Author's Notes: Many thanks to everyone for the wonderful reviews, and please keep them coming! Also, I have begun a series of side-ficlets that are companion/background pieces to the main stories in this series: Tales From The Front Lines. Please check it out, particularly if you want more of the Mark-1 glory days! As for this story, fans of the novelization may recognize a scene from this chapter; it was one of my favorites. I quoted a couple of lines straight from the book.
Cameo Note: Aw, none of you watched The West Wing back on NBC?! Dr. Eleanor Faison is the married, graduated name of Ellie Bartlett, middle daughter of President Josiah "Jed" Bartlett. My US President from 2016 through 2020 in this story is President Matt Santos, who succeeded Jed Bartlett on the show. Compared to her gregarious sisters, Ellie seems quiet and meek, but has deep conviction and compassion. She married a fellow medical student named Vic Faison, whose sole description is "the fruit fly guy." In this storyverse, he's gone from fruit fly DNA research to K-Science.
Chapter Thirty-Three: Middle Ground
Lima Shatterdome…
September 1, 2018…
Once they'd gone, Stacker rubbed his eyes and brought up the security camera feeds to the infirmary. The dark room was... dark. "And Stacks is the smart one," Tamsin would snort. He toggled the infrared to reveal the single occupied bed and the tall figure in the chair next to it.
It had been more than a day, but Raleigh Becket was still very much in the grip of the attack; Stacker could tell by how still he was. His brother moved his fingers methodically from one pressure point to the next, massaging Raleigh's temples, sometimes holding his trembling hand. There was an IV in Raleigh's arm now. This had to be a bad attack even by Jaeger-head standards.
Adrenaline tended to delay it, the medics' reports said. Maybe the hotheaded Ranger had effectively given himself his own stimulant blast, which might explain why the attack was lasting so long and so severe.
"He's been punished enough," Choi and Spencer insisted.
"Have a heart, Stacks," Tamsin would say.
His interface buzzed, and he switched from the security feed to the network.
PPDC Internal Network
TSevier: Online
Stacker chuckled to himself and logged on.
SPentecost: Online
SPentecost: Think of