are you deaf and dumb?"

Again, she did respond. Her expression seemed almost bored, as if she felt absolutely no danger in the situation. Instead, her unremarkable brown eyes took in the room. Her mouth moved as if she were talking, but no sound came out. Then, Diamond could barely feel a faint mana pulse as she locked on the crate with the tri-core. Her mouth turned ever so slightly into a smile.

"That isn't—"

Before Diamond could finish, Persian, Zhangzi, and Federation MI officers burst into the warehouse.

The man toppled backward and sprained his wrist as he hit the ground hard. It was like the whole world had crashed down upon him. Without a weapon and his thugs being quickly apprehended, Diamond felt the measly power of being just one man.

The Oracle got up and left with the agents that had come to his rescue. The South Afrikan knew all of this was coming. Sally W., Ramona Mercer, and the Oracle had set him up, leading him with carrot and stick into a trap. But how? This was not how the world worked. This was not how this story was supposed to happen.

The mysterious woman, who could have been anyone, stood at his side. She was speaking to him, but her words were still completely inaudible. Her words could have been anything.

What the tycoon did know was that this was the end.

 

[LoreleiFlowers]

Book One Timeline of Relevant Events:

• 1930s
  • Europa:
    • The Great War ended with the Germanian Empire receiving a conditional surrender, which included the Kaiser stepping down.
    • Visha rejects Tanya's confession of love, and Matheus adopts the young former commander into his family, who teaches her how to program computation orbs.
    • Tanya, Visha, and Elya form a Freikorp (mercenary group) to keep the 'peace' as Germania creates its new government. Agent Nichts is Tanya's way of pretending to be the perfect law enforcement mercenary. Together, they stop the January Uprising and the putsch of the Kaiser's Men.
    • Tanya accidentally kills a brainwashed Warren Grantz, with whom Visha was engaged. Visha and Tanya go their separate ways. Matheus gets brainwashed but is trapped in that state as the hypnotist responsible, Figmund Sreud, goes into hiding.
    • Shortly after Germania reformed its government, Hans von Zettour, Elya, and Tanya worked together to create Interpol to go after rogue mages, organized crime, and terrorist groups.
  • Middle East
    • The Mandate of Power, Alexander Magnus, goes on a war of conquest, claiming most of Arabia and Persia for Magna Rumeli.
    • Alexander takes the Bactria Princess Roxanne for his first wife and bears with her a child, which he names after himself.
  • Americas
    • The Silver Legion takes power in the Unified States and quickly restructures the country into a fascist plutocracy.
    • The prison population in the Unified States balloons, and the country starts systematically targeting socialists, communists, and other anti-plutocrat radical groups.
    • The other countries in the Americas started having to aggressively resist the oligarch-controlled CIA and monopolists, which have begun instigating profit-driven regime changes.
    • American weapon manufacturer Richard Diamond kidnaps the family of the Mandate of Beginnings, Mary Canary.
• 1940s
  • Middle East
    • Richard Diamond uses Mary Canary's family as leverage to get her to kill Emperor Alexander when he is in one of his regular cursed moments of weakness.
    • The Rumelian Cassander assassinates Empress Roxanne, her mother-in-law, and her son during the chaos in order to seize power in Magna Rumeli.
    • The US and Europa balkanizes the Middle East. Laurence "Masquerade" Drake assists the nationalists in their struggle for independence, but only for that movement to be betrayed by the Albish and Francois leaders.
    • Cassander issues a red notice to get the Mages of Interpol to stop human experiments being conducted by one of his political rivals. There, the Interpol officer Tanya unwittingly finds the reanimated corpse of Empress Roxanne, who gains consciousness due to Tanya's still unknown Mandate of the Self. Tanya dubs this new person Sonnetto and invites her to live with her in Germania, where they live together.
  • Afrika
    • Francois Dzayer revolts against the Francois Republic, leading to a brutal and bloody conflict.
  • Asia
    • Zhangzi makes headway in expelling the foreign Uruan Dynasty and Akinese invaders with help from the Russy Federation and Tanechka's Angels. The three major Zhangzi liberation factions are the imperialists, nationalists, and communists. The Red Turban faction under Zhu Chongba is victorious but his hold over Zhangzi is very weak.
    • Fang Shiyu escapes Zhangzi because a martial artist and his followers are out to kill him. He eventually joins the Mages of Interpol in order to improve his martial arts ability.
• The Main part of the Story (1950s onward with chapter titles)
