Chapter 8: Moments Before Disaster.

  While Amy had dipped out, my parents had rushed in, fussing over me. My mother was terrified, as she is with anything I do, and my father was shocked and disappointed to see me laid up in hospital. Fortunately, the painkillers the hospital had me on were the good stuff, and dulled the worst of the pain.

  “Who did this to you, my son? How did this happen? Who would do such a thing?”, my mother asked.

  My parents were soon joined by a trio of police officers. While two of the officers escorted Mum and Dad from the room, the third pulled up a chair, and began writing in a pad.

  “Full name?”

  “Elias Oscar Reyes Beltran. My ID doesn’t give the Reyes though.”

  “Occupation?”

  I froze. I couldn’t tell anybody that I was a mech pilot: the Major had been clear on that. I tried to relax as best I could.

  “I work for a toy company, sales, marketing, design, you name it.”

  “And the Company’s called?”

  “Kookaburra Toys and Games. It’s a local startup, so you might not have heard of us yet.”

  “And can you tell me what you were doing at approx 9:50PM last night?”

  “I heard a noise outside my apartment, I stepped out, somebody was spraying up graffiti. I called her on it, she throws this big energy blast at me, I got knocked unconscious.”

  “Right.”

  “I didn’t catch her face, because she was wearing a metal mask and a green hoodie. She sounded American, but I couldn’t give you a specific place. She had a gun, too.”

  The officer looked at me, like I must have been the dumbest dude on the planet, then got back to her notepad.

  “Uh-huh. Do you happen to know of anybody who might want you dead?”

  “You mean apart from Banksy with the mask and a gun? Lemme see… there’s a few suckers at the casino whose money I might have won. Blokes that I had to forcibly remove from the club for getting handsy with the strippers, back when I was a bouncer. Somebody from my Army days, maybe? I don’t know, and I don’t have any names I can give, sorry.”

  “Yep. Well, we’ll take it back down to the station, see what we can do with it. Serious question: what kind of toys?”

  “All due respect Officer, are you dead-ass right now?”

  “I’ll ask the questions here, mate. I’ve got Christmas shopping to do.”

  There was a particular venom in the way she said mate that made me feel suspicious. I leaned back.

  “Uh, we’re still a startup, so nothing major yet. Starting out with some gunpla for the older kids and the collectors market, then some princessy stuff, wands, tiaras, stuff aimed at the preteen female market. Basically, trying to take a slice out of Bandai and out of Disney at the same time.”

  “Right-oh. Well, like I said, we’ll investigate.”

  The cops left, leaving me alone to be fussed over by my parents, almost like I was a kid again. My parents seemed to accept that I was working for a toy company now: by necessity, I’d had to feed them a string of half and technical truths for a few years, but never anything that didn’t have at least a grain of truth behind it.

  Once they left, I decided to start putting my old plan into action. Sure, Amy was powerful, but she was just one woman. What if she got hurt like I did? So I called an old high-school buddy of mine, and had him reach out to his sister Emma, one of the old Crystalline Sisters, see if she’d be willing to talk to Amy.

  The next day, I got a call from the Major. After explaining that no, I hadn’t violated any NDA’s or the Official Secrets Act, the Major asked me to send any toy designs I had through. I paused, and realized I had an opportunity here. It was dangerous, and of questionable taste, but if we could pull it off, we could make a bit of money.

  Whipping open my phone, I pulled up a drawing app on my phone and drew Che Saguaro from memory, then texted it to the Major. “We’ll need a line of villains, too, for the robots to fight. Maybe we could make toys of them and sell them too.”

  “You serious, Beltran?”

  “Dead serious. The best way to sell Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber is to sell Darth Vader’s too. You wanna sell the Autobots? Sell Decepticons for them to fight. I mean, you can go down to Hobbyrama, and you can buy a scale model of a Panzer or a Zero, just as easily as you can buy a model of a Sherman or a Spitfire. There’s dark, there’s light, and you can sell toys to both. Plus, what’ll the kaiju do, sue us for illegal use of their likeness?”

