Entity #: 5959
Codename: The Lesser Gigantes
Known Abilities:
Atlas gigantes, as many spiritual beings with wide-ranging abilities, are each intelligent self-developing collections of thaumaturgical principles. The exact capabilities of a lesser gigas may wildly diverge into various procedural transformations for decades of development, then converge on small-scale generalized reality warping with certain things larger or faster. Age, specializations, and degree of effort increasing their abilities through meditation are most useful for establishing standard progression (see related research). Setbacks in expected power may occur due to drastic physical damage and need to postdiction-scry missing memories, but this is rare.
Lesser gigantes may develop various abilities quickly, without need for outside research. These are often generalized flexible abilities regarding making and manipulating a concept at low levels per time spent affecting it, 'very niche spell that does a thing and handles the side effects' with great instant power at the cost of magical energy, or gaining some specific will-it-so such as control over an attribute-to-transform. An instance of this takes a deep meditative session aligning principles and desiring a spell be made, or a generic intent over several daily rest periods dreaming rather than meditating. Few actually do this for more than specific things they want to do, and so pick up ideas tied to their daily life at random over the years. This may leave them with toolkits and rates of adaptation drastically below what other beings of their caliber can simply wish so, unless they have time to prepare. They may also obtain certain powers more or less randomly in moments of insight or severe emotion. Overall, lesser gigantes are not as arbitrary as some transformative devices available, but make up for it in greater non-transformation environmental control and ability to interface with complex concepts.
Lesser gigantes are immortal except in the event of massive area damage and active attempts to destroy them. Specifically, they regenerate ex nihilo such that humanly long-term crippling injuries may recover within months to minutes based on individual. Most accidents of nature do not destroy them thoroughly enough to render them externally inactive for more than a few days. Often this is because of their spiritual components' willingness to linger in the world reforging a physical body instead of a ghostly one. Biological maintenance actions when embodied are optional, but typically performed anyway for minor mass-energy benefits or to avoid social concern. A lesser gigas' magical energy is not infinite but regenerates faster while resting, so sleep is used for increased recovery speed via recharging for healing spells. Conventional death may allow extended distribution or allies to easily orchestrate resurrection/reconstruction-with-continuity elsewhere. Thus, capture and containment of hostiles is favored over destruction lest they become long-term uncontained.
Lesser Gigantes are shapeshifters to varying degrees, especially with regard to overall size. However, it is considered a skill that has to be developed from principle talent and desire (similar to their general meditation-for-spellmaking authority), rather than trivially available or prerequisite-to-manifestation. Those who do not specialize in shapeshifting may take inconvenient amounts of time to shift size or dematerialize unless they are generally-powerful elders. This makes it possible to grip them physically for several seconds to minutes before non-total restraint is ineffective, depending on individual (e.g. those who know fluid transformations may simply flow out rather than be gripped). Some gigantes with a taste for irony have even learned becoming smaller than human high-speed beings extremely quickly to specifically escape containment.
The true physical form of a lesser gigantes, and their default when observation or momentary-strength is a nonissue, is often an oversize human with only slight distortion. Younger lesser gigantes for their first few decades are typically a few meters tall at full size, able to stand alongside or above giraffes, small buildings, and modest trees. Typical sizes of centuries-old or growth-specialist lesser gigantes range from dozens to hundreds of meters tall, with physical abilities to match. Younger giants, even without any more-efficient size-boosting ability, can temporarily match the size of their elders if they try or want to. Oversizing can be sustained for several minutes passively before it becomes an effort comparable to exercise, about as long as an exercise routine in battle or great need, and several hours before it becomes tiring enough they shrink down from lack of energy automatically. Older lesser gigantes are able to maintain larger forms for longer more easily, and may prefer to be as large as they can maintain indefinitely without effort. Anti-impact and anti-detection abilities are often developed, allowing a lesser gigas to take physical form and influence commensurate with a greater gigas without arousing global shadow government ire. Several old giants close in scope to greater beings may prefer nonphysical manifestations. Reports include mind controlling a vague area of people, being hard to distinguish from a weather formation, or possessing significant areas of landscape.
