Setting Information

RISE OF THE KAIJU

The world changed in 1953 when a radioactive monster rose from the Upper Hudson Bay in New York City. Those who survived the assault described the beast as a dinosaur, reporting that, "the massive lizard moved through the Financial District on all fours." The U.S. military diverted the beast before it could advance further into the city, turning it back into the bay, but their limited firepower did little to harm the creature. Despite a concerted offensive by the Army, Air Force, and Navy, the behemoth survived and retreated to the depths. Analyses of the monster's blood and scales, recovered from the battle, traced its lineage back to prehistoric times. Its cells showed extreme genetic anomalies caused by industrial waste and radiation. This was only the beginning.

Just over a year after New York, another creature appeared in Tokyo. Over the course of several weeks, the creature — now called a "kaiju" (literally "strange beast") — wreaked havoc along the coast. The monster purposefully destroyed modern buildings and vehicles, including an American naval vessel. A blockade of Tokyo Bay pushed the beast south. Before the kaiju could enter Yokohama, the Japanese Defense Force and the U.S. military routed it back into the ocean. Their attack, though ultimately unsuccessful, helped scientists gather additional samples.

After close examination of the genetic material left behind by the beast, the team of researchers discovered that Senshuseki did not match the New York dinosaur. The kaiju was determined to be a new species. Some residue shed by the creature during the Tokyo invasion was, in fact, found to be pulverized coral matching radioactive fallout found near Bikini Atoll. The Americans had performed dry fuel thermonuclear testing at the atoll only a few years earlier. The combined forces in Japan prepared themselves for the kaiju’s next landfall. After the failure at Yokohama, the U.S. military commissioned an experimental high intensity microwave gun. When Senshuseki next attacked, it took multiple shots from the heavy masers to bring it down. The monster collapsed into the water and escaped.

Humanity waited in fear for the next kaiju attack but did not have to wait long. Soon after Senshuseki's defeat, monsters appeared on every continent. Megaro, a monstrous praying mantis, ravaged Taiwan for three days. Charybdis the Fleet Eater accosted cruise ships and freighters in the Mediterranean Sea. The acid-spewing mega-snake known as El Culebrón terrorized Argentina and Chile. Manetoa, a burrowing serpent with a fiery horn, desolated portions of the American heartland and put the U.S. Army on high alert for over a month. The giant solifugid Onibaba was sighted in the Arabian Desert, and, through a joint operation between Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, was eventually killed before it reached the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The hyena-headed flying kaiju called Bultungin claimed East Africa as its hunting ground, displacing millions of people from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania.

This rash of kaiju attacks occurred sporadically for over a decade. Crisis loomed and world governments were perplexed. The cause of the near-simultaneous worldwide emergence of kaiju remained a mystery. Researchers hypothesized that the kaiju’s arrival was related to ecological disasters and nuclear testing. The theory gained traction during the 1970s with the Gaia Hypothesis. Senshuseki’s connection to the nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll supported the theory. Some discounted this theory, however, due to the massive damage a single kaiju emergence created. When a gargantuan mammal emerged from the epicenter of the 1960 9.5 earthquake in Peru, many attributed the earthquake to the kaiju, arguing that the destruction it brought to Lumache afterwards countered the Gaia Hypothesis.

Fear led many countries to attempt to develop their own artificial kaiju, but only a few were successful. These bioweapons were created to combat the kaiju threat, but the giant creations proved as destructive as those they fought. Under the guise of protection, less reputable nations used them as weapons of war. In the end, most of these man-made kaiju escaped their human masters to live in the wild, for good or for ill. The U.N. Security Council soon passed Resolution 2560, banning the creation of kaiju by nation-states.

Two events in the 1970s caused people to revisit their perceptions of the kaiju. An airborne chemical cloud from an explosion in Seveso, Italy, was dispelled by a butterfly kaiju. And at Three Mile Island, a lumbering, plant-based monster wrapped itself around the leaking reactor and sucked out the nuclear material. Public opinion toward the kaiju became more complicated. Some places even saw the rise of the so-called "kaijutaku" or "Monster Superfan" that worked to understand the monsters, with many people calling for non-military methods to address the problem.

