It was a crisp cold day down in London. The weather was as foggy and dour as always, and the air reeked of sewage and old cobblestones. The one thing that made this day not like any other dour day in London, was that not a single building was standing. As far as the eye could see, metal bars and chunks of brick littered the streets. Not a single soul was in sight either - the terrain was far too dangerous to make traversing the remains advisable.

The land was cracked and charred, with large, jagged edges blocking the sky - not that the sky itself was worth looking at, ash and dust conspiring to block out the sun and any remaining piece of the blue sky that could be seen. The air was rank, covered with smoke and debris, barely breathable to most and borderline toxic in some areas. The only signs of civilization laid in smoothed out metal bunkers beckoning all underground, where most of the population stayed nowadays. It truly was the end of the old world order as everyone once knew it.

Everyone brave enough to breach the surface could see for themselves what had caused this. How could they not, when they broke through the skies and covered entire districts with naught but their legs alone.

To call these beings giants would be to call an ant a tyrannosaurus rex. Living mountains would be a better descriptor for the mounds of pink and brown skin that dominated the landscape and blocked the horizon, blanketing the world in their eternal shadows. Monstrous footprints covered the land, indenting the soil deep, creating valleys with every footfall, compressing and squeezing the surrounding stone with overwhelming pressure to the point that it practically seemed to mold like putty. The ground seemed to never be stable, and practically shifted to and fro, molding to their steps like putty. Thus far, no one had really been able to see beyond their toes, their stature alone dwarfing many of the high rises in their heyday, let alone the ruins that they were now.

They were gods to the people that lived on the surface, now forced deep underground in order to survive. But more importantly, they were still their children.

No one knew quite how it happened. One moment, it was an average day like any other, where boys would be playing tackle football in the park and aggressively daring one another to eat the nearest caterpillar, and girls would be playing hopscotch and aggressively daring one, their older siblings either trying to control the madness or egging it on, and their parents watched on bemusedly in reminiscence of their own childhoods. The next, like a wayward flap of butterfly wings, every single biological male ages 5 to 17 around the world began to grow. And grow. And grow. Larger yet larger, larger till entire cities came to be flattened by just their feet, and then larger yet more. The youngest would soon wake up to a cold, unfamiliar, barren world, completely flat and surrounded by nothing but strange imposing masses of white fluff - fluff that they would come to recognize as clouds, which would come to swirl and form all around them. The older teens, trust upon more responsibility than they ever expected to handle by themselves, could only try to help their younger siblings and friends adjust to this strange new yet familiar environment - a task made all the more onerous once they realized what had happened. While they now remained with only the clothes they were wearing, there was no food around, nothing to drink, nothing at all to protect and sustain their newly enlarged forms for long.

It wasn't completely hopeless, though. Due to the quick actions of a number of the children, who were able to evacuate themselves and others from populated areas, there were some pockets of civilization that still stood, albeit drastically crippled by the numerous blows to supply chains generated by the chaos across the world. There were some who even managed to establish a method of communication between the children and the human mites that now rested at their feet. Those lucky few who were able to make contact with their children were soon able to form a sort of truce between the two, ensuring that work would be done to feed the children and find a way for them to return to their normal stature in exchange for providing protection from any kind of threat from either themselves or others. Others would come to refer to this period of time as the New Genesis, as now, the planet belonged to the young.

Eventually, a new normal settled across the planet. The remaining scientists were actively working with DNA samples gathered from the children in order to attempt to probe at what exactly had caused the insane growth to begin with. Law and order had by and large stabilized to primarily revolve around lots of small settlements with a few children acting as godlike patrons. Larger organized governments were few and far between, with all but the largest superpowers having collapsed a while back. It was inevitable, as whatever military and nuclear capacity most of the world had was mostly annihilated in the prior chaos, with the remaining capacity mainly serving a subordinate role to the might of the children. The children around the world, in turn, did their best to adapt in the face of an overwhelmingly difficult situation. Some children, in an attempt to stay as close to their friends and family as possible and ensure as little harm came to them as possible, took to crawling as close to the ground as possible, drawing dirt circles on the ground to mark territory and ensuring that no harm would come to the people. Others told stories to the youngest about the "invisible people" below them, and how they provided for them and were in fact their family and friends. Many children eventually took to traversing the oceans by foot, as the majority of the ocean surface was easily within their reach. There were some that even made residence there, as all the girls whose gender identity was ignored by whatever caused this massive growth united against the overwhelming majority of boys their size, all of them getting to be known as "the water ladies" by the ones they called "the land men".

Each and every settlement set aside as many plots of land of land as they could for the children, the process resembling more ceremonial tribute than an actual meal. Nothing was off limits - slaughtered cows and corn bales alike were offered, countless cattle and crops to feed a town presented. It all ended the same way in the end though - a monolithic hand or two, scooping up every last bit of the offering along with some of the surrounding land, and all of it hurtling towards their mouths in one bite, barely enough for a morning, but was all that a day could provide. There were times when even this much had to be split up among the children, but what else was there to do. More than a few children became savage in nature, deciding instead to hunt down the most plentiful and filling food around: other kids. They hunted down as many as they could with nothing but the broken-off tips of mountains and were more than willing to attack the minuscule settlements in order to get their way. Fortunately, though the children now have to contend with infighting, they have in turn adapted to swiftly deal with it. Every now and then, the planes would have to be careful to maneuver around the children when they got into these conflicts. It was simple a fact of life that these would happen, and there would be nothing anyone could really do about it now that the planet wasn't theirs anymore.