What was long divided must unite.
When the Warlord Era waned at the beginning of the Second World War, its powers slowly drew their swords and loaded their guns to end the struggle once and for all. And yet, while mighty giants gathered in clouded halls and representatives gathered bribes to dance on their strings to the puppeteers' whims; one man arose. Held up by the workers of his home, Mao Zedong rose within the Party over decades to prominence with his zeal, cunning, and dedication to the cause. He was the one that guided the will of the people over the dangers and pitfalls which beset their righteous cause and the one who led them to safety into Shaanxi in the Long March. There, they rebuild.
Arms, Munitions, Equipment, Vehicles, Industry, Tools, and more were built by strong hands and iron minds. Thousands worked hand in hand, one titanic chain of interlinked industry producing the machine that would enable the liberation of the workers, for only the worker could free itself. The freedom of the Chinese would come from their hands, not the grace of those thinking themselves above their head or by stepping on anyone underneath them deliberately sacrificed. No! The workers would rise as one, and they would triumph as one! Indivisible, unassailable, invincible, the workers' will would not be denied, for there was a glorious future to be gained and built by sweat, labor, and unity!
What was long united must divide.
There were no concrete numbers.
How could there be? The Party ensured that there would
not be any number to be drawn from other than vague memories of documents deliberately burned or falsely copied.
There was no number.
Only the echoes of crying children starving to death, mothers mourning over the skeletal remains of children and husbands as they struggled to even cry, their bodies too starved to do even that. Children stealing food from wherever they could, unafraid to murder to attain even a muddy piece of bread. Fathers, sons, and husbands doing everything in their power to feed their families, no matter the costs to their bodies or the lives of others. The markets that sold meat nobody questioned.
And yet, if one needed to put numbers to the "Five Bitter Years" famine that gripped China in the 50s and 60s, one would be right to conservatively guess at around 60-80 million dead. Later counts, made when the topic had become less politically charged and able to be accessed due to the political will to unearth skeletons to bury opponents, would put the number of death in the 75-85 million bracket.
"I traveled on a bus to my home village, hoping to get my parents to move in with me in my small one-room apartment in the city. We still had food, as we took it from the countryside, and I had a good job working for a local Party Man. I didn't see them anywhere when I arrived, and I was only told they had died. When I asked to see their bodies...nobody dared to look me in the eyes when they muttered that the dogs had eaten them before people noticed."
Thus It Has Ever Been.
The Great Leap Forward.
That was what they called the killing of millions in the deranged attempt to build greatness from little, all because they couldn't accept to wait another ten or twenty years.
Can you imagine that?
Twenty years. That would have been all it could have taken, and we would not only have been better off than now but also with far less lost in the process. All because one man decided that his imagined worldview was correct and that the scientists and scholars who had studied for years and decades, whose experiments and research had allowed them to attain worldwide recognition for the Chinese Education System, were false.
How could it not? They weren't politically reliable; their science, results, and evidence contradicted the Party Line.
Obviously, they were traitors to the nation, workers, and cause.
So they either recanted papers due to shameful errors...or died. Away, hidden, far from any who could hear the gunshots as bullets ripped into their bodies. Yet, at the same time, they still tried to beg the wardens to listen to reason, that the system would kill millions, and that eradicating so many animals would increase the insectoid population, leading to the loss of thousands of tons of grain everywhere.
Pàn Tú had been one of those guards, having been inducted into the ranks at the age of 22 thanks to his uncle keeping an eye out for him due to favors owed to Pàn's father. There, he had learned the three rules of living under the regime far better than anywhere else.
Do not dissent. Dissent was any action that went against the will of the Leader.
Do not speak treason. Treason was anything that contradicted the words of the Leader.
Do not keep subversion secret due to familial ties. Subversion was like a tree; it had to be burned out wholly, branches, trunk, and roots unless you wanted it to grow back more resilient than before.
However, he also learned other skill sets in those days when he lost count of how many he could have shot for trying to bring a better tomorrow.
Pàn learned how to interpret the Leader's will to whatever purpose fit his goals and convince those who mattered of his interpretation's legitimacy.
He gained experience in what it meant to talk and be
listened to, to hold people's attention by wilfully obfuscating your words into phrases and sentences that had all the meaning wanted by those at the top and with watchful eyes. And how to warp them into whatever shape you needed to plant seeds of doubt, confusion, and dissatisfaction into those who listened, as tiny and ignorable as singular grains of sand.
But among them all, he learned one thing. A grain of sand may not grind a machine to a halt, or a corn of rice may not feed a family. But a dozen? A hundred? Thousands? Millions?
They would shatter the machinery as sure as they would feed the people.
And while Chairman Hua Guofeng acted in the open, trying to steer the nation into whatever unimportant direction he wanted it to venture into, people like Pàn Tú operated in the dark.
Gathering. The National Liberation Army would find itself with enough eager recruits to fight against even the staunchest defenses.
