Protectors of the Earth

Part I: Drop

Prologue:

When disaster came calling, nobody was ready for it.

To be fair, before the Kaiju started leveling entire cities in the course of an hour, anyone sounding warning bells about giant alien monsters rising from the seas would have been dismissed as entirely insane. Rightly so, too.

But that was reality now.

Every country with a coastline was in danger, and in those first devastating years, the Kaiju did a lot of damage. It looked like the end of days. When it took a nuclear arsenal to rid the world of just one of the beasts, that's when you knew you were in trouble.

It seemed like humanity's days were truly numbered.

And then an international coalition of countries came together. They decided that the only way to fight the monsters preying on the earth was to build bigger, better monsters.

Bobby Singer, a former mechanic and marine pilot was placed in charge of the Jaeger pilot program, an experimental and obscenely expensive venture that represented humanity's last hope against the Kaiju. The program was both incredibly awesome and batshit fucking insane.

The first wave of Mark I pilots were (and would still be, decades later) widely considered to be tough as nails, and completely, utterly, and bewilderingly crazy.

For one thing, the Mark I Jaegers were all self contained, fuelled by a nuclear core with little to no protection, meaning that the pilots risked death by cancer or spontaneous nuclear detonation. For another, the Drift was unstable, and the bond required to allow both pilots to remain in control of the giant robot meant placing an unimaginable level of trust in another person. It placed pilots at a danger of going insane, reducing them to a dribbling, incoherent mess. Oh, and the weapons were all prototypes, and many early flights had technicians in the control room crossing their fingers they would explode on themselves when tested in the field.

All this, of course, is besides the fact that these pilots heard "sign up for this program, you will literally hunt down the giant monsters that have already caused billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives worth of damage and punch the crap out of them" and decided to say "sign me up!"

Again, it was awesome, but it was also totally batshit insane.

Bobby Singer and his partner Rufus Turner were the first to try the drift compatible technology, and theirs was the first completed Jaeger: a Mark I prototype, codename: Rumsfeld.

Ellen Harvelle and Daniel Elkins represented the first Russian Mark I; codename Salyut. She had similar specifications as Rumsfeld, but with three extra cannon ports. Her name in Russian meant "fireworks" and Ellen liked to say the old girl lived up to her name in the field.

The last of that round of Jaeger pilots, from the first early days of its inception, were Japan's Linda Tran and Mako Miori, who piloted Coyote Tango.

Common public opinion generally agreed that those first six pilots and were the biggest badasses on the planet, and also probably the craziest sons of bitches that ever lived.

But then something even crazier than people fighting alien monsters in giant robots happened.

Humanity started winning.

The Kaiju stopped being an existential threat to the human race. Instead, they became something to laugh at. Bedtime stories that could only frighten children – and with the amount of targeted Kaiju merchandise aimed at children, even they didn't fear the Kaiju.

The Jaegers did their job, and did it well.

It was during this, the first successful year of the Jaeger program, that the first category two Kaiju made its appearance.

One minute, Salyut and Rumsfeld were holding their own.

The next, the massive category two beast took Salyut by surprise, tearing it own with a swing of it's massive, barbed tail. Salyut went dark, and Harvelle and Elkins were gone. A moment later, Bobby was screaming out in pain as the Kaiju rammed into Rumsfeld headfirst, goring it open.

And then it was open season. The Kaiju destroyed half of Hong Kong before Coyote Tango brought it down. Of the four pilots, only Bobby made it.

That was a wake up call. The program needed more Jaegers – with more frequent attacks, they couldn't afford to have less than three functional Jaegers at any given point, which led to the development of the Mark II, and a massive spike in recruiting.

John Winchester was personally recruited by Bobby Singer to the program as his copilot. The two of them had the highest kill count of any single pair of pilots.

That was, of course, until the Winchester boys signed up to pilot their own Jaeger.

Hunting Kaiju, saving the world, it was practically the family business.

Then everything went horrifically wrong.