Have ye heard the story of the Watchman of the Forest? Of the Wailing Giant? He holds out in the wilds, roaming amidst the animals and the trees, slaying any man who dares to set foot in those dark woods. His mother was a streetwalker, a prostitute, a woman who sold her holiness to the men with gold. No one, not even the mother, knew who could have sired the babe, for the mother was known widely for her services and oft used. The father could have been anyone. But he wasn't. The father was a man of god. It's said that the Giant's creation was in retribution for their sinful fornication. The pregnancy was painful. As the Giant screamed himself into existence, the doctor and nearby nurses gasped. Fine white hair grew from atop his head and his pupils, even then, glowed with a striking yellow. This strange babe garnered such attention that it was a good twenty minutes before a nurse even realized his mother had died. One of the older nurses took the babe in her arms, attempting to hush him. She cooed and stroked his nose with a solitary finger, but screamed and nearly dropped him when his sharp teeth plunged into her meaty hand. ~This child is a beast, she declared. And indeed he was. It was suggested that perhaps the child should be let to die for the mother was dead, the father unknown, and the babe already dangerous and monsterous. But all present were good people and could not reasonably kill an innocent child. ~Send him to the orphanage, the doctor decided. So the Giant was sent to the nearest one, however, it was not long before the other children outcast him as a freak. His teeth had continued to grow sharp like those from a wolf. His hair came in dangled and stringy and white like that from an old man. His eyes were planted crooked and grew yellow like that of a serpent. As he aged, the older boys began to take turns forcing him into a locked room where they would beat him with staves and call him Monster! Monster! But the monster grew. ~The beatings quickly became a daily fixture of his life, no more different than being forced to eat last and alone or being kicked out bed and only being allowed sleep on the cold wooden floor. By the age of eight he was the size of a grown man. So the other boys no longer beat him one at a time, they beat him en masse. They would tie him to a chair and as they beat him and screamed Monster! Monster! But the monster grew strong. ~One day, as they were beating him, the Giant began to wail and thrash against his ropes. He had found earlier that his screams only encouraged the boys and so and he tried to remain silent as possible with his weeping. But on that one day, something sparked in him. He began to wail like a beast. He flexed his shoulders and the back of the chair broke. He flexed his arms and the ropes snapped. He stood up amongst the children, his tear-streamed face no longer locked in an expression of torment. Blood trickled down onto his lips as they slowly stretched into a grin. Like a beaten dog when the owner accidentally drops the stick. In unison the other children's faces had dropped. There, for a single moment, all was silent. Then, all began to scream; the children in fear and the Giant in rage. The children attempted to scatter but they had locked the door to keep intruders out and the room was a very small room. ~As the time for dinner approached, the head of the orphanage went upstairs to gather the children. What he found at the end of the hallway was broken down door. Even from many feet away he could see the bloody scratches carved into the inside of the door. The room itself contained the cold, dismembered bodies of twelve children. Their limbs scattered, having been broken off at the joints. The Giant, however, was no where to be found. Suddenly terrified and ashamed by his own actions, he bolted for the nearby woods and only stopped running when he was overcome with exhaustion and passed out.
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Born of Desperation
Running: Standard
The Giant awoke to the sounds of dogs barking in the distance. The angry howls of hunters that can feel themselves close to their prey. The head of the orphanage had alerted the town and the men folk were now in pursuit. The Giant's body froze in panic. His eyes darted about the surrounding trees, desperately searching for the source of the sound. It seemed to be coming from all directions all at once. With tears beginning to swell in his eyes, he finally forced himself to take off in the direction he thought most opposite of the most sound. As he crashed through the underbrush his clothes became ripped and torn. Branches slashed his body and face, cutting and drawing blood. Sweat streamed down his body. His throat became parched and his lips dry and cracked. His stomach groaned in hunger. All of his muscles screamed for oxygen yet he continued to run. His legs pounded away at the ground as he used his massive body to forge a path through the increasingly thick vegetation. Fear and the baying of the dogs kept him forward. Past giant oaks and rushing streams he ran. Past dirt ravines and small caves and startled animals. One foot finally snagged in a root and the Giant came crashing to the earth. Spitting dirt from his mouth, he rose and prepared to take off once more. But he could no longer hear the dogs. He fell to his knees hungry and scared. And alone. He was now larger than most men, but he was still only ten years old.
