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Description

Entity ALPHA-FILIUS (AKA GODZILLA JUNIOR)
First Sighting: Guinea, 1985
Size: 65 metres in height, 180 metres in length
Weight: 37 000 tonnes

History: In late 1954, history was written. “Year Zero” as some would later put it. Nuclear testing in the South Pacific had awoken a prehistoric sea beast of titanic size, and sent it on a destructive warpath. Over several weeks, this creature tore its way up the Japanese coastline, eventually ravaging the capital of Tokyo, before an experimental chemical superweapon put an end to its rampage. However, the sheer strength of this weapon seemed to have annihilated nearly all traces of its target, leaving behind only a few bone fragments and some ragged strips of skin and flesh. G-Force retained whatever could be collected on site for extensive research into the physiology and metabolic processes of this creature, Godzilla, noting the extraordinary defensive and regenerative properties of his cell samples. With the creator of the only known device that had managed to harm Godzilla dead, and taking all knowledge of its creation with him, they prayed each and every day that another of his kind would never return.

It is now 1985. The city of Jayapura is being razed by a newly appeared kaiju which had washed up on shore as a dormant carcass, before reawakening and burrowing inland. As attempts were being made to combat this threat, a disturbing distress call from an offshore naval fleet was received: Godzilla had reappeared after more than thirty years and he was rapidly making his way from the sea to Jayapura. With barely hours to spare, available naval forces formed an outward-facing blockade in a desperate attempt to prevent Godzilla from making landfall and coming into conflict with Krollar, as land and air forces commenced their assault on the insectoid. Rows of pale, bony spines crested above the waterline, an explosion of sea mist clouding the kaiju’s approach as he plowed through the battleships without slowing. Turrets and machine-gunners fired wildly into the billowing cloud as a torrent wave of boiling red seawater flooded the coast. A dark form tore from the wake, a familiar shape… but only barely.

The creature that dragged itself ashore was not quite the beast which had once razed Tokyo. Its flesh was ragged and torn, the dorsal spines thin, the eyes and jaws bulging grotesquely from its dripping face, and a fleshy cord running beneath its stumpy tail running to a veined, bulging abdomen. But just the same the creature radiated with powerful gamma radiation, its thunderous screech of aggression and jagged saurian shape unmistakable. Godzilla heaved himself ashore like a corpulent seal, awkwardly dragging himself upright and thrashing his way into the interior, leaving a trail of irradiated crimson fluid in his wake. After only the first line of artillery fire, he clumsily reared and blew forth a billowing cloud of superheated radioactive smog from its mouth in a sweeping blast, blowing a few teeth out in the process, but obliterating the front line in one shot. Ignoring blast after blast from all sides, it was clear this Godzilla was determined to engage in savage battle with Krollar in the battleground of mankind's steel and concrete, and nothing on Earth could stop them.

As the two behemoths collided, a call came in from a nearby Soviet naval ship which had come within communication range. It was a direct warning; they had heard of this major kaiju incursion event and decided there would not be a better chance to conduct a field test of their secret anti-kaiju weaponry magnum opus. A targeted strike weapon capable of piercing the most durable armour, honed from decades of AMF research, as powerful as any nuclear weapon. For the better part of the last decade they had designed and constructed a superweapon of a scale previously considered theoretical, a device which could annihilate anything on Earth by orbital bombardment: a kinetic attack satellite. The use of inert tungsten rods made them superior to nuclear weaponry against radiotrophic organisms and left no fallout. Now they were prepared for a preemptive strike for the good of the human race, and both kaiju would be killed within the abandoned city in one mass strike. The captain of the Soviet ship then stated any forces remaining within the city should evacuate at once; within thirty minutes the satellite would come within range of Jayapura, at which point they would commence bombardment.

