I don't own the Monsterverse, sadly.
Kong is not the only King.
"Kong…is not the only King."
For Mason Weaver and James Conrad, the simple and extremely brief summary of how the world didn't belong to humanity was a surprise, but to discover the implication that Kong, the enormous gorilla-like ape that they had befriended on Skull Island where the very rules of nature itself seemed to have been rewritten, with enormous lizard-like Skullcrawlers which could move like lightning and were vicious monsters that had made short work of the expedition to Skull Island and those bird-like things that looked more like plants or trees than any kind of bird the two of them knew.
And then there was Kong.
Mason was a photographer. She had photographed her own fair share of incredible and unique sights but she knew the film in her camera and what she'd had on her paled in comparison to the myriad photographs she had accumulated on Skull Island. And if the world knew about Kong, then there was a good chance her friend who was already so lonely given the loss of his family thanks to the Skullcrawlers, especially the one named by Marlow as 'the Big One,' would die. The photojournalist in her wanted nothing more than to show her photos to the world, was clear it was a terrible, terrible decision to tell the world about Skull Island; it would be all too easy for someone to try to finish what Packard wanted. Mentally Mason sneered at the thought of the war-torn and insane Packard. The two of them hadn't gotten along since the colonel had blamed Mason and her fellow journalists for the loss of the war in Vietnam.
No, that was not her fault but within seconds of meeting him, Mason knew there was no chance in hell of them getting along, but the way he had gone mad trying to kill Kong…
At first, okay, Mason had believed the enormous ape was a monster before Marlow told them the story of Kong and how he was merely protecting himself from the Skullcrawlers, the same disgusting creatures that kicked the asses of the survivors of the military escort but when she had seen the compassionate way Kong had lifted that piece of the helicopter off of that giant buffalo/stag and when she had touched his face, making him cry with longing, Mason had come to understand the ape. It was a shame they couldn't have stayed on the island a little bit longer, help him and give him a lasting friendship.
But hearing there were other enormous 'kings' out there… while she was stunned when she saw the little film this Monarch outfit had set up for her and James, in truth Mason saw the logic as she watched one slide after another that Kong, the Skullcrawlers, and the other creatures they had seen on the island were not unique; the dinosaur-like monster with the enormous dorsal spines, the three-headed thing that put Mason in mind of the half-forgotten myths of the ancient Hydra, to that dinosaur-like bird to the moth.
Right next to her James Conrad stared at the still slide of the two creatures, the one that resembled a giant T-Rex that looked like it had some strange horns on its back fighting a three-headed creature while they both seemed to breathe fire, his SAS and mercenary trained mind tensing involuntarily when he caught sight of the crudely drawn and painted skulls underneath the three-headed 'king,' believing it to be a threat instantaneously.
But what surprised him the most was how seriously he was taking this now, knowing full well that if he had refused to join Randa and Brooks when they had first come to him in that brothel then he would never have believed this. But after he had seen the way Kong fought off the Big One and how they had seen so many other large creatures that Packard casually dismissed in the belief they could easily kill them off, Conrad had to accept these slides were correct.
But Brooks was not finished. The young Monarch assistant had watched as his teammates had absorbed every single thing.
"Monarch was set up when the first nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, dived to the deepest depths a submarine had ever travelled down to, and they woke something up," Brooks said quietly.
"What?" Mason asked breathlessly, unwilling to take her eyes off of the slides before a video played, this time showing a massive creature with the sharp dorsal spines on the massive reptilian back which put her in mind of a gigantic dinosaur with spines like somebody had broken giant shards of half-melted glass and shoved them into the creature's back, recognising the creature as the one in the cave paintings.
"Him. When he arose, the 1950s nuclear tests were used as a cover to kill him," Brooks said, and as if to emphasise his words the video showed the gigantic creature as it surfaced on an island with a nuclear bomb with a crudely painted icon with a red cross through it. "He was one of the first of the Titans to rise up.
"We call him Godzilla. He belongs to a very old order of prehistoric life. Our current theories are he, and many like him evolved on an Earth where the natural radiation was quite high and it promoted many different kinds of life before the natural radiation began to fade and the laws of nature asserted themselves on different lines. When that happened, the titans went into hibernation around the planet so they'd be closer to the natural radiation of the Earth's core," San Lin said.
"But in the 1940s, an aquatic titan was already loose. It attacked and destroyed the USS Lawton. The government classified it, but when the nuclear tests went on, the then President of the USA believed the establishment of a new agency to research and determine ways of combating the Titans was formed. Monarch."
"Randa was a sailor in the US navy in 1943. He served on the Lawton. He was the only survivor and he was a major lynchpin in Monarch operations; many of his ideas were considered insane and many believed him to be mad, but his ideas were sound," San Lin added, to the surprise of the listeners.
"And he was recruited into Monarch because of that," Mason nodded as she saw the sense in that.
"Where do we fit into this?" Conrad asked.
"We'd like you two to join Monarch," Brooks smiled as if the offer was the one everyone wanted.
"What will happen to us if we don't?" Mason asked. She was a natural rebel and she didn't like the thought of someone else being her boss beyond the ones she knew.
"Nothing," the worry on Brook's face was so genuine, so unforced that the pair believed him. "We won't hurt you. We feel that your skills will help us. Another expedition is being planned for Skull Island in the near future and we need your experience there to help us guide it."
Mason and Conrad glanced at each other. The offer seemed a bit too good to be true, but they knew their worlds had both been shaken up by the expedition they'd returned from. Did they want to go through that again?