Capeworld Comics

At Ishikori-dome shrine, metal titans that fought in the service of mankind are venerated as kami. In Japanese, they are called hagane kyojin, translated literally as “steel giants” but idiomatically as “guardian giants.”

 

Every guardian giant resting at Ishikori-dome shrine has a story. Perhaps that is what it means to be a kami–to be storied.

 

Closest to Furthest

 

Kannushiza

 

One of the earliest attempts to replicate the success of Beyondion during the demon war of the 70’s was Kannushiza, the holy warrior. Wielding a monk’s spade and blessed by Shinto, Buddhist, and even Christian priests, it was built when little was known of Dr. Dark’s demon army. It was theorized that Dr. Dark’s demons were actual demons pulled from the mystic shadow. If that was so, then a blessed warrior in the shape of a Shinto monk would cut through their ranks.

 

But it was not so. Dr. Dark’s demons were mutated humans. Holiness can destroy supernatural evil, but against human evil it is powerless. On its very first mission to provide backup to Beyondion, it was destroyed and its pilot, a young man rumored to have been a kannushi from a small shrine from the heart of Japan, was slain.

 

The precise identity of this young man, or perhaps even young men, remains unknown to this day.

 

What remains of Kannushiza rests at Ishikori-dome shrine. 

 

Though it’s service was brief, it’s defeat taught engineers much about guardian giant design. It was defeated so that other guardians would prevail.

 

Smoke King

 

Smoke King was constructed in the garage of eccentric scientist and junk yard owner Colby Fumar after seeing Beyondion repel the first demon attack on Tokyo on television in 1973.

 

Colby Fumar lacked the patience for academic instruction. Entirely self-educated, he spent his time making things out of the broken and discarded machines in his junk yard just for the sake of making things. After seeing Beyondon stand more or less alone against Dr. Dark’s demons as the bozo armors and kurōrukumo of the JSDF failed, Colby decided that Beyondion needed help. 

 

Many guardian giants based on Beyondion’s general model were constructed during the 70’s. There was Fight City, and Kannushiza, and so many others. But they were created to match Beyondion, and Colby found that a problem. He believed that Beyondion needed something less like another Beyonidion and more like a compliment to Beyondion. Beyondion needed something like a squire, a shieldbearer, a sidekick–something like what Colby wasn’t seeing being made.

 

Colby drew up and submitted plans, but they were firmly rejected. He was a gaijin without even a college degree to his name. The brilliant minds behind the guardian giants of the seventies, mavericks and trailblazers though they were, were not immune from hypocrisy.

 

So Colby decided to make his own guardian giant.

 

And he did.

 

Rickety, inefficient, and literally made from junk, Colby’s guardian giant Smoke King wasn’t what he had hoped his designs would become. But it had to do, and Colby was up to the challenge of proving his designs even with circumstances stacked against him.

 

Smoke King fulfilled the original goal of being a support unit for Beyondion, which was the most important thing. As long as Smoke King could be of just a little use, then efficiency was just a matter of adaptation and upgrading. Smoke King was armed with a pneumatic system of Colby’s own design which could, try to Smoke King’s name, produce and direct clouds of smoke. It was an aerokinetic system able to not only create smoke but move it. Among the many death-beams and power-swords that guardian giants use, a giant smoke machine may seem underwhelming, but it did cover a weakness of Beyondion. Beyondion was bright, loud, and large. It’s combat registered on the richter scale. Stealth combat wasn’t something Beyondion did. It wasn’t even considered as something it could do. Beyondion was made to fight, not to hide. It didn’t matter if Dr. Dark’s demons kept ambushing it as soon as it made an appearance. It was made to fight. If Beyondion’s enemies came to it, that just made its job easier.

 

But Colby believed that Beyondion could benefit from tactical applications of cover. Colby read extensively on military uses of smoke, particularly how the ninja of Japan used it to short bursts cloak their movements, and believed smoke was just what Beyondion needed.

