Tiratola, the Long-Tailed Terror!
Aliases: the Dragon of Etna, the Serpentine Savior, Our Lady of Flame
Date Discovered: May 20th, 1954
Place of Origin: Mt. Etna
Notable Stomping Grounds: Mt. Etna, Messina, Pisa, Stromboli Kaiju Reserve
Height: Generally holds head around 15 meters above the ground, but can rear up to tower at around 34 meters at her tallest.
A prehistoric varanid of enormous size from the same lineage that produced Kraydi, Tiratola brings to mind the dragons of yore, slinking and serpentine and adorned with a crown of fearsome crests and horns. Indeed, her Mediterranean location closely matches with depictions of dragons from the ancient Greeks and Romans, although her demeanor is hardly that of a rapacious devourer of maidens and hoarder of gold.
Rather than her jaws, Tiratola’s primary weapon of choice is her tail - even for a reptile, hers is incredibly long and dexterous, making up more than half of her total body length and as flexible and powerful as the body of any snake. With it, she can lash at targets several hundred feet away, coil and constrict her opponents, and even pick up and hurl objects as big as buildings or handle very small objects with the very tip of the tail like an elephant’s trunk. Indeed, her style of combat is very similar to that of the American kaiju Gorgolisk, preferring to coil and constrict her opponents with her powerful body.
As a kaiju, Tiratola also sports a fairly standard powerset:
An enhanced healing factor
She also has one more trick up her sleeve - like many other prehistoric varanids as well as Tyrantis himself, the Terror of Italia sports venom glands within her jaws that she can either ‘chew’ into her opponents or spray like a spitting cobra, and like Tyrantis, this venom has further honed into a flammable compound like something out of the pages of myth and legend.
Of course, comparing Tiratola’s fire spitting with Tyrantis’ flaming breath would be akin to comparing a firecracker with a flamethrower - rather than napalm-like torrents of ignited venom, the enormous reptile’s sprayed venom ignites into a cloud of scalding sparks and embers that explodes outwards in a shotgun-like blast with a loud crack and a blinding flash. While it’s not the best at actually damaging opponents, it still stings and burns quite painfully for targets, especially if hit in the eyes and other sensitive areas, and the sharp rapport of the venom combusting can cause a few seconds of disorientation. Injecting the stuff into the bodies of opponents, however, produces rather more grisly results as it reacts with oxygen in the bloodstream, causing the wounds inflicted by her teeth to burst open a few seconds after she lets go. To a kaiju’s durability and regeneration, it’s not nearly as harmful as it looks unless Tiratola injects a truly immense amount of venom or her opponent is considerably smaller than herself, but it’s still quite painful to experience.
When the Superquake of ‘54 rocked the world, the actual tremors weren’t the only force behind the resulting destruction - tidal waves lashed the coasts, avalanches and rockslides buried towns, and a number of already-rumbling volcanoes were roused to erupt once more, pushing up not only molten material but all manner of strange new landforms forged from the Yamaneon tunnels beneath the earth. Home to several volcanoes as they are, Greece and Italy were particularly subject to this, disgorging an assortment of subterranean environments alongside quite a number of kaiju. Among them was the great reptile Tiratola - emerging from the volcanic aftermath of Mt. Etna, the serpentine saurian made herself known to the public at large when she swept through the outskirts of Messina and smothered a major fire when she settled herself on top of it for warmth, inadvertently saving much of the city from burning to the ground. In the aftermath of the fire, she would go on to save even more lives as she nosed around the rubble, unearthing nearly two dozen people that had been trapped beneath fallen debris.
Since her awakening, Tiratola has come to roam across Italy and Greece, frequently digging people out of rubble wherever she went and frequently engaging smaller mutants emerging from local Yamaneon tunnels as well as the occasional full-on kaiju - her most famous scuffles include preying upon a hoard of Paleozoic invertebrates that emerged from a Carboniferous swamp in the Greek Kassandra Peninsula and engaging a hulking one-eyed hominid kaiju that had been menacing the city of Taranto, dragging it down to its doom beneath the waves before it could do anything worse than superficial damage to buildings. Aside from an incident involving the Leaning Tower of Pisa, she’s been responsible for relatively little destruction, and has become somewhat of a local hero to the populace of the regions, something that Tiratola has come to notice.
