April 09th 2035

Shatterdome, Hong Kong

Jaeger Bays

1541

"Sir and I say this with all due respect, but it was really, really stupid put those two into the bridge together."

Marshal Stacker Pentecost did not take well to being told he was wrong, especially after the fact, by non-combat personnel. The fact that it was their resident Kaiju expert, the frenetic and more than slightly foolish Newt "don't call me doctor" Geiszler only made that more unacceptable. He'd already caught flack from the combined crews of Blue Winter and Cherno Alpha, as well as the Kaidonovskys. Of those, only Ms Teerthankarovna's parents had anything resembling a leg to stand on.

Well, elements of Winter's crew seemed to have been giving a report on the accident; it was hard to tell over the general chaos in his office at the time.

In any event, he was not about to take a dressing down from the least combat-ready person in the Shatterdome.

"Dr. Geiszler," he said with the irritated calm of beset administrators every where, "If you would get to the point of this impromptu meeting you called me away from already much delayed lunch to attend, then perhaps I may see clear not to investigate why you have half a Conn-pod's worth of pons equipment torn apart in a corner of your lab."

Newt just stared wide-eyed for a moment before his brain kicked back into gear, deciding to ignore that he had been found out until it became an issue.

"Alright," he began, "what we have here is a perfect storm of things that we have no handle on. The Jaeger is the test-bed for an experimental control system, and can only function properly when in concert with the original pilot. The pilot is the most heavily mutated case of Kaiju-blue exposure that actually survived, and he's been amnesic since he was inducted into the Jaeger program four years ago directly after his exposure. The tech girl you pulled to CP for him has no experience in combat, but you know what she does have, rumors about her because she was Drifting in the womb! And abnormal brainwaves, if our telemetry is to be believed. And all of this without a bit of oversight by the resident freak expert, moi."

"All right, you've made your point." The Marshal conceded, "Now what do we actually know about what happened?"

"Take a seat, we'll be here for a while" Newt dragged one out from under the desk for him, which he ignored. "Okay, suit yourself. Well, we need to start with Thomas Iceland. Not his real name, we have no idea of his real name. Prefers to be called Jack; that might be his real name we don't know. He's amnesic, has been since he was doused in Kaiju blood in an Oregon attack on a small city. Word got around of his exposure while he was in a healing coma, and the PhD's descended like vultures.

"Tests since show that he's developed clusters of neurons throughout his body, laced with the organic superconductor that Kaiju have in their nerves. As well as proteins that prevent freezing, and bones that changed over time to the organic carbon fiber lattice of Kaiju bone, as well as an increase in muscle mass, but its dense and lean so unless you can look under the hood, nobody can tell. His Junk DNA is something they've been studying for the past five years and we still have no idea of all of what the Kaiju Blue did to him. He does everything but bleeds blue and breathes ammonia. Take a look at this."

The scientist pulled a key boarded of the desk behind him, which he then sat on, and typed quickly before a holographic window coalesced between them. It showed a loop of the fight from earlier.

"This is the footage from this afternoon." he said.

"How did you get this?" the Marshal asked, suspicious.

"I have a dumb AI scanning the security footage tracking our boy there since he came in, for circumstances like these."

"Like what?" his superior asked, wondering how mad one of his two scientists had become.

"Kaiju-like behavior emergence." Newt asserted. At the unbelieving look he continued "On the surface, it's just a guy getting into a fight with an entire engineering crew over a girl. Tale as old as time. But wait."

He pulled up another window, this time showing the beetle-like Kaiju 'Mutavore' in Sydney fighting Striker Eureka.

"At first glance there is not a lot of similarity between the two of them. But look closer. Both have split-second reaction times three or more times faster than any vanilla human, if you'll pardon the pun. Both react to stimulus outside of human visual range, but one with the assistance of multiple secondary eyes and the other without. He does not need to see an opponent to know it is there and destroy it. Anatomically, Jack has more than enough Kaiju secondary traits to justify the repurposing of Meteor Epoch into Blue Winter as a research project after it was scrapped fighting the Kaiju that exposed him. One will tell you that when he was in that fight he told his body to attack and it did everything else on autopilot, not that you could prove it."

"You think his combat record is because of his mutation." Pentecost asked, thinking about how best to keep control over a half-alien killing machine under his roof.