  • The Germanian Candidate - Amber "Calamity" Canary joins the Mages of Interpol to flee the Silver Legion and not be forced to assist in fascist violence. The Mages of Interpol 15 (MI15) defeat Figmund Sreud and free Matheus from his hypnotic trance.
  • Tanechka's Angels - Masquerade flubs a mission involving stopping communist propagandists known as Angels who are trying to expose the Albish Empire by targeting the Albish Royal Museum. The Commonwealth suspects MI15 are not loyal to Europa.
  • Woman on Fire - Liliya Ivanova Tanechka uses the release negotiations of her Angels to force Interpol to investigate Francois Republic's war crimes in Dzayer, particularly involving a Covert Corp paramilitary group. One thing leads to another, and Tanya's Mandate powers start to manifest more visibly.
  • Silver is Forever, so Die Another Day - Richard Diamond and Mary Canary kidnap Tanya, who escapes but without her Type-95 (good riddance).
  • Doctor Jones and the Search for La Destripadora - After pissing off the Francois Republic, MI15 decides it's best to go on a workcation around the world. Their first stop is Argentum, where they meet a Mandate named Khuyana Gonzalez, who becomes their friend by the end of the trip. Tanya, however, fully transforms into her soul form, which reflects a mix of Japanese and Germanian origins.
  • The Hustle at the Zhangzi Showdown - Richard Diamond orchestrates a situation in order to isolate Emperor Zhu and Empress Ma from outside help and to get the US a foothold in the country.
  • Gone with the Snow (it gets far more complicated from here on)
    • Richard Diamond has the Red Guard and Zhangzi Nationalists attempt to assassinate Emperor Zhu. His real goal is to get Empress Ma to hand over Zhangzi to a US puppet.
    • The Angel Demiguichi Akira stops Empress Ma before that can happen, instead transferring power to the Popular Front faction.
    • Mary Canary kills Avgust Zimin, the Mandate of Change. Now she is burdened by not only the memories of Avgust and Alexander, but the influence of their souls and the curses of their mandates.
    • Tanya and Sonnetto fuse into Sonata for the first time.
  • Kaines' Second Chance
    • Evan Jude Kaines learns from American socialists that the Unified States plans on eventually invading Europa. He uses this information to get the Commonwealth to start working against the Unified States.
  • In a Legion of All Her Own
    • Calamity flees to Zhangzi to escape being deported to the Unified States and receive treatment to make her ageless body mature into an adult.
    • Fang goes to Zhangzi to support MI12 and protect his friend, Emperor Zhu.
    • Masquerade goes into hiding because the Allied Kingdom knows he and his girlfriend have become compromised.
    • Cassander takes Sonnetto and uses her to become Emperor of Western Persia with the Unified States.
    • Tanya gets arrested by Mary Sue, and Tanya gets given to the Unified States, which brainwashes her into being their weapon of mass destruction and goddess to keep the populists in check.
    • Mary Canary and her family are handed over to the Commonwealth.
  • When Power Comes at the End of a Gun
    • The Unified States had a socialist revolution overthrowing the Silver Legion.
    • President Yockey escapes before the Silver Legion's government collapses.
    • Sonnetto almost dies, so Tanya permanently fuses with her to save her soul. Their fusion form, Sonata, wields the Mandates of Purpose and Self. She assists with the revolution in so far as she is acting as an Interpol officer with a grudge.
  • It Ends with the Truth
    • Sonata, Matheus, and Calamity move to the Democratic Federation of Abya Yala (formerly the western portion of the Unified States) because Germania is becoming increasingly fascist.
    • MI15 wrote a report on the Silver Legion emphasizing what fascism is in order to influence the world to steer away from it.
    • MI15 has become a globally focused team and has expanded its membership to include non-mage field agents.
    • Though Dzayer has gotten its independence, the leaders of the Francois Republic have decided to test its new superweapon - the arcanium bomb - in southern Dzayer. The Francois Republic has become the first country to develop weapons of mass destruction. Note that Mandates are functionally superweapons as well.
    • Germania's election leaves no clear party in charge. President Ropen of Germania has to decide who the next chancellor will be, and his decision could affect the entire world.
    • Sonata and Interpol finally bring Richard Diamond and his allies to justice.

 

[LoreleiFlowers]

The Democratic Federation of Abya Yala (and the World Federation movement)

Military:

• Centralized military following siege socialist pragmatism in regards to preparing for armed conflict with Europa.
• Citizen Militias are encouraged while Europa-funded rebel groups try to get a foothold in the country.