Natural and intentional stylization of fat and musculature in forms varies significantly for aesthetic reasons. Physiological strength is orders of magnitude eclipsed by magical physics-alteration strength simply to allow pseudo-biology exist at that size. Thus, most lesser gigantes appear what they deem conventionally attractive or conventionally imposing unless intentionally evoking a style. Many favor large chests and robust limbs to not appear spindly. Females often stylize themselves as curvaceous or thick. Males may amplify specific areas or secondary characteristics. Other genders often express heavier elemental aesthetic. Explicitly genderfluid gigantes tend towards rapid reformation based on mood or present identification. Due to shapeshifting and non-biological high-adaptability core mechanics, gender among lesser gigantes is mostly performative or a matter of preferred abstract energy concentrations.
An individual lesser gigantes often opts for physiology comparable to a strong, large human when avoiding attention or approaching human society. This 'human size' is considered an affectation, terminal-type remote-sensor body, or compression of their true or preferred form. Lesser gigantes in the wild may partake in human society for various reasons. Typical reports indicate lack of peer giants, desire for power advantage, access to a wide variety of stimulating culture, or specific technical information. Individual preferences vary, but they often engage in events that connote growth, intake, or superiority. Most commonly this is sports (especially weight-lifting, wrestling, and other contact-strength-heavy ones), eating competitions, being terrible on dating sites, physical labor, management, and specific fetish parties. Lesser gigantes may develop and deploy mind-affecting powers in order to engage in these activities (e.g. to ignore documentation and accreditation requirements). Once engaged, they typically act within the same formal weight class or otherwise stabilized physical form to maintain challenge, at least for short periods. Others develop further specifically so cheating becomes independently easy and can be done indefinitely: several local awards and poorly-recorded athletes may have been lesser gigantes or relatives thereof.
Many gigantes, feeling unwilling or unable to express their complete size in constrained environments, develop the magical ability to shrink or size-drain persons. It is often coupled with developing specific bodily structures for vorarephilia and/or expanding a few feet in height above human range while being able to fit in local buildings. Temporarily shrinking persons directly or via cursed clothing items for a short-term fetish experience is common. However, long-term 'pet keeping' has also been known to occur. Absorption of humans into a lesser gigantes' spiritual framework is common, typically via 'soft vore' or bodily fusion creating a spiritual remote endosymbiosis after physical containment. Conventional people-eating absorption is typically an act of destruction instead. Those absorbed into a lesser gigantes but retaining or redeveloping physical separation are still integrated into the thaumaturgical principles and may make use of them independently (see Other section).
Lesser gigantes who decide to go beyond cheating and private play into regular human consumption often end up G.E.T. capture targets. Statistically anomalous missing person trails, sudden localized infrastructural effectiveness reduction, and long-term population declines despite local environmental/economic conditions are often created by shoddy cover-ups. Failure to cover-up at all often merits G.E.T. backup or supplanting of appropriate local law enforcement and military presence when a giant straight-up attacks.
Containment: A lesser gigas, gigas-integrated, or descendant thereof liable to produce unacceptable losses, consume excessive populations, or perform large physical infrastructure damage is to be contained through anti-kaiju protocols. Application of several types of large-scale containment thaumaturgy and recommended use of strength-inducing transformations is preapproved according to Anti-Kaiju Protocol 18-B v4, 'Superhero Movie 2'. Once the gigas is physically secured for a short period, application of space compression transfer and a full-body gimp or containment tube is standard. Less than heavily reinforced full-body or area-wide binding may allow them to shrink or grow past it.
Contained lesser gigantes are stored at Site #T49-2B, 'The Giant Farm'. Storage consists of magical energy exploitation, output analysis, and possibly other effects as experimentation dictates.
Lesser Gigantes instances are created through damage or reproductive construction by various models of thaumaturgically-active divinity. Ichor from damaged god-bodies is the most common source, as direct reproduction simply produces demigods. Concentrations of magical energy in the earth with insufficient landscape maintenance/self-integration bias may also induce Lesser Gigantes formation, especially in societies that have unmanaged size alteration effects in play. Transmutation refining of sustained demonic influence through natural flows into something else also applies, which has produced multiple in recent history. However, the Earth is old enough that most giant-producing formations have stabilized by now. Thus, the best preventative measure is avoiding bleeding or sexualizing deities that have not constructed avatar-presence to avoid this. In the event of significant volcanic activity or tectonic plate shifts, planetary leylines and known magical energy concentrations in affected areas should be reviewed in case new giants are generated, despite the low probability.