Watching. There could not be one moment where the wrong mind uncovered the NLA's movements without suitable pawns to deflect or eliminate.
Preparing. Guns were hoarded. Tanker crews were bribed. Regiments swayed. Villages and towns were stocked with munitions and materials. Fuel and Food slowly built up in secure locations.
Somehow, it was ironic that a thousand actions, ten thousand moves, and hundreds of thousands had but one mind to hold it all together in the end.
One person that saw fit to divide what had been united, so he may unite what had been divided. A task taken up from others and carried with steely determination, no matter the costs to the people, for the costs were already too great.
Hu Yaobang would not see that free nation he sought to bring about in thirteen months. Defeat, or the bullet and revolver in his table, would see to that.
Too much blood was on his hands to allow him to live another decade.
The reveal of the Iron Tigers would have shaken the popular consciousness far more than it had, had it been even a single week before
that day. I am sorry, but displaying a technological edge in electronics and robotics one or two decades over every other nation paled significantly compared to the revelation happening in West Germany a mere five minutes after the first pictures of the Iron Tigers raced around the world.
However, what these miracle machines failed to elicit in the minds of the people at that moment, they sure as all hell managed to do so in the minds of military planners, strategists, tacticians, and all other manners of military riff-raff dedicated to making certain humanities armies got more 'ded killy.'
I would be amiss to mention that the first two attempts of the world to do just that flopped so hard into the ground that they embedded themselves into the eternal consciousness of their respective nations, ensuring that, no, they would perfect the horrid abominations they created, because they spent far too much
and what the hell is the sunk cost fallacy?
Regardless of that tangent, it is undeniable that, in those early years, the doctrines of Mecha and Power Armor slowly embedded themselves into the marbles of the people across the world, aided, with some gleeful cackling by the minds behind the operation, various shows produced by Commiewood to lead the world into technological dead-ends or inefficient paths.
Yet, it is to no one's surprise that the development of the second, third, and fourth independent Mechas outside of the Communist Sphere followed the respective characteristics of the nations (or commission by a collection of countries at that time) they were developed by.
Japans...
slightly adorable abomination deeply mired in the "First Gen Tank Look" derpiness that existed solely due to nobody having any idea what worked (or had the technology to make 'em in the first place) cemented the designers the first place of any Top 10 most wonky or idiotic vehicles of all time compilations. And yet, for all that we mock it, the Monarch was the bedrock for every other Mech in the western hemisphere which would follow. Every technology used in this machine had to be developed from zero and only brought to maturity over a decade after it had been built.
It was, for all intents and purposes, a test-bed for a nation terrified of a weapon of another country with legitimate grievances over their crimes against humanity which they had visited upon the Guang a few decades earlier, with less than zero effort to recognize them as such. Therefore, while we may mock it as target practice for artillery and Gen1 Iron Tigers, it was all it needed to be. A fortress that could allow the technology to mature as its existence tipped the scale ever so slightly in favor of Japan. It was the first Iron Fortress, and its children would guard Japanese cities and their citizens from the predations of Communism.
Now, I won't mince any words. The Viper is an abomination of the highest kind: able to function once brought to maturity. But, unfortunately for following generations, it was also the height of the American belief that they were unassailable in their homes and nothing could ever touch them at home, where it would hurt, instead of their imperialist possessions abroad or in the homes of their allies and "friends" all over.
The Viper was created to prowl the dunes and deserts of the Middle East and Africa, deep in China or the underbelly of the USSR. It was meant to eradicate supplies and logistics, convoys of light vehicles, and ambush targets once shepherded by the other branches of their military into suitable corridors. Its four chain-gatlins enabled a mass of fire unparalleled to any other vehicle on the planet, and its cannon (hidden in a "mouth" in subsequent iterations after its inception) could destroy tanks with decent accuracy.
And yet, it was a project created by a congress trying to side-step technological limitations by doing too much coke in their meetings, seeking the path of least resistance by creating the ultimate hangar queen and penultimate burden on subsequent US Mecha. We all know what PROJECT CENTIPEDE proposed, and we all thank whatever divinity is out there that this never came to be. Viper was a project of vanity and corruption, brought to fruition by engineers far too skilled to waste their time with such idiocy, yet one that proved one thing above all: where there is a budget, there is a way. The Viper would embed one thought into the mind of the Americans: heavy firepower forgave all sins.
In sharp contrast to all those above, the EDP sought only one thing for
their Mecha: a proof of concept that could stand on solid ground.
The Weberknecht was the solution. Eight legs holding its body stable and fast with a speed of 67km/h top-speed over flat terrain, two arms with machineguns against infantry at the front, and its main draw at the back, a rocket battery with 12 shots, ready to unleash guided devastation to whatever target needed to be deleted from the earth.