Born of Necessity
Hyper-Senses: Supreme
It is said that when one sense leaves you, the others grow proportionately. For instance, a blinded man may find himself more sensitive to touch and to sound. But what happens when your sense of self disappears? When your sense of humanity goes? The Giant found himself alone deep in the inner most recesses of the forest. The many years of being treated like a monster had caused the Giant to begin believe that he was, indeed, a monster. His very last social acts with civilization only encouraged this notion in his mind. So as he found himself completely free from humanity, the humanity in himself seemed to very easily disappear. He adapted in order to survive. His posture deteriorated rapidly until he loped along the ground with his knuckles occasionally scrapping the dirt. His useless human senses devolved into something primitive, animalistic, and effective. The sounds of the forest became a map to his ears. He breathed in and his nose picked up the scent of animal trails and nearby streams. His eyes detected the quick movement of the beasts and the swinging of edible vegetation in the trees. He killed for food and ate the meat raw. His digestive system grew strong. His became twice the size of an ordinary man. Eventually, the Giant's mind was no longer even processing true human thought. Only emotions and blurs of memories. He had become an animal.
Terrain Familiarity: Ancient Forest
Terrain Familiarity: Standard
For years, the Giant in lived in the forest, forgetting of man, and, as years passed, man too forgot about him. He roamed the woods aimlessly, traveling from place to place, always in search for his next meal. He drank his fill from the wild streams he crossed and gorged himself on the wild beasts he captured. During winter, he entered caves and burrowed deep for warmth. During summer, he climbed to the tops of boulders and cliff faces and basked in the heat of the sun. After a while he became intimately acquainted with a certain area of the woods. Every year after that he would try and expand his range. As years passed he grew to his full size: five times that of a regular man. The Giant's great stature and long legs enabled him to travel across the land with a mighty speed. The forest was his home. He learned to know every inch of it with the utmost of certainties.
Monster
Berserker: Supreme
- Target Seeker
- Weakness: Limited Uses - Multi-Use
As the Giant's territory expanded, he was doomed to once more be forced into interaction with man. Early one morning, his ear detected the strange, yet familiar, sound of the human voice. His mind attempted to place the sound, but only blurry memories could be recalled. Curious, the Giant loped forward and peered through the trees. A path had been carved through the woods and any grass that had once grown there had been beaten down into pure dirt. Not twenty feet away rested a small colorful carriage being pulled by two black horses. Immediately sensing his presence, the horses began to violently whinny and stamp, desperate to remove themselves from the area and the new, unknown threat. The carriage driver, who had been reliving himself on the other side, quickly returned to calm the steeds. His voice, that language, was the familiar sound. As he gently rubbed the snouts of his horses and spoke gently to them, his glance caught the feet of the Giant. His gaze followed up the Giant's body until eye contact. Within the mind of the Giant, a spark of human began to emerge, a bit of thought, a glimmer more of memory. The driver then screamed quite possibly the single worst thing given situation. Monster! Monster ! he cried. The Giant's spark down memory lane disappeared as the raw of emotion of rage seethed and exploded from his body. As his eyes rolled into the back of his head, he released a wail that sent all birds of the area fluttering into the sky. He dropped completely to all fours and charged. With one heavy hand he crushed the driver into the ground. The man inside of the carriage began to scream and the horses attempted to dash off. The Giant pounced on the carriage, drug it backwards, and slung it into the trees. The horses, in their desperation, began foaming at the mouth as they ordered their bodies to flee. But broken legs and a sideways carriage kept them from doing so. They were soon put out of their misery by the gnashing teeth and the clawing of large cruel fingers. Inside the carriage, the occupant continued to scream. The Giant turned from the horses, rolled his eyes over the carriage, and began wailing once more. He slammed his hands down onto the wooden carriage repeatedly until he burst hole large enough for fingers to slip in. He peeled back the planks of the carriage like an orange. The occupant, a bishop who was once a priest who once visited a brothel, screamed as his son into the air. The father screamed. The son wailed. The father lost his head. Literally. And then the son feasted. After his rage subsided, the Giant remained strangely euphoric for the next few days.
