Journal entry
Monsters have declared war on the human race.
I'm not talking about the bogeyman who children fear of seeing hidden underneath the bed at night. I'm not talking about people who have committed atrocious crimes.
I'm talking about kaiju, gargantuan beasts from another universe that enter ours by a portal at the very bottom of the Pacific Ocean. They come in all different shapes and sizes. They're designed for one purpose; exterminate humanity.
It all started on August 10, 2013, when I was twelve years old.
San Francisco and its neighbor city of Oakland experienced a 7.1 earthquake that day preceding its approach. After that, people witnessed something huge rising out of the water. This hideous beast was hundreds of feet tall, easily dwarfing the Golden Gate Bridge in the first footage of its attack leaked to the world. The creature already killed countless people before US Armed forces responded swiftly, but their efforts were constantly met with failure. No weapon seemed able to work against the it.
Deemed Trespasser, the monster nearly annihilated San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento and many of the surrounding towns and cities. The military threw everything they had at it, troops, tanks, jets, everything. Even combined assault from multiple missiles, cannons and bombs did nothing except piss it off.
Finally, after six long days at batting the creature, it was finally killed in Oakland by a tactical nuclear missile. The victory was pyrrhic; much of the Bay area population was killed alongside it as well as the city becoming inhabitable. This was marked as K-DAY, the day kaiju, or strange beasts began a war of extermination against humanity.
At first, the appearance of the kaiju was thought to be an anomaly, just an isolated event. Life eventually settled back to normal, although countless conspiracy theories emerged and many nations claimed to take a stand against the threat. Trespasser's skull was displayed in a museum and the world moved on after mourning all the dead in the San Francisco Bay.
Six months later in February, everyone was proved wrong. A second kaiju emerged and assaulted the Manila metropolitan area. The excrement it left behind severely contaminated much of the city before it was killed by a second nuclear strike.
Four months later, a third attack hits Cabo in Mexico. A fourth hits Sydney in September. Although nuclear attacks had killed the two during their rampages throughout the city, it still made the majority of the place uninhabitable and risked having countless innocent people caught in the fight.
It was clear that there was no end in sight to these attacks. Nukes killed them, but the cons of their use outweighed the pros. Much of the cities were uninhabitable after the strikes, either by the kaiju blood or by the fallout from the nuclear weapons.
In Seoul, many nations around the Pacific Ocean gathered to share ideas, placing diplomatic issues aside on how to combat the kaiju without the use of nuclear weapons. All options presented on alternates were cast down.
Until a brilliant scientist named Schoenfeld proposed the Jaeger program in late 2014. Apparently, he was witnessing his son play with a toy robot and a monster as a concept and devised the idea of creating mechs that rivaled the kaiju's size to fight them. Approved after an audience with the United Nations, Schoenfeld introduced the world to Brawler Yukon.
Straight out of a futuristic sci-fi movie, the Brawler Yukon was the first prototype jaeger, among the best accomplishments of human engineering. Standing at a height to rival skyscrapers, the mech had dome-shaped armor and massive razor sharp blades running alongside its arms. Armed to the teeth, it was to be piloted by a single human connected neutrally to the machine. Unfortunately, that aspect did not turn out very well.
The Pan Pacific Defense Corps first test pilot of the jaeger suffered death. The neural load to control the machine was too much for a single brain to handle. Eventually, a two-pilot system was developed to share the neural load between the two hemispheres of both the pilots' and the jaeger's bodies. Now able to control the jaeger without any pressing issues, the UN gives approval and begins to fund the PPDC in manufacturing more of the giant robots.
The fifth kaiju named Karloff emerges and heads into Vancouver on March 23, 2015. All of the jaegers had yet to enter service at the time. In response, the PPDC sends Brawler Yukon to fight it off. The jaeger easily overpowers and kills the creature. Humanity was ready to make their stand and show the kaiju that they weren't the only monsters here.
Bolstered by the jaeger's success, subsequent other machines began to get constructed and shipped to various parts around the Pacific to ready in defense of kaiju attacks. Soon enough, every kaiju that emerged into our world met its fate at the hands of a jaeger.
The mechs were just as famous as the individuals who piloted them. It definitely wasn't easy to become a pilot and those that did became instant celebrities overnight. You would see them on talk shows, commercials and some of the more attractive female pilots on the cover of sports magazine, in a scantily clad bikini. I remember watching a show that anchors discussed jaeger pilots as if they were professional athletes.
The thought of battle against the kaiju began to fade as years passed. People no longer worried everyday about the dangers. It became so far back inside their minds that sometimes, nobody took the attacks seriously. The sirens could be going off and still there would be that handful of people who would ignore all orders to get into the kaiju shelters. The beasts seemed so harmless now that they began making a toy line for them in action figures. Frequency of attacks seemed as common as other natural disasters. In 2018 to 2019, the jaeger program was at its peak of success with more than thirty in service around the Pacific.
If one looked closely at the kaiju attacks and their rate, they would have seen a pattern. The beasts were slowly getting more powerful and many battles had jaegers encountering near-destruction before emerging victorious. It was almost like we were being toyed with, probing for a weakness.
Still, everyone continued to relish in their victories. The tide turn is coming; much faster than when people want to believe it. I just hope the PPDC is ready when it happens.
