These are the witwatersrands of Gauteng. It's an escarpment; a sloping cliff made of quartzite. It's hard to believe that long ago, this rock was underground, being heated and pressurized over a period of time...and that it was originally sandstone. (Sandstone becomes quartzite when this happens.)
Waterfalls, here and there all over the top of the escarpment, do what they can to erode the rands. Alas, no matter how hard the wind howls, Africa will never bow to it.
A subpolar oceanic climate infects this land. This is one of the few parts of Africa where it snows in the winter. (Winter here, of course, meaning from late June to late September...the opposite of what it is in most of the world.) Summers are warm, and winters freeze. Alas, that's all winters here do; these lands are very much a stranger to extreme subzero temperatures.
Along such a river that one of these waterfalls feed, a hospital sits. Some of its patients are permanent residents. Others are dying.
Locked in her room, a Zulu-Sotho woman lies on her bed, with a rare blood anomaly running through her bloodstream. She's a brunette with flowing hair; in younger years, she'd curl it. Alas, her doctors seem to think that her blood will soon become the death of her.
Otherwise, Dorcas looks like she could be a she-wrestler. She doesn't know it yet...but one day, she will become SO much more than that...
Outside, a strange truck pulls up to one of the docks. It's got several locks on the back of itself...and few windows...let alone prison bars. As the truck backs to the dock, its back secretes a calming gas into itself.
In masks and goggles, nurses go in, with rods and ropes. Moments later, they come back out...leading a she-gorilla. She doesn't resist her captivity, as she'd led upstairs...to the room where she'll be experimented on.
At about the same moment, other nurses come...for Doris Zuel. She would thrash and scream for this part...if only she thought she could do so without causing her blood condition to deteriorate.
Nonetheless, at one point, she decides that repressing what she can't deny is useless. Hence, she starts thrashing on the cart the nurses have got her strapped to. There's a clamor and a struggle, as the nurses work hard to keep her restrained, and to summon other nurses to help them reinforce her existing constrictions.
Upstairs, they give the she-gorilla many inoculations...with very large syringes. They attach hoses to several of her veins. They attach the hoses' ends to a tank...that sits between the gorilla's berth and the one they'll tie Doris to...as soon as they bring her.
Now, they bring Doris. One step at a time, they lay her into the berth where she'll be bound during this procedure.
Within her bloodstream, her tantrum has done some magic; Bloodforce magic, to be more precise. Some of her RBCs have swelled in size. Soon, some of her leukocytes will, too...
By now, the nurses' latest sedative, which they've recently put in her to calm her tantrum, has reached these swelling RBCs. Alas, while the sedative does halt their growth...it doesn't re-shrink them. It can't. The Bloodforce magic in Doris's blood has already made up its mind about what will be.
Nonetheless, Doris's body stays asleep, as the nurses plug the same hoses into her veins...and attack them to the tank. Now, one liter at a time, they mix her corrupted blood with that of the she-gorilla's.
What happens next baffles the doctors. The tank takes both patients' blood supplies, all at once. Thunder rolls, as the blood shoots some kind of red light into itself. For many prolonged moments, the frightened nurses are worried that the tank's glass will shatter...
Without being controlled, the blood supply of both patients siphons itself back into the gorilla's body. With no blood left to live on, the body of Doris Zuel dies tonight...for she flatlines.
A team of nurses comes to take Doris's corpse to the morgue. Another team comes to drag the she-gorilla back onto the truck. It takes some time, but they pull it off. The she-gorilla doesn't so much as flinch, as this takes place.
The country roads of Gauteng can be dangerous. Nobody would describe the geology of this state as recommendable. These dangerous roads wind through Gauteng and Mpumalanga. In the winter, they've been known not to get plowed after snowstorms...as long as those tend to not last here.
Even in the winter, though, snowy roads are often the least of travelers' problems. Vast animal migrations have a tendency to put traffic on ice for hours, and often days. In moments like these, it pays to turn on the truck engine with dignity.
Lucky for the truck crew, it isn't winter yet. Alas, it might be the prelude to it. These are the last golden weeks of the dry season, before the very cold opening of the wet season crashes the honeymoon for all of Mpumalanga's drought-lovers.
In the back of the truck, such a drought-lover is about to be born. Now, the she-gorilla wakes. As she does, she shifts shape. Not only does she shift shape, but she shifts size.
Soon, the truck rocks back and forth. The crew panics, and abandons the ride.
Next, rivets start popping out of the truck's metalwork. At some point, the truck rolls off the road on its own. Initially, it rolls back and forth...for several meters across the road.
Next, it rolls like a bowling ball through the herd of springbok that's taking forever to cross the road. Now, it's just made the migration worse; now the herd is stampeding in all directions.
Not sure what else to do, the surviving truck crewmen draw their pistols, for protection. Alas, they're pretty sure that whatever's causing that truck to turn into a bowling ball, their pistols will NOT hurt it... Alas, try they must. This is NOT a very hospitable place to die...for man or springbok.
Now, the truck rolls off an escarpment, and vanishes. As the guards shoot springboks to keep from getting speared by their horns, they shield their eyes, as their gaze is fixed on the escarpment ledge. With luck, the gorilla fell to her death.
From over the ledge, a very angry woman yells in rage. That was MUCH louder than a normal woman's yell...and whatever she did to amplify her voice, it wasn't with a bullhorn...or a civil emergency siren. These truck crewmen are no stranger to both.
Something huge leaps over the escarpment, and lands on her feet atop it, facing the terrified crewmen. She flexes her big lady-muscles, and shouts in rage again.
She looks exactly like Doris. Alas, last this truck crew checked, Doris wasn't ten times her normal height...or stronger than her blood anomaly. Nor did she dress like an amazon...however she pulled that off...
Now the crewmen KNOW they can't defend themselves with these pistols. Hence, they holster what they've got left, sound a retreat, and run for their lives.
Doris considers chasing the crewmen for fun...but decides against it. Besides, keeping her new condition a secret probably isn't going to work out.
Or at least, Doris thinks this...before she shrivels back to her normal size.
Perfect; she's gotten over her blood anomaly and escaped the mental hospital on the same night. Now, she's got to survive. And she will. She's always wanted to do something like this, after all. And with her new power and abilities, all of Africa's nations must be foolish, if they seriously think one of their factories makes a weapon worthy of her doomsday.
Alas, they can still kill her when she's this size, which might not... But then, she'd better make it a point to clean house, each and every time, before re-sizing herself back to normal. But then, it's possible that the Bloodforce magic works on her in a way that...at one point, she'll grow to superhuman size, and never be able to re-size to normal again...
Alas, Doris knows better than to pretend to know things she doesn't. She's pretty sure that she's the first person in history that Bloodforce magic's done this to. For now, though, rambling and survival are her better business. So, from here, she rambles off...at her normal size. For now, she pledges only to grow to superhuman size to defend herself...or to hunt. With that said, she can probably expect to make enemies with a game warden in the next three weeks.
Giganta has been born. Africa is mostly powerless to defend itself from her. But with luck, they'll never have need. All Doris has got to do is lay low...which doesn't come easy, of course, when you stand taller than a baobab...and seem to gradually get taller, with each successive self-expansion...