Deviation Actions
Description
When the US campaign against Japan in the Pacific began, relatively few recruits were familiar with the South Seas, so their expectations did not extend beyond the vague images drawn from Hollywood and popular novels. Most were therefore not taken aback that the sun occasionally seemed a bit too large, thinking it a feature of the tropics, and although the sky acquiring a slightly greenish tint was strange, it could be dismissed as an atmospheric phenomenon. The giant floating seaweeds stretching as much as a thousand feet across the tropical waters were more disquieting, especially to experienced sailors. But things really went undeniably wrong when the dinosaurs showed up.
On June 26, 1942, only three weeks after the battle of Midway, reports began coming in of US ships and planes operating in the South Pacific going out of radio contact. Similar reports were reaching the Japanese military, and confusion and alarm reigned for some time. When some of the missing finally began broadcasting again, the reports coming in mostly created further confusion. Violent storms coming out of out of nowhere. Reports of empty sea where there should be islands. Reports of islands, some very large, where there should have been nothing but sea. Reports of islands there one second, and not there the next. Long periods when nothing but static could be received on the radio. And monster attacks. Attacks from the air, from the sea, and on land when landing parties were sent to investigate islands that shouldn’t have been there. Monsters resembling dinosaurs, but often ungodly huge and ungodly tough, to the extent where some could only be dispatched by a battleship’s main guns.
A number of ships and planes failed to return at all.
Modern scientific theory holds that the Pacific Anomaly is a major interdimensional incursion, or a “cross-rip” as described by brane theorist Egon Spengler, author of popular science books Why We May Be Doomed and Further Evidence We’re Doomed. At the time, however, there was no scientific theory to account for events, and for some time governments on both sides of the Pacific went into denial mode, even after some ships returned with gruesome specimens abroad, particularly on the Japanese side, where several captains were executed for insisting their losses were due to monster (or Kaiju, as they would later become known in Japan) attacks rather than enemy action. Denial was initially made easier to the initially highly unstable nature of the incursion, with islands often appearing and then transitioning back to their own space-time (usually with a large section of the Ocean) in a matter of hours.
However, it soon became undeniable that some sort of impossible barrier had been thrown across the Pacific Ocean, extending thousands of miles from just south of Japan’s Bonin isles to a bit northwest of Fiji. Attempts to cross the area by sea inevitably running into land masses at variable and uncertain locations, massive tidal and atmospheric disturbances, and, of course, monsters. Crossing was first achieved by air: at heights over 50,000 feet atmospheric disturbances seemed to decrease, and none of the monsters seemed to fly that high. But only a few specialized planes could reach that height, and mass transportation of men and equipment over that route was impossible. The US strategy of island-hopping would now have to change: with the central Pacific now inaccessible, US forces would now move towards Japan by way of the Indonesian archipelago: and if practicable, by way of the Aleutians from the north.
And the US would have at the same time have to fight a second campaign: while the land monsters were at least confined to the mysteriously shifting islands of what would be termed (officially) as the Pacific Anomalous Zone, and (popularly) The Lost World, the marine and flying monsters would not be so considerate of lines drawn on the map. Small island nations lying deep within the zone were often simply gone or scoured clean of human life by massive tidal forces released in the initial dimensional displacement, while others remained intermittently, shifting back and forth between this world and the unknown other side. Even the most stable had to be evacuated, as monster attacks from sea and sky increased multiplied: although initially fighting to defend the islands on the fringes of the Anomaly, many would be evacuated as too much trouble to defend in the long run – it was not considered practical for, say, a coral atoll with a couple thousand inhabitants to house the staff, supplies and equipment necessary for the combination of heavy artillery and flak required to defend them.
The situation grew more complicated in 1943, when increasing reports of Japanese activity within the Zone began to cross desks in Washington. The Japanese had decided to make a purse out of the sows ear of the Zone by establishing bases from which to launch attacks on US forces from within the Zone, clearing small islands with incendiaries, capital ship’s guns, and expendable troops laden with high explosives with little concern for human costs. Which bases would have to be located within the Transition Zone and even in the kaleidoscopically shifting madness of the Unstable Zone, destroyed, and US forces based to prevent the Japanese from returning: “island jumping” had returned with a vengeance, in an environment a thousand times deadlier.