The din of battle continued carrying for miles as the last of the land forces were hastily taken aboard sea vessels and carried as far as they could. The sky lit up as four glowing lances shrieked from the heavens, piercing through the clouds and into the earth, and Jayapura was obliterated in a series of massive explosions that shook the lands for hundreds of kilometres. A plume of pulverized bedrock rose more than a mile into the atmosphere. But as the dust clouds swelled up from the ruins, before the last echoes of the bombardment had even ceased, something stirred some within the smoking craters. Unbelievably, impossibly, something living managed to lurch free of the pulverized mountains of concrete and steel... Godzilla! With a prolonged groan, he dragged himself towards the beach, his dorsal plates shattered, the skin stripped from his flesh, his jaw hanging loosely from his head, glowing tears streaked across his body. With his one remaining arm he dragged the bisected remains of his slaughtered insectoid opponent along despite his own wounds, clinging greedily to the spoils of war. Godzilla's movements were laboured, chunks of himself falling off with each step, but gradually he slipped into the sea with his kill, the ocean again steaming on contact, foul red and milky residues mixing and colouring in the bubbling water. Just as suddenly as he had appeared, the reptilian creature had once more disappeared into the watery abyss from whence he had come.

He would not be allowed to escape this time. Another call came in, signalling the fleet off New Guinea, this time from G-Force. They had been preparing for deployment only moments after they had heard tell of Godzilla's return. While they had not been able to arrive in time to act on Jayapura, they were not going to let this event simply end in such a pyrrhic victory. They had decided it was disallowable to allow a creature as destructive as this to remain on this world, to let escape the creature which had once nearly brought the nation to its knees, and were prepared to eliminate this threat at any cost. The AMF’s orbital masterwork may have failed to terminate Godzilla, but now he was weakened, and it was their turn to finish him off for good. G-Force’s own secret ultimate weapon was now unleashed to confront him for the last time.

Description: A living anomaly even among kaiju, ALPHA-FILIUS, or Godzilla “Junior” as it has been colloquially nicknamed, is, astonishingly, an immature individual of the very apex kaiju species. Over the past few decades, it had been believed only one such individual of this species had persisted into modern times, owing to the highly aggressive nature and assumed apex global trophic level such an organism would certainly occupy. This was backed up by the occasional discovery of fragmentary fossil remains in regions around the world of ancestral “Godzillasaurus” which were never younger than the Late Palaeozoic. However, tissue samples have confirmed that this new “junior” individual has the exact same genetic and cellular makeup as the individual which surfaced in 1954. Core samples taken from the tooth collected from Krollar also indicated that it had only formed about twenty years prior, while radioactive decay on the 1954 tooth indicated a minimum age measured in hundreds of millennia. All this together suggested, incredibly, that these “two” Godzilla individuals are one and the same.

From what can be inferred, Godzilla's regenerative abilities were beyond even the extreme capabilities that they were previously believed. It must have been during the final release of the 0-bomb in Tokyo Bay, some portion of Godzilla was able to make its escape from within the range of the deadly chemical weapon, where he slipped back into the oceanic depths to heal from his near-death state within the noxious chemical soups and geothermal energy of the volcanic seabed. By the more well-developed nature of Godzilla Jr’s hindquarter region it is speculated that the secondary brain mass, buried deep within the central body mass, must have been relatively unscathed, allowing Godzilla to recover from what would certainly have been devastating wounds, fatal for almost any other living thing, as the fast production of G-cells from the umbilical base at the same location reproduced the destroyed portions of the body. However, such catastrophic damage would take a long time to heal from regardless, longer even than three decades, because clearly, Godzilla was unable to recover his form entirely when he resurfaced in 1985.