Low to the ground as she is, the Whip-Tailed Terror is by her nature literally closer to human beings than many other kaiju, and is more aware of their activities as a result. She’s come to recognize how people react to her presence and realizes how easily she can reshape the tiny world that she now finds herself in. Were she a more malevolent sort, this awareness and her ability to easily wind through city streets could potentially make her an incredibly dangerous thrat to human beings, but the ultimate result of this is that Tiratola has come to realize that she quite enjoys the attention and praise she gets from acts of heroism. Being a reptile, she is by nature a very energy-efficient creature, conserving her strength when she does need to exert herself… but being a kaiju, acts of aid towards humans are trivially easy for her. A couple sweeps of her tail can smother a major fire beneath dirt and water and pulling people from danger can be easily accomplished by simply pushing her head into, say, a burning building and using her keen senses to locate survivors in the same way that modern varanids break into termite mounds and locate warm chambers to lay their eggs in or mother crocodiles dig out their young from nests. It costs little to the great reptile to lend her aid to others, and the reward for doing so is more than worth it - adoration and cheers whenever she enters a populated area, occasional offerings of fish and other treats, even occasional cleanings by teams of volunteers that scrub her down and aid in peeling off any lingering bits of unshed skin. The latter task has also provided another boon to the people of Greece and Italy - analysis of Tiratola’s shed skin has shed a lot of light on kaiju cellular biology, and the scales themselves are durable enough to be shaped and worked like metal or glass, fostering a small but lucrative industry of decorative items made from the kaiju’s scales.
However, there may also be another reason for her gentleness towards humans - while unearthing survivors from rubble, Tiratola frequently makes vocalizations not unlike those of crocodilian and alligator parents when unearthing their buried young, even scooping them up in her jaws in a similar fashion to carry them to safety. It may be that trapped survivors reminds the the whip-tailed dragon of her own offspring, buried in sand and soil - joint Reptodite-human expeditions into the collapsed tunnels where the kaiju emerged have even found the crystallized remains of ruined nests and cracked eggs, suggesting that she may have produced several clutches of offspring before via parthenogenesis in the same manner as some species of monitor lizard, although none seem to have survived.
Behold, my entry to @tyrantisterror ’s ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest 3D, Tiratola! I’ve entered both of his previous contests, and I didn’t want to miss out here, although this is admittedly my first time posting one here to Tumblr; there’s a bunch of really creative kaiju already entered into the competition, and I highly recommend checking them out. My entry really isn’t the best by far (I wanted to make Tiratola a lot lengthier and more serpentine, but I didn’t have the space to do it, and I can’t really do detail work for shit), but I’m still reasonably happy with how my girl Tiratola came out!
Tiratola is meant to be an homage to that tried-and-true staple of the monster movie genre - movie companies from other countries trying to cash in on a trend! It’s how the world got creatures like Gorgo, Paleosaurus, and Reptilicus - creatures whose movies were far from the source material, but were packaged as being the same thing in their posters and translated titles overseas, leading to weirdness like Godzilla vs Mothra becoming ‘Watang and the Fabulous Kingdom of Monsters’ in its Italian release, the infamous cut of ‘The Volcano Monsters,’ and so on. As such, she takes the basic concept of Tyrantis - ‘giant green prehistoric reptilian monster with a long tail and horns that breathes fire’, and reconstructs it through that lens. To that end, she’s also somewhat based on slurpasaurs and on cheap rubber props, staples of Italian monster cinema.
Designwise, I based her quite heavily on, well, monitor lizards as well as the classic LEGO dragon model plus the movie poster design for Reptilicus - both are a nice combination of reptilian features that doesn’t really lend itself to any particular order, with Kraydi factoring in as another reference. Indeed, Tiratola’s meant to be a cousin to that kaiju, another of the varanid lizard lineage that would have lead to dragons and their kin in the Lost Epoch - she’s meant to be a bit farther down that evolutionary line than Kraydi is, but still not exactly a direct ancestor.
I was struggling to get a feel for Tiratola’s personality at first, but I managed to get something when I reread ATOM and the way that its reptilian stars think, plus some takes on protective dragons and why they defend humans so much smaller and weaker than they. A big part of this series is about how the kaiju are far more intelligent and empathetic than they let on - I thought it’d be neat to play off of that. While her motivations come from a very different place than they would in a human being or a similar creature, the end result is still the same: if it feels good to help others, and doing so is relatively easy, why not do so? I also added a good deal of Ogra and Reptisaurus as well - I figured it would be only fitting.
The thing about her visiting Pisa is a nod to Dinosaurs Attack, the card where the Rhedosaurus and Giant Behemoth teamed up to destroy the Leaning Tower, while her battle with the giant is taken from the battle between the dragon Taro and the Cyclops in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The date of her discovery is also the date that Reptilicus was released in theaters, albeit moved back a few years.