Economy:

• Dual-Track Pricing
  • Federal and state governments set quotas for essential goods but allow socially owned firms to sell goods at international market prices.
• Farming Co-ops
  • Individual families are trained to maintain and use heavy farm machinery for their communities.
  • Families work together on each of their assigned lots throughout the year.
  • The federal government sends experts out to communities to provide advice on best agricultural practices and to hear from the community about their innovations so that other communities may learn, too.
  • The federal government advises on what crops are most advantageous to produce under current market conditions, but farmers can pick their crops for themselves.
• State-Owned Enterprises
  • Mostly in the military, natural resources, housing, healthcare, and agriculture
  • It was relatively easy to transition to the socialist model because these industries were already market-controlling monopolies under the Silver Legion's plutocratic economy.
• Worker councils for most firms and small businesses. Individual ownership of small shops is allowed if there are no employees.
• Major Economic Struggles
  • Commodity Obsession - with people's needs met, people's wants have become their needs. Even though mass transportation is more ecological and cost-effective, everyone wants cars.
  • Essential Good Ratcheting - the price of power, healthcare, and high-quality housing cannot be increased without popular protest, even if the federal government's budget struggles to maintain them at historical prices.
  • Rural-Urban Divide - Attracted by lifestyles afforded to urban professionals, there is a demographic shift towards big cities. This leaves regions left aside for farming co-opts with insufficient population. Reforms to stop this migration are highly contentious, as locking people down in farming communities would create a class division between farmers and urbanites.
  • Managing Incentives and Worker Discipline - with people more free to pursue their own projects and unmotivated to work longer hours without greater incentives, people slack off, and the worker councils are rife with time sheet fraud and conspiracy. Reforms to address these problems have leaned more toward promoting commodity markets and adding more performance-driven incentives and hierarchical structures to worker councils.
  • Sanctions and adverse economic actions from imperialist countries (discussed more in the international relations section).

Government Structure:

• Governing Ideology - World Federadationism
  • It seeks to put the entire world in a single international socialist framework.
  • This ideology attempts to solve nation-state wars by eventually unifying the entire world, and it is contrasted with democratic confederalism, which sees breaking down nation-states into autonomous townships as the superior solution.
  • It sees its government as modular, where new member states can join it freely without coercion.
• Bicameral Central Legislature
  • Resides over the whole Democratic Federation
  • The People's House is a citizen's assembly (sortition) that advises and votes on policy as well as holds the Senate and administrative agencies accountable. Stakeholders for region-specific policies can be added to subcommittees to assist with deliberations.
  • The Senate is composed of the Founders' Party members, technocrats, and representatives of the regional workers' council. The Senate also contains the heads of central administrative agencies.
• Regional Governments
  • They must abide by the Central Legislature and World Federationist governing philosophy but otherwise have discretion for their regions.
  • The Democratic Federation of Abya Yala will become a regional government when another region joins.
• Democratic Confederation
  • These are autonomous townships that freely associate with one another.
  • They mostly consist of minor nationalities and adherents to non-statist ideologies like libertarianism, primitivism, and anarchism.
  • They have robust community militias and have protections from the overreach of the Democratic Federation.
  • The Democratic Federation committed to investing in autonomous zones related to historically marginalized and wronged populations, providing material support in building up infrastructure and industry while letting the community lead in how that support is utilized. The goal is to reach parity.
  • The Federation includes those in the Confederation in decision-making even though the federation is mostly uninvolved in the confederation.
  • Tensions exist over when and how the Federation can get involved if a Confederation township commits crimes against humanity and other gross moral ills.

International Relations (includes movements, not just nation-states):