The costs to Tokyo in men and above all material were so high that by many measures they would more than cancel out any gains to the Japanese Empire, if it were not for certain discoveries that the Japanese would call the Unknown Ones and the Americans, thanks to an officer who was a pulp fan, The Elder Things. Shattered masses of shiny black not-stone blocks big as small cottages, eroded pillars a thousand feet or more high, and partly melted structures of titanic metal rods that seemed to have grown like plants, all sunk in seething, monster-haunted jungle. Nothing else remained: of the builders, not a single bone was ever to be found, although some careful measurement of what appeared to be collapsed passages and staircases of stone seemed to indicate proportions as anomalously gigantic as everything else in the Zone. The chance, the desperate chance, of finding some trace of ancient science that would allow Japan to gain an edge over the Americans, drew Japanese soldiers and sailors and scientists deeper into the zone, often to their death.
In the end, something was found by the Japanese. But the Americans did too.
The combat situation for troops both American and Japanese (and some Australian, etc.) was quite unprecedented. Radio communications over distance was unreliable, landing sites were occasionally (and worse than occasionally in the Unstable Zone) absent, airplane scouting could end up with plane and ship literally in different worlds, and all that before even making a landing. Movement on the Zone islands was impeded in some areas by dense jungle growth, with some trees exceeding 600 feet in height, while other places relatively open ground was overgrown with grasses too high to see over even in the turret of a tank. Weather was often violent and unpredictable as air masses shifted and clashed, the only good part of the frequent violent gales that they occasionally cleared the usually low-lying cloud cover long enough for planes to ascend and take pictures.
Of course, the main problem was the local life, especially a plethora of “mega-dinosaurs” often only vaguely like their extinct terrestrial equivalents, huge lizard and salamander like things, giant arthropods, and in coastal waters, colossal crustaceans and immense octopi. Interestingly, a variety of mammalian species coexisted with the dinosaur-creatures, many tiny fast breeding eaters of fruit or leaves, but others giant creatures able to compete with the mega-dinos on an almost equal level (See “notes on Zone life forms”, below), or, equally, threaten human beings on an almost equal level, greater intelligence compensating for small sizes.
Combat with local life was often complicated in early days (and remains so, to this day, in the Unstable Zone) by the dimensional instability of the region, which made some of the great beasts semi-intangible at times, still lethally dangerous to humans outside an armored vehicle, but unsubstantial enough for machine gun bullets to pass right through with minimal damage, and shells to penetrate without detonating. (There are a few reported cases of airplanes in mid-air combat actually flying right through giant Pseudo-Pterosaurs). Fortunately creatures in this state were more than usually susceptible to disruption by high explosives, satchel charges and grenades doing considerably better work than they would have done with a similar beast in a fully materialized condition. On the positive side, none of the local bacteria and viruses have adapted to the human body, and local insects generally disliked the taste of human beings, although certain aggressive local fungi did lead to extensive mandated chemical assaults on various human body creases and folds.
The land itself became an enemy in the most unstable regions, at times allowing individual soldiers (or, in one case, an entire armored convoy) to sink helplessly into semi-dematerialized ground, while violent earth tremors and massive landslides took place as dimensional shifts radically changed the level of the ground. Fortunately, as the Zone effect does not appear to extend too far above the Earth, it also does not seem to extend too far beneath it: large scale new volcanic activity does not appear to be taking place within the Zone as a result of ground shifts.
In spite of all the challenges, Allied and Japanese soldiers struggled on, human ingenuity, technology, planning, and sheer-bloody mindedness winning out over the brute power of monsters of all sizes and types. As US trooped struggled, there emerged the legend of the “Suicide Squad”: small, disposable units sent into the teeth of the monsters to win or die, badly equipped, treated as disposable as tissue paper by the brass, but somehow managing to survive just another day. Tales were spread and embellished, and the real joke was that there were no “suicide squads”: it was just a blackly comical commentary on the situation the GIs found themselves in, facing menaces on a scale never seen before, battling monsters whose nature, weaknesses and capacities were as yet only dimly understood back in the States.
Before long new allies would arrive in the field.
Robotics, in the US, Japan, and Germany had made great steps forward in the 30s, building on the work of the brilliant if erratic Rotwang [1], but robots at the start of WWII were limited by the inability of the state of the art to create a true mechanical “brain”, making even the most sophisticated designs unable to deal with any challenges beyond the limits of their programming. Still, the purveyors of robots, hoping to sell their machines on the basis of preserving human troops by substituting machines in situations where brains weren’t particularly important – say charging right at a mega-dinosaur with a couple 100-pound satchels of explosives. The first prototypes of the “GI Robot” line arrived for due in the Zone in the fall of 1943.
