CHAPTER 1:
THE FIRST ATTACK
A WEEK AGO...
On a busy afternoon, somewhere on the beaches outside what was once San Francisco...
A group of NCR civilians and scavengers were crowding about, as strange scrap and debris had been washing ashore, covering the surrounding beach and the waters beyond with underwater garbage that were manmade in origin.
Tension was rising between the civilians and the wasteland scavengers, and a fight nearly broke out when NCR coast guards in wasteland brown and dull grey combat armor came in to break it all off to maintain peace.
However, the coast guards themselves would not long after be invested with the presence of ocean garbage that had suddenly been rising up.
Among them was a Vault City holdover in a vault jumpsuit with a yellow V.C. written on the back.
Uninterested in the other garbage strewn about, they instead ran over to a curious piece on the ground.
Upon picking it up, unfurling the clumped up and wet red cloth ball revealed it to be a rather small handkerchief. A flag of the old world with red and white stripes, thirteen white stars on top of a blue background, surrounding a capitalized E.
The flag of what was once the Enclave.
"Anybody who can make up what's all this?" The pompous Vault City kid asked among the crowd.
It didn't take too long, but he was eventually approached by an NCR coast guard, a woman, who then responded, "This most definitely came from far beyond, where the Enclave Oil Rig was."
"But didn't something like this happen a long time ago?" The Vault City kid then asked again, "I thought every scavver worth their salt wiped the beach clean after the big ol' folk hero blew up the place?"
"Nothing our clean up crew can't fix." The coast guard assured the kid. "Though what we're not sure yet is what's causing these things to wash up ashore again, after all these years."
War.
War never changes.
Thousands of years ago, before humanity reached greater power, when humanity couldn't understand the world yet...
The still growing species huddled in caves. Around campfires, their only source of light.
Mankind was incapable of perceiving properly what it couldn't yet understand. Incapable of acting rationally in the face of the unknown.
As humanity developed, so too their clarity. Despite that, religions, cults, and other philosophies born out of irrationality had been made throughout human history.
Gods, demons, entities to be revered or demonized had been conceptualized out of humanity's fear of the unknown.
When the Great War that would end the Old World drew close, many clung to their faith in whatever would listen.
Some prayed for a savior that would prevent the inevitable.
Some wished for a destroyer to lay waste to all that opposed them.
When the Old World finally ended, many lost hope in the New World that surrounded them, while some still hang on.
Through their faith and effort, many realized that there was still a world to live in.
A world created out of their own volition.
A post-nuclear world humanity is forced to live in.
It is the year 2289.
The last strand, before the turn of the new decade comes to change the course of human history yet again.
Humanity will soon be joined by an avatar of pure destruction. A victim of the war that set the world ablaze with atomic fire, with the sole purpose of declaring war with its miniscule creators.
And war...
War never changes...
AUGUST 23, 2289
Somewhere south of San Francisco, at an early morning sunrise...
A cloudy day loomed over a rather recent small agricultural settlement, labeled by one lone sign at its entrance simply as "Lampshire." A small farming community established by a rather small Japanese-American community from the Boneyard's ruined city of Torrance that decided to break off when living under the threat of the Blades and the Rippers was no longer desirable to them. The settlement just about sat behind the hills near the beach with ample amounts of brahmin herds, fields of razorgrain and maize, adobe houses and a bell tower with one onlooker to check over the horizon. It wasn't a fine day however, as the people of Lampshire scattered about within the vast brahmin pen. While majority of the two-headed mutant cattle were healthy, some of the brahmin were dead on the ground, looking sufficiently gray and dry, like they were drained of their blood.
Two of the workers, men in the typical wastelander rags and an apron, were largely distraught by the predicament. Somewhere along, the people were joined by a new individual, a young, fresh-faced man of Vault 15, if his jumpsuit number on the back slightly obscured by his large backpack is any indication. His name was Jonathan, also known as Jovie to friends.
"What happened here?" Jonathan spoke out, asking the surrounding settlers.
Initially, no one bothered Jovie for a little while, when out of nowhere one of the brahmin herders approached Jonathan, holding up a dead creature. By the looks of it, it had a real tough shell and a soft body underneath, and was also stabbed.
"What is that?" Jonathan would ask the herder, taken aback by the dead creature the Asian woman was holding.
"It's some kind of lice..." The woman replied. "Damn thing has been killing our brahmin. Me and Brad have been huddling around the pen, killing these giant parasites."
"This one's still alive, Rei." A new voice called out.
The woman would turn around while Jonathan went to look behind her to see the other herder Brad, holding up another giant louse by its shell. It was still alive, perhaps struggling to break free.
Seeing an opportunity, Jonathan took to his holster to pull out his 9mm pistol, first holding it by the hip.