• The Pan-Afrikan Movement
  • This is most closely aligned with the Abya Yala model of World Federationism. There is a belief that joining forces with Abya Yala will create a major counterweight to imperialism.
  • The Francois Republic gaining arcanium bomb capabilities has made major changes in the world balance perilous as the Francois Republic has invested interest in keeping its CFA-Franc zone under its thumb.
  • The Francois Republic has artificially balkanized its Afrikan holdings and required them to negotiate individually instead of collectively in order to maintain dominance in the region, but this also means that there aren't many organic cultural-linguistic nation-states in the continent, further supporting the Pan-Afrikan Movement.
• The Aztec Republic and Mayan Democratic Confederation
  • Unlike the Democratic Federation of Abya Yala, the Aztec Republic (formerly the Empire) has a hostile relationship with its own Democratic Confederation faction.
  • The Aztec Republic has traumas related to the Silver Legion's genocides in their region and fears joining the World Federation will force them to grant greater autonomy and return more land to the Mayans.
  • The country works as the middleman for most trade between Abya Yala and the socialist side of the world, and it leverages that role to reap enormous benefits through massive tariffs and negotiation power.
  • They received large reparations from the Unified States and some from Abya Yala, which sees itself as needing to share the burden of the guilt of what happened to the Aztecs.
• Anti-Revisionist Marksist-Levinists (MLs) and Marksist-Levinist-Taoists (MLTs)
  • MLs and MLTs are most prevalent in most of the world outside of Europa and Afrika.
  • They have too many differences with World Federationists to get along unless they have a common enemy. They both see the other as the lesser evil to capitalism, imperialism, and fascism.
  • These groups are typically more culturally conservative than World Federationists, particularly on women's rights and GLBT issues. They see the urban cosmopolitan progressivism of World Federationists as bourgeois. These ideologies focused primarily on economic rights and national independence rather than social realities.
  • MLs and MLTs lean stronger towards nationalism not only as a praxis of revolution but also as a way of measuring escaping imperialism and establishing self-sufficiency. In contrast, internationalism is seen as too prone to liberal betrayal and movement disintegration as revolutionary energies go in too many directions.
  • MLs and MLTs tend towards monoculturalism, which can cause what started as a national independence movement to turn into suppressing ethnic minorities within their new nation-states.
• Tanechkists (including Demiguichists and the Angels as a whole)
  • Their organizations exist as the feminist alternative to the masculine-dominated ML and MLT organizations.
  • Yalans tend to find working with Tanechkists much more palatable to their ML and MLT cousins.
  • Tanechkists have effective strategies to access hard-to-reach communities due to splitting the social front from the armed insurgency, which gives communities a face not associated with the violent aspects of the revolution.
  • They are much better at humanizing socialist causes to liberal audiences who lack a lot of the historical and social contexts behind why these movements have such momentum. In other words, they emphasize winning the narrative war with imperialist media, which strives to sanitize and justify its terrorizing of communities across the world. Tanechkists strive to get not only domestic populations but also the imperialist military to turn against imperial projections of oppression.
  • Imperialist countries have become extremely hostile to the Angels' propaganda and have implemented practices to keep their soldiers focused on completing the missions assigned to them without becoming disenchanted or persuaded.
• Francois Republic and Commonwealth
  • They barely recognize Abya Yala, encouraging both armed insurrection against the World Federation government as well as the reunification with the Eastern Unified States.
  • These two countries imposed illegal sanctions on the fledgling country, and the Albish Empire used the Royal Navy to blockade some of its major ports. Much of the Silver Legion's navy was seized by the Albish Empire along with the Pacific bases without Abya Yala's ability even to negotiate that point.
  • There is a brewing proxy conflict over Kuba, where the Francois Republic and Albish Empire intend to put a military base. The Tanechkist Angels have discovered plans that Francois Republic wants to develop an arcanium missile and silo it on Kuba as a way to encourage Abya Yala to become an exploitable private equity market again.
  • Abya Yala has reasonably large strategic oil reserves and produces most of the commodities and cash crops that Europa wants. The loss of these has created shock waves in Europa, which has to balance between public outcry to regain access to preferred American goods and a strategic desire to crush a potential socialist superpower that could not only pull Afrika out from under them but suffocate capitalism out of existence by preventing imperial trade relations.
• Zhangzi and the Russy Federation
  • Neither had a navy to challenge the Albish Empire, which had become incredibly powerful after seizing most of the US naval assets, including bases. This greatly reduces the amount of support they can give their ally through the Aztec Republic.
  • Zhangzi is focused on recovering from the massive death toll from the second Zhangzi-Akinese War. The Albish Empire began expanding military bases on the Akitsuhima Dominion and Formosa, boxing in Zhangzi, forcing the country to be isolated as famines started to take place.
  • The Russy Federation is spread thin from supporting Brotskyists in Argentum and Ispagnia to feeding the starving people in Zhangzi to its own domestic struggles. The decentralization programs under Ivan Smirnov's predecessor, Brotsky, made the Federation less organized at dealing with emerging threats but more efficient locally.
  • The Russy Federation and Zhangzi have growing tensions as the former to weigh its commitment to Zhangzi, and the latter obviously will take it very personally if their Russy allies leave them in the lurch; however, Abya Yala's massive agricultural output allows it to send large amounts of food supplies to Zhangzi, preventing a permanent split occurring.
  • There is a strong desire to get Zhangzi's industrial base off the ground as fast as possible to help shove the Albish Empire back for all of them.
• Arabia, Persia, and Magna Rumeli
  • Since Europa is also stretched thin and doesn't have the military-industrial base to hold back the Red Wave everywhere, the communist movement in Magna Rumeli and the nationalist movements across Arabia and Persia have been widely successful.
  • While they cannot help Abya Yala directly, they definitely do not want the old Unified States coming back…ever.
  • The independent countries are de-balkanizing and forming tighter-knit collective bargaining over internationally strategic oil reserves. Not only is this putting huge pressure on the Albish Empire, which simply could not afford its navy without cheap oil, but it also directed the strategic oil reserves to anti-imperialists.
  • Arabia and Persia are also developing their navies, which, if allowed to happen, will turn them into one of the leading naval superpowers. Because of this, it is in their interest that Magnua Rumeli's communist revolution be successful, but it acts as an additional barrier to Western aggression in the region.
  • They have effectively forced Western Europa to the negotiating table with favorable terms for the growing anti-imperialist bloc.