Pure Savagery
Martial Arts: Ultimate
Once the Giant tasted the flesh of man, his previously senseless roaming of the woods ended. He began to find and stake out the points of travel. His hunger for the flesh of man grew insatiable. All parties attempting to cross through the middle of the woods were mercilessly slaughtered and devoured. Once those paths became unused, the trails simply around the woods became dangerous. Then those, too, became abandoned as the traveling bands rarely made it to their destinations. An attack meant certain death. There was no pleading. There was no mercy. All commonly used woodland trails soon became littered with the destruction of caravans and the mangled corpses of the trekkers. As more and more roads were abandoned, the Giant moved closer and closer to civilization. Those villages and towns on the outskirts of the forest began to hear the horrific wailing that signaled an attack more and more often. The Giant struck swiftly and viciously. He threw his body into battle with no heed for potential danger. His body was a moving, flowing weapon that rained hell upon everything around it. Teeth, feet, hands, shoulders, knees, all were damaging and potentially lethal. He used no intricate style to finish off his victims. If they were killed easily, then so be it. If he was forced to brutally tear them into pieces, then he would. The Giant had no qualms in how he killed, he only cared that they were dead enough to eat. Or, in the very least, immobile enough to eat. It was only then that he was truly happy.
Tenacity of the Devil
Regeneration: Supreme
It had previously occurred to those attempting to battle the Giant that he had an uncanny ability to survive damage. However, the survival rate of said fighters was low, and, generally, the testimonies of those rare survivors were incoherent ramblings and pain-induced delusions of the torturously scarred. The horrid witnessing of fellow men being, literally, torn into pieces was often too terrible for an intellectual analysis of the Giant to be concurred. It was not until the carnage of the village of Buford that word spread of the Giant's unnatural resilience. Buford's inhabitants had heard the horrific wailing of the Giant almost daily for a week. As native forces were not deemed worthy of battling alone, outside mercenaries were hired for additional protection. As evening approached one day, the wailing began again, but much, much closer. Villagers soon saw one of their scouts, riding one of the fastest of the towns horses, barreling around the path leading up to the village. The scout screamed obscenities as he spurred his horses again and again to pick up more speed. From the side of the road, the Giant burst from the trees. Ripping horse and rider from the ground and into the air with a single hand, the Giant closed his other massive hand around the duo and squeezed. Bones cracked and shattered as the Giant grinded the two entities into a single dead lump. The whole of the village remained perfectly silent as the grisly crunching continued. The Giant seemed to shudder with glee, like a child happily toying with his food before consumption. A woman gasped. The Giant's head instantly snapped toward the sound. All hell broke lose. Men ran yelling for their weapons, women ran screaming for their homes, and the Giant wailing ran for the village. ~But the villagers of Buford made a brilliant stand. Though they took heavy losses, with a wall of spears and a hail of arrows they managed to force the Giant back time and time again. Soon, blood seemed to drip from the village walls as if the village itself had been wounded. As every villager died, the ranks became tighter, the defense more united. The Giant, covered in a hundred lacerations and cuts, limped back and away from the concentrated mass of men. The dozens of arrows that pierced his flesh stuck out from every angle. He may have known naught of tactics, but he did understand pain. And now he was hurting as he had never hurt before. As he began his wail once more, an arrow caught him straight in the throat and the wail became nothing more than a pathetic gargle. The Giant quickly dragged his ravaged body away from the village and into the woods, presumably to die. ~The villagers cheered. Men and women wept together in victorious joy and in mournful despair. So many good men had died. But how bravely they had fallen in battle against such a monstrous of foes! The village of Buford patted itself on the back for a job well done. After the village gave a proper burial for those brave men who so heroically sacrificed their lives, the grandest of festivities began. ~That night, many hours later, while the feast was just beginning to die down, the Giant came again. His wounds and all damages inflicted having been healed. Somehow his body regenerated at an unearthly speed. Buford was not ready a second time.
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