Should I be concerned? Absolutely. Being in high school and college I always made dreams in saving the world? I mean, which young boy didn't during their time in education? Stuck in boring classrooms for half the day left you to daydream wildly. Exactly. Slugging a kaiju and then launching a missile into their face. It collapses and you emerge from the jaeger's conn-pod to cheers from the crowd.
Once you descend to the ground, a drop-dead gorgeous blonde strides up and goes right for your lips, tongue inside and all.
Yep, that's what living the dream is like.
From time to time during the jaeger launches at Kodiak Island in Alaska, there was a long balcony overlooking the buildings that housed the Academy. Our school had taken a trip up there for history one day to learn our brief lesson about the PPDC. We just happened to see the jaeger plant and part of the shatterdome, an enormous hangar that was probably the largest building I have ever seen. Sadly, everyone was expecting to see a jaeger that day, but the shatterdome's doors remained shut.
Everyone talks about dreaming to become a pilot one day and fight to kill kaiju. I would too, if I wasn't reoccupied with another love that I had before.
I've been playing football ever since I learned to throw something.
I was born on February 4, 2001 to a single mother at Long Beach, California. She dumped me at an orphanage in LA when I was only two. Thanks to this act, I wasn't able to go to school until the fifth grade. The sisters who ran the orphanage did their best to put me onto the level of everyone else at my age, but I still continued to struggle with my education.
Football was what had kept me going.
It's hard to remember where it all began. Everything was involving extracurricular activities after school or just simply throwing the ball between other kids at the playground. Lots of people noticed my growing skill, before even I did. They told me I'd be a great quarterback one day.
Sure enough, I'd watch the professionals play whenever I got time to watch television. The sisters gave us so many hours based on our grades and the work we did around the place. Some of the other kids would tune in to watch cartoons and comedy shows, which I enjoyed as well. However, I bided all my TV time until the weekends to watch the professional Football American League.
When I went into intermediate school, I tried out for the quarterback position of the football team and could have gotten into the role, but I was denied. All because of my grades which had been deemed to be too low in order to participate in school sports.
Yes, there was more to life than football. I found that out the very hard way.
I knew that if I didn't start my quarterback legacy here, I had no idea what to do with my life. Up to that point, being a quarterback and calling plays was just about everything I knew and the only thing I considered myself to be good at. Slowly, through a dedicated schedule of both studying and honing my skills, I began to pick my grades up and eventually was allowed to play on the school team.
High school rolled around, along with widespread news of the first kaiju attack in the San Francisco Bay. Everyone was terrified and much of the talks during the entire school year were about it and the subsequent one in Manila during February, just a day after my thirteenth birthday.
Despite all that fear, I continued studying, beginning to develop an interest in sports medicine. I earned the starting quarterback position for my team. It's a given fact that we were among the best high school football teams in the city. During that time, I made my fair share of costly mistakes and we lost a handful of games. However, I like winning and I won a hell of a lot more games than I lost.
All of a sudden, the jaegers are introduced during the end of my freshman year. Chatter about the titan machines exploded all over the school halls, much of them being about dreams of piloting them one day. I shared those aspirations with everyone else, but they all expected me to be star quarterback of the school. Not that I could be eligible to join anyway.
Despite this colossal war being waged to our west in the Pacific Ocean, life still went on in the greater Los Angeles area.
In 2017, a kaiju made landfall at Los Angeles, striking first at Long Beach. They were now being sorted into categories one through five, determining several factors as well as their overall dangerousness. The news about their attacks seemed to be all distant, taking places at faraway lands. This time, it was very real and mere miles away. The PPDC had named the beast Yamarashi and it was supposedly the biggest category III to emerge.
As we were moving to the school's bunker, I was helping other students get inside. Everyone was casting a look across the street. I knew why.
It was about a mile and a half away, but it looked close enough that I could've run over and touched it. Everything about it seemed hostile, the spiny protrusions out of its shoulders and back, its hunched body that was ready to spring out and attack. Any doubts about them being a hoax were cast out the window for anyone in the Los Angeles area that day.
The sounds we heard inside our shelter were all vein chilling, missiles being fired, the monster letting out a loud roar that drowned out the sound of the jets sent in to fight it and eventually we heard more sounds of mechanical machinery. We couldn't see anything inside the shelter, but we all knew that it was fighting jaegers.
We stayed inside the shelter for what seemed like hours, until the PPDC broadcasted on their channel that the kaiju attacking Los Angeles had been killed by two jaegers and it was safe to resume normal activities. Much of the southern LA areas had been damaged in the fight, but the jaegers ultimately prevented the city from being ruined.
My respect for the jaegers and their pilots dramatically increased after that day, particularly those of Gipsy Danger, the jaeger that struck the killing blow to Yamarashi. Nowadays, everyone often regards them on the equivalent of celebrities. Pilots were now as famous as FAL players.
I graduated in 2019 with slightly above average marks and was set to head to Southwest California University, which had granted me a scholarship in becoming a competitor for the starting quarterback position.
That's when my life turned itself upside down.
Hi everyone, I'm new to the Pacific Rim fanfiction base and am excited to write this story. This is something I've been trying to put together for a long time, along with balancing work and several other ongoing stories I'm currently writing. This is my pilot chapter and I intended to leave off enough for more to be shown in subsequent chapters.
I don't own Pacific Rim.
Thank you very much for reading and reviewing, you give my writing purpose.