SERIES TWO BEGINS...(wait for it)...NOW!

Confessions of a Monger

Sarah was in her new giant form in one of the bases' storage warehouses, one of the few places she could still fit in. She sat with her legs crossed as Dr Sprocket stood on her knee, no bigger than a toy soldier compared to her. He was running tests to see if Sarah's new size had no long term complications.

"Seriously, Doc, I feel fine!" she insisted.

"Better to be safe than sorry," said Dr Sprocket, tapping the small computer screen on his wrist as he inputted more data, "We have to be sure this new height doesn't cause any harm to your body in the long run! Somewhere down the line your body could suddenly give way under the increased mass!"

"Was that possible at fifty feet?"

"Good point. But as I said, better safe than sorry!"

He then detached his head and a propeller appeared out the top of his head and he began to hover up to Sarah's huge face. Sarah didn't move, she was a little perplexed as to what he was doing.

"Now don't move," he said as his green pixelated eyes lit up like headlights on full-beam right into her eye. She tried not to blink as the light shone into her eye, an eye that was now as wide as she was tall in her human form.

"Vision seems to be okay, better than okay in fact," said Dr Sprocket as his head re-joined his body, "I wonder…My dear, you see those crates at the other end of the warehouse?"

Sarah saw a pile of wooden crates stacked up in the far corner and nodded.

"Could you read one of the labels that are on them?"

Sarah was sceptical, at her size there was no way she could read something so small from so far away. Nevertheless she looked at the small stickers on the sides of crates, she squinted at them and suddenly the text became clear, "It says: Mr Stickys Cello Tape! 140 rolls! What the…that's as clear as day!" she said amazed.

"I knew it, your vision has been greatly enhanced so you can still see things that are small, like a hawk's vision!" said Dr Sprocket, "Now I wonder what your opinion is when I say…." He suddenly turned the volume on his voice box down so he was talking in whispers.

Sarah stared at him crossly, "You're wrong! Pizza day is the best day of the week!"

He turned his volume back up again, "Both your vision AND hearing have been greatly enhanced it seems, I'll assume that smell, touch and taste were also upgraded in the process,"

"Huh, so I can see and hear things just as well as everyone else, maybe even better!" said Sarah, then an important question came to mind, "How much do I weigh now in this form?"

"I, er, I don't know…" he said, not meeting her gaze.

"Doc," she frowned at him, wanting an answer.

"Well, as Titana you were 12 tons, in this form it's a bit more, about the same as a haul truck,"

"Which is?"

"100 tons."

Sarah spluttered and giant spits of saliva covered the robo-doc. As he wiped himself clean Sarah had covered her mouth, "Aw man, I gotta go a diet again!" she moaned.

"Your inability to gain weight is something that hasn't changed I might add," Dr Sprocket pointed out.

"Well there's that I suppose," she said, still not getting over the new weight, "In New York I was still able to move freely as before, I would have thought wind resistance and gravity would have slowed me down but I felt like I could run a marathon!"

"That would be due to your increased strength, that's the biggest increase of all!" said the mad scientist.

"Really? What's my new limit?"

"Well, as Titana you could lift a house with ease, now I say your quite capable of lifting a cruise ship!"

Sarah stared wide-eyed at him, "For real?"

"Maybe, maybe even more than that, we don't really have the means to test this theory but I'd say you'd give Superman a run for his money!" he joked.

The giantess looked at her hands, they weren't muscular or manly, they still looked dainty and small to her. They didn't look like hands that could literally pull the planet apart.

"Wow, all this and I can still switch between my normal size and Titana!" she beamed with excitement.

"One size for a specific purpose,"

"And I can change at random, not just from Sarah to Titana to Super Titana!"

"That's another thing, you're going to have to do something about that name," said Dr Sprocket.

"What about my name?"

"Super Titana? Sounds a bit unimaginative. It's a totally different form from the other two so you should have a brand new one,"

"A new giantess name? Hmm, how about Hugina? Mountana? Ginormica? Very, Big Girl? Gah, I can't think of a good enough one!"

"How about this, you are in a way a mega form of yourself, a Mega Sarah if you will, how about merging the two into something like…Megarah?"

"Megarah? Megarah. Megarah!" she repeated in different voices to hear how it sounded to her, "Yeah, I like that! Megarah it is! Now I have to introduce myself as Sarah Miller aka Titana aka Megarah!" she laughed.

Dr Sprocket laughed too, careful not to go into one of his mad hysterics, "Yes, my dear, and by the way I've taken the time to alter your M.A.D to adjust to your new form, I've replaced the wheels with tracks for added strength and the Titana-Board can now split into skates when in your Megarah form. The Panzer-Fists will be more like knuckle dusters as they attach to your hands instead of your arms and I've increased the energy output to give it more welly!"

"You've thought of everything!" she smiled.

"Hey, it's me!" he grinned.

"Well I'd like to try my armour out but I doubt General Monger is going to let us do anything we want for quite some time,"

They had managed to convince the world into thinking that the recent damage by the Rubiks Crystal to New York was caused by Gallaxus' robot probe and had just been overlooked by the surveyors, and that the new Statue of Liberty was not made by aliens. General I.N. Monger however was not so easily deceived and twigged almost instantly about what had happened. Needless to say he was not a happy General.