"Don't think. Know. Blue Winter was constructed around Jack's theoretical ability to interface with it on his lonesome. That's why it fights with a cryogenic weapons system scaled up from an old Mark 1 the Chinese fielded, Horizon Brave. Only this time, the coolant is also routed into Conn-pod to activate the superconductors in his body and kick on all those little nexuses in his limbs, letting him spread the load of the Drift across himself. In theory. But the cold would kill his copilot, and they were hesitant to perform a full test on the chance it would kill him, so they had this Jaeger all dressed up and never took it anywhere special. Just kept running tests on him periodically. Blue Winter, of course, is so optimized to run off of Jack, that he never experienced a full Drift with a co-pilot. Until this morning."

Typing once again, Newt pulled up a series of windows, dismissing the old ones in favor of footage of the disastrous test this morning, along with several types of telemetry from the same.

"These readings show that Miss Tulika Teerthankarovna is not normal. By all accounts she should be the poster girl for the Jaeger program. The fact that she isn't shows just how stupid people can be without applying critical thinking skills. Born in the last of the good ol' days of the program, her parents were Teerhankar and Tutana Hegde, pilots of Kali Armature, a MK II out of India. Nothing unusual there, relationships between Rangers have always been encouraged to make Drifting easier. Except that her mother was in the cockpit through her pregnancy in a half-condoned experiment, and gave birth in Kali after her husband died. She herself died of a hemorrhage soon after. Tooth, our girl, was born into the Drift.

"As you know, after her parents died, the team they were assisting on that mission, the Kaidonovskys took her in. She grows up in the program, more or less. Trained in a little combat by here parents, trained a lot in mechanics by the crew. And she's cute. Really the whole package, but see there are these rumors. The ones that started that fight today. That the Drift messed her up, despite the fact she hasn't been in there since she was born. So nobody has ever looked at her too closely, at her parent's instance. That was a mistake.

"Medical records I pulled after the accident show unusual, persistent, gamma wave activity in her brain in conjunction with Jaeger proximity. I mean talking about them, seeing them, thinking about them, whatever, it sets off these abnormal readings. I don't know exactly what that means yet, but I can tell you what it did."

"About time, I was beginning to think you would never come to your point." The Marshal said, checking his watch to see how much of his time had been wasted.

"During the test," Newt continued, ignoring the boredom from his audience, "Tooth dived into the link between her and Winter deeper than anybody ever had before, but still remained separated from Jack. It was only after she already was running half the machine that she reached for him in the Drift. That is straight up backwards from how it usually goes, but okay. It was workable. Things got out of hand when she began to go down the rabbit hole. That's also not uncommon in inexperienced pilots. What is unusual is that our Jack has no memories before the program. Eventually she comes upon those blank spaces.

"All of a sudden Blue Winter lights up like a Christmas tree and Jackie-boy dives deeper than should be possible. Somehow he went straight through the motor-control AI and into the weapons control, which is where the cooling system was. That activates in what I can only guess is a defensive measure from the R&D program. All this time he's going into cardiac arrest, and the helmet was picking up huge areas of his brain activating for what was possibly the first time after his KB exposure in his memory centers. The girl, meanwhile, is having sympathetic arrhythmia and is taking the burden to keep them both alive.

"By the time their crew dragged him from within the AI, they'd come closer to dying in an activation test than anybody in 10 years."

"So you figured out what happened, what's your professional opinion on getting their machine working?" Pentecost asked, at this point just wanting the man to stop talking so he could get on with his responsibilities. Like his own adopted daughter Drifting in a few short minutes going through the same that Blue Winter so disastrously failed.

"You need me to oversee the next time they Drift."

/

Tooth couldn't get that fight out of her head, even hours later.

Funnily enough, after another physical altercation outside the Marshal's office there now was a pool forming in the common room this evening: Who'd win? Jack, or Gipsy Danger's original pilot, Raleigh Becket in a brawl? She had bowed out as a conflict of interest, despite giving a pleased hum that Jack was favored.

She really found the whole thing rather distasteful, especially considering that Gipsy's team had had an accident like hers did earlier that afternoon. Chuck Hansen always was a Tool.

She had walked past the medic wing an hour ago and saw Newt there chatting with the Marshal. The two seemed to be discussing Jack's fight. She had sidled up to see if any more disciplinary action was forthcoming for her partner. That was when she heard something she wished she hadn't.

"...stimulus outside of human visual range, but one with the assistance of multiple secondary eyes and the other without. He does not need to see an opponent to know it is there and destroy it. Anatomically, Jack has more than enough Kaiju secondary traits to justify the repurposing of Meteor Epoch into Blue Winter..."

