A/N: Ooookay, sorry about the long wait for this. Lots of things got thrown my way the last few weeks and I put updating this to the side, but I'm back now. Anyways, I'll let you read now. Sorry for the wacky tenses and possibly OOC Pidge.
Ever since Katie Holt was little, she had had an obsession with fixing things up and making them better. It had started with dolls, moved to some of her other toys, and shifted to technology as she grew older and became more interested in it.
The first time she fixed a doll up, it was her favorite one. The leg had broken off due to her overuse of the toy and she had immediately asked her mom for a new one, but little Katie was disappointed when she was told they didn't have enough money for such an unimportant thing at the time. So she had gathered up any materials she thought would be useful to fix her doll and retreated to her room, tinkering away at the doll until she had fixed it properly enough to be played with again.
It had only taken her a few hours, interrupted by her annoying older brother and concerned parents, and the doll's leg had been put back on and was good enough to work. In fact, the more she had played with the doll after fixing it up, the more she noticed the leg worked better than before. Granted, it wasn't the prettiest doll anymore, but it worked way better and was a lot more fun to play with. Naturally she ended up taking the rest of it apart and putting it back together so all of it worked better and was easier to play with. Afterwards it looked a little like Frankenstein's monster, but little Katie couldn't have cared less if she tried. Her doll had been better than ever and that's all that mattered to her, even if Matt teased her about how ugly it was. (He had just been jealous, that's all.)
Her fixation to fix things and make them better than they originally were only grew from there. Soon all of her toys ended up like her doll, ugly and a bit misshapen but working better than when they came out of the factory. She even started to combine some of the toys, leading to new fun times and one of a kind inventions all the other kids were surprisingly jealous of.
At the ripe age of seven, Katie became very interested in technology and all the wonders it could accomplish. It was amazing how machines could transmit messages across miles, how links could be established between any people from completely different parts of the globe, how ocean floors could be mapped by bouncing sound around, how space could be explored by launching a tiny rover to distant planets. The possibilities we're literally limitless if the right machines could be built and the proper technology was used!
She started improving video games her brother had handed down to her, fixed the coffeemaker anytime it was broken and made it more sophisticated each time, made a ridiculously tiny storage chip that could hold hundreds of data files and installed it in her favorite laptop she carried on her at all times. Surprisingly her family never got tired of her antics, even if a few of her projects didn't run so smoothly the first time, but they always supported her. Money hadn't been so hard to come by anymore, thanks to her dad's and brother's new job with the Galaxy Garrison, and they bought her just about anything she asked for. So long as it was a decently reasonable price.
Her life was perfect, and she was going to go far with how smart she was. Or, at least she would have, if her dad and brother hadn't been sent to Kerberos and disappeared.
Katie's poor mom had been so lost and afraid, trying to weasel answers out of the high commanders at Galaxy Garrison but getting nothing besides condolences and apologies and the same old "it was a pilot error, ma'am. We have no idea what happened to them except that it's highly unlikely they survived." Katie refused to believe that, and she had a feeling her mom did as well. But they're hands were tied and there wasn't much they could do besides accept what they were told and deal with it.
Until Katie got the brilliant idea to sneak into Galaxy Garrison and go looking for answers. She was caught by a guy named Iverson though, and told never to set foot on Galaxy Garrison property again. The smart thing to do then would have been to listen and return home, help her mom put their lives back together, but Katie had assumed an alias and disguise and signed up to be a cadet. Her one goal now was to find her some answers and hopefully her dad and brother, and fix her family so it was whole again.
However, she couldn't have predicted her friends, a guy who apparently used to go to Galaxy Garrison, and the pilot her dad and brother had been with would find a space robot lion built by aliens and end up having to save the entirety of space. That had thrown a real wrench in her plans.
Katie, now going by Pidge, had tried to stay focused on finding her family and put saving the universe to the side, but it hadn't worked. She grew close to the four knuckleheads, six if the aliens were counted, and realized helping put together a team wasn't a terrible idea. Especially if they were going to fix up space by saving it from being completely controlled by an evil race of aliens.
Besides, she had unlimited alien technology to tinker with and to learn from, and to use to upgrade her own technology. Maybe she could even invent something to help her find her dad and brother. She knew, using her primal gut instinct, that they were still alive and out there somewhere, waiting to be saved. Someday she would find them and be able to take them back home, finally fixing her broken family.
Until then, however, she would fix whatever technology she could and learn from whatever she could, alien or technology wise. She would help keep the team together and she would help save the universe. Because if she didn't now, she might have to anyways later. And, as much as she enjoyed fixing things, there would be tons of more things to fix if the Galra gained anymore power.