Analogously similar to some species of cnidarian metazoans, Godzilla is evidently capable of remaking his body through a cyclic metamorphosis where he goes through stages of its life cycle as it regrows (and, as some hyper-biologists suspect, maybe take on features of its ancestral forms which are lost in the mature form). The juvenile form of the species is evidently more aquatically adapted than the semi-terrestrial adult form, and less inclined to land movement. The arms are poorly developed, while the legs are large, even in comparison to the rest of the body. The skin does not appear to keep up with the extraordinarily fast regeneration and growth rate, as numerous portions of the body are covered in red tears of the underlying flesh, from which dark blood-like, steaming fluids occasionally leak free. Because the armoured skin layer does not form a uniform covering over the entire body, this immature form is more susceptible to incoming physical trauma and relies more heavily on its cellular regeneration. The umbilical mass is disproportionately large in comparison to the body, allowing for even faster tissue regeneration than in the adult form, but this sometimes results in irregular cell regrowth (resulting in the new tissues appearing different from the old tissues, a fact which contributes to Godzilla Jr.'s unhealthy pallor), and only functions for a limited number of injuries before the internal nuclear energy is used up (whereas the mature form can back up its regeneration with physical resilience against most attacks that would injure the immature form so it does not need to excessively make us of its internal nuclear energy). The dorsal plates are similarly more brittle than on the adult form, but regrow quickly in response to trauma, with new spines visibly tearing through the back flesh rapidly to replace damaged ones.

Unable to process radiation as efficiently as the mature form, Godzilla Jr. releases vast profusions of thermal energy and toxic liquid waste from its body. Large quantities of superheated fluids and waves of scorching body heat radiate from his body periodically, creating a trail of smoulder and flame in his wake. Thus, it cannot accumulate the necessary ionizing gamma energy to utilize the defensive energy attacks of the adult form, such as the atomic breath or nuclear pulses, to a truly effective degree. With some effort, it can eject a billowing cloud of superheated matter from its mouth in a blanketing attack, but this lacks both the range and power of atomic breath. When sufficiently pushed Godzilla Jr. can also release a blast of superheated air through its flesh, but doing so often tears apart its own skin, injuring itself. Because of the overall inefficient and rather incomplete state of its regrowth, it risks thermal meltdown in air, it cannot remain away from a source of major radiation and coolant for long periods, and is believed to spend much of its time at or beneath the sea floor. It is questionable whether such a stage of metamorphosis was even meant to see independent mobility at all.

———

NEXT: First Empire of Man

Description

Entity ALPHA-FILIUS (AKA GODZILLA JUNIOR)
First Sighting: Guinea, 1985
Size: 65 metres in height, 180 metres in length
Weight: 37 000 tonnes

History: In late 1954, history was written. “Year Zero” as some would later put it. Nuclear testing in the South Pacific had awoken a prehistoric sea beast of titanic size, and sent it on a destructive warpath. Over several weeks, this creature tore its way up the Japanese coastline, eventually ravaging the capital of Tokyo, before an experimental chemical superweapon put an end to its rampage. However, the sheer strength of this weapon seemed to have annihilated nearly all traces of its target, leaving behind only a few bone fragments and some ragged strips of skin and flesh. G-Force retained whatever could be collected on site for extensive research into the physiology and metabolic processes of this creature, Godzilla, noting the extraordinary defensive and regenerative properties of his cell samples. With the creator of the only known device that had managed to harm Godzilla dead, and taking all knowledge of its creation with him, they prayed each and every day that another of his kind would never return.

It is now 1985. The city of Jayapura is being razed by a newly appeared kaiju which had washed up on shore as a dormant carcass, before reawakening and burrowing inland. As attempts were being made to combat this threat, a disturbing distress call from an offshore naval fleet was received: Godzilla had reappeared after more than thirty years and he was rapidly making his way from the sea to Jayapura. With barely hours to spare, available naval forces formed an outward-facing blockade in a desperate attempt to prevent Godzilla from making landfall and coming into conflict with Krollar, as land and air forces commenced their assault on the insectoid. Rows of pale, bony spines crested above the waterline, an explosion of sea mist clouding the kaiju’s approach as he plowed through the battleships without slowing. Turrets and machine-gunners fired wildly into the billowing cloud as a torrent wave of boiling red seawater flooded the coast. A dark form tore from the wake, a familiar shape… but only barely.

