The next thing I knew, I was perfectly motionless, standing upright on a firm, but slightly crunchy surface. My vision was blurry. I blinked, shaking my head. I could hear faint, high-pitched whee noises filling the distance, though I couldn’t figure out what they were.

A mountain came into view as my vision cleared. It was at the edge of twilight, lit in pale indigo by the light of the coming dawn. Orange haze rose behind the mountain’s wide, snow-capped peak. The orange hue faded through greens and purples to a soft blue.

Is that…?

Yes, it was.

It was Mt. Aoi, the volcano that overlooked Noyoko.

Noyoko!? I thought.

I looked at what lay below the mountain.

Never in all my life had I had such a marvelous view. I was on the top of the world.

I could see the whole city: a grand panorama that spanned from land to sea. Wind buffeted my hair, carrying the scent of salt. The city lights greeted the dawn. Noyoko and its spires gleamed like geodes in the Sun. Little blues and oranges twinkled here and there, like spirits from the hereafter.

But then I looked down and realized that something was very, very wrong. More than one thing, actually.

I was naked.

I wasn’t the least bit human.

I had a snout blocking the lower part of my field of vision.

And I was huge.

Based on what my wyrm-memory could recall about skyscraper heights, I had to be three-, heck, maybe even four-hundred feet tall.

That “crunchy ground” beneath my feet? (My claw-tipped feet?) It was a city street, along with the cars parked along the way, and the bunches of one story homes and shops that grew like clover at my feet.

Shocked and very much overwhelmed, I staggered about. This was a bad move, mostly because I was surrounded by malls and office buildings and other large structures. The things littered my surroundings like a room cluttered with furniture. To make things worse, I also felt the weight of a tail swaying behind me. It was much smaller and shorter than my wyrm tail-body, but it was there and it was causing problems. Being startled, I was curling my tail reflexively, which sent it swinging at a five-story building. The high-rise cracked like a broken candy cane. Glass and concrete filled the air like dust as the building tumbled over.

Though I had a pretty strong suspicion as to what I’d become, I wanted to be sure, so I looked down at my belly and stuck out my arms to gazed around my shoulder. Everything from my clavicle to my crotch (and even southwards of that, too) was sheathed in row after row of bony scutes. There was a rufflike mane of blood red feathers around my neck. Fibrous, golden fur intermixed with dull, cyan scales over the rest of my body, while the dull feeling of broad weight on my back signaled a massive turtle shell—one no doubt covered in spikes.

Somehow—and this was a very big “somehow”—I’d turned into the kaiju from Mr. Himichi’s nightmares.

As I squinted to get a better view, I felt something twitch behind my eyes, and suddenly, my vision zoomed in as if I had binoculars for eyes. Relaxing my vision caused the muscle responsible for the twitching to relax, causing things to zoom back out.

“Holy Angel…” I muttered.

By an even bigger somehow, my voice still sounded like it normally did.

Then the gears of my mind completed another revolution, and I realized that the quiet wheeeee sound I was hearing were the collective screams of thousands of people.

“I think I’m going to be nauseous…” I muttered.

Civilians fled from me in waves, running down the streets like bees too frightened to fly.

Then, an impossibly tiny voice whispered into my left ear.

“Mr. Genneth!”

A second later, a softly glowing blue gnat flew out in front of my snout.

I zoomed in on it.

“Andalon?”

“What’s going on?”

“I can’t hear you,” I said.

The sheer force of my voice flung Andalon back. She let out a tiny scream.

“Get back in my ear,” I whispered.

The little blue light flew to my left, out of sight. A moment later, I heard Andalon speak, and this time, I could actually understand her.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

I was about to answer “I don’t know,” when another voice spoke, only this one was loud and clear. “You!”

It was Mr. Himichi’s voice.

I turned toward the sound, only to come face to face with the kaiju from Mr. Himichi’s nightmares. The other kaiju stood what, to me, felt like a couple yards away. A couple of skyscrapers stood in between us, though a collection of interconnected buildings—maybe some kind of mall complex or convention center—filled the main part of the space. It felt like the two of us were standing on either side of a low-lying coffee table. The kaiju looked just like it had back in the garden, only bigger. We were clearly the same species—perhaps even clones of one another.