"May I do the honors of killing that?" Jovie asked nicely, if not slightly jokingly.
Brad would smirk, as he then held up the flailing giant louse before nodding and saying, "Go ahead, rookie. While you're at it, kill whatever giant louse you can find."
Jonathan then snickered, as he popped a couple rounds on the giant louse before it started bleeding out... glowing red blood. Upon seeing this, Brad would quickly let go of the now dead louse and step back away, as did the others near the dead parasite. Also in this revelation, the geiger counter on Jovie's pip-boy started crackling, indicating high doses of radiation, and in response the vault dweller stepped as far away from the still bleeding dead louse until his geiger counter stopped crackling aggressively.
Taking the hint, the other settlers step as far away from the dead louse, while the two brahmin herders go over to Jonathan.
"When has this been happening? Where did they come from?" Jonathan asked the two herders.
Rei would chime in, saying "We've been having this kind trouble since about a week ago. And these bloodsuckers were coming out of the ocean. If they keep this up, we may have to report to the NCR. We don't wanna cut our losses just because some giant parasites are suckin' on our brahmin."
"Maybe you people should." Jonathan suggested, crossing his arms and looking at the dead louse. "What's especially troubling though is how unnaturally radioactive that thing's blood is. Knowing lice, they must be feeding off of something from the bottom of the ocean. Something very radioactive."
"Let me collect a sample! I never seen something like this before!" A new, feminine voice called out.
Jonathan turned around and two other dwellers from Vault 15 coming in. His blonde-haired sister Aurora, nicknamed Ari, packing a sawed-off pump shotgun and following a curly-haired Asian friend known by them as Miyuki, popping a capsule from a bottle of Rad-X, putting on some rubber gloves and lab coat and then pulling out a couple sample tubes before she went ahead to collected blood samples from the dead louse that has since stopped bleeding.
"A bit too quick to collect samples already, Miyuki?" Jonathan asked the biologist, crossing his arms and looking at her.
"It's what you expect from a biologist, Jovie." Miyuki said to him, still collecting some samples. "I'll have to test these later, back at the Squat."
"Biology? That's some cranky stuff." Aurora would giggle. "More of a pin-up model than-"
"I'm not cranky at all, Ari!" Miyuki would pout.
Jonathan would laugh for a moment, before shaking his head and approaching the two girls in an attempt to break up the ruckus, saying "That's enough, Ari and Miyuki. For now, we should help kill any other giant sea lice we could find around the brahmin pen."
"Y-you guys tag em'," Miyuki said to Jonathan and Aurora, "I'll bag the samples they bleed out."
"Gross." Aurora said bluntly, before pumping her shotgun.
While Jonathan and Aurora left off to walk around the pen to kill anymore giant lice they could find, Miyuki approached Brad, who was about to discard the dead louse back to the ocean when she asked him, "Can I have that carcass with me instead? I want to examine it at my place."
"Well, I have no use for this anyway, go knock yourself out, sister." Brad would nod, as he then handed over the dead parasite to Miyuki. "Meanwhile, I'll have to go over with our big man about reporting this whole mess to the NCR."
Miyuki would then smile and take the dead giant louse off of Brad's hands before running back to Jovie and Ari, who had gone considerably far enough from her, still looking around for anymore parasite to kill.
While Aurora was more or less startled by the dead louse Miyuki was carrying, Jonathan wasn't any bothered by it, having seen his fair share of kills.
"So what's with the dead louse you're carrying, Miyuki?" Jonathan asked. "Find out anything?"
"I'm taking this big boy and the blood samples I collected back to the Squat to analyze them, Jovie." Miyuki replied. "...And the herders are thinking of talking to their leader about reporting this issue to the NCR."
"That's good. They may as well do that." Jonathan would cross his arms and then bring up, "That does make me wonder about the sea lice."
"We're definitely gonna find out in time, once I analyzed these samples, Jovie." Miyuki assured him, smiling in confidence.
From there, the three of them would patrol around the brahmin pen for a long while until the afternoon hours came up and eventually concluded the pen was free and all three of them left Lampshire to head home...
Later that afternoon...
The Squat, since the arrival of the Chosen One had considerably changed in the last few years. Once a tiny settlement of scrap houses, now a decently sized town of adobe houses, walls, and heavy NCR presence. Certainly, it's seen quite a revamp when the New California Republic annexed the settlement that sits upon what was once Vault 15.
Moving over to Miyuki's humble little house, at the basement, the young biologist was hard at work, going through her lab equipment back and forth, checking on the numbers.
"This is genuinely strange..." Miyuki thought. "Everyone knows there aren't any intact sea life left, with all the irradiated water in the ocean."
