[Author's Note: This is optional worldbuilding. New readers can skip to Episode 1 and come back to this later. The story starts with Episode 1.]
September 26, 1983
The air in the Cheyenne Mountain bunker was thick with the smell of ozone and stale coffee.
General Tucker stared at the primary tactical display, his thumb hovering over the authentication key. The world was screaming. Radar pings confirmed a full-scale Soviet launch — three hundred warheads currently arcing over the North Pole.
"Seconds to impact?" Tucker barked.
"Six minutes, sir," the technician whispered, his voice trembling. "God help us."
Tucker closed his eyes and turned his key.
He waited for the end of the world.
It never came.
At exactly 12:00 AM, every red dot on the radar vanished. The screens didn't glitch. They simply turned gray. The launch board in front of him went dark too — his own counter-strike, unmade before it began. In silos across the Dakotas and deep within the Siberian taiga, thousands of pounds of weapons-grade enriched uranium didn't just fail to detonate. It ceased to exist.
The silence that followed was more terrifying than the sirens.
What did they do? How did they steal the sun?
---
October 14, 1983
The riots started two weeks later.
Humanity, stripped of its nuclear teeth, found its claws instead.
In a small suburban home, a fourteen-year-old girl named Liuyan sat in her basement. She didn't understand why her father was screaming at her mother upstairs. She only knew that she was scared. As she sobbed, a violent, wet sound echoed in the small room. Her skin tore, and from her shoulder blades, a pair of dark, leathery wings unfurled — grotesque and twitching with a life of their own.
The front door kicked open. Not the police. Not the army.
The Containment Teams.
"We found another one!" a man screamed, his face hidden behind a gas mask.
Liuyan's father didn't try to protect her. He stood in the corner, pointing at his daughter with a shaking hand.
"Get that demon out of my house," he stammered, stepping backward. "I never want to see that thing again."
As they dragged the screaming child into the black van, she caught one last glimpse of her parents' faces. The same people who once tucked her in at night, who kissed her scraped knees, now stared at her with wide, hollow eyes — not as their daughter, but as a monster. That look carved deeper wounds than the wings ever could.
Inside the house, a news anchor spoke in a clipped, clinical tone.
"The Global Registration Act has passed. All NovaBreeds are now classified as state-owned deterrents. For the safety of the human race, the monsters must be caged."
---
New Kong, 2079
Marcus lay in the sterile ward of the Industrial Belt Clinic, listening to the steady beep of his own heart monitor. He was nineteen. Three of his ribs were cracked, his left leg was crushed in an external fixator, and he couldn't stop staring at his hands.
Twelve hours ago, he had been working a graveyard shift at the docks. A massive cargo crate had slipped from the crane cables above him. He'd thrown his hands up in a desperate, instinctive block, and his payload had awakened. He didn't just stop the crate. The payload had unleashed a concussive kinetic shockwave so violent it blew the four-ton container backward through a structural support pillar and straight into moving traffic on the Ring Road.
He remembered the screech of twisting metal. The fire. The sirens.
The door to his hospital room slid open, but it wasn't the NCC. Two men in immaculate black suits stepped inside. No badges. No names. One of them held a digital tablet.
"You caused quite a mess out there, Marcus," the taller one said, his smile perfectly practiced and entirely devoid of warmth. "The authorities are waiting in the lobby. They're drawing up the paperwork for a measure eleven charge. Terrorism."
Marcus tried to speak, but his throat was like sandpaper.
"But we can make them go away," the man continued, stepping closer to the bed. "We can fix your leg. We can teach you how to control your payload. We can give you a completely clean slate. All you have to do is come work for us."
The man handed him the tablet. It was a contract.
Marcus looked at the men, then at his own trembling hands. He thought about the sirens. He didn't have a choice. He signed his name, trading his freedom for his life without a second thought.
They had built the cage to look like an opportunity, and that was the only improvement ninety-six years had managed to produce.
Nobody dragged him anywhere. Nobody called him a demon.
He went quietly.
This was how the world operated now—quiet, sterile, and utterly ruthless.