SUPREME HEADQUARTERS, ALLIED EXPEDITIONARY FORCE (SHAEF),
LONDON, ENGLAND (1 APRIL, 1943)
* * * * *
"They were initially referred to, in Greek mythology, as 'the Thriae.' A trio of pre-Hellenic goddesses worshipped mostly on the island of Rhodes. It was only after their worship spread to mainland Greece that they became known as 'the Melissae,' and started getting depicted on varius amphorae as anthropocephalous bees! The Minoans of Crete, however, worshipped them in the singular as 'Melissa' (nymphic nursemaid to the infant Zeus). While in Asia Minor (as present-day Turkey used to be called), their worship was assimilated by the equally matriarchal Cult of Ephesian Artemis."
"And, it's this cult, Major, that became the theocratic nucleus of the Gorgonian Empire. A confederation of matriarchal tribes that, at its height, ruled from North Africa to southern Scandinavia. But, which is better known to modern laymen as simply...the Amazon race."
Major Percival Throckmorton (British Military Intelligence, Section 5) was dumbfounded.
Two months earlier, one of his operatives--a Dartmouth-educated Inuit from Greenland, based in Sweden and posing as a Lapp reindeer herder--had received a disturbing message from the Norwegian resistance. Usually, he smuggled them arms and ammunition and they paid him back with updated information on German troop movements and air traffic. But, this time, they had intercepted--and decoded--an urgent radiogram from the Nazi High Command, in Berlin, to the German embassy in Stockholm. Translated into English, it had read:
"LIEBENKRAFT: BARBAROSSA IS KAPUT. ACTIVATE OPERATION: UTGARD, IMMEDIATELY--HIMMLER."
It was subsequently determined that the radiogram referred to Herr Doktor Gustave Liebenkraft; archeologist, mythologist, and "ethno-genetic historian" for the occultist Thule Society.
According to the British embassy, in Stockholm, Liebenkraft had been a Visiting Professor at Uppsala University when World War II broke out. Officially leaving him "stranded" on campus. Yet, once the radiogram's message was evidently relayed to him, he disappeared from Sweden, altogether. Ultimately turning up in Cayenne, French Guiana, as "Dr. Jose' Aleman" from Spain!
There, Liebenkraft had hired an expatriate Portuguese bounty hunter, named Vasco Gonsalves, to help him track down a Chilean woman, of Easter Islander descent, named Marisol Herrera. Supposedly, to get back some stolen research papers involving the mysterious Peruvian ruins of Tihuanaco. But, Gonsalves quickly realized he had been lied to when Senorita Herrera grew into a one hundred-foot tall giantess when cornered!
It was after her eventual drug-induced capture that Gonsalves was given the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth from Liebenkraft aboard a Fokker trimotor airplane en route to an island in the Bahia Huemul region of Lake Nahuel Huapi, in Argentina. Unfortunately, for him and Senorita Herrera (who preferred to be called by her Polynesian birth-name of "Kaikala"), the plane crashed into the lake not that far from the island.
Upon swimming ashore, as the only survivors of the plane crash, Gonsalves and Kaikala wound up being captured by a bevy of blue-eyed blonde giantesses from a Nazi research facility, masquerading as a German Red Cross refugee relocation camp. The head of this facility being a German biochemist named Klaus Kraus. The latter egotistically explained, to Gonsalves, how he had developed a means of causing supra-normal growth in human beings. Using fungal spores from an old meteor-impact crater, near Gardnos, Norway, that he injected into gigantized guinea pigs. Which were, in turn, fed upon by vampire bats smuggled in from Brazil...and which subsequently urinated that sucked blood into a pool of similarly mutated leeches!
Unfortunately, for Kraus, an Anglo-American team of commandos (code-named "Eagle Owls") had been landed upon the island via Waco glider. Their mission: to destroy the whole facility, while simultaneously stealing all the research papers they could carry. And, in this regard, they were successful.
Unfortunately, for the Eagle Owls, they were not as successful in destroying the Hitler Youth giantesses. The latter were magically teleported to safety by a raven-haired giantess clad in nothing more than a black-feathered cloak! And, who had defiantly identified herself, just before the mass vanishing, as...
Labia of the Melissae.
All of this now being explained to the major as part of an after-action report by Professor Ash Phillips. Father of U.S. Army Ranger Captain Robert H. Phillips, who had been the commando team leader on this operation (code-named "Beanstalk").
"Let me see if I've gotten this straight, Professor," Throckmorton now attempted to summarize: "This solid gold thingamabob..."
"The Hsia Jie-ji," Ash corrected him: "...also known as Le Bec-de-bardiche Giserne Chinois."
"Yes; that one. It's the only thing in the world that can cut down one of these antediluvian giantesses?"
"Well, not the only item. They're also vulnerable to any Christian-blessed projectile of sufficient mass and velocity! But, when I learned that Professor Kraus' research assistant was a female Italian national, descended from the Italian House of Barbini, I became duly concerned. You see, the heraldic symbol of the Barbinis consists of three honeybees in triangular formation. The exact same formation as on this ancient shard of Rhodian pottery!"
Whereupon, the fifty-something archeologist held up a small rectangular box of acrylic glass. Sure enough; inside it was a reddish-brown piece of clayware with a black-painted central region. And, within that central region were three bees. One between and below the other two.
And each one possessing the head of a maliciously-grinning woman.
"I know for a fact," continued Ash: "...that Lucretia Borgia belonged to a Melissae off-shoot known as the Sisterhood of the Eastern Lady (or 'Signora Oriente' in Italian). Beginning a tradition that passed down to the House of Barbini via the Casa D'Este! So, knowing that the heiress-apparent to the title of Contessa Barbini was working for a Nazi scientist, I could only draw one conclusion. The Melissae had infiltrated Operation: Utgard and were using its progress for their own purposes."
tbc
Giantess World