The Machine Virus appears only patchily in the Zone, and is associated with large crystalline growths appearing on certain types of exposed rock. The contagion mechanism remains obscure, since such crystals show no activity under examination: however, their structure is too similar to the crystalline encrustations that begin to form in areas of intense activity within any sophisticated electronic device. In the early stages this can be cleared off with commercial electronic cleaning solutions, but becomes more difficult in later stages: in any event doing so in a full-blown infection has been legally murder in the US since the 1970s.
The effect of the Machine Virus was first detected by US soldiers serving in the Zone, when they began to note that the “metal morons” and “tin twits” were beginning to show signs of higher thought: a capacity for planning, for abstract thinking, and for…self sacrifice. Even heroism. It would be quite a while before the brass really took these reports from the field seriously, ascribing it to (1) the machines operating better than predicted, something Rossum’s representatives were eager to suggest, and (2), the human tendency towards the pathetic fallacy, especially towards useful and helpful machines such as planes, ships and now man-shaped machines. It would take a lot more interactions in the field, and some quite odd human-machine alliances, before what was actually going on was forced upon the attention of Washington.
The Japanese didn’t discover the Machine Virus during the war, but they did discover certain metals and ores which did not seem to operate on any rules learned from the periodic table, and learned that while forgeable at temperatures 1940s technology could attain, when cooled hardened into metals whose strength under compression and tension greatly exceeded even the best steels. The serious constraints on Japanese efforts to create an industrial base (with masses of expendable slave labor) prevented the construction of more than one “unsinkable” battleship, the Yamato (which would indeed remain afloat, even after chemical fire unleashed by the US airforce had burned to ash all its crew), but did produce, in combination with the discovery of the “black bells” [2] the basis of Project Mecha, to fight both monsters and US marines. The first models encountered by US troops in mid-1944 were only about 50 feet tall, but so heavily armored that tanks shells did little to stop them: in the end it was the transmitted concussion of massive explosions, not a breach of their armor, that killed their human crews.
Boobytrapped (their power sources would overheat and melt their way out of the Mecha and then down through the ground), no Mecha would be seized relatively intact until well into 1945, not long before the first atomic mushrooms began to bloom over Japan. The last and greatest Mecha ever built, Tetsujin, stood over 300 feet tall, could defeat even the largest mega-dinosaurs, was radio remote controlled, and was widely proclaimed by its builders to be unbeatable: three days before it was to be recalled to Japan to defend against the expected US invasion, it crossed paths with a small force of US troops and one GI Robot, and ended its operating life ignominiously wedged helplessly upside down in a narrow canyon.
Today, of course, Mecha, Combat Armor Suits, and robots of all types, intelligent or not, are a part of daily life. Although neither the Black Bells or the Machine Virus have as yet been duplicated by human science, enough clues were obtained to create the crystal cores of modern AI and the less powerful but far safer nuclear engines of modern ultra-heavy machinery. Zone super-metals remain a limited product: all mining takes place on only two small islands on the edge of the Transition zone, risks in establishing mining operations further within the Zone being too high for any rational government to countenance. (In the case of irrational governments, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea’s efforts to start up a mining operation actually with the Unstable Zone failed so utterly that many suspect even the Koreans themselves have no real idea what happened).
A divide exists between old-school robots enhanced by the Machine Virus (which in older robots often leads to something like senility weirdly combined with genius as the crystals multiply exuberantly within their brain cases) and modern AI, each side considering the other somehow Other and somewhat hostile to eachother. The GI Robots and their kin have developed their own odd form of reproduction, building deliberately retro “children” and then going on pilgrimage to certain regions of the Zone for the long, chancy wait for infection to take hold: it does not always happen, and at times in spite of all precautions the “pilgrims” are destroyed (or “killed”, as it is polite to say nowadays). (The US government no longer officially disapproves of its robotic citizens reproducing themselves, but refuses to underwrite it by providing military protection: several veterans groups do what they can).
