Hi everybody, Duffy and Chris here.

This week, we’re taking a deeper look into organized crime in the world of Gigargun by talking about the biggest movers in the game, Ghul. We’ve learned a bit about them already.

Find out more below!

The policing of kaiju and alien technology was very lax in the beginning of the Gigargun War. Relief efforts were so focused on saving who they could that securing the bodies of the enemy and their weapons was last on the list of priorities.

Scavengers would quickly pick clean anything they thought might be useful in rebuilding their lives or act as a souvenir after the battle. The Aurian technology’s value couldn’t be overstated, but the remains of the kaiju proved to have a variety of practical uses due to their rare chemical, radiobiological, and mutagenic properties. This led to a black market popping up almost overnight.

It started small: loose affiliations of dealers and scavengers would serve private organizations and governments that weren’t willing to wait for the materials to be cleared by G.A.R.D. It was lucrative, but only to those who had access to buyers who could afford it. A lot of operations were taken out early simply because they didn’t have the means to stop people from taking their product by force.

What came to be known as Ghul started as one of these operations in Southwest Asia. A Swiss scientist named Vikis Brise had been experimenting on the effects of kaiju biology on human body sytems and found that kaiju adrenal secretions could induce a chemical high in humans with little side effects.

Brise was reluctant to share his findings with pharmaceutical companies for fear that his work would be taken from him and he wouldn’t see the profits. He instead sought to go into business for himself, and was able to find a supplier in Southwest Asia to aid him: black marketer who had been supplying materials to the private corporations, militias and governments in the area. This person, who history only remembers as Iblis, helped Brise with his research.

Skinner

The end result was skinner. Normally, it is injected into the bloodstream. The result is a high burst of energy and a heightening of the senses. Depending on the dosage, it could last a hour to over half a day.

Side effects were otherwise limited to withdrawal symptoms (mild to life-threatening, depending on the dose) and dermatitis at the point of injection. This side effect is what gave this new drug its name.

Skinner has a relatively short shelf-life compared to most illicit substances due to containing organic materials. And since harvesting it requires the kaiju to be alive or recently deceased, transporting and selling it was too expensive to be viable to any but the richest customers.

Its shelf-life can be extended, though, by mixing the drug with a nutrient broth that keeps the organic components fresh. This was often used to sell the drug at a discount in poorer countries.

The unintended side-effect is that this can have serious mutagenic effects on the user. A few uses will only cause slight mutations like cancerous growths, while higher doses will lead to a change in body chemistry. In the rarest cases, it leads to a gruesome death.

The nutrient broth causes stem cells in the skinner to grow and reproduce within the user. It takes on the aspects of the host’s genetics while at the same time maintaining the genes of the kaiju the drug was initially harvested from. Often, this leads to abusers growing scales, feathers, or growing new teeth. In extreme cases, the cells reproduce, consuming and replacing the host’s in an agonizing fashion that slowly kills the user and leaves behind a chimera made of the combined genes of the user and the kaiju.

From the outside, it looks like the user is hemorrhaging from their soft tissue as their skin comes off in sheets to reveal the creature underneath. The hybrids have no memory of the host that incubated it, and often attack the first people they come into contact with.

These were rare cases that appeared mostly in 3rd world countries, and Ghul did their best to keep them quiet.