Ming-Na Xiang

There are two faces of China, the face that it shows to it's allies in the Sphere (ACPS) and the other world powers, and the face that it hides from even itself. The cities are full, with the poor living off of the trash that pours out of the arcologies. There are places where people are born, grow up and die, and never see the sun. The geofronts are the worst. In that filth a special kind of criminal grows. They are smart, cunning, and utterly remorseless. The dumb ones, the ones that are too blunt and too obvious, those hindered by morals or ethics are all weeded out. Only the worst of humanity can thrive in such places. The committee members, sitting at their lavish desks, sipping spring water and real peaches have no idea about what really goes on in the shadows of their towers, and they know that they want to keep it that way. China is strong and clean, propserous and happy as any nation of the West. Or more, even.

The Gong'Anju work to make sure things stay that way. We number in the hundreds of thousands, office workers and data compilers and patrolmen who walk beats and all of the other things that regular police do. But we are outnumbered, understaffed, and invariably facing some threat. It falls to the Gong'Anju to sniff out the drug dealers, the slave markets, the organ thieves, the weapons smugglers, those who deal with magical contraband, and a hundred other threats to the thin skin of peace and civility. Finally, there is the Wu'Jiu'Xiao. We are the officers who become criminals, worm our way into their organizations, and break them from the inside out. Its hard, it's thankless, and retired Wu'Jiu are as rare as chicken teeth.

A Rare Woman

Women are rare in the Gong'Anju, the ACPS intranational police. Women are even rarer in the Wu'Jiu'Xiao, the Ministry of Infiltration and Sabotage. Ming-Na Xiang doesn't look like the stereotypical Chinese woman, she is a bit taller and there is a decidedly caucasian turn to her face. This isn't uncommon in many parts of the ACPS. She has long dark brown hair, brown eyes, and is remarkably muscular. Xiang has been trained in Tai-Chi Chu'an and Muay Thai, and as such has impressively developed legs, as well as a large amount of grace and poise.

My father was an officer in the Chinese Armed Police, he was a god and honest man. That's what all the girls say about their fathers, but mine was. It cost him his life when he refused to be bought by a criminal overlord from the Dhaka Arco. When he lead the raid that busted half a billion nuyen in contraband and drugs, he was a marked man. A week later he was dead, the side of his head blown out by a sniper. We were playing in the yard, the sniper was over a mile away, and no trace of him was found. I swore to avenge him, and I studied with a fury that no one can understand, not unless they've seen the most important person in their life killed in front of them. I learned martial arts, kicking and punching, how to breath properly, how to hold and feel my ki. While the others eventually went their own ways, or accepted monastic vows of peace and poverty I pushed harder. There was more, and I was rewarded.

I took months off to study at Kuo School where I learned how to access the power that lived within me. The monks had scrolls and old traditions and said that the path to unlocking your inner ki was to stand under a waterfall for forty days, or to only eat the leaves of one particular plant, and only one a day. The sciences of the Kuo School revealed the nature of ki as it was observable by machines and the like. I learned to move my ki, to control it, to make it obey my will. The men of science were amazed, and when I returned to the temple to continue my martial studies, the monks were aghast. I was a part gaijin blooded commoner, and in a span of a few years I had learned to harness my ki to a level that only masters reached after decades of control.

I could leap like a cat, springing onto a second story floor with ease, with effort I could strike faster than a person could follow with their eyes, so fast that my movements blurred in all but the fastest cameras. I could and did shatter stone with my kicks, and crumple steel with a dropping kick. It was then that I entered the Gong'Anju. I was a weapon, ready to avenge my father.

Sexism and the Desk Job

When Xiang applied to the Gong'Anju she was readily accepted. Few people wanted to deal with the scum of the earth, and few of those people were attractive young women. Constantly understaffed, she was gladly taken in, and promptly assigned to the one sort of job she was not prepared to take; desk work. Rather than hunting criminals and maybe looking for the men responsible for the murder of her father, she was handling data for other officers, wrangling computer systems from a crowded desk in a rennovated skyscraper turned into a HQ for the Gong'Anju. Xiang hated the work, it was mentally beneath her, and there was also a thick layer of contempt in it. The men in the department thought her a pretty that was more for looking at. Her scores on the firing range were ignored, as were her hand to hand capabilities.

Xiang was considering breaking with the department and going on her own vigilante style when she got her unexpected break. A group of assassins and thugs from the Bega gang infiltrated the HQ and did their best to destroy the building from the inside, while looting as much as they could from the evidence and impound lockers. They set off improvised bombs, gunned down men and women in halls, and almost made good on their plans. They were confronted by Xiang, who crushed them with a combination of her service pistol, and fists and feet. Several of the assassins boasted cyborg augmentations, but even metal limbs didnt help them. The ones that survived were cuffed and Xiang recieved several commendations. Higher ups decided that there was a better use for the Alpha they found than playing receptionist organizer. Xiang was transferred to the Wu'Jiu'Xiao as soon as she was released from the hospital.

Bega

The Bega Gang is a huge organization, the scum who killed my father. They control interests from Pyongyang to Tehran, and rumors say that they have even made inroads in the West and in Japan. But they are spiders, hiding in webs of deception, shell companies within shell companies, gangs backing other gangs, and they run from white collar thieves in the arcologies, looting international funds, to thugs with their mother's blood on their hands. The only way to bring something that big and powerful down is from the inside.

I went undercover.

The cover is as effective as it is insulting. Hostess and escort, they have me dolled up in something they call a traditional qipao but it feels more like a mix of what a stripper or a gymnast would wear. The chest is padded out two cup sizes, while other parts are similarly padded, making me look like some pneumatic whore wrapped in spangled spandex. I'm high priced, my clientele is exclusive, and I'm only available to the highest bidder in ther underworld. The next hardest part is pretending to be roughed up, and pretending to need the protection of whatever middle gang boss runs the job. I've beat names and contacts out of men who were hypnotized by a flash of panty. One boss blew my cover, after beating his bodyguards to bloody pulp I chased him down, caught him in his sedan trying to make a dash for the airport, I turned the car into a ball of wreckage, it took the rescue squaddies six hours to cut his blubbering sniveling ass out of that.

An Officer and a Lady

After several years working in the trenches, and in the alleys and warrens beneath the arcos, Xiang will eventually no longer be a front line operative. Eventually she will be noticed enough that she will no longer be able to infiltrate the Bega Gang's cells. She remains a powerful figure and will be promoted to major and have her own agents to organize. Instead of being the infiltrator, she will be the commander of the cavalry, and when things turn ugly, a skinny athletic woman draws less hostile fire than the guys in the police issue power armor. When it comes to investigating potential criminal activity with ACPS roots, she is likely to be the woman sent to the foreign city or state. She is less threatening, and with her combat prowess is possibly more dangerous without a weapon.

Final Notes

Ming-Na Xiang is presented in the fashion of hard-boiled Hong Kong action theatre. She shoots guns, drives cars too fast, and when the clips are empty she gets out and kicks butt with a mixture of artistic tai'chi blocks and evasions and Muay Thai flying kicks, helicopter spins and scissor take downs in over the top anime style. The Character is built off of the CthulhuTech system, blending high skill in martial arts as well as para-psychic capabilities. The setting has both high tech (power suits, mecha, etc) and magic in the form or ritual sorcery. The magic users who employ para-psychic abilities are given a rather short deal with extensive costs to their abilities compared to magic users or just spending money to equip someone. The Para-psychic martial artist pulls off the sort of fighting that has more in common with fighting video games than and traditional cinema.