Since returning to base he had made both Team Monster and Team Alien perform gruelling tasks as punishment, from peeling the bases' entire batch of spuds to cleaning out the entire ventilation system. Fang and T.O.M were currently washing out the sewers.

"Surely someday he will calm down, right?" Sarah asked.

"I've known that man for nearly five decades and when he's like this there's little else you can do but ride it out! We'll just have to be patient till that hurricane of a temper he has passes over,"

"The sooner the better, I wanna get to know this new body of mine better. I want to lift heavy things out in the desert, see how far I can throw things, see how fast I can…" forgetting how big she was she started to get up and hit her head on the ceiling, hard.

She fell back down and rubbed her aching head. She looked up and saw a deep impression where her head had been, she looked down at an alarmed Dr Sprocket who was avoiding falling rocks from the cracked ceiling.

"Oops!" she smiled sheepishly.

More and more cracks appeared and they started to get bigger. Larger pieces of rock fell till finally the largest piece of all fell and smashed to the floor. Sarah threw herself over the mad scientist to shield him from the flying debris.

Eventually the debris stopped falling and the dust settled. Sarah looked up and saw almost all of the ceiling had fallen in, exposing the room above. Wisely she shrank all the way back down to human size and joined the robo-doc as he brushed the dust off his lab coat.

"I think in future, my dear, that Megarah should only be used OUTSIDE the base!" he told her before looking up at the hole.

"So, erm, how much angrier do you think he'll be after this?" she asked.

"After this, I'd say he'll be livid until September!" said Dr Sprocket, "Strange. This shouldn't be here," he said, staring at the room above.

"What shouldn't be?"

"That room up there. I've got the blueprints of the entire base on my hard drive and that room shouldn't be there!"

"You've got blueprints of the base?"

"It was back in the attempting-to-escape days, there were certain areas that were missing so I never really used it, but this room is a new one that I never knew!"

He then saw something other than the floor had fallen into the warehouse, it was a long cylindrical device with a polycarbonate cover on the top, there were large pipes feeding into it and rusty generators at both ends.

"It's a cryotube!" he said.

"A what?"

"It's what you put people in if you want to freeze them, or technically speaking cryogenic suspension. Kinda like what happened to your clones originally,"

"That's horrible! Why would you want to freeze someone?" said Sarah, staring at the weird cylindrical machine.

"Normally it's to preserve someone, say like if they had a fatal illness and not enough time to find a cure then they could be frozen till one was found. You could be placed in one and be frozen for years, theoretically."

He began looking it all over, his scanners going over every inch of the machine, "Fascinating, this machinery old, very old, crudely old. It seems to be made with components from every era; newer technologies are built over the top of older ones, like it was constantly upgraded over time,"

"So how old is this thing?"

"Can't say for sure, maybe there are some records of usage," he began looking through the rest of the rubble that fell and soon found a filing cabinet, busted open from the fall. He found a large in one of the draws and took it out, he opened to the first page and his curiosity meter went up, "Weird, this is a photo taken from the First World War!"

"What's strange about it?" asked Sarah.

She looked over his shoulder and looked at the photo, it was crinkled and faded but she saw it was a photo taken of a regiment in the trenches; one of the soldiers looked familiar.

"That's Monger! That's Monger in that photo!"

"It can't be! I remember him saying not too long ago that he was celebrating his 90th birthday!" said the robo-doc, "Which roughly puts his date of birth in the 1920s!"

He began looking at other photos in the file; one showed the Monger lookalike standing next to President Abraham Lincoln, another during the New York Draft Riots and another during the Mexican-American War.

"This is illogical! They're all Monger! He's in every one of these photos!"

"But he can't be! Surely its photo-shopped or something?" said Sarah.

"The photos themselves are too old, these are genuine!"

"Maybe it's an ancestor or something?"

"The likeness is too identical, there should be some minor differences in appearance, but he looks in these as he does now!"

"It can't be the General! It just can't be!"

At that moment an African-American military figure wearing the rank of General and a jetpack flew in, "What in Thor's Thunder are you doing in here?" he snapped.

The two monsters jumped in surprise as Monger arrived and suddenly saw the hole in the ceiling, he was about to shout at them until he saw the cryotube lying on the ground and the pair holding a load of photos.

"You…that's…aw, crud!" he cringed, face-palming. He knew the cat had just been let out of the bag.

"General, is there something you've neglected to tell us all these years?" asked Dr Sprocket, holding up a photo of the General in an Indian settlement during the Indian Removal Act.

"That…ugh, that IS me in all those photos!" he said as he rubbed his eyes and landed on the rubble littered floor.

"How…how can this be? These photos are ancient!" said Sarah.

"Oi! Watch who you're calling ancient!" Monger said sternly, "This is a top-secret facility; it's only fair that I have some secrets of my own!"

"Monsters and aliens are no secret anymore, General!" said Dr Sprocket.