The Pacific Anomalous Zone is divided into several concentric areas: the outermost is the Stable Zone, where activity has (mostly) ceased and the islands, whether terrestrial or otherworldly, generally stay in place and rarely shift interdimensionally anymore. Within is a more active transition zone, and then the so-called “unstable zone” within that, where the landscape (and sea scape) rarely remains fixed for more than a day or so and in fact may become partially “phased” and not entirely material. There are of course no fixed borders, the level of activity being a continuous function, and the division lines being fairly arbitrary conventions drawn (and redrawn, as borders slowly shift over time) according to electromagnetic activity readings recorded by buoys and satellites. The outer edge of the Zone is a bit arbitrary as well, some odd EM activity being occasionally detected as much as a hundred miles beyond the “official” border, although normally activity at the outer edge of the “stable zone” is close enough to zero for all practical purposes. The outer edges may shift by as much as fifty miles over a period of months, but the total area of the Anomalous Zone never changes by more than plus or minus five percent. Aerial visibility within the Zone is usually rather less than outside of it, with most of its area normally obscured by thick, low-lying cloud cover.
Not arbitrary at all is the Central or Forbidden Zone (also known as the Void), the borders of which are demarked by a continuous wall of storms, with violent, random winds and currents of ocean water occasionally being sucked in or jetted out. No manned ship or probe has remained in radio contact for over 15 seconds after passing through what is parsimoniously referred to as the “death line”, although on a couple occasions there has been time for brief screams. It is generally supposed to be an area of such extreme dimensional stability that no object of any size can long exist with all of it in one dimension at once. Studies continue, especially in the light of the fact that since the Zone was finally mapped with a fair degree of accuracy in the 1960s, the Anomalous Zone as a whole has decreased in size by about 3%, but the Void has increased in size by 10%. [3]
Land claims within the Zone have been a knotty problem since the start, with various nations extending claims to territories equivalent to former Pacific possessions, and some simply “squatting” in spite of UN directives (the last Japanese holdouts weren’t winkled out until the 1990s). Fortunately, the sheer difficulty of establishing any sort of secure human presence in the area eventually made the major powers agreeable to a UN mandate over the territory, with territorial arrangements made on a case by case basis. (The Soviets made a terrible fuss about the ex post facto recognition of many US footholds in the area established while fighting monster invasions of inhabited islands and pursuing Japanese secret projects in the area: the US remains the largest “landowner” by far in the area, although most of its bases are on surviving our world Pacific isles within the Stable Zone.)
Multiple nations retain “interests” and national footholds in the Zone in 2017, continued idealistic efforts to bring the whole area under UN control nowithstanding, with US predominance challenged by the Russian Union [4], France, the UK, North China, and the Lunar Reich, although by the 2003 Treaty of Minsk the Russians have allowed foreign corporations mining rights in their super-metal ore regions in exchange for equivalent rights in the US “new territories.” There are private actors as well: as well as the occasional billionaire SOB with his own rocket launcher and a desire to hunt the Most Dangerous Game (I’ll take unarmed human over 100 foot flesh eating pseudo-tyrannosaur with aggression issues, thank you) there is an issue with various private cranks trying to “homestead” in the Zone and create their own free/holy/whatever society. The unreliability of long-range radar and sonar in the Zone has meant that a fair number of boat-owners have managed to sneak in, and while most such efforts end as lunch, a few groups of the more clever and cautious have succeeded in finding ways to coexist with the monsters, on some islands not too rich in aggressive species, atop colossal trees, underground in the tunnels of the giant worms, nocturnally, growing local fungi on their skins to mask their smell and body odor. US and other forces forcibly evict them “for their own safety” when they are found, but some experts estimate there may be now as many as a couple dozen groups of hardscrabble survivors making a go of it in a place most people would consider insanity to live in.
Island bases, established either by killing all the larger animals on the islands through high explosive and incendiaries bombing or by using an our-world Pacific island evacuated of its inhabitants if any, remain hardship posts: islands are usually surrounded by floating mines to discourage the basketball court sized crabs and other creepy sea things, and extensive ground to air missile systems remain on 24 hour alert in case some colossal thing of the air decides to sweep in. And in those cases where the island has “non-terrestrial” fauna, there’s always the chance the bombs missed a cow-sized spider in a cave or something equally unpleasant.
