Daikaiju (Unity)

Daikaiju are titanic carnivorous aliens that travel from planet to planet, stripping them of animal life to feed their hunger.

Biology
Daikaiju are gigantic quadrupeds far larger than any creature on Earth, standing around 500 feet (150 m) tall at the shoulder. They are completely covered in plates of dark gray armor, which is thick enough to shrug off railguns and missiles. Beneath this armor, their bare flesh is reddish. Their hands and feet end in three digits, and their stubby fingers bear huge retractable claws. Their heads resemble those of turtles in shape, but have four red eyes and no visible nose or mouth. Daikaiju have long, thick tails for balance, with a huge spike at the end for combat.

The daikaiju's most notable trait is their complete lack of anything resembling a mouth or nose. Instead, they breathe and eat using thousands of holes in the flesh beneath their armor. These holes appear small in comparison to the immense body, but they are in fact as large as cars. Each hole contains a long, prehensile tendril that ends in a spike for impaling prey.

Diet
Daikaiju are voracious and indiscriminate carnivores, eating smaller animals in vast quantities. They feed by opening the gaps in their armor and firing tendrils out of their holes. The tendrils impale prey animals and drag them into the hole. A daikaiju can have hundreds or even thousands of tendrils out at once, allowing it to eat thousands of victims at the same time. A single daikaiju can devour an entire city's worth of people in short order.

Fear
Daikaiju have the apparently psychic ability to induce crippling fear in those nearby. They must consciously activate this ability and must open their armor and use their tendrils to "cast" it. Those affected experience a vivid and fully immersive hallucination of their worst fear or memory. Victims are generally incapacitated, left unaware of their actual surroundings and unable to fight or flee. Daikaiju use this power to subdue prey that would otherwise escape or resist.

Technology
The daikaiju travel on massive motherships several miles long. These ships are black and spiny, with huge spikes emerging from one end. Sometimes, they are surrounded by much smaller craft of unknown purpose. Curiously, the combined volume of the motherships in Earth's atmosphere is not enough to hold the entire daikaiju invasion force.

The daikaiju use huge, fleshy pods as landing craft, which burst open upon impact and release their passenger to feed. The pod's impact is itself a deadly weapon - it strikes like a meteor, causing massive tsunamis and shockwaves.

History
The daikaiju's origins are not certain. They are suggested to be cosmic predators that seek out life-bearing planets to find food. It is not known if they are a civilized spacefaring race in their own right or if they are living weapons created or used by another - both possibilities are suggested.

The governments of Earth first learned of the daikaiju under murky circumstances. Earth lost contact with a colony on Mars only a month after it had been established. The colony's rover remained active and continued to transmit to Earth, allowing authorities to learn what had happened. What took place at the colony is not known, but the event killed all the colonists. The incident terrified the governments of Earth, who founded the Unity organization. Unity would later create giant robots called Shugoten to fight the daikaiju, suggesting that Unity had at least a rough description of the daikaiju from the Mars incident.

Twenty years after the Mars incident, the daikaiju invaded Earth in force. Some ten thousand daikaiju landed on Earth, one of which landed in the Pacific to find and destroy the base where Unity kept the Shugoten. Unity's child trainees were en route to the island at the time, and their planes were knocked out of the sky by the shockwave created when the daikaiju's pod landed nearby. The trainees landed on the island unprepared and only learned of the daikaiju invasion days later, when they finally reached the Shugoten hangar. By that time, the giant aliens had killed millions of people and devastated much of the world.

The Pacific daikaiju arrived on the island not long after. The trainees used the Shugoten to fight and kill the monster, but even one daikaiju proved to be a difficult and dangerous battle. Afterward, the trainees buried the body, hoping to avoid any further attention, and then began contacting other Unity bases to form a resistance.

It was predicted that the daikaiju would eat every animal bigger than a raccoon in six months' time if they were not stopped.

Appearances

 * Unity, by Jeremy Robinson