Giants



A \sco{roda} is a general term for any giant. In Malomanan there is a population of giants living in the far north of Tuujonsån. Due to the harsh weather and difficult terrain of where they live, humans rarely if every travel so north so contact between them is limited. This hasen't prevented the giants from entering the mythos however. The size of the giants can vary wildly depending on age, sex and whether it is social or not. Typically the females will stay together in groups while the males spend most of their life in solitary, meeting the females only during the mating season, which is heralded when the planet Scylte is at its closest to earth. The solitary males can reach gargantuan sizes, with some old males becoming \sco{titans}. The average male can from 60-200ft tall while a titan can range from 400-1000ft. The females tend to range from 40-50ft tall. The size difference is not purely genetic as it is possible for a female to become a titan or for a male to stay smaller under the right circumstances. The size of the giants is controlled by a hormone which limits growth, without it a giant has no limit to how large it can grow, indeed there was one giant who had a birth defect and was unable to produce the hormone or be affected by it. Eventually he grew so tall that his head reached far above the clouds, he was heavy that he was rendered immobile, such that he sat down and solidified into rock and became \sco{Sölpio}, the largest mountain in the world. Since females stick in groups the hormone is more concentrated among them which limits their size more drastically. The solitary males experience less exposure to the hormone so they are able to reach titan sizes in their isolation. There have been cases where a female was either estranged from a group or was the only survivor of a disaster causing her to become solitary. These females have been able to reach titan sizes but they are not the norm. The reason for the hormone limiting size is to deal with population control. If a group of titans lived together then the land would not be able to sustain all of them and food would become scarce, so the hormone limits the size of social giants so that the land can support them. Due to titans requiring a lot of land to feed themselves they can become very territorial when another male enters his territory, they are more tolerant of smaller females or females in general during the mating season.

The giants are incredibly long lived. On average they can reach several hundred years old or even a millenia. Some of the older solitary titans have been known to live for several thousands of years, becoming so old and large that they struggle to remain mobile, choosing instead to rest and hibernate in the form of a mountain. As such one must be very wary of climbing some out of place mountains in the far north, for it may be a resting titan.

Despite their animalistic appearance. The giants are incredibly intelligent, such that they rival even the most learned scholars when it comes to wit. Their curiosity and memory are astonishing. They even have their own language which Upwolast described as being as complex and intricate as any human speech. Shamefully not much can be said of their wisdom. While they are smart, the giants are quite gullible and naive, being prone to deception or making foolish choices. An example of this, albeit mythological, is when the giant Sgruimtyr entombed the corpses of the people who died after the first wave of settlement. Sgruimtyr adored the humans and he was greatly saddened by their deaths. To prevent any animals from feasting on the bodies, the giant entombed them in large balls of earth and threw them into the sky\footnote{Which according to legend is how the planets and moons were made}. While a noble act, Sgruimtyr didn't think about the consequence of this, as preventing corpses from rotting or breaking apart is a taboo in Sumric lore, a taboo because if a corpse is not destroyed then the spirit becomes a demonic being known as the Olistanonica. Sgruimtyr had preserved \emph{thousands} of bodies this way and in doing so he unwittingly unleashed a massive wave of demonic spirits into the world.

Human-giant interaction is minimal. However one interaction had a great affect upon the history of Malomanan. It took place during the Proto-Sumric period. There was a large band of female giants, the group was so large that each of the giants was smaller for it, with no individual being taller than 10ft. A particularly harsh winter had driven the group quite far to the south, so far south that they ended reached lands that they had never been to before. When the winter calmed and passed the female giants were unable to find their way home and they became very lost. However the land where they were was fine for them to live in so they remained without issue, without issue until their mating season came. The female giants were far away from where any males were so they had no one to mate with which put them into a deep sadness. The gods looked upon them with pity and sought to end their sadness and loneliness in a rather unorthodox way. First the wilderness god Ansotroḥlce made it so that if any man in the area looked upon the open land where the giantesses dwelled, that he would be filled with the \sco{huscarotâtïnsotroḥlcebinâsci}\footnote{This is the sudden desire felt, when looking over a great expanse of land, which compels one to roam deep into the wild. This effect is caused by the wilderness god Ansotroḥlce who use it to instill madness in humans} madness. Next the lust goddess \sco{Poihi} filled the insane men with a deep desire to mate with the giantesses, and she filled the giantesses with a deep desire to mate with the insane men. Even with how hideous the two species would normally find each other, under Poihi's eye they became lustful for each other. The result of this was that every giantess gave birth to a human-giant hybrid. Hundreds of hybrids came into existence, the resulting beings were more human-like than they were giant. They lacked the thick hair of giants but they had their thick brows, incredible strength and heights ranging from 7-8ft. The population of hybrids mostly stuck with themselves forming a new tribe. The generations afterwards only mated with hybrids or humans with no new giant blood entering the population. The resulting tribe was the \sco{Tuuric} people. Their giant ancestry allows them to live further north then regular humans ever could. With the isolation from other Proto-Sumric speakers their language evolved into Old Tuura which itself evolved into the \sco{Tuuric language family}. If the original group of female giants had never been lost then the Tuuric peoples would never have existed.