Following these developments, nations began cooperating to reduce various sources of pollution. Kaiju attacks decreased as their food sources — or evolutionary mandate, according to some — dried up.


MONSTER ISLAND

In 1984, Japan attempted to broker a treaty between the United States and the USSR in hopes that the two superpowers could lead an initiative to deal with the kaiju. Talks were slow-going, but the thawing of the Cold War in the early '90s helped to make substantial progress. Still, heated arguments about the kaiju threat raged, especially during U.N. Security Council meetings. Despite evidence that some kaiju were intelligent and an important part of Earth's ecosystem, Russia pushed for total elimination of the monsters. The U.S. preferred a more scientific approach, wanting to study the creatures, dead or alive.

Japan remained steadfast in its desire to contain the threat and study it. Japanese scientists hoped to learn about the creatures’ origins and the ways in which these behemoths routinely defied the laws of biology. They believed in the possibility of co-habitation with the kaiju. Their insistence led to the development of the United Nations Kaiju Task Force ("UNKTF" or more commonly, "KTF" for short), an international organization responsible for tracking, understanding and combating the kaiju threat. Although the KTF is much more than a global monster hunting force, most people have come to associate it almost exclusively with the giant peacekeeper mecha it uses to suppress dangerous kaiju activity. However, the KTF's central mandate has always been to preserve and study the kaiju phenomenon; termination is considered a last resort. Under the leadership of its current director, Dr. Huchiro Tanaka, the KTF continues to do just that.

The KTF's shining achievement was the development of the Azorean International Kaiju Sanctuary in the Azores Islands of Portugal. This isolated archipelago in the North Atlantic, once home to a quarter of a million people, had been devastated in the 1970s by a series of attacks from the kaiju named Kobaseijin. Following an agreement with the Portuguese government and the European Union, remaining residents were relocated to mainland Europe, and the KTF selected the archipelago's largest island as the site for the sanctuary. In this place, with no human-inhabited areas for almost a 1,000 miles/1,609 km in any direction, the kaiju could be contained and studied without interference.

Over the next decade, the KTF dedicated itself to placing the world's kaiju population in its new protected sanctuary. The organization accomplished this feat any way it could. Some kaiju were captured when possible. Others were baited and lured to the island. And others still were discovered in states of hibernation and relocated as they slept. These efforts were monumentally difficult, dangerous, and costly, but in the end, the KTF managed to re-settle about two dozen kaiju (estimated to be about half of the world's kaiju population at the time).

In the beginning, life in the sanctuary was precarious. Kaiju regularly fought one another and attacked the KTF’s forces. Attempts to escape were met with resistance, though in practice, less dangerous kaiju were given leeway to roam the local waters or nest on other islands in the archipelago. In time, the resident kaiju carved out their specific territories in the sanctuary, and other kaiju learned to respect these boundaries. Surprisingly, most of the beasts acclimated to their new home, so much so that even those who could easily fly or swim to freedom chose to remain in the general geographic area. Eventually, the Azorean International Kaiju Sanctuary came to be known by its universally most popular name: Monster Island.

The KTF perpetually monitors "Monster Island" via satellite. Offshore weapon batteries surround the sanctuary, as does an international flotilla of warships and submarines that remain stationed in the surrounding waters at all times. Likewise, giant mecha based in Africa can be deployed to the sanctuary in less than twelve hours if need be. Most of all, each and every nuclear superpower in the world has its nuclear arsenal trained on the sanctuary in the event of a worst case scenario. However, given the role that radiation has played in creating many kaiju, most agree that the nuclear option would probably do more harm than good.


THE PROTOSTOMION INVASION

It began with strange lights. For weeks, observatories around the world reported radiant streaks appearing in the nighttime sky. Each night, cosmic debris burned up as it fell through the Earth's atmosphere, nearly all of which landed in the oceans. Experts explained that these were sightings of a particularly high-volume meteor shower - unexpected, but completely normal. The news cycles moved on, and people quickly forgot.