The Weberknecht had been created to be able to exist even if it turned out that Mecha would be nothing more than fancy toys after all. Conservative to the extreme compared to its compatriots, it was, nonetheless, innovative in multiple aspects, the two foremost being its multi-legged locomotion and the missiles comprising its primary weapon. Filled with 120 guided missiles, the Weberknecht could, with the proper positioning, shoot at entire divisions of tanks from the cover of forests, destroy attacking helicopters, bring down jets, strike buildings, and take out advancing Mecha all on its own before vanishing back to resupply and fuel up again. The Weberknecht was the father of the Hunter-Killer Doctrines of the EPA, and it would not be unthroned so fast, no matter what Guangchou may have to say about it.
And Guangchou had a lot to say about it, mainly because they saw it as the only attempt by any other nation capable of threatening their machines in actual combat. The Monarch was regarded as little more than a fancy target for their pilots. The Viper was either mocked as utterly impractical in most environments or deemed a bold innovation in the sex toys industry. They did tut at the allocated budget; they themselves had made cheaper toys without burning millions upon millions on them.
But it was the Iron Tiger which, due to its near-miraculously perfect shape and doctrine, that would embed itself the most into the minds of a nation...
The pictures raced across the world.
Every nation that had any radio broadcasting service, television station, or other medium or mass information halted everything they were doing, ceased any publication or broadcast and program, anything that had nothing to do with what they were currently receiving from sources that
couldn't be lying because those sources were the entire government of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Heads of state and politicians were ripped from sleep, meetings, or relaxation.
In Germany, thousands, then millions, looked and listened to the declaration by the government with shock, disbelief, bafflement, anger, confusion, fear, excitement, and a myriad of other emotions. Yet, at the same time, a young nation's understanding of its place in the world cracked,
snapped, and
broke under the revelations from those who couldn't lie about this, wouldn't, not even if they were held at gunpoint.
Religious leaders listened to the reports, saw the pictures, and stared blankly at their faiths' impending future, the theological complications that would arise, and the seeming impossibility that had happened.
A day passed as
nothing but this information resounded worldwide: Humanity, Homo Sapiens, was no longer alone. From the depths of a hidden laboratory within West Germany, experiments had been freed, experiments to create another species of humanity. Experiments...that succeeded fully and wholly in all aspects.
The world resounded in horrified screaming, demanding answers, explanations, and the eradication of the things currently sitting in a temporary tent city outside their once home. Thousands of journalists flooded the location, with thousands more trying to catch glimpses of the Wolfsmenschen, or Homo Lupus, as they would be classified.
It was a week in which the entire world stood utterly still, no attention given to anything
but this one issue; all eyes and minds focused on trying to understand what had happened and what it
meant for humankind to be two once more.
Some rejected this outright; cults and priests in America outright called them demons incarnate or utter debasement of the holy form of the human body, beings to be exterminated and killed at once to wipe away this sin from the earth.
The Vatican, Jerusalem, and Mecca found themselves under veritable siege as the weeks passed, people trying to gain strength through faith and answers by Divinity, seeking to offload the burden of the world's changed path unto the shoulders of those versed in the scriptures and holy texts.
For some religions, like the animist faiths in the Third World and Catholicism, the answer came from ancient times or their roots and weave, Pope John Paul II declaring outright the Wolfsmenschen to be people,
humans, despite their origins, beholden to God and bearer of souls as ancient texts and theological discussions had already answered the question of if people with animal characteristics could hold souls by another representative of God in the past.
Some shattered outright, parts of various religious sects worldwide unable to reconcile another human species with their faiths, while cells of other spiritual paths splintered over every little facet one could argue over.
Humanity shook in soul, and it roared in political rage. Germany, for all that it acted cagy on the origins of the Wolfsmenschen, had made it very clear that they,
especially they, could not,
would not, commit the first complete genocide upon an entire sub-species of humanity, nor would they stand aside so that others killed them in their stead. Humanity was now a duality and would remain for as long as Germany had a say in the matter.
What had little say in the matter were the communist nations of the world, silently staring at the news in silence. They saw little wolf-children play with each other in military fatigues in the temporary camp, a few rare adult figures walking around ensuring order among their many charges. They listened to the few interviews of these new people being confused about why they had been so violently ripped from their homes, questioning reporters, people, and soldiers alike if the purpose they had been created for was no longer needed and, if so if
they were no longer needed.
The Communist Block stood in the middle of history, silently staring at its worst nightmare personified.
And it could only silently break down as the very fundament of its entire system had been altered irreversibly.
And across the world, on the other side of the globe, Guangchou received the news,
all the news. Jungming has ordered it all to be broadcast, uncensored, too shocked to do anything but stare at the screen in his office broadcasting alien, yet noticeably
human beings a world away.
It took him a day to be able to form coherent sentences again.
The world has changed...irreversibly. Humanity is no longer alone.
How does Jungmin react to this revelation?
How do the people of Guangchou react?
[][Jungming - Traits: Trusting, Idealist, Vengeful]
[][Guangchou People]