The so-called “thin grey line” of ships and aircraft carriers that patrol the borders of the Zone to shoot down flying monsters and depth charge marine monsters continues its endless vigilance, but is considered by many a boondoggle: it killed off a lot of whales before more accurate detection methods were developed, generally failed and continues to fail to intercept a not insignificant number of sea creatures (especially sea floor crawlers and small juveniles) and is ultimately not needed to prevent monsters from taking over the Earth: given their subtly different molecular structure, the Zone monsters are unable to successfully incorporate terrestrial food molecules into their bodies, and essentially die of starvation within a few weeks at most of living on terrestrial rations. It is however too much of a public opinion third rail to be gotten rid of it: it does decrease monster attacks on civilian populations in the Pacific zone, and no politician ever wants to look weak on “preventing constituents from being eaten alive.”
By careful timing and navigation, it is possible to navigate the dimension shifts with the Unstable Zone and the Transitional Zone to reach the stable zones beyond the equivalent area on what has become known as Primordial Earth. Exploration since it began at the end of the 1980s has been slow and cautious, and as yet only about a third of Primordial Earth has been mapped, mostly by extreme high altitude planes, due to the rather severe difficulties involved in setting up a satellite launching facility. Exploration is carried out by specialized purpose-built carrier/destroyers heavily armored, heavily armed, and equipped with a cellular internal structure that makes them almost impossible to sink if the hull is pierced (and odds are that the hull will be pierced at some time during the ships operating life, in spite of sonar and depth charges: if nothing else goes wrong, there are the giant acid-secreting barnacles). US ships carry with them one [5] “Behemoth” class heavy Mecha to help defend landing parties human and (sentient) robotic.
Primordial Earth is almost exactly the same size as Earth, although the atmosphere is a bit denser and richer and oxygen (the faint green tint to the sky is actually biological in origin: there are some odd floating life forms above the 20,000 foot level): the sun is a bit brighter, and why the planet hasn’t gone into runaway greenhouse is mainly due to a fearsomely active biological system sequestering carbon at an accelerated rate. It does appear to be a near-duplicate of our solar systems, eight planets and a ringer as OTL, although Jupiter also has rings and Mars appears to have some small seas: the constellations are not the same, though, although long range observation of the deep sky indicates it’s still in the right galaxy. Some speculate that this is an Earth-equivalent a few hundred million years further along in its evolution: some speculate it is our Earth, although such people are generally in the Kook class, given that most life and most of the matter of (at least the outer layers) the planet consists is made of “macromolecules” subtly different from anything known in our own universe. (They are also lacking in non-handwavy explanations for dinosaurs reappearing. Cyclical history has been a bit out of fashion since around the presidency of Millard Fillmore). As yet, no terrestrial state has advanced claims on the other side of the dimensional rift.
The deepest part of the Ocean south of the main continental mass is now avoided by exploration parties, after the last images from the accompanying survey drone showed what appeared to be approximately thousand-foot long tentacles emerging from the sea and dragging the Russian carrier Slava under the waves in a matter of seconds.
That something bad happened a while back does seem clear: large areas of the moon appear to have been resurfaced, and the nearest continent is peppered with suspiciously round lakes and downright alarming long, thousand-foot deep, perfectly straight “canyons”. Monstrous life swarms everywhere, even more bizarre and diverse than on the islands, and the scattered and mostly ruined state of artifacts found on the isles is duplicated by what cautious (i.e., no more than 5% fatalities) exploration has uncovered on the mainland.
Recent careful analysis of high-altitude observation data from the smaller eastern continent has revealed something rather exciting (or alarming, depending on who you ask): an area of some hundreds of thousands of square miles in the north which has a thermal profile inconsistent with observed geography. There are no other anomalous readings or signs of electromagnetic activity, but closer examination of visual data shows what appear to be immense shafts descending deep into the planetary crust. Currently most of this has been kept under wraps by the two terrestrial governments who know about it as the leadership argue about what should be done: there is a strong faction which argues that the only rational response is to stay the hell away from the eastern continent from now on, with a smaller sub-faction which calls for shutting down exploration of Primordial Earth altogether.
