She strained to hear what was going on. But in the end, the sound of death turned out to be silence.

Crimson died before she ever had a chance to scream. It was worse, in a sense. What you imagine is always worse than the reality, after all.

Cherno was underwater when he was taken. He went as quietly as he had lived.

Finally, there was Striker. She wasn't dead, yet, but she might as well have been. She had been paralyzed, and it probably had something to do with that wave of blue lightning. Crimson had told her once that the two of them were deathly allergic to that kind of stuff.

Either way, Striker's dying screams would be just as silent as the others.

And here Gipsy was, in the safety of the shatterdome, just as powerless as she.

This was wrong. If anyone should have been dying, it should have been her! She was the one who spent most of her life acting like an idiot!

But now she knew better! She was ready to fight! This time, for real! If only she could just move!

As if on cue, two figures in black appeared before her. She shouldn't have been able to tell who they were, but she instantly recognized them.

Supposedly, Coyote Tango had once said that a Jaeger was both herself and her pilots. Trying to define where one ended and the others began was like a human trying to pinpoint a specific brain cell as being "her". It was the pilots whose influence formed and shaped the Jaeger's consciousness. A Jaeger without her pilots was still herself, but she was still somehow "less" than she was when she had them, just as a sleeping human was "less" than she was when she was awake. The death of a pilot, then, was like a traumatic brain injury.

So what, then, did it mean to get a new pilot? Gipsy could somehow sense that the shorter one was that new part of her from that drift test, and she had no doubt that this new pilot would change her (if she hadn't already). But how much would it change her? Would she still be herself? Gipsy was still getting the hang of this "thinking" thing.

Still, that other part of her seemed to trust her, and that dead pilot from so long ago was gone. If she wanted to move on and do what she was created to do, what she wanted to do, she would have to accept this new pilot and whatever changes she brought.

Would she do what she was born to do, or remain stagnant?

It was an easy choice for any Jaeger to make, and Gipsy was no exception.

Those two figures in black were her.

And it was time.