 

Once, Koga Shinji, modern day ninja master and pilot of the guardian giant Shadow, asked Colby what a gaijin could possibly know about ancient ninja arts.

 

Colby replied that he only knew what few secrets they had allowed to be written in books, same as anyone else.

 

Koga Shinji had to admit that Colby had a point.

 

When Colby first introduced himself to Tanaka Go, the pilot of Beyondion, he was treated as an idiot. When he showed up to assist Beyondion in battle in his rickety machine, he was treated as a nuisance. But when Tanaka Go realized the benefits Smoke King brought to battle, he was treated as a friend. In time, Colby became Tanaka Go’s best friend.

 

Smoke King allowed Beyondion to disengage from a demon, disguise its movements, and feint at attacking one demon while attacking another. Smoke King’s smoke also damaged the biological demons. It choked them, blinded them, and agitated their skin.

 

Smoke King served as Beyondion’s support  through the end of the demon war until it was totaled during the Mu empire’s attack on Science Cloud. It rests today at Ishikori-dome. Colby went on to become a leading guardian giant designer and variations on Smoke King’s aerokinesis system have been applied to guardian giants like Cloud Covert. Colby’s proudest achievement as an engineer is the aerokinesis system on the combiner guardian giant Shin Shinobi (often referred to by the portmanteau Shinshin). Shin Shinobi uses Colby’s aerokinesis system to project pressurized sections of air called “smoke bombs” that can be detonated for distraction and concealment. It’s technique is the realization of Colby’s original idea for Smoke King.

 

Though Colby has advanced beyond Smoke King, he fondly remembers his time piloting it against the demons and often visits his “first love” at Ishikori-dome. 

 

Not all kami are magnificent. The kami of the hills are not the kami of the mountains. But all kami are worthy of respect.

 

Data Stream

 

One of the fastest, if not the fastest, guardian giants, Data Stream was constructed in 1984 as the culmination of everything mankind had learned about speed. 

 

Artificials exceeded the speed of human thought back in the 1920’s and have only been getting faster. Electron brainhearts upgraded to photon brainhearts upgraded to tachyon brainhearts upgraded to mercuryon brainhearts. Data Stream has a top-of-the-line mercuryon brainheart that is just as impressive today as it was back in the 80’s that allows it to perceive the world at speeds where time itself is frozen.

 

Data Stream was originally created as a conceptual model. It was never meant to see combat, but when the Neo attacked Earth later in the same year it was constructed, mankind had a need for super-fast warriors. 

 

The Neo were an all-consuming wave that swept across the universe. Beings of quantum foam, the Neo were able to possess virtually anything and convert it into a monstrous body for their use. They could possess stars, planets, even entire galaxies. If it had mass, if it had energy, the Neo could absorb it and repurpose it for their needs.

 

And they were fast–extremely fast. They were fast enough to chase down warping spaceship armadas and consume them in attoseconds.

 

Just as they say fight fire with fire, fight speed with speed.

 

Data Stream was a powerful weapon against the Neo. It’s speed far surpassed the Neo. The Neo made light look slow, but Data Stream made the Neo look slow. The mercuryon radiation of its movements jammed the signal between the Neo’s quantum-bodies and whatever they tried to possess, drawing them out like ghosts.

 

But Data Stream had a critical weakness–it’s AI was a daydreamer. And when your frame of reference can shift by exponential magnitudes, that becomes a huge liability. Data Stream would get distracted by the motion of particles, by the beauty of a photon in flight, and by the underlying symmetry that makes up the physics of our universe.

 

This meant it would stand still and space out while Neo bashed it.

 

The solution to this problem was a pilot to keep Data Stream focused and on task. Data Stream was good at tactics, but terrible at long-term strategic planning. A human pilot could help it by devising routines telling it exactly when to go fast and how fast to go when it did so.

