It was an average dreary wasteland day when the Vault Dweller found the depression. It was shallow, only half a meter into the cracked sandy earth, but its dimensions were enormous. It was large enough that, from one end, you could not see to the other. It started slim, but expanded, and ended in three prongs, each about as wide as the beginning. The most striking part of it all was that it was unmistakably an animal's footprint. Why a lone, humongous footprint was out by its lonesome int he desert was anyone's guess.
"What a peculiar sight!" thought the Vault Dweller, peering over the edge and into the stomped-hard dirt. "I don't think I've seen a sight more peculiar tha this in all my days."
The Vault Dweller picked up a handful of the compact soil, and let it sift through his fingertips. "Perhaps it's some sort of queer joke, or mayhaps even a freak indentation, caused by chance and chance alone?"
Shrugging, the Vault Dweller stepped out of the indent, shaking his boots from the excess dirt. "Well, I certainly hope I never run into any critter of that scale. Why, even a Mole Rat of that size'd lick me. Lord forbit it be some terrible mutation, like a Deathclaw or Yau Guai."
With that, he stepped out of the encounter and pushed it to the back of his mind. After all, there was no real chance of anyone encountering such a beast in reality. It was a dead, cruel earth to be sure, but how could any reality allow such an abomination of reality to walk upon its shores? Surely anything so vicious and cruel would have been wiped off the face of creation.
Right?
An entire actual ocean away, an enormous reptile, one capable of defeating armies, giant moths, dinosaurs, and 1:1 scale robotic replicas of himself, was feeling an emotion. Lonesomeness. It had been so many years since the Japanese nation which had created him with nuclear folly had been annihilated by that same folly. For ages, he had stomped across already-annihilated cities, praying to find one more screaming citizen to terrorize.
It had been a long time since he had last heard a shrill voice shriek 'GOJIRA!'
But, in the depths of his loneliness, in his sadness cove at the bottom of the most depressed piece of ocean in the post-apocalyptic world, an idea was born. Perhaps, although the Japanese had been completely wiped out from a combination of bombing and an uncontrollable giant lizard stomping around the place, that maybe he could go elsewhere. To the West, with their paranoia, some of them may have survived.
With a flick of his tail and a flourish of his wrists, Godzilla dived upwards, towards the surface. There would be nothing to get in between him and his passion of terrorizing the living shit out of absolutely everybody forever. There would be nobody to be ignorant of the cowering terror that came in his wake. Once again, infamy would be his lot.
It was the Enclave who saw him first.
From their oil country headquarters, they could see the readings, of a massive behemoth from the East, coming straight for the mainland. Some of the elders had ideas of what it might be, but sheer dread was the lot for the rest of the station. What could it be? A new mutant, coming to destroy the last bastion of real humans alive? Or maybe some kind of continental breakaway, molded from a homeland pounded by red-hot atomic steel tubes until there was nobody left to submit. Maybe it was just an equipment malfunction. God, they hoped it was an equipment malfunction.
Visual contact came days later. It came and went in the night, with only a massively soft glow to denote its presence.
The leadership breathed a collective sigh of relief. Whatever this thing was, it had come and gone without bothering them. Their plans could continue unabated.
It would be quite some time before news of what, exactly, the creature had been came to them. It wasn't long after that, though, when they learned of what it had done. It was deemed to be a "conductive force" to the Enclave's destructive goals. Several reports were filed after it, but were lost within a half-hour, along with the personnel who had filed them, the other files, and generally the rest of the headquarters.
The day of Junktown's annihilation didn't start that much differently than any other. Andrew was minding the prisoners, Doc Morbid was stitching a few people together with extra parts he'd found in the desert, and the jerkey vendors were hawking their wares in full force. By mid-day, the only unusual thing happening about town was the lack of any real excitement. No big deals to be made, or news from the Vault Dweller who had crossed through their town not too long ago. There was a bit of a sandstorm to the south, and some folks were worried it might hold up traders headed in from past the Vault.
At about six o' clock, a breath of atomic fire blasted its way through the town square. Anybody unfortunate enough to be caught in its path was quickly annihilated, cooked, and incinerated in one fell swoop. As it would turn out, these were the lucky ones.
From the sandstorm, a titanic figure loomed over them, black as a Ghoul's tit and just as nasty. The top of this mobile mountain made many men quiver, as its blue smoke was indicative of one fatal phenomenon: Radiation. It lifted a foot-god, it had feet-and crashed into the town's perimeter, wiping out about half-a-dozen guards. Its roar more or less deafened all who had lived this long, and it smashed the rest with another burst of atomic breath.
Godzilla enjoyed his triumph. At last, another place to conquer and to destroy.
A few seconds later, he felt a huge piece of calloused flesh slam into his side. Before he could gather its wits, this blunt force began tearing into his side, shoving its claws into between his scales and into the soft flesh below. He roared, and swiped his tail, sending this new attacker skidding across the shattered earth below.
Had he really thought it could be so easy?
It rose before him, a hunchbacked alien monster. Its face was festering with sharp spikes, which were more coarse than any he'd felt before. It was grey, light grey, except for the glowing green eyes, which peered dumbly from inside its skull. Long, tapered claws, dripping with Godzilla's blood, extended from its body. Huge legs propelled it, which could run as far as he'd swam in a moment.
A worthy opponent.
It grunted, and charged. Godzilla reared back and let loose his belly's atomic fire. It very accurately hit the spot where the creature had once stood, but it was gone, and now it was behind him.
Once more, it sunk its claws into Godzilla's back, and the pain was tremendous.
From below, survivors screamed and scrabbled as their homeland was reduced from a ruin to rubble. "Deathclaw!" came the cry, echoed more than any other.
The Deathclaw in question ignored them, and busily dug its claws into Godzilla's back. A tail wrapped around its body, and thrashed it into the ground. Godzilla let out a mighty roar, baring his fangs one inch away from the beast's face. Then, he bit down.
An electric current surged through the Deathclaw, who did not appreciate it much. It flailed and scratched, its face trapped in Godzilla's mighty jaws. Godzilla swung his head left, then right, and finally down, slamming his opponent into a patch of twisted automobiles. Twisting his body around, he prepared to finish the job with a swift back-slam.
The cars atomic engines detonated before he could, propelling most the former Deathclaw's flaming corpse into his backspikes, and the rest across what was left of Junktown.
As he sailed through the air with the greatest of ease, Godzilla found himself happier than he'd been in a long, long time. For the first time in forever, he'd conquered a mighty challenge, with plenty of civilian casualties. There was a twinkle in his eye, and he knew why.
Godzilla'd got his groove back.
'RUN!' he could hear one of the last survivors cry. 'Hurry, before that goddamn gecko finishes the job!'
Godzilla twitched. 'Goddamn Gecko' didn't really have the same ring as 'Gojira'. Snorting the ash particles out of his nostrils, he looked up towards the night sky. Perhaps, this wasn't a place he could call home. Nobody knew him.
There was so much left at home. So much magic. They knew him there. Maybe he'd gone the wrong way when he plunged into that ocean. Maybe he needed to head back to his heritage, to the mainland.
Perhaps he could see if the chairman was home.
A silent grin inside his mountainous face, the big lizard slunk off into the night, leaving ruins in his wake.
Gojira was headin' home.