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  I heard the Major suck air loudly through her teeth. “Let’s table this for now. We’ve got another problem: Manufacturing. We obviously can’t do it here at Mount Daymoon itself, so we’ll need a place in Port Moonstone. The old factory district’s a bit rough now, but if we can just work out which of the factories best suit our needs, we can get it all up and running. I’ll need you to scout out the area, Beltran. I also want you to stay away from the base for a couple of days. Don’t talk about work, unless it’s part of the toy business. When it comes to Iron Mask, the only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know anything. You think you get a lead, turns out to be an obvious dead end. The intel I had access to always suggested Iron Mask was a bloke, so I’m not sure where this girl is coming from, but remember: keep shop talk to an absolute minimum, and keep everything on a need-to-know basis. We don’t know what, if anything, Iron Mask knows, and the more you think you know, the more you realize you don’t. Stay frosty, Lance-Corporal.”

  “Uh huh. We’ll talk later, then, Major.”

  I hung up, closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. I had not signed up to be a toy salesman/real estate scout, but here I was. I reminded myself that as long as I got to pilot Silverback, it would all be worth it, right?

  The minute I got discharged, I went to the old factory district. Maybe this was largely the nostalgia talking, but back when I was a kid, this area was thriving, with companies making all sorts of crap here. Yeah, it was industrial, but it was exciting in a way: We were making things, and the future looked bright back then. The factories were silent now, though. I sighed. I always. These days, more than ever, Port Moonstone felt like it had been left behind, almost like it had been deliberately hidden, like a dirty secret. Sure, people still lived here, but nobody in the rest of Australia ever seemed to acknowledge its existence ever. Germany allegedly has Bielefeld. Australia has Port Moonstone.

  Taking the taxi out of the hospital, I wandered the streets, and looked over the old factories. Try as I might, I couldn’t imagine these factories cranking out the merchandise, day in day out anymore. We’d need workers as well, and I couldn’t see anybody lining up to live anywhere where “Death By Rampaging Kaiju” was a realistic possibility, no matter how terrible the real estate market was.

  I found one potential candidate, an old doll factory, managed to find a way in by a back door. A lot of these places didn’t even have a For Sale sign up: From my understanding, some hedge fund bought these places not long after the GFC, in the hope of snapping up some cheap real estate, but then even the hedgies had gone out of business, and I wasn’t stupid or audacious enough to try running a commercial operation from a squat.

  I took a couple of photos. The factory was dusty, and in direct need of some maintenance, and still had old creepy doll parts scattered around, but that could all be fixed at the time of setup. I realized that this might be exactly what the business needed. I texted the location to the Major, and found an old For Rent sign, covered in dust and mildew. I sent the contact details to the Major, and continued to wander the factory.

  The cops had informed me not to come back to my apartment until they gave the word, and the last thing I wanted to do was give Iron Mask any idea where my parents lived. So, I found an office somewhere in the factory, with an old desk and chair that nobody had bothered to cart away. With every muscle and bone in my body protesting in pain as the painkillers wore off, I lay on the floor, near old-fashioned filing cabinets. With nothing better to do, my mind began to wander.

  Everyone was so sure that Iron Mask was a man, but that didn’t explain what happened to me. And if I met this new Iron Mask again, how could I possibly counter her? Look, even after I had to give up Puma One, I’d actually been a legit soldier for those three years. I went through Duntroon and Pucka and came out the other side. But the Army only prepares you to fight human beings. Someone or something like Iron Mask was thankfully rare, but the Army doesn’t really teach you how to deal with energy blasts. And it doesn't teach you what to do when you can't trust your superior officer or the cops.

  I needed a way to contact Amy, and I couldn’t assume that phones were secure. So I did the dumbest possible thing. I pulled up my profile on Down Under Connections, and did some searching. Sure enough, Amy’s profile came up, so I sent a chat request.

  Instantly, I realized the error of my ways. What would Amy think I was trying to do, contacting her on an online dating website, especially one as skeevy as Down Under Connections? I was on thin ice as it was, and I knew it. I panicked, looking for a way to withdraw the message, but I couldn’t find one. My blood ran cold, and I accepted that death was sure to follow, from the umbrella of a furious magical girl.