The creature that dragged itself ashore was not quite the beast which had once razed Tokyo. Its flesh was ragged and torn, the dorsal spines thin, the eyes and jaws bulging grotesquely from its dripping face, and a fleshy cord running beneath its stumpy tail running to a veined, bulging abdomen. But just the same the creature radiated with powerful gamma radiation, its thunderous screech of aggression and jagged saurian shape unmistakable. Godzilla heaved himself ashore like a corpulent seal, awkwardly dragging himself upright and thrashing his way into the interior, leaving a trail of irradiated crimson fluid in his wake. After only the first line of artillery fire, he clumsily reared and blew forth a billowing cloud of superheated radioactive smog from its mouth in a sweeping blast, blowing a few teeth out in the process, but obliterating the front line in one shot. Ignoring blast after blast from all sides, it was clear this Godzilla was determined to engage in savage battle with Krollar in the battleground of mankind's steel and concrete, and nothing on Earth could stop them.

As the two behemoths collided, a call came in from a nearby Soviet naval ship which had come within communication range. It was a direct warning; they had heard of this major kaiju incursion event and decided there would not be a better chance to conduct a field test of their secret anti-kaiju weaponry magnum opus. A targeted strike weapon capable of piercing the most durable armour, honed from decades of AMF research, as powerful as any nuclear weapon. For the better part of the last decade they had designed and constructed a superweapon of a scale previously considered theoretical, a device which could annihilate anything on Earth by orbital bombardment: a kinetic attack satellite. The use of inert tungsten rods made them superior to nuclear weaponry against radiotrophic organisms and left no fallout. Now they were prepared for a preemptive strike for the good of the human race, and both kaiju would be killed within the abandoned city in one mass strike. The captain of the Soviet ship then stated any forces remaining within the city should evacuate at once; within thirty minutes the satellite would come within range of Jayapura, at which point they would commence bombardment.

The din of battle continued carrying for miles as the last of the land forces were hastily taken aboard sea vessels and carried as far as they could. The sky lit up as four glowing lances shrieked from the heavens, piercing through the clouds and into the earth, and Jayapura was obliterated in a series of massive explosions that shook the lands for hundreds of kilometres. A plume of pulverized bedrock rose more than a mile into the atmosphere. But as the dust clouds swelled up from the ruins, before the last echoes of the bombardment had even ceased, something stirred some within the smoking craters. Unbelievably, impossibly, something living managed to lurch free of the pulverized mountains of concrete and steel... Godzilla! With a prolonged groan, he dragged himself towards the beach, his dorsal plates shattered, the skin stripped from his flesh, his jaw hanging loosely from his head, glowing tears streaked across his body. With his one remaining arm he dragged the bisected remains of his slaughtered insectoid opponent along despite his own wounds, clinging greedily to the spoils of war. Godzilla's movements were laboured, chunks of himself falling off with each step, but gradually he slipped into the sea with his kill, the ocean again steaming on contact, foul red and milky residues mixing and colouring in the bubbling water. Just as suddenly as he had appeared, the reptilian creature had once more disappeared into the watery abyss from whence he had come.

He would not be allowed to escape this time. Another call came in, signalling the fleet off New Guinea, this time from G-Force. They had been preparing for deployment only moments after they had heard tell of Godzilla's return. While they had not been able to arrive in time to act on Jayapura, they were not going to let this event simply end in such a pyrrhic victory. They had decided it was disallowable to allow a creature as destructive as this to remain on this world, to let escape the creature which had once nearly brought the nation to its knees, and were prepared to eliminate this threat at any cost. The AMF’s orbital masterwork may have failed to terminate Godzilla, but now he was weakened, and it was their turn to finish him off for good. G-Force’s own secret ultimate weapon was now unleashed to confront him for the last time.