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“Who are you, and what have you done with Mr. Himichi?” I asked.

The kaiju’s snout went slack. Its mane ruffled as it shook its head. “Genneth?” it said, in Mr. Himichi’s voice.

“Mr. Himichi?” I asked, dumbfounded.

I guess we were both kaiju now.

Mr. Himichi yelped in surprise as he took a look at himself. Like me, his surprise was bad news for the buildings around him—particularly the six-story apartment building behind his left leg—and then doubly so as he tripped over his own tail when he tried to right himself. As he toppled backward, he flailed his arms as he toppled backwards, accidentally slamming them into a cluster of skyscrapers that rose from the ground like glass harrow stones.

I could spend time with Brand later debating whether or not (and to what extent) any of this was real; at the moment, I very much wanted to avoid causing billions of groats of damage to life and property, and I imagined Mr. Himichi felt the same.

“Mr. Himichi!” I yelled.

This was another thing I shouldn’t have done; it sent a torrent of green plasma blasting out of my mouth, leaving a tingling, slightly spicy aftertaste on my lips. My breath weapon sliced through the shopping center like water from a power washer. Explosions as big as my arms blossomed from the cuts as the shopping center collapsed on itself in a rain of molten steel and glass.

Snapping my mouth shut, I decided to cut my losses. I tramped through the devastated shopping center’s crinkly architecture as quickly as I could, and then lunged forward to grab Mr. Himichi’s arm before he fell onto the even larger cluster of buildings behind him

I lunged forward.

My left ear buzzed with Andalon’s tiny screams.

I clasped my clawed hands around Mr. Himichi’s, only for his momentum to pull me forward. I had to dig in my heels and lean back as far as I could to keep him from taking me down with him. Grunting, I staggered back, crushing more of the shopping center as I pulled Mr. Himichi away from the skyscrapers behind him, saving them from destruction. Mr. Himichi accidentally flicked his tail a second later, awkwardly bashing its wicked spikes into one of the skyscrapers. Glass shattered and metal groaned, making both of us wince as the doomed building toppled over, crashing into one of its neighbors and bringing the two of them down, spewing up smoke and dust.

I grabbed him by the hands, holding both of his in mine.

“Don’t move,” I said. I made sure to use my inside voice, not wanting to have another plasma breath incident.

“You have a tail now,” I said. “Feel it, know it, and don’t—”

Looking over his shoulder and shell, Mr. Himichi practiced flexing his tail, which only knocked more buildings to the ground. Down below, emergency sirens sang like crickets in the grass.

I sighed in defeat. “—move it too much…” I said, finishing my warning.

Not that it had accomplished much…

“What’s going on?” Mr. Himichi asked.

“We’re in Noyoko, and we’ve turned into kaiju.”

Mr. Himichi furrowed his scaly brow. “I know that!” he huffed. “But… why?”

I started looking around.

“What are you look—”

“—Look, there,” I said, pointing with a claw. “There’s the Tokuwatsu Palace.”

And, indeed, there it was, standing amid its ancient imperial gardens, forming an island of grass and blossoming sakura trees in the middle of modern Noyoka's concrete and steel.

Mr. Himichi joined me in staring at the city’s skyline.

“The skyline is different,” he said. “I think it’s the same as the one we were just in, before we turned into… urm… kaiju.”

I nodded. “We’re in another world, then,” I said.

Mr. Himichi’s savage, slit-pupiled eyes widened in shock. “Wh-what?”

“I’ve been puzzling over whether the inconsistencies I’ve seen in memories as of late were caused by time travel or the existence of multiple worlds. I’m still not sure about the inconsistencies between Yuta and Geoffrey’s memories—that could be time travel, or maybe they’re from two different copies of our world’s past, or maybe it’s a combination of both—but… while destroying stars in the past to remove them from the future makes sense, I can’t see how time travel has anything to do with kaiju existing.” I looked over my own body and Mr. Himichi’s. “And, though Dr. Nowston could probably give a better explanation than I could, I’m pretty confident the laws of biology don’t allow for kaiju, just like they don’t allow for the NFP-20 fungus. And if the fungus is from another world, why can’t the kaiju be, too?”