 

Data Stream’s pilot was race car driver Danielle Bluestreak. She brought the philosophy of winning races before they began through planning to the partnership alongside quick-thinking and a patience for machines that acted up. Together, Danielle and Data Stream became a shining example of the human-machine union that creates effective guardian giants. 

 

Today, Data Stream rests at Ishikori-dome while Danielle Bluestreak teaches young pilots how to form successful partnerships with ultra-fast AI. Data Stream is asleep, but functional, and if the the need ever arises, it can be awakened. Until then, it sleeps and paints dreams in colors beyond light only waking up to share its creations with Danielle when she comes to visit. She rarely understands Data Stream’s art, but she is happy to see that her old partner is spending his time doing something it enjoys.

 

To connect man to what is beyond man, to harmoniously bring humans into the presence of the divine–that is the way of Shinto.

 

Wi-Fight

 

As guardian giants became more common following the demon war of the 70’s, the possibility of one becoming a danger to humanity was raised. Machines can be stolen and repurposed, and even giants controlled by uniquely-bonded pilots are not immune to hijacking. Countermeasures had to be planned.

 

America’s superhero community dealt with several incidents involving mind controlled superheroes in the 60’s and responded by creating countermeasures for if their heroes ever turned on humanity. These countermeasures were never perfect and always controversial. They usually took the form of “killswitches”–a confidant of a certain superhero would be trusted with their secret weakness, the least powerful member of a superteam would keep plans on how to defeat all the rest, or bunker full of specialized weaponry and plans would be kept in a secret location inside a Statesmen center. These killswitches were sometimes useful as when Dr. Chime’s powers over multiversal vibrations slipped his control due to a device created by the Sphinx. Dr. Chime was quickly neutralized by a device of his own making entrusted to his good friend Gold Star which cycled him through the multiverse until his excess energy was burned out. But sometimes, they proved disastrous as when the The Five Stars were defeated by the supevillain Enigma after she discovered their killswitch inside the Louisiana Statesmen center at New Orleans. Killswitches also took a great toll on the trust between superheroes and those they protected. Their existence told the public that superheroes couldn’t be trusted and told superheroes that the public didn’t trust them.

 

Japan wanted to avoid the complications of killswitches and avoided creating them even after several guardian giants were captured and reformatted by enemies of mankind. 

 

Japan prides itself on social order and obedience. To question the protectors of society is taboo.

 

And yet, Wi-Fight, a guardian giant designed to fight guardian giants through their weaknesses, exists.

 

Who built Wi-Fight? Who pilots Wi-Fight? No one knows. One theory states that all the major guardian giant scientists and engineers have had a silent hand in its construction. In a face-saving culture, a faceless guardian perhaps required to check the powers-that-be. 

 

There are whispers throughout the guardian giant community that the pilot of Wi-Fight is none other than Tanaka Go, the pilot of the first Beyondion. Who would have more of a right to strike down guardian giants than the pilot of the very first guardian giant? But perhaps this is only wishful thinking on the part of the community.

 

Wi-Fight first appeared in 1988 to disable the combiner guardian giant Metal Beast after its experimental aether drive was damaged in a battle with an enemy which caused the pilots to enter a state of berserk rage. Wi-Fight demonstrated its design philosophy–disable guardian giants with as little damage as possible–during its fight with Metal Beast. It used an advanced hacking suite unlike anything the world had seen to interface with Metal Beast’s systems through a multitude of mediums. Metal Beast’s systems were sealed, and yet Wi-Fight was able to break through to them after several concentrated bursts of encoded radiation.

 

The one weakness of guardian giants is that something has to tell the robot how to move. This could be a person, or an AI, or a modified animal brain, but something communicates with the metal. Whatever this something is, Wi-Fight has a way to interface with it.

 

Once Wi-Fight was inside Metal Beast’s systems, it used its audio/visual communication systems to project alpha waves and calm the pilots down. While they calmed down, Wi-Fight used a specialized weapon to temporarily freeze the Metal Beast’s energy weapons through a specific counter-frequency–proof that whoever built Wi-Fight had top-secret knowledge of how the latest guardian giants functioned.

