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28th of May, 1986
Somewhere Near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River, Siberian SSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
“Emissions of radionuclides drop from 8 million to 150,000 in a matter of days… And what do they do?” Doctor Zura Geladze asks as he takes a puff from the cigarette offered by his current companion.
“They start building a sarcophagus around your three-headed boyfriend?” Answers Elena.
“THEY START BUILDING A SARCOPHAGUS AROUND HIM-HEY!” He catches onto the ribbing remark.
“Come on Zura, can you blame them? He’s a dragon eating radiation, it’s already insane that just taking him to Pripyat didn’t get anyone killed.”
“No, it’s an utterly sensible route to take, keep him contained just in case, but that doesn’t mean…”
“Come on Zura, we all know you’d rather play for the other team. You can just say you don’t want us to cage your scaly friends.”
Under most conditions such a comment would terrify any man, let alone a MAKD scientist. Even throwing out the mere conjecture of being on the Kaijus’ side in any issue is nothing less severe than an accusation of treason or being a western agent. Surrounded as they are by the KGB, even a joke, which is what the russian woman means with her statement, ought to be at the least a visit to a sound-proof office somewhere very far away.
Instead, all Zura does is laugh.
After all, if there’s a man the KGB can’t get rid of at the moment, it’s the one who convinced a more than one thousand ton beast to peacefully cross four hundred and thirty five kilometers of Russo-Ukrainian soil without killing a single civilian.
That’ll change some day, Zura is sure of that. Which is why he’s come to Siberia so quickly. In a perfect situation he would have stayed with the team building a permanent facility in Pripyat to continue monitoring his… Friend as Elena puts it.
Operatsiya Prazdnik, as successful as it has been, only buys him so much time.
Tunguska, on the other hand, must be his next saving grace.
“So, Elena,” He attempts a return to what should have been a serious conversation between a wildlife behaviorist and an applied physicist. “I take your theory has gained support?”
“Indeed, a meteoric burst ,” The two words leave her mouth even more mocking than her comments on his partisanship. “What kind of idiot studies the Tunguska Event and thinks ‘Oh sure, a comet burst mid-air and simply didn’t leave any traces’ ” She acts with a childish intonation.
“Well, not to draw your ire, but it’s not as if before Tokyo happened there was any reason to believe a dragon could create a fifteen megaton explosion.”
“Don’t call them dragons, it mythifies them.”
“Would you rather I use Monster?”
“Kaiju.”
“Kaiju is just the Japanese word for monster, and you know that.”
All Elena Frolova does in response is huff in annoyance, not responding and thus giving him the unofficial victory this time. With that, a comfortable silence settles down between the two scientists as they continue to walk into the digsite by the side of a dirt road choked with coming and going trucks. Activity, it seems, has picked up with the coming on milder weather.
Zura’s first visit to lake Cheko had seen him just as part of a massive team guided by local Evenki hunters and Red Army cavalry. A beat-up, postwar, army truck, their most technologically advanced piece of equipment.
Now little remains of the once considerable lake, its waters drained and turned into something akin to a mining operation as workers continue carving away at the tons of frozen solid soil of which are made up what once was the lake’s shoreline, now sheer walls. All of it founded by dear old General Yakovich’s godsend of an obsession with not half-assing even the least pressing of issues.
Excavator with drills attached to their arms instead of buckets and other such equipment works away at said walls, attempting to unearth Doctor Elena Frolova’s life’s work.
“Do you have any names for him yet?”
“Are you already assuming it’ll be a male?”
“Give me a break and answer the question, any names for it yet? I could offer-”
“No I do not want suggestions, your naming conventions are horrendous, archaic and derivative.” She interrupts. “And it’ll be decided by committee, anyways.”
“Doctor, here!” One of the operators calls, both turn in tandem to look in his direction, but a second gesture makes it clear he’s attempting to catch Frolova’s attention specifically, Zura graciously deferring to her with a vow, something he finds enjoyable due to how exasperated it makes her.
The worker, one of hundreds of local miners pressed into service by kind-talking MAKD officers (only the best poached from the KGB’s worst) with rubles in their hands and pistols on their hips, takes them to a section of the open-air pit no longer being worked on, coverver in a large blue tarp.
Both of their boots splat on the wet mud of a lake strongly attempting to refill itself as they near it, with a hand gesture from his colleague prompting the man to lift part of it.