Himichi chuckled. “You sound like the notes I write for myself when outlining a new story,” he said.

I was about to thank him for that—I took it as a compliment—when, from out of nowhere, I felt the sensation from before.

“Wait, it’s happening again,” I said.

“What is?”

“Before you appeared to me, I had this feeling that there was something within me—within you—that desperately wanted to come out. Like—”

But this time, whatever it was that was trying to claw its way free finally succeeded.

“—You’re glowing!” I said.

Mr. Himichi looked at himself in surprise. Radiance was streaming off his body, forming trails of light that flew across the city and gathered by the horizon, over the sea, where they coalesced into an image. The lights took away all my feelings of pressure and urgency.

The sky flickered.

“Whatever it was, it’s out,” Mr. Himichi said.

The next thing I knew, an image of a kaiju was projected onto the dome of the sky. It was the same kaiju that had appeared to us in the garden; the same kaiju whose body Mr. Himichi and I now possessed. There was no flickering this time. The image was continuous and complete.

Even so, I couldn’t have expected what happened next: it spoke—and in a young man’s voice, no less.

“Listen! Please, Kosuke, if you can hear me, listen! You have to remember my words!”

I stared at Mr. Himichi. Kosuke was his first name, after all. “I think he’s talking to you.”

Mr. Himichi raised a clawed finger to his snout. “Shh!”

“I know you’re probably not going to believe this, Kosuke, but… I’m you.” The kaiju-projection tapped a hand on its chest scutes. “Mom’s secret ingredient was cinnamon! You like furikake and cheese on your TKG, and onsen egg yolk, never raw. Hajime once got tendonitis from jacking off too much, and it’s why he had so much trouble typing in our first year of high school. The rock-climbing ended up being useful! Yamago-sensei doesn’t like tuna! Please, you have to believe me!”

Andalon, are you seeing this? I thought-asked.

“I see it,” she said. “What is it?”

Then the image flickered. The voice was interrupted by static and other interference.

I turned to Mr. Himichi. “What was that?” I asked.

Mr. Himichi had said he remembered this kaiju from his nightmares, so I figured he was our best chance to figure out what this all meant.

Mr. Himichi stared at his hands. “This…” Shaking his head, he looked at the flickering image. “That’s my voice. That’s what I sounded like as an adolescent.”

Even though it was beset by static, I noticed the kaiju’s message paused whenever either of us spoke.

And then I put two and two together. My knees locked in place.

“Beast’s teeth,” I muttered.

“What is it?” Mr. Himichi asked.

I looked him in the eyes.

“That sense of being pulled that I’ve been feeling? That feeling of something within me, desperate to break free? That had to be the other Himichi—Kosuke the Kaiju.” I pointed at the kaiju in the sky. “Ever since I entered the lobby quarantine, what I’ve been feeling has been Kosuke’s burning need to be heard.” I nodded. “And I’m willing to bet that that’s why the fungus has been sending its Incursions after us. It doesn’t want us to hear what Kosuke has to say.”

“But… I’m Kosuke,” Mr. Himichi said, somewhat confused.

“Not right now, you aren’t,” I replied. “At the moment, you’re Mr. Himichi; he’s Kosuke.” I pointed at the two of them. “It’s not like I’m going to start numbering you.”

But then Mr. Himichi’s gaze veered away from me. He pointed behind me with one of his clawed fingers. “Genneth… look.”

I turned, and then looked around past the cloud of smoke and ash coming up from the ruined shopping center behind me.

In life, violence was rarely the answer, particularly if kaiju were involved. Unfortunately, like in so many kaiju movies, the government of this alternative Noyoko and Mu appeared to think otherwise.

At a glance, I spotted several trails of tanks rolling down the city streets, with at least two squadrons’ worth of military aerostats flying overhead.

I flexed the zoom-in muscles behind my eyes to get a better view.

“Fudge,” I muttered. “They’ve got weapons. Big ones.”

“How big?” Mr. Himichi asked.

“Big! And of the exploding variety!”