While this happens, she grabs her two blood samples and insert them to some sort of a genetic analyzer that's connected to a terminal on a desk, going over a couple options before initiating the analysis. From there she watched the terminal perform some number crunching as the analyzer did its work.
"This is uncharacteristically taking a bit long..." Miyuki thought, being a bit concerned with the analyzer.
Eventually though, the genetic analyzer finishes and so did the terminal it connects to. What was written on the terminal screen though was something else for her.
"30% belongs to Lepeophtherius salmonis. That part's the sea lice. The DNA's been likely damaged by the radiation..." Miyuki began. "...5% is from Bos taurus, likely the brahmin blood it consumed. And the remaining 65% is... Unknown?"
With this data in mind, she began taking notes on her notebook before hastily yanking off only one blood sample and booting off the genetic analyzer. From there, she moved over to another part of the desk, inserting the two samples and one empty one into another appliance, something she clumsily labeled "Precision Isolator" with a marker pen on the device's side. As with the genetic analyzer, the isolator was also connected to a terminal, which Miyuki promptly turned on and then watched the number crunching went on, while the isolator did its work sucking out the blood samples from the tubes and then going back and forth between filling either one and emptying, until eventually all three sample tubes were filled. One just barely, the middle tube half-full, and the third tube nearly full of glowing red blood.
The terminal was also done with its number crunching, and Miyuki began taking notes while looking at the terminal.
"The DNA found in the sample doesn't match any exact fauna from the wasteland..." Miyuki took note.
When she looked at the terminal again, she found out... "...Traces of reptilian DNA found, but is heavily damaged by doses of ionizing radiation."
With this revelation, she took down notes and gets rather concerned. "The isolator's never done this before. What the hell were these lice sucking off?" Miyuki thought, looking at the dead louse on the operating table.
"I'll have to check on Lampshire further tomorrow." Miyuki said to herself, before booting off both the analyzer and terminal. Eventually, she went about with setting her equipment back to safe places, covering the dead mutant louse with a protective fabric and then moving up to her room to change clothes to take some rest and call it a day.
A few hours later...
Back at Lampshire, the settlement has been joined by six NCR troopers, two pack brahmin, and two NCR rangers in all-brown patrol armor, wearing sunglasses, black bandana covering half his face, and a ranger hat. For the one man, according to the tag on his armor, he's at the very least named Conrad, making him "Ranger Conrad." As for the fair-skinned womanly ranger with a shaped build and model face, her tag would designate her as "Ranger Darrow."
The settlers were just about surrounding the five of them by the entrance, with Brad and Rei approaching the ranger. The two of them went on a tangent about the mutant sea lice attacking the brahmin, even showing a dead carcass as evidence, but Ranger Conrad wasn't impressed much to the trooper's dismay.
"So you're calling for the New California Republic to take care of sea lice?" Conrad recapped to the two herders, crossing his arms.
"You've got to understand sir," Brad began. "These things have been coming out of the nearby beach since last week, and killing our brahmin!"
Hearing Brad out, Ranger Darrow took off her ranger hat to reveal her smooth blonde, chin-length hair. She then looked at Conrad to remind ask her, "There have been reports of debris washing ashore on the beaches outside San Francisco since last week. Old scrap from the bottom of the ocean."
"You're saying something deep within where all that Enclave scrap came from is the source of all this sea lice?" Conrad asked Darrow.
The woman would just about nod, saying "Just about, Ranger Conrad. If this keeps up for at least three weeks time and more like these mutant lice appear, the beaches will no longer be safe to establish settlements in."
"We'll just kill them all. Nothing to worry about. The time-honored tradition of doing things." Conrad said to Darrow, still a bit cranky even with what his partner thinks. This response doesn't seem to impress her.
"You're thinking more like a trooper than a ranger, Conrad." Darrow pouted, crossing her arms. "Whatever the case, we'll have to report this to the brass and give Lampshire some added security from this parasite threat."
"T-that would be very much appreciated!" Rei would then light up, smiling widely at Ranger Darrow. "P-please lady! We can't afford to keep defending ourselves and our brahmin any further."
Ranger Conrad closed his eyes and paused for a moment, until he lit back up and pulled up a thumbs up to say, "...You have our word."
From there Darrow smiled happily, as Conrad turned to face the troopers, prompting them to straighten up and get into position as Conrad laid out some orders. "Alright you four, starting today you will all be on guard duty around this settlement. If you folks find the trouble's way beyond your paygrade and the settlers' control, you may have to evacuate these civilians to Sacramento. Am I clear?"
"Sir, yes sir!" The troopers call out.
"At ease." Ranger Conrad then nodded, before looking over to Ranger Darrow to tell her, "Let's move out. The brass needs to know more about what's going on at the beaches."