NOTES ON ZONE LIFEFORMS
It is generally accepted that in spite of similarities the giant reptilian beasts of the Zone and Primordial Earth are not actually dinosaurs: they appear ordered in clades and groupings dissimilar to the dinosaurs of OTL, and the bipedal giants are not in any way related to birds. (Birds, as such, do not exist in the Zone). Thanks to an alien molecular structure, life in this world can grow far larger than in ours before succumbing to the cube-squared law, and the largest species can be as much as ten times the size of the largest dinosaurs of OTL, with proportional gigantism among marine species. Some of the Mega-dinosaurs resemble giant sized versions of such terrestrial species as the Tyrannosaurus or the Triceratops: others are of almost phantasmagorical grotesquerie. An unusually high percentage of the species, ecologically speaking, are either carnivores or omnivores, which may in part be explained by the rather extraordinary intestinal flora of the larger omnivores, which allow them to digest both wild grasses and meat with no difficult. Herbivores in turn are prone to extreme defensive aggression: the cautious explorer should keep in mind that pretty much all Mega-Dinosaurs will want to either eat them or trample them.
Phyla paralleling the arthropods and crustacean of our world grow even more disproportionately large, with the pseudo-arachnids growing as large as terrestrial cattle, literally thousands of times larger than terrestrial types (oddly, the closest equivalent to insects are little larger if at all than our terrestrial species; having found their ecosystem “size niche”, they have apparently never had an evolutionary incentive to leave it). While the Zone lacks bird equivalents (although “birds of passage” from our world occasionally appear, the lack of digestible food prevents them from becoming established), it does have mammals. Many are small fruit and leaf eaters, burrowers and insect eaters, too small to attract any attention from most of the Mega-dinosaurs, some are quite huge and formidable: the bear-sized Titan Rat has been known to attack and swarm quite large Mega-dinosaurs, the Thundercloud Bat is not much smaller than the largest Pseudo-Pterosaurs, while there is little that can harm the heavily armored, building-sized God Sloth. The most notable mammalian species by far is of course the giant white ape, named rather inescapably as the “Kong” (Kong Rex). A highly intelligent animal, it has on multiple occasions proven able to cooperate with human troops and explorers in the Zone against its mortal enemies, the Mega-dinosaurs. Exactly how intelligent the Kongs are was not really determined until the 1970s, when a Soviet experiment to create a force of cyberneticized Kongs as a sort of mostly-organic Mecha force went rather disastrously wrong and led to the near destruction of Aldan in Siberia: whatever else they were, [6] the Kongs were intelligent enough to trick Soviet security officers into thinking them a lot more cowed and obedient than they actually were.
There are also a variety of mammals which have adopted to parasitize the larger mammal and Mega-dinosaur species, which has led to some unusual morphological changes: although rarely aggressive towards human-sized prey, the Tick Bat has a rather strong tendency to induce nightmares in those who get a good look at it.
The automatic savagery of many local lifeforms, even vegetarian species which in theory should not feel either threatened or hungry at the presence of tiny humans, and their occasional oddly cooperative heavier in attacking them, has been somewhat explained by the discovery of certain parasitic fungi, which seem to infect the brains of a sizable percentage of the local Mega-dinosaurs. These fungi appear to induce increased aggression and a tendency towards violent attack in the infected, especially towards things the dinosauroids see as new and unknown. As yet, the adaptive and evolutionary explanation of this remains unclear: although the fungi do grow well on the corpses of dead beasts of all types, their behavioral influence does not seem to be part of their reproductive life cycle, like the fungi which infect ants or the dreaded cat poop protozoan.
The first reported case of the fungal infection spreading to humans, turning a hidden settler colony into a band of bloodthirsty cannibals, was reported in 2016.
[1] Believed to have died in 1935, when his house was devastated by a peculiar fire after several SS troops entered it to arrest Rotwang due to his “uncooperative behavior.” Three of them were found later, reduced to ash but oddly still maintaining human form until poked: Rotwang’s body was never found, but assumed crumbled.
[2] Discovered through the investigation of some mysterious “hot spots” and much dangerous digging, the Bells were energy sources of immense power, if also so radioactive that any human Mecha-pilot had an operating lifetime of under a week in spite of intervening armor. There is now some doubt if they were originally power sources at all, but most of what is known of the Elder Things is doubtful.
[3] See, Egon Spengler, Further Evidence We’re Doomed, pp. 72-193 inclusive.
[4] Includes east Ukraine, Belarus, and northern Kazakhstan. The fall of the USSR was longer and more drawn out than OTL, and involved giant robot battles.
[5] More than one wouldn’t leave enough room on the boat for other essential cargo.
[6] A certain overly romantic view of the Kongs exists and should be discouraged. They do not automatically warm up to human beings, and a Kong encountering humans for the first time may take them for quick snacks rather than potential allies.
"Eight planets and a ringer."
Could you please define a "ringer?"