A month later came the first attacks. A trio of behemoth crustacean-like kaiju emerged from the Indian Ocean and rampaged across the City of Mumbai. It was the efforts of KTF mecha and a native kaiju named Rajashiva that eventually drove the invaders back into the sea after a three hour battle. Unfortunately, half of Mumbai was laid to waste before the monsters were repelled, and Rajashiva perished in the fighting, its tiger-esque corpse sinking into the waters of Mahim Bay. The three attackers were identical-looking kaiju that no one had ever seen before, but what was most shocking was that these creatures had giant-sized high-tech weaponry fused to their bodies: shoulder-mounted artillery pieces, bionic implants, and synthetic arm blades.

Other attacks on coastal cities followed: New Orleans, Lisbon, Lagos, Perth, Auckland, and Naples, among others. And each time it was the same type of kaiju that assaulted Mumbai; strange cyber-molluscoids augmented with advanced technology. World governments went into a panic, and theories abounded. What were these beings? There were enough of them that they seemed to be a species, yet previous kaiju had generally shown themselves to be unique, one-of-a-kind monsters. Initial suspicions were that the creatures had been artificially created in a laboratory; after all, it wouldn't be the first time humans had built a kaiju. But no nations or corporations took responsibility, and investigations came to a dead end. Not to mention that no single country or company on Earth had the resources or know-how to make so many sophisticated cyborg kaiju. This left one glaring possibility: the new kaiju weren't native to Earth.

These extraterrestrial kaiju have since been dubbed the Protostomions, from the word "protostomia," a clade of animals that includes anthropods and molluscs. The creatures presumably arrived with the meteor shower, spending weeks strategizing and preparing their assaults from beneath the seas. For some reason, this race of giant alien monsters had declared war on humanity, and the first volleys of that war had been fired. As attacks escalated across the globe, world governments began to get desperate. Russia was highly criticized for using nuclear ordnance against several Protostomions attacking Vladivostok. While this seemed to successfully vaporize two of the three gargantuan attackers, it also demolished the city (killing hundreds of thousands) and rendered the Muravnoy-Amursky Peninsula uninhabitable.

As with most kaiju, the Protostomions cut a swathe through conventional military forces. The KTF's giant mecha, while somewhat effective in the beginning, were unable to get repaired or rebuilt fast enough to keep up with new attacks. Ironically, what ended up being the Earth's saving grace was its native kaiju. Like a strange and terrible immune system, the planet's behemoth monsters responded to the presence of the alien invaders, perceiving them as territorial threats or competition. Thus began what many on Earth have called The War of the Gargantuans.


THE WAR TODAY

It has been months since the first Protostomion attacks, and still they continue; typically about one or two per week. Dozens of cities across the planet have been severely damaged, if not entirely wiped off the map. The world death toll is in the millions. Coastal communities have seen mass exoduses as people abandon their homes to live in the safer interior of their respective countries. The ocean is now something many have learned to dread.

No one knows what the Protostomions want. The leading theory is that they are trying to depopulate the planet in order to keep it for themselves. Perhaps their world is dying, or Earth has resources that they wish to harvest. The aliens are clearly intelligent, as demonstrated by their technology and their tactics, but attempts at communicating with them have failed. They give no basic acknowledgement of humanity but seem to have developed a wary respect for Earth's kaiju.

Battles between the planet's kaiju and the Protostomions are becoming more commonplace. Many kaiju, as if sensing the threat that the aliens represent, have gone out of their way to hunt and attack them. This has slowed the progress of the alien monsters, and more than a few have been slain at the end of kaiju claws. Unfortunately, however, not all kaiju have come to view the Protostomions as enemies. A few of the Earth's native titans have chosen to tolerate the invaders, instead focusing on settling old vendettas with existing kaiju rivals or using the chaos as an opportunity to rage against humanity. In one notable instance, during the Battle of Tianjin City, an entire Chinese armored regiment was brutally destroyed when the resident kaiju in that part of China, Ti-Lung, decided to team up with the coming Protostomions to fight the humans. All three monsters rampaged together across Hebei province until the KTF's Strife Force Asia eventually stopped them.

Such temporary alliances are rare. Most kaiju of Earth appear to be dead set against the alien monsters and react aggressively to them. Still, enough of these "Judas kaiju" exist that it makes the KTF (and the world) very worried.