Prologue

We all thought alien life would come from the stars; when I was a child, living with my dads out in the greener parts of Connecticut I would sometimes take advantage of the minimal light pollution and look out into the night sky, wondering if someone else somewhere else was doing the same thing.

Turns out I was looking in the wrong direction.

I want to say that we could have been prepared; professing one's guilt at a mistake always seems preferable to admitting that you were powerless to prevent the deaths of nearly twelve million people. But in the end the fact of the matter must be swallowed: no one could have guessed that humankind was being watched, keenly and malevolently by intelligences infinitely greater than its own. No one could have predicted that as we busied ourselves with the comforts and banalities of everyday life, with a few turf wars, environmental disasters and celebrity scandals to tide us over, that our lives were being studied, scrutinised, perhaps with no more thought afforded than what a scientist might grant the transient creatures that fumble and multiply in a drop of water.

For what many of us would likely designate as a long time we, like the aforementioned microbes, endured and festered and multiplied and, in rare cases, improved within the infinite complacency of our empire. Only the mad or the sad ever entertained providence to the thought that the darkness surrounding our serene little globe would be a source of great danger or that the bottom of the ocean would be the vessel for the maw that would open from within the deepest darkest depths to swallow us whole.

From behind a fissure known as the Mariana trench, the machinations of a distant, gestalt intellect, with fingers that rend and weave the fabric of space/time itself, regarded our world coolly, unsympathetically with envious eyes, while slowly but surely, drawing their plans against us.

The great disillusionment, otherwise known as K-day, came in the summer of 2013, on August 10th.

The first attack hit San Francisco: heralded by the rumbling voice of an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale with an epicentre pinpointed towards the middle of the San Francisco bay. A great, grey dorsal fin grew from the churning waves beneath the golden gate bridge before motorists and pedestrians alike were greeted with the sight of quartet of cloud-sized claws digging into the superstructure, crushing and sending hundreds tumbling to their deaths.

The monster, later nicknamed "Trespasser," went on to decimate the entire city in what was only the beginning of a thirty-five mile rampage that included the destruction of the cities of Sacramento and Oakland over the next six days.

When a vast but ultimately futile gambit of British and American guns, tanks and bombs refused to even slow the creature the higher ups decided enough was enough and on August 15th, five days and tens of thousands of deaths later (not counting military casualties) the San Francisco exclusion zone was created by the screaming light of a trio of nuclear bombs and the vast slick of toxic blood that leaked into the bay for weeks afterward.

At first all humanity could do was reel back in shock, but as with all major disasters, in the end, we memorialized the attack, mourned the statistics, tsk'd at the survivor's cries and kept going.

There were some however, who were hesitant to believe that the danger had truly passed.

"No great challenge, in the history of man, has emblazoned itself in our memory bereft of rivals"

Sure enough, Six months later, the second monster, "Hundun," struck Manila after making land in the Philippines. "Kaiceph" hit Cabo San Lucas, and then "Scissure" laid waste to Sydney. By the time the clip of the opera house's destruction had gone viral the majority of the world understood: this was not going to stop anytime soon.

After almost a year of governments and extremists stonewalling efforts, insisting that WMDs would be enough to deal with the kaiju menace, they grew sense and the jaeger program was born on November 9th 2014.

Japan was unsurprisingly the most enthusiastic, looking to outstrip the rest of the world in much the same way 1960's America fought so hard to be the first nation to put a man on the moon.

They adulated their accomplishment and named their first Jaegar: Jet Jaguar.

The first battle, the first victory, went down in history; the entire world cheered for the pilots that had lost their lives to Jet Jaguar's exposed core and to the orphaned survivor later pulled from the wreckage of Tokyo.

In the wake of this triumph many of the other countries began to pick up the slack and soon enough a slew of new jaegers edified their places in humanity's arsenal.

We started winning. Jaegers were halting the Kaiju menace across the globe, but jaegers are only as good as their pilots, so jaeger pilots turned into rock stars.

Danger turned into propaganda…

Monsters into memorabilia, ruined cities into children's playsets…

We got really good at it though: winning…

Then, everything changed.