Kaiju-3

Aw, hell yeah! This is what I signed up for!

— Gerald "Big-G" Adler, BREACH First-In Specialist

My migraines have migraines.

— Dr. Apurva Pradhan, BREACH dendribiologist

First Encounter

The initial breach point opened in what appeared to be contemporary London. There were no obvious deviations noted during the first few minutes. No stormtroopers marching the streets, shop signs and prices were typical, clothing and technology was on-par with Baseline.

The first recorded note from one of the First-In Team says a lot: "Buildings look too new. Ditto, roads. Lots of electric cars, looks like over 90%. They're really slick looking, too. Maybe we should take one back, for, uh, 'research' and... holy ███████fucking ████, what the goddam hell?"

A physically-impossible squid-thing, with lightning crackling from its tentacles, had erupted out of the Thames and was busy dismantling Blackfriar's Bridge as alarms blared. The surrounding crowd's reaction was to briskly, but overall calmly, move towards entrances featuring rotating green-blue signal lights, as claxons blared "Level 2 Alert! Eldingkrake!" over and over, while people intently studied their phones, some reading, some tapping as they marched. A few stepped to the side to film the event briefly before rejoining the crowd. The Breach team tried followed the mob, where they spent several hours in a cramped, but otherwise comfortable, shelter far underground, drinking provided tea, eating provided biscuits, and picking up stories about the world from the more-annoyed-than-terrified folk trapped with them for about three hours.

They emerged into streets full of scattered rubble, broken glass, wrecked cars, and trapped or injured people being triaged by emergency teams, but far less of all of that than they'd expected. The bridge, and the squid, were gone. Helicopters buzzed everwhere above, and a group of young people in colorful uniforms, standing next to a squad of 10-12 foot robotic exoskeletons, were talking with a group of politicians and reporters as the cops tried to keep crowds -- waving autograph books and desperately trying to film and photograph -- away. The populace seemed far more excited by what Breach later learned was "BIG BEN". or "British Intervention Group: Beasts, Enemies, and Nuisances".

Monsters And Mundanity

No one -- not even Kaiju-3's gargantologists -- know precisely why such creatures exist, much less how they operate in seeming defiance of many laws of physics. Kaiju-3's history was overall identical to Baseline's until shortly after the development of nuclear weapons. Two things happened in the ensuing years: The most obvious was that giant monsters of all sorts, from ants in the American southwest to 600 foot tall radioactive lizards in Japan, began to appear. The less obvious was that psionic abilities, most commonly telepathy, precognition, and clairvoyance, began to verifiably manifest in a small number (about 1 in a million) of children conceived after the first atomic tests (there was, however, no connection anyone could find to parental radiation exposure; they appeared in the same frequency in Sweden and Zimbabwe as they did in Japan or New Mexico). It's commonly assumed the events are somehow connected.

There is an average of two or three minor monster manifestations, globally, per year, and a major one about once a decade. These have led to slightly more international cooperation, though hardly an era of perpetual peace -- the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and so forth followed Baseline history mostly in the same way, modulus each having a few "giant monster" incidents in the midst of battles. Technology improved, particularly in construction techniques, to make more monster-resistant buildings, and to very rapidly demolish and replace those destroyed. The development of "cyber suits" to give humans some ability to fight the monsters (which require some level of psionic power to operate at all) advanced other areas of technology. Viable fusion plants came online in the mid-80s, and a 2023 electric car gets about 500 miles to the charge, and can charge to full in 5-10 minutes. (Kaiju-3 is considered TL 9 in these areas, TL 8 in most others.)

As with so many things, the existence of monsters, and their occasional city-destroying rampages, is simply part of life. Just as humans on Baseline (and many, many, other alternates) accept the death toll of automobiles and cigarettes, and keep rebuilding cities in the same place after hurricanes and earthquakes, so, to, do the people of Kaiju-3.

World Type

Alternate Physics, Fictive

Divergence

1945 (mostly)

Current Year

2023

Myths of Yore

Many of the creatures of Kaiju-3 strongly resemble monsters from the ancient lore of various cultures, which is one of the few pre-1945 divergences. The 'Eldingkrake' observed in London by the Breach team was a part of old Norse lore on Kaiju-3, and a very obscure part. There was no scholarly record of it prior to 1957. Shortly before its first appearance, an ancient runestone bearing its image was dredged up during the construction of an oil rig in the North Sea, and one of the workers reported being told tales of the beast by his grandfather, who had heard them from his grandfather, and so on. After the Eldingkrake attacked and nearly destroyed Edinburgh, research into the myth did turn up more evidence of an oral tradition going back centuries, but some historians still suspect it was due to old Norwegian fishermen having a go at stuffy university scientists. The runestone was certainly authentic, but no other records were found.