Description: A living anomaly even among kaiju, ALPHA-FILIUS, or Godzilla “Junior” as it has been colloquially nicknamed, is, astonishingly, an immature individual of the very apex kaiju species. Over the past few decades, it had been believed only one such individual of this species had persisted into modern times, owing to the highly aggressive nature and assumed apex global trophic level such an organism would certainly occupy. This was backed up by the occasional discovery of fragmentary fossil remains in regions around the world of ancestral “Godzillasaurus” which were never younger than the Late Palaeozoic. However, tissue samples have confirmed that this new “junior” individual has the exact same genetic and cellular makeup as the individual which surfaced in 1954. Core samples taken from the tooth collected from Krollar also indicated that it had only formed about twenty years prior, while radioactive decay on the 1954 tooth indicated a minimum age measured in hundreds of millennia. All this together suggested, incredibly, that these “two” Godzilla individuals are one and the same.

From what can be inferred, Godzilla's regenerative abilities were beyond even the extreme capabilities that they were previously believed. It must have been during the final release of the 0-bomb in Tokyo Bay, some portion of Godzilla was able to make its escape from within the range of the deadly chemical weapon, where he slipped back into the oceanic depths to heal from his near-death state within the noxious chemical soups and geothermal energy of the volcanic seabed. By the more well-developed nature of Godzilla Jr’s hindquarter region it is speculated that the secondary brain mass, buried deep within the central body mass, must have been relatively unscathed, allowing Godzilla to recover from what would certainly have been devastating wounds, fatal for almost any other living thing, as the fast production of G-cells from the umbilical base at the same location reproduced the destroyed portions of the body. However, such catastrophic damage would take a long time to heal from regardless, longer even than three decades, because clearly, Godzilla was unable to recover his form entirely when he resurfaced in 1985.

Analogously similar to some species of cnidarian metazoans, Godzilla is evidently capable of remaking his body through a cyclic metamorphosis where he goes through stages of its life cycle as it regrows (and, as some hyper-biologists suspect, maybe take on features of its ancestral forms which are lost in the mature form). The juvenile form of the species is evidently more aquatically adapted than the semi-terrestrial adult form, and less inclined to land movement. The arms are poorly developed, while the legs are large, even in comparison to the rest of the body. The skin does not appear to keep up with the extraordinarily fast regeneration and growth rate, as numerous portions of the body are covered in red tears of the underlying flesh, from which dark blood-like, steaming fluids occasionally leak free. Because the armoured skin layer does not form a uniform covering over the entire body, this immature form is more susceptible to incoming physical trauma and relies more heavily on its cellular regeneration. The umbilical mass is disproportionately large in comparison to the body, allowing for even faster tissue regeneration than in the adult form, but this sometimes results in irregular cell regrowth (resulting in the new tissues appearing different from the old tissues, a fact which contributes to Godzilla Jr.'s unhealthy pallor), and only functions for a limited number of injuries before the internal nuclear energy is used up (whereas the mature form can back up its regeneration with physical resilience against most attacks that would injure the immature form so it does not need to excessively make us of its internal nuclear energy). The dorsal plates are similarly more brittle than on the adult form, but regrow quickly in response to trauma, with new spines visibly tearing through the back flesh rapidly to replace damaged ones.

Unable to process radiation as efficiently as the mature form, Godzilla Jr. releases vast profusions of thermal energy and toxic liquid waste from its body. Large quantities of superheated fluids and waves of scorching body heat radiate from his body periodically, creating a trail of smoulder and flame in his wake. Thus, it cannot accumulate the necessary ionizing gamma energy to utilize the defensive energy attacks of the adult form, such as the atomic breath or nuclear pulses, to a truly effective degree. With some effort, it can eject a billowing cloud of superheated matter from its mouth in a blanketing attack, but this lacks both the range and power of atomic breath. When sufficiently pushed Godzilla Jr. can also release a blast of superheated air through its flesh, but doing so often tears apart its own skin, injuring itself. Because of the overall inefficient and rather incomplete state of its regrowth, it risks thermal meltdown in air, it cannot remain away from a source of major radiation and coolant for long periods, and is believed to spend much of its time at or beneath the sea floor. It is questionable whether such a stage of metamorphosis was even meant to see independent mobility at all.

———

NEXT: First Empire of Man