Prologue
We always thought alien life would come from the stars… But it came from deep beneath the sea. At the bottom of the Marhyena Trench, the deepest point on the planet's seabed in the Zoocific Ocean, appeared a portal between dimensions, one we would come to know simply as the Breach.
The first Kaiju came through the Breach on 10th August, 2013. At 0700 hours it made land in San Furcisco. A beast as big as a skyscraper. By the time tanks, jets and missiles took it down, six days and thirty-five miles later, three cities were destroyed and tens of thousands of lives were lost. Some of those missiles were tactical nukes. The Kaiju, which got the code name Trespasser, survived the first two. The third finally took it down, but there are places around the area where people won't be able to live for centuries.
But the monster was dead and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Mammalkind mourned their dead, memorialized the attack and moved on.
Scientists attempted to locate the origin of the monster but the Breach had already closed. They got their chance just six months later, when the Breach opened again and puked out another Kaiju. This time, the target was Bunnila and the Zootopian military were forced to nuke it again.
It was then that the long-term ramifications of these attacks became apparent. The poisonous blue-coloured blood of the Kaijus combined with the toxins off-gassed by recently-deceased Kaiju tissue created the phenomena known as Kaiju Blue, where the toxins would coat any living organism and starved it of oxygen, asphyxiating it to death. Thus creating the Exclusion Zone in the Bunnila Bay, a large region entirely devoid of any marine life.
The third attack came a little less than five months after that. It almost destroyed Cubbo San Leocas before it too was nuked to cinders.
And then the fourth attack hit Sydneigh…
It was then that mammalkind finally realized that the Kaijus were not going to stop coming. This was just the beginning...
Every time, tactical nukes were the only thing that took the Kaijus down, but large swathes of land and sea were destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. We couldn't keep using nuclear weapons or pretty soon the whole planet was going to be irradiated by nukes. No conventional military could handle them. They didn't even notice tank shells. Missiles hurt them a little, but couldn't take them down. They were the closest thing to invincible that our world had ever seen.
But that was when mammalkind started to show its best. The world came together, pooling its resources and throwing aside old rivalries for the sake of the greater good: the survival of all mammals.
To fight monsters, we created monsters of our own…
The best engineers, roboticists and military minds of the world put their heads together to create the only thing that could stop something the size of a Kaiju without having to resort to nuclear weapons: robots.
Called Jaegers, these robots were over thirty storeys tall, bristling with weaponry and wired to respond to their pilots' commands as if they were an extension of the pilots' own bodies.
The Jaeger Program was born.
There were setbacks at first. The neural load to interface with a Jaeger proved too much for a single pilot. So, a two-pilot system was implemented ‒ one pilot controlling the left hemisphere and the other controlling the right hemisphere of the Jaeger. Even then the mental strain was phenomenal. But a team of neuroscientists figured out a radical solution, the Drift.
Based on advanced neurological research in recent years, the minds of two pilots can be melded together through their memories via the Drift space, to the body of the giant machine. The deeper the bond between the mammals, the better the Drift responded to their commands on the Jaeger, and the better they fought. Drift compatibility between two persons were found to be completely random. A mammal can have a higher compatibility with a complete stranger of a different species than their next of kin. But after the connection had been made once, the two individuals would become as close as soulmates.
Finally, mammalkind was ready to fight back. It was time for the Kaijus to pick on something their own size...
Author's Note:
Welp, here we are. Basically the idea of Zootopia + Pacific Rim came from a discussion with aemx, author of the amazing fanfic Zootopia: Thicker Than Blood, Link: archiveofourown_org/works/7569217/chapters/17219935 and fanfiction_net/s/12072871/1/Zootopia-Thicker-Than-Blood (replace _ with .)
I was saying how refreshing Zootopia was in that it was a movie where the male and female leads have no romantic subplot whatsoever, which reminded me of Pacific Rim, where the male and female lead had no romantic subplot either. My brain made the connection and I was almost floored by the sheer epicness when I imagined the events of Pacific Rim occurring in the Zootopia universe.
Immediately, I did a google search for 'Zootopia Pacific Rim' and found these 2 beautiful artworks: imgur_com/a/To9xF (replace _ with .)
The plan was decided, my hands were tied. This was a story that NEEDED to be told and if nobody else had done it yet, well, it might as well be me. So here you go :D
Please pester me with comments/reviews so that I may be encouraged not to sit on my lazy butt like I did with my last fanfic.