On the Blood of Gods and Men (5/6)

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Implications of the Titanomachies for Titan Taxonomy

This review surely seems more history lesson than scientific treatise, but the significance of these events for both titans and humans cannot be overstated. When my ancestors arrived on earth they varied greatly in powers and abilities, but when they began to procreate, they cemented a caste system wherein "alpha-class" titans - those with A.I.s to enhance their powers and prolong their lives - ruled over the other classes of titans. When alpha-class titans began relinquishing their A.I.s to successors, this created a new category - titans who gave up their A.I.s were no longer as powerful as the alpha-class legacy bearers, but they were still more powerful than those titans who'd never possessed legacies. Moreover, titans who received an A.I. that passed through multiple generations were - in some respects - more powerful than their predecessors, such that the number of hosts a Legacy has been grafted to is an important consideration.

Further complicating the picture, my research points towards a technical problem with Pandora's Box - storing all of the A.I.s without a host, in one vessel, seems to do some degree of damage to them. Although I have not fully quantified the extent of this damage, this compels me to classify post-containment legacy-bearers (like myself) as distinct from those individuals (like Hephaestus) who inherited legacies that were never subjected to these conditions.

The Second Titanomachy gave rise to a final consideration. In a moment of desperation, Prometheus used Pandora's Box to imbue his two most trusted and capable human warriors with Legacy A.I.s. With the benefit of these A.I.s, Typhon and Echidna were able to immediately overpower Kronos, an otherwise powerful titan. These two augmented humans were later overpowered by Zeus, shortly after he gained his own legacy A.I. This might suggest that an augmented human is less powerful than an augmented titan (an intuitive conclusion), but the circumstances of Zeus's bonding may have allowed him to assimilate the A.I. more quickly than usual. It's possible that, given time, Typhon and Echidna's own powers would have grown to match those of any alpha-class titan. Furthermore, after being stripped of their A.I.s, Typhon and Echidna retained the significant genetic alterations which the legacies had made, and (for most practical considerations) became titans themselves. These events conceivably establish two more taxonomic categories worth considering - alpha-class humans and post alpha-class humans.