A History of Intersize Relations: First Contact (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

As it goes for any noteworthy event in our nation, it was only natural that the order of recordkeepers was contacted and asked to be present for the recording of an accurate account – for historical posterity – when a visitor from far away across the sea materialized on our banks. Though of course there was no way of knowing that this would turn out to be the most significant event in all our combined annals up to that point, until I arrived in person. It wasn’t even supposed to be me who went to mark the occasion. But our then-master of the order was left sickly bedridden just one week earlier and couldn’t possibly have gone to record the event himself, which left me as the most senior member when the call arrived from the queen herself, even though in many ways I still felt like an apprentice. I was told almost nothing, as the cart arrived to transport me four provinces over, except that a mysterious woman had evidently washed ashore and been happened upon by a group of hikers. (In hindsight, the authorities seemed to be doing their best to keep her a secret from the public in order to prevent any widespread panic, though a secret of this size could only stay hidden for so long). While I expected it would be both fascinating and important for the recordkeeping canon to meet someone from another land, as our civilization had stood in solitude for over a thousand years since before history was even formally written, I still couldn’t have conceived of how major her arrival would prove until I beheld her with my own eyes.

It was difficult to keep from fainting when I stepped out of the cart, though my knees at least went out from under me, as I stared gawp-eyed and slack-jawed at the unknown visitor. During the ride to the coast, as I got my supplies and instruments in order to prepare for a thorough documentation of this historic event, I wondered if this stranger would look much different from us, or whether I’d even be able to recognize that she was a foreigner without all this fanfare to guide me. Well, I certainly didn’t have to worry about. No one alive across our country could’ve possibly mistaken her as anything but an outsider. Because although her physical appearance wasn’t too dissimilar from many of the higher-society women in our land – objectively beautiful with her sun-kissed complexion, long dark hair, elegant features, and a well-endowed silhouette – she also happened to stand at eight hundred feet tall: the equivalent height of one hundred and thirty-nine average men, all stacked atop one another.

Or rather she would have “stood” at that stature, if she’d been upright when she was discovered by the hikers. As it happened, though, the nameless giantess was lying down upon a bedding of grassy hills, encircled by a makeshift curtain of trees that only partially hid her while she was lying as low as she could to the ground. Based upon the fittingly gargantuan footsteps leading away from the beach into the nearby woodland less than a mile from the water, hardly very many strides by her huge metric, it seemed she’d arrived on our shores – though exactly by what means, we couldn’t yet say, since there was no boat the size of a mountain anchored on the horizon – then laid down here to sleep. While the landscape probably provided relatively comfortable accommodations for her, especially since no bed large enough to contain her whole body likely existed, it was immediately doubtful to me that she’d feel particularly welcome once she finally awoken.

For as I found upon arriving, still staying at a cautious distance from her immense form alongside my escorts, a rapidly-assembled squad consisting of several dozen soldiers and builders had quickly fashioned a crude but effective way of holding her captive in place. Ropes crisscrossed all over her body from neck to ankle, as well as winding individually around her limbs and waist, then collectively attached to an elaborate rigging of boulders, tree trunks, and wheeled machinery. Either they’d given her a sniff of a drowsy substance to keep her unconscious while they worked, or the giantess was absolutely wiped out by her journey in order to sleep so soundly while she was tied up by creatures she could have, in all honesty, squashed and decimated like pests if faced on even footing. The element of surprise was our only advantage. Either way, she’d become (for now) a prisoner of our nation just as much as a specimen for ground-breaking study. This at last was where my role came in.

The shock of this historic turnabout was still washing over me in waves, tempting me to simply slump down on the grass and drink in the view of her for a while, as well as wildly contemplate the many scintillating implications this discovery might have for our nation and the wider world beyond that we (at the time) knew so little about. Was she a singular freak of nature, impossibly overgrown to a titanic stature that could only be compared to our religious and mythological figures? Or was she only one of many from a civilization that looked and even dressed much like us, except for the crucial difference in being several hundred times more enormous?

Rather than get stuck contemplating philosophies while history went on without me, however, I soon pulled myself together and focused on doing my duty, to history and to our people. I knew even that what a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity laid before us. This event had to be recorded in writing, down to the finest detail. Especially because there was no telling how long we had before she woke up, and how she might react to being bound as she was. Probably not pleasantly. Yet my job as temporary-mater recordkeeper only began with logging the circumstances of the giantess’s discovery, along with all known clues and an intricate description of her appearance. While a dispassionate mathematical account of the event in pure fact-based terms was called for too, just as vital for our records (in the tradition of our order) was the vivid documenting of all sensory details and even real-time feelings, to paint a complete existential picture of the circumstances for all future citizens.

And while I’d of course never seen or documented an eight-hundred-foot-high woman before – let alone imagined that someone that big could exist – I’d been trained to follow a very specific protocol for recording empirical data just as well as the mood of the entire affair based on my perceptions. Once I’d settled myself down from that initial shellshock, and been put in charge of ten men to help me gather all the information and experiences I required for this arguably-most important recordkeeping in our history, we began in earnest to collect information – starting at her shoes.