After that she had booked it out of there as quietly as she could. Whatever Newt had been talking about, she didn't have enough information. But she did have access to a source that nobody but her knew about or could hide from her.

But how could that be possible? She sighed as she walked to Bay 7, the tiniest bits of fear gnawing at her inner stomach. The 'Penguin Crew' had left for the night, and Blue Winter stood there in all his glory. She could sense an undertone of dread seemingly pulse from him. She silently walked to the Conn unit, and opened the door; once she was inside she shut the door, turned off his cameras, and just sat in the middle of the pod, breathing through her mouth in a meditative state.

*Hello!?* She called.

*Hello.* Came the reply.

Tooth gathered her breath.

*Do you know why I'm here?*

The response was a purr inside her mind. Tooth cracked a small smile. Jaegers mimic more than their pilot's fighting styles. If anyone but her knew that there was something like a consciousness in these colossal machines, they would see each Jaeger grow and change as pilots Drifted into their minds, growing as they did, and changing dramatically with each new pilot. She felt the pod charge with invisible energy, a cold breath entered onto the quite chamber of the pod.

*It all began such a long time ago… I was there when Jack was hurt, when he stopped being who he was and became who he is. There was a Kaiju. I won the battle, but I lost too. My pilots died. I had to become someone new too.*

Tooth bit her bottom lip in tension. Winter was a bit cryptic it seemed. Maybe from whatever happened to it and Jack. It was so frustrating, she needed details!

*They made me different from what I was, because Jack was different. None of the other pilots fit with us. They could only Drift deeply enough to relieve his strain. No one was as good as he was, as we were together.*

She snorted. He was just like Jack alright. Arrogant. At least about some things.

*How did Jack fight like that?* She asked.

She grunted as she brought up the memory of him kicking the Tool-bags around the world and back. Twice. She felt a cooling sensation tinged with joy that she thought might have been the Jaeger's laugh.

*Sorry.*

She rolled her eyes but sat patiently as Winter's joy tempered with knowledge.

*You're his partner. He fought where you could not. Jack fights like his bone and blood tell him to.*

Tooth looked up at that. She cocked her head in confusion, as Winter continued.

*I was made a different Jaeger because Jack is different. Jack is what that Kaiju made him. The Kaiju taught him to fight, down to the core of him. He fights like they do.*

It took awhile for Tooth to process what had just been divulged. Jack learned to fight from a Kaiju? What? And before, he had Kaiju parts? She only ended up with more questions. She muttered in Russian under her breath, until she felt memories from Blue Winter pouring into her mind in a steady stream.

All of them were Jack and the machine performing incredible, if not insane, feats while the Co-pilot screamed in terror, marginalized in the bridge between the three of them. In each of them the Conn-Pod was cool, like during the failed test, and the copilot was barely a shadow in the Drift. When Jack and She had Drifted, disaster though it was, because of her gifts she could handle the Drift with them, somehow. She added this new piece to her already rolling mind.

What were the chances of these two meeting someone who could do what she could? Was it something as clichéd as destiny or some silly thing like that which brought these two oddities of nature together? Maybe it was that there was no other place for people like them, with the other Shatterdomes closing. She sighed and pulled her legs to her chest as she rested her head on her knees.

She felt a soft prodding. She looked up, and knew Blue Winter wanted her to go to him. They had left things badly between them. She had to go to Jack. She rubbed her eyes of grit that had accumulated and began heading to the wards. While Blue Winter's concerned feeling turned into one of hope.

/

Jack was going crazy. He couldn't move, at all.

Camicazi, the doctor who rushed him here gave him strict orders to stay put. Apparently she had taken upon herself being his crew medic in the absence of one on his team. Which meant when he was injured she basically owned him. Getting into a fight while on rest orders mean he was going nowhere.

When he tried to sneak off, she put him in two pairs of handcuffs and bound his wrists to the bed. His nose itched furiously, and he could not reach to scratch where he slumped against the bent steel tube headboard.

He'd been there for who knows how long before he had visitors. Scary, Russian, Parental visitors. Tooth's parents and her former Crew Chief, to be specific. This would be fun.

As Aleksis Kaidonovsky glowered from the seat next to his bed, his wife Sasha stood with crossed arms and a detached expression. The huge older man whose name he never caught stood off by the door, looking bemused by all of them.

"You are the young man who pulled my daughter into a cockpit." the woman said with no small amount of vitriol. "But you also properly chastised those idiots in the hallway. That earns you some leniency for endangering Tooth."