Zura is very much not “playing for the other team” as most of his fellow Kaiju experts claim he does. But the light in his eyes as he sees the very tip of a purple tail which extends deep into the wall would beg to differ.
“Ground-Penetrating Radar showed it in a cephalic presentation, not a death pose as we expected.”
“Why didn’t you tell me it was alive?”
“We didn’t know, couldn’t tell before we started getting tissue samples. Our best theory was that the impact which created the crater and the skidding which buried it were too fast for rigormortis to set in before the winter restored the permafrost.”
“Makes you think,” Mutters Zura as he continues inspecting the exposed bit of Kaiju, as large as a cow and yet proportionally no more than a pinky-finger's tip’s worth of body weight for it. “If we’ve found these many just by checking the obvious locations, how many of them might lay under the permafrost between Vorkuta and Vladivostok…”
“I’d rather not.”
“Is there… Are there plans to terminate it?”
“Not yet, Yakovich has implied a wait and see approach, something I’m sure you are happy about and will stride to make into actual policy. But in the short term we are just going to finalize digging the extra material, securing the area and building a permanent facility, but that one will have to wait until winter stabilizes the soil.”
“Is that a concern?” Zura asks. “The ice I mean, if the permafrost is what keeps it dormant, wouldn’t climatic developments create a risk?”
“The global warming effect? Probably, if not for this one, then the ones who we won’t find in years. Some of the guys are even arguing we should use it as an argument against gas, oil and coal, that going full nuclear will help keep them trapped.”
“Are they unaware of what all our vehicles run on? Or of how much the government makes off of exporting those things?”
“You are the one who wants to hook Kaiju into our power grid, compared to that they are absolutely sensible.”
Zura can only laugh.
Conversation within the same sphere of topics continues for a while as Zura inspects the tail. Sometimes he asks specific questions on the data her team has already collected, or their conjectures. Others simply fall silent, mesmerized by the very fact that he has a chance to safely touch such a creature.
“So, any preliminary thoughts on the reason you are even here for in the first place.” She interrupts one such trance.
“Questions…”
“Such as…?”
“How did it survive being the cause of a twelve megaton airburst? How did it survive a fall, or flight, fast enough to create such a shockwave and the following crash? Was it injured? Is it still injured?” He takes one last puff of his dying cigarette before flicking the ashy butt aside. “But mostly, what in god’s name happened to the other one for it to be incapable of finishing the job?”
“Other one? Finish the job? We’ve only found this one so far, Zura, why assume there was a battle?”
“They are Kaiju Frolova. They don’t just fall from the sky, something brings them down .”
30th of June, 1908
Somewhere 80 Km above Siberia, Russian Empire
At the speeds at which Jyarumu flies, the world underneath becomes little more than a blur. Quite literally, where if not for the beast’s perfectly attuned senses, it could mistake itself for being floating on an unmoving state. So thin is the air at this height, that friction is irrelevant.
Only a single detail gives away the draconic Kaiju’s true speed: The fact that it is closing in on its mark.
The beast, a probe from one of the parasitic usurpers, has only just entered the black ever-flying wyvern’s territory above the Great Cold.
Her four digit hand-wings bear massive membranes pulled taunt by a double-jointed fifth digit. Jyarumu needs no such biological contraption, by strength of will alone do the two bladed fingers which make up his wings give him just the bare minimum amount of lift he needs to catch up to her.
Her long barbed wings on a massive club composed of three interlocking pincers. She bashes at him with it once he closes the gap, attempts to grapple him, puncture and break and destabilize, bladed wings slashing with the speed of sound is all she receives in return. Within the span of one of thousands of grapples they tangle into per minute, his breath as cold as the edge of space he rules swaths over her over engineered tail. It freezes upon contact, snapping off like a dead twig.
Chunks of it will fall, only to disintegrate without a trace.
They bite at each other's neck, her disjointing lower jaw grinds itself against his armored skin. Corrosive acid sacks expand and release their dolorous excretion, blinding the jet black kaiju. In return, a horn as long as Jyarumu’s head twice over stabs into her chest, running her through.
At some point a corpse and victorious dragon dislodge from each other, one falls to the frozen sea, to be devoured by those Jyarumu dares not challenge, it’ll make for a glorious offering. The other, master of flight as he is, knows itself too close to the ground, and braces for impact.
The heat and bruising pain of impact is soon replaced by the cooling balm of freezing mud, lulling him to sleep.
The slumber will be long, he knows, but oh so rewarding. For the trespassers are once more sundered in the name of the All-Ruler.