Essence of the(Anti-)Kaiju

This ‘bottle’ appears to have been carved out of the scale of some massive beast. The liquid inside glows blue, and you can subtly hear a sound like a geiger counter ticking. Tastes like cheesy popcorn and the perseverance of man. Drinking it grants you the following:

• Two paths are before you: Humanity and Monsterkind. You may take one, or both if you truly think you can harmonize them.

• H: If you choose Humanity, you receive an absolutely peak human body, designed to your tastes, and with a boost to your logical mind and endurance. You have the grit and the guts to wage a half-century war with giant monsters and keep powering through, win or lose.

• M: If you choose Monsterkind, you receive a monstrous form that fits a couple different criteria: One, it is big. How big? Up to 50 meters tall, 30 wide, and 40 long to begin (ignoring wingspan), weighing tens of thousands of tons. Don’t worry; you’ll grow quickly if you play your cards right. Two, it is an amalgamation of a few chosen concepts. Maybe you’re an alien-cyborg-rogue-dinosaur (Gigan), earthen-chi-protector-turtle (Gamera), oceanic-nuclear-unpredictable-dinosaur (Godzilla), or something more esoteric. Your design is entirely up to you beyond the size restrictions, and you have a number of natural (or unnatural) abilities that we’ll get into in a bit.

• H: As Humanity’s greatest defender, you possess the knowledge and talent to design weapons capable of toppling even the most insurmountable beasts. This will be a general knowledge of anti-monster (not necessarily giant ones, either) tactics and weapons designs, but as you encounter more monsters you may learn to reproduce their natural abilities through technology and find perfect counters to their biologies. If you got your hands on part of a monster, there’s no telling what you could build. Mecha that completely violate the Square-Cube Law just as the monsters do, computers that rely on DNA for information processing, perfect recreations of their internal energy ‘reactors’, breath weapons remade under your control… Your scientific talent for designing things that kill things is post-post-postmodern, and you can reverse engineer even the most alien biologies and technologies trivially with a single concrete example.

• M: You have access to an energy or energetic substance that serves as the source of your abilities. Maybe it’s technology, giving you lasers and huge chainsaw blades, maybe it’s radiation, giving you powerful ranged beams and a radius of burning radioactivity, maybe even magic, giving you more esoteric powers. On top of the inherent abilities of having a huge combat-focused monster body, you have one ranged and two short ranged special abilities, although you can develop more over time. Flight doesn’t account for one of your slots, but taking a specialization in flight such that you are obscenely fast even by monster standards takes up one of your short range slots. Examples include: Godzilla, long range breath, short range radiation, short range brawling. Biollante, long range acid spit, short range tendrils, short range burrowing. Rodan, long range wind, short range beak, flight specialization. King Caesar, long range energy reflection, short range martial arts, short range magic-enhanced attacks.

• H: Monsters instinctively recognize your power and either fear or respect you, especially considering you have the balls to stare them down face to face. Other non-monster races will see you and recognize you as the best humanity has to offer, making them much more willing to negotiate with you.

• M: You hold real power over lesser monsters. Beasts below you in strength will instantly know it, and unless they’re suicidally aggressive they will bow before you. Even those that are brave (read: dumb) enough to challenge you will only need to have some sense knocked into them to realize you’re their superior. It might come with a little grumbling, but they’ll accept you as the Alpha.

• H: You are extremely talented at public speaking and politics, capable of stirring up an entire nation’s populace to go to war against monsterkind. You could easily serve as President, King, Emperor, whatever, and lead the charge against monsters with your forces as the spearhead.

• M: You can asexually produce smaller versions of your same species/type of monster that will grow in strength the longer they remain alive, but also serve as decent fodder against human forces. You can also take a specialization in this reproduction instead of your starting long-range ability, putting you on par with Godzilla Anime Prequel Novelization Zilla, which managed a complete overrun of wide swaths of Europe when only a single individual’s clutch of eggs survived long enough. Your offspring will produce their own offspring, so on and so forth, but you will always be the strongest and biggest example and hold total control over all of your descendants.

• H: Any anti-monster projects you oversee are sped up obscene amounts, such that you could get workers from Detroit to finish building a massive untested mech with energy weapons within months, all while using early 2000s tech. You yourself are a master at piloting your weapons and will often come out of them unharmed even if they are fully destroyed.

• M: You are a master at moving and positioning yourself in such a way to trick and confuse other creatures and their machines. You can inspire intense emotional reactions in other monsters and in humans just by showing up, with fear being the easiest to pull off, but you could also inspire awe or submission, among other things.

• H: You somehow come out of monster attacks, even attacks directed specifically at you, with far less harm than an ordinary person would. Being attacked by monsters even gives you greater and faster insight into how to kill them or reverse engineer their abilities, so that you won’t have to worry about it next time they try to get the jump on you, seeing as you’ll have already built the perfect counter.

• M: You are deceptively and abnormally agile for your size and weight, and you have almost selective capacity to deal damage. You could duke it out with another kaiju to prove your dominance in the middle of a city and at most destroy cars and roads underfoot and maybe bang up a few storefronts, or you might instead cause horrific and widespread destruction through your passing alone.

• H: Even when deploying dangerous and extremely volatile weapons against monsters, your fellow humans (or whatever race you are) will rarely get caught in the crossfire. In fact, almost every attack you wield seems to have little to no effect on those you see as innocent to the conflict, instead focusing itself on the target of your wrath.

• M: You receive access to a den, in which you can refuel your chosen energy/substance quickly simply by being there, and which you cannot be traced back to in any way. Convenient entrances and exits that lead to it (which really function more like portals to a pocket dimension) will be scattered across every new world you visit, even letting you fast travel to previous worlds through them. You can also raise your young here, and bring along other monsters, for the sake of staging full-on attacks or just to recuperate them as well.

• H: You receive control over an anti-monster force, potentially an entire new branch of a local nation’s military, or just an international task force, designed toward saving humanity (or humanoid races, if there are multiple on a given world) from the monsters and beasts of the multiverse. This military force grows with each new world you visit, incorporating their tech and any political gains you make into themselves each time. You may even work your way from a military force to an entire nation and bring it with you, serving as its head of state.

• HM: If you have taken both Humanity and Monsterkind, you are the perfect fusion of both. You receive both sides’ perks, and as a monster may elect to be a mecha or partially mechanical monster, into which you can build your superweapons and command your allies from the front lines. Your human body may be a separate body that serves as your ‘pilot’, but you are the consciousness of both and can convince or force both monsters and non-monsters into your control, from their respective forms. Would be pretty weird if a giant cyborg monster was President, after all.

• Of course, this is all toggleable, or a sliding scale adjusting to your liking, so long as it stays at or below the original stated strength.

• Optionally, be inserted into a specific or generic kaiju setting, including fanfiction or non-canon media.