Jack snorted, which actually prompted Aleksis to growl of all things.

"Look," Jack said, "you could keep playing around with me or you could say what you came for. I don't have the patience to deal with these kinds of games."

The heavyset guy in the back chortled at that, as the Russian couple shot him an annoyed look.

"We need you to understand what Tooth is to us." Aleksis said, deep and intimidating with his thick accent almost slurring the words. "You will protect her with your life in combat, we do not doubt this. But you must understand. Her life is yours. If you harm her it is worse than any other hurt she could be dealt."

"There is a reason why Jaegers have mixed sex teams. Their bond is not like that of family, and often turns to a relationship of one kind or another." Sasha continued, picking up where her husband left off. "They become close, dependent upon one another. This is the nature of things. Tooth has already started to depend on you. Our girl is not meant for battle."

"I think you may be surprised at what she is capable of." Jack retorted, annoyed at their lack of faith in their daughter.

"I have no doubt we will all be surprised." Aleksis replied, actually guffawing a bit. "But we will still worry. It is a parent's nature."

"You have nothing to worry about. Nothing is going to happen to her." Jack shot back annoyed.

"The accident today says differently." Sasha said, shutting him down. The boy on the bed became thoughtful.

"I... don't think that the accident will be repeated." Jack said quietly.

"And why not?" the woman pressed

"Because..." The boy hesitated, the sighed in resignation and continued, "Look, I don't know how much information about me you're cleared for, so I can't give you many details. Suffice to say I'm in the program because of my history with the Kaiju," he emphasized the point by shooting a look at his snowy bangs.

"I...see." the woman said, wondering where he was going with this.

"To that end, Blue Winter and I are unique in the program." He continued, just skirting classified information with his statements. "We have advantages that others probably don't, and as of now, all of them are devoted to killing monsters and keeping Tooth alive and well."

"And these 'advantages' are the cause of the accident this morning?" This from the old man near the door of the room.

"I don't know. Maybe." Jack conceded, " But I don't believe that that will be an issue."

"Why not," the old man pressed.

"During the Drift your daughter did something nobody else ever has. What, exactly I don't know. But she solved a problem that nobody else could, somehow. Whatever it was that happened, it will not happen again, ever."

Both parents looked at each other, their years living and fighting in each others heads showing with the ease they understood one another. They looked over to the man by the door, who just gave a reassuring nod, and then exited without sparing Jack another look.

The large old man lumbered up to him with a smile shining from under his beard.

"I am sorry, my friend." He began, "They worry, and so they must test you. You will never be good enough to protect Toothie to them, but even they would never be enough for them."

"It's cool. I'm kind of fuzzy on my parents, but they seem to do okay job with Tooth." Jack casually brushed off their brusque behavior.

"It is good you understand." the large man said "We have not been introduced, where are my manners? I am Nickolas St. North, Toothie's old teacher, mentor and boss." He offered a massive paw of a hand to shake, exposing what looked like a sleeve tattoo from under his jumpsuit.

"A legacy of my misspent youth" He explained as they shook, catching Jack looking.

"I'm Jack." the boy said. "So how is Tooth holding up, with everything?"

"Better than you or her parents." North replied with a smirk. "She is not so fragile as either of you make her to be, though very precious to us."

He looked the boy up and down.

"Do you know of her birth parents, what happened there?" North asked

"Only what's in the file they gave me when she was bumped to Ranger." Jack supplied.

"Is enough," the other man said, "Their family has always held that sword over their heads, that Aleksis and Sasha may not come back like her birth parents did. Now, they worry to loose her the same way. They will need time to learn to live with her circumstances. Just time." He nodded, softly, and made for the door.

"Thanks, for explaining things I guess," Jack petered out at the end kind of lamely

"Is no problem." the genial older man replied pausing in the door to add, "As a young man, many things do not make sense, because you have not learned enough to understand yet. Old men, they know everything, but young men don't listen when they tell them so. You, listen a little more than most. If you ever need some one to listen to you, then I am willing to talk. I think for one so young, you have had many burdens placed upon you. A friendly ear could in time of need can keep a foolish young man from being more foolish."

"Maybe I will..." Jack replied, wondering if it would come up.

"But before you go off spilling your guts to strange old men" North continued with a wink, "Maybe you should talk to the beautiful young lady who is supposed to be your partner, eh?"

And with that the batty old man was out the door.

Jack's eyes followed him out, with a bewildered look.

'Can my day get any weirder?'