From there, the four troopers and the settlers went back through the entrance to go on with their lives, while the two rangers and the remaining troopers move out to report back.
Later that night...
The troopers were on high alert, patrolling Lampshire for any threat. So far, the brahmin pen had since been repaired and cleared of dead cattle and mutant lice. Farther along the ocean was some odd waves which already had set the trooper near the hill on the edge, with him pulling on his service rifle's charging handle in preparation.
"I don't like this..." The trooper said to himself.
Out of nowhere, the ground shook beneath their feet, strong enough to wake up just about the whole of Lampshire. No surprise here, the trooper got startled by this and looked up above the hill, dreading what was approaching.
The ground then shook again, and again. It was getting louder as well, like something was getting close.
From there, the ground continue to shake. And then the rather harsh sounds of gigantic footsteps started sounding off in the distance. It sounded like explosives setting off in the distance with every step.
From here, just about every settler in Lampshire was awoken by the shaking and crowded up to behind the one trooper, with the other three pushing the crowd back to safety as best they can.
Some among the crowd armed up with whatever they had, from pitchforks, to torches, to their own guns. The gunmen among the crowd having even no faith, complaining that they have little rounds left on their weapons. Regardless though, the now mostly armed crowd were ready for what was approaching.
But they all immediately lost color on their skin, when up the hills popped the head of something truly gigantic. Bigger and more threatening than a deathclaw, let alone mutant lice.
Rising up from the hills was a gigantic, hunched over reptilian bipedal monster with rough and bumpy black scales with an almost green accent. An 80 meter terror that rose from the depths. When it turned, it appeared to have three rows of dorsal plates that glowed as blue as a bottle of quantum, and white eyes with black rounded pupils that stared down at the wastelanders.
The sight of this giant monster was already too much for the crowd, prompting them to start running for their lives, while the four troopers started stepping back to aim at the approaching monster.
"H-holy shit!" One of the troopers cursed out, hastily firing at the creature already with their rifle. "E-evacuate the settlement! Now!"
The other troopers were about to fire as well while they step back away to follow after the fleeing settlers, when the monster lifted its head up high, opened its mouth and let out a roar, announcing itself to the people of the Wasteland, and shaking the very wastelanders fleeing from them to the absolute core of their being.
SKREEEEEEEEEEEEOOOOOOOONGK~!
As the monster let out a booming gigantic roar, just about all the troopers decided to start running with the fleeing settlers while firing at the creature. They were just about getting as far away from Lampshire as possible, in an effort to get away from the giant monster. From this panic, the brahmin all around the pen just about joined in the madness, especially once the cattle themselves sighted the beast, and just about broke off from the pen, breaking through the fences and also fleeing for their lives.
Among the fleeing settlers was the herders Brad and Rei, and Rei was especially mortified by the monster's untold arrival. More importantly though, she never thought that something that impossibly large could ever exist.
The entire crowd would continue running as far away as possible, until this just about prompted the creature to hopefully walk back to the ocean, as they were all out of reach. All of them could do was look on. Lampshire definitely wasn't safe, with being in close proximity with the giant monster. The vast brahmin pen was just about ransacked, with all the mutant cattle scattered about in the midst of the panic.
While the rest of the settlers followed after the troopers, Rei and Brad looked at Lampshire one more time, with the woman falling down to her knees and Brad getting down to hug her in an attempt to comfort her.
"I-I don't think we're safe anymore, Brad..." Rei said to her partner. "M-my old family back at the Boneyard feared something like this. I-I can understand d-deathclaws a-and mutant rats and cattle... b-but not something that large. I-it only existed in their old little f-folklore."
"E-everything's going to be okay, Rei..." Brad tried to calm her down just about, patting her on the head.
However she wasn't going to listen when she continued, "They repeatedly told something about leaving their homeland to get away from this."
Hearing the ramblings of Rei, the other settlers were collectively agreeing that the monster was something they knew from their old man's stories.
And in those stories, they called him GOJIRA. Something the uninitiated NCR troopers would mishear as Godzilla. To some extent, it was fitting. It was etched onto their minds that there was a god living among them.
Far back out from behind the hill, what's known so far as Gojira had already fallen back to the ocean, leaving behind humongous four-toed reptilian footprints and a big tail track on the beach sands that led back to the ocean.
With the settlement of Lampshire completely abandoned in fear of the now colloquially named Godzilla coming to attack and presumably begin to kill settlers, the just about intact survivors followed after the four troopers and their pack brahmin as they made their way to Sacramento to seek shelter.
The presence of Godzilla definitely sends a message to the troopers and the survivors that the coastline wasn't safe.
And worst off, the Wasteland at large does not know yet that the King of the Monsters had risen from the ocean.
This was only the beginning of a new era for the New World.
THE END