 

Infamously, Wi-Fight once used a mysterious satellite weapon to disable a hijacked Spectron in 1995. By treaty, Japan isn’t allowed to keep weaponry outside its sphere of influence. World-breaking robots are fine so long as they aren’t housed in outer space or in other dimensions. It may seem an arbitrary line, but it is nonetheless a line supported by several binding legal documents. Japan denies all knowledge of a space weapon, and the question of where the beam of light Wi-Fight summoned came from remains a popular subject of conspiracy shows like Mysterious Earth.

 

The Wi-Fight at rest in Ishikori-dome shrine is its earliest shell abandoned after a fight with a berserk Beyondion Sol in 1990. Wi-Fight is still active with its most recent sighting being in 2018 when Wi-Fight disabled Beyondion Tetra after it was hijacked by an American supervillain Joy Rider, who true to his name stole Beyondion Tetra for a joy ride. 

 

Wi-Fight is a mystery, and what is a kami if not mysterious?

 

Crawler Drone

 

One of a countless many. Crawler drones, called kurōrukumo or crawling spiders, have been produced by Moriyama Robots since the Worlds War of the 1940’s. Originally designed by Dr. Moriyama Taro as paramedics to drag wounded soldiers off the battlefield, the Imperial military redesigned the kurōrukumo into fighting machines. While keeping the economically efficient shell which attracted them to the kurōrukumo to begin with, they removed the medical equipment and installed a pulse cannon charged in the body and fired from the optic.

 

Kurōrukumo were the embodiment of the kokutai ethos. They were soldiers that did not complain, could not desert, and would fight the enemy to the last. General Noboyuki Abe once remarked how his kurōrukumo were “more men than men.” 

 

Kurōrukumo also embodied the reality of kokutai–cannon fodder shoved to the front lines to grease the wheels of the military apparatus. Kurōrukumo were not an effective fighting force. Their pulse cannons were outdated by the force projectors of basic Ally footsoldiers. But they were as numerous and pesky as their name implied and menanced the Allies day and night without pause. They were also excellent saboteurs. Ally engineers were never sure if the ground they were building on was stable or hiding kurōrukumo ready to spring out in an instant.

 

After the Worlds War, kurōrukumo formed the backbone of the JSDF alongside surplus bozo armor given by the United States. While Japan rebuilt and scrambled to build back up their superhuman population, all they had for defense were power armors dated as soon as the war ended and robots dated before the war even began.

 

When the Demon War of 1973 began, Dr. Dark’s bioweapon demons cut through Japan’s protectors like a hurricane. This created the need for Beyondion and all guardian giants to follow. But there is more to the kurōrukumo resting than at Ishikori-dome than simply being a footnote in guardian giant prehistory. This kurōrukumo may be one of countless many, but it also has a very special story. Every giant at Ishikori-dome has a special story. What kami doesn’t? 

 

During Dr. Dark’s attack on Kyoto, JSDF officer Nakajima Kenji was pinned down by a raging demon. Noticing a fallen kurōrukumo, Nakajima quickly repaired and switched its manual controls on so that he could pilot the kurōrukumo against the demon. Though a blow hacked Nakajima to pieces, he was able to give a final command, slay the demon, along with a final farewell delivered tenderly to the machine with his last breath, ganbatte yo.

 

The kurōrukumo was later found by a recovery team nonfunctional but with the remains of a demon rotting on its metal shell.

 

The world marveled at how such a small, broken machine could have slain a biological siege weapon and because man marveled at this kurōrukumo as they would a kami, it was treated as a kami and enshrined at Ishikori-dome.

 

“Ganbatte” is a common word of encouragement often translated to “to do one’s best.” It is through this phrase that the Japanese spirit expresses its belief that a strong heart can overcome even the strongest adversity. During the hari-kuyo, the festival of broken needles, broken sewing needles are thanked not because they were important, but because they tried their best.