Other: Taxonomic separation from greater gigantes (e.g. Atlas jotunn and certain types of currently-unclassified divinities) is informal, as are breeds thereof. Hybridization and origin-unclear results are known to occur with various affiliations of jotunn, full titans, a wide spectrum of lower-scope nature deity, div, asura, demons, jinn, rakshasa, and oni. It is entirely possible being a lesser gigantes is more cultural than physical.
Development of significant new abilities requiring specialized containment may merit an independent entity reclassification. Ability patterns deviating from standard are usually grounds for a named instance, e.g. 5959-####.
Gigas-integrated persons retain the ability to meditatively develop arbitrary thaumaturgical principles and connect to relatives' spiritual networks, effectively equivocating them to half-giant children of the lesser gigantes. This powerful magic-user bloodline ability breeds true at equal levels and averages in disparate levels of speed, but reduces in speed in hybrids without significant magical talent. Lesser gigantes occasionally fuse with each other or transcend to live elsewhere. As their bloodlines reduce in expression generations shortly down and rarely climb back up, the Earth population of them is fairly low outside atavism.
Half-giants operate mostly as intuitive or meditatively-developing magic-users. If training to be faster or improving certain attributes, they may effectively overwrite their humanity and become full lesser gigantes with some developmental effort or through fusing with other part-giants. They may be able to 'nudge' spell parameters on the fly, or use their broad authorities to knead and rewrite either specific things or a general area. They can reliably produce spells, conceptual authority, and types of form alterations on nothing but desire and hammering out the specific side-effects managed. This may take meditation for hours, lucid dreaming, planning over the course of a few days, and/or an extremely emotional sequence, but they can do it. Half-giants treat their physical form as something they can just will different in a few minutes transforming generally, or a magical-girl-speed sequence over a few seconds if it's between specific attributes they control. Their arbitrarily-supportable-size growthrate is slower, with many sticking around a few meters tall and growing slowly from there or opting to be near-constantly compressed to human-size. Many half-giants have arbitrarily-extensible lifespans and may effectively ignore any boundary between life and death by materializing a new young-adult body if their natural one breaks, though it may take large volumes of magical energy or preparation time such that it cannot be done in rapid succession. Like their parents and other magic-users, many half-giants use mental-interference abilities to reduce objection to or external comment on their abilities if they live in normal human society.
Quarter-giants need to specifically self-improve for an extended period to reach the level of half-giants. Typically this is several months or a few years of active self-redesign. Otherwise, they can live much longer than humanly normal and leave behind physically interfering ghosts that can rebuild physical bodies to return to life. Many choose not to fully return, instead behaving as unusually mobile poltergeists before growing bored and departing for the afterlife for an extended period. Spell-design abilities and affinity for conceptual control are talented compared to average magic users, but the 'giant trance' of truly arbitrary development with zero external support is comparable to writing papers over the course of several days to a few weeks or a long-term ideological devotion. Shapeshifting is more self-adaptive and indefinitely-supportable-size growth exists but is very slow, often stabilizing at a few meters tall for most of their life unless improving inherited abilities.
Part-giants less than the quarter-level simply have magical talent. At this point, the spiritual bloodline is mostly stable for a few generations and physical traits from other ancestry dominate: they might not even have a propensity to be large-sized past the eighth-level. They may discover or have taught the 'giant trance' of unsupported ability development and gradually obtain specific magical powers over several days. Unaided, actually trying is rare until either a youthful obsession or the prolonged focus of young adult life trying to worldbuild coincidentally granting actual capability. Without a specific magical tradition, a connection to the family line progenitor, or incentive to increase their own ability-to-develop-abilities, descendants will rarely grow themselves up to the quarter-level and might not display any nonhuman traits externally. However, atavistic jumping to the quarter-level is sometimes spurred by biological changes in teenagers or young adults. In separated or non-discussing families, the giant responsible may be completely unknown by the time an atavistic generation occurs.