General Monger let out a big sigh, "Fine, biologically I am 95 years old, but I was born in 1774,"

The pair stared at him with open mouths, Dr Sprockets jaw had become locked in place and he couldn't close it, "Ut appunt?" he asked with his mouth wide opened.

"It was a time of great unrest, the War of Independence in 1812. There was fighting everywhere, both sides desperately trying to invade the other and failing at every attempt. As the war raged on no-one bothered to check if there was anyone watching from above," he pointed skyward. Dr Sprocket looked up and his jaw came loose again.

"Aliens? In 1812?"

"There were aliens back in those days too. During the Battle of New Orleans I was abducted by an unnamed alien species. They held me for days and performed weird experiments on me, some harmless, others bringing to the verge of death,"

"That's horrifying!" said Sarah through her fingers, "And no one saved you?"

"When you're fighting for your country you don't tend to notice one soldier disappearing off the face of the Earth! Eventually they released me and delivered me at the base camp of General William Henry Harrison,"

"Americas Ninth President." Dr Sprocket told Sarah.

"The aliens wanted to know the limits us humans had to see if we were a danger to the galaxy, our war hadn't gone unnoticed to the stars. They then told me that the anaesthetic that their species used on me had an unnatural side effect on human physiology. It had slowed my body clock right down so now I could hardly age!"

"So that's why you don't look any different in these photos!" said Dr Sprocket.

"I said slowed, son, not stopped! I was still gonna age but it would happen at a snail's pace now! The aliens, after explaining everything to General Harrison, left behind a cryotube as they reckoned that the world wasn't ready for an almost immortal human being wandering around the planet. So we all agreed that I would be put in cryogenic suspension until the time was right for me to re-emerge into the world,"

"Wait a minute! We've seen your mother!" said Sarah, "You telling me she's immortal as well?"

"So I would comply with going into an alien freezer they allowed any remaining family I had to be frozen with me, there was only my mother back then. The aliens supplied us with another cryotube and she was unknowingly placed in cryogenic suspension, being in a deep sleep affected her memory so when she was awoken over fifty years ago she had no memory of living in the 1800s, I came up with a quick cover story to fill the gaps in her memory and to this day she thinks she's from this era,"

"So hang on, you were frozen all that time, what about all these different points in history?" asked the rob-doc.

"America needed a one of a kind soldier, an unknown hero to fight the battles that normal human beings couldn't. I was brought out of my hibernation at various points, mostly when there was a war on or a mission to complete, when it was all over I was once again placed back in my cryotube, which was constantly maintained as time went on, hence the patchwork of parts on it. My mark on American history was never recorded so the world never knew what really happened. During the Second World War I met my wife, who I may or may not have, and during that time we started a family that we may or may not have had. They advised me not to do so but you can't help who you fall in love with. So my wife and children who I may or-"

"General, it's plain to us that you do have a wife and children, their photos are in these files!" said Dr Sprocket, holding up the file.

"Fine, Mr Smarty-Rustpants! They were placed in manmade cryotubes and frozen with me until the early 60s, that's when everything changed. In 1962 there had been word that a creature had been spotted near Oxford in England, and it wasn't alien in origin. This situation called for me to once again be awoken from my frozen beauty sleep and seek out this new threat,"

Dr Sprocket scoffed, "Threat? Hardly, that 'creature' as you put it was me!"

"You blew up half the university!"

Sarah glared at the robo-doc, "Seriously?"

"Accident, always an accident, never on purpose!" he defended.

"Anyways, I had the tin-man captured but as he wasn't an alien we couldn't send him away. We were stuck with him. So President JK decided that monsters should be locked away somewhere out of the public eye, so Area Fifty-Unknown came into existence, I was made their warden, given the rank of General and had my family brought out of cryo-sleep. I had my cryotube stashed away so no-one would know about my history and I had my family's cryotubes stored in other secret parts of the base. And that's about it."

"Wow!" was all Sarah could say.

"Truly fascinating!" said Dr Sprocket, "That you experienced all those events in history yet history doesn't remember you,"

"And that you had to go into that 'freezer' whenever they were done with you!" said Sarah.

"Having monsters around meant I could live in one place with the people I care about. You monsters may be a constant pain in my rear-view,"

"T.O.M?"

"T.O.M. But I wouldn't be here now if it weren't for your existence. Darn it, my world would be a whole lot darker without you around," he sighed.

"Aww! That's so sweet!" said Sarah, leaning her head to one side.

"Cut that out! No-one's going mushy here! And no-one's telling anybody about what you've found!" Monger ordered.

"Absolutely not, General!" said Sprocket, "Cross my fluid pump, hope to shut down!"

"Good, cos remember I got files on all your sordid little secrets, like what missy here did to earn spare cash during her college years and how tin-head figured out how to amputate a brain!"

Both looked in panic at his words, "We swear we won't tell anybody!" they said.

"Good. Aah, you monsters and aliens have been punished enough; you can go tell the others to stop what they're doing now," he sighed.

The pair nodded and quietly slipped out of the room, leaving General Monger alone with the cryotube, "Maybe it's time I buried the past once and for all," he said as he placed his hand on the long cylinder, "Although, come to think of it, you could be a handy place to store my beers!"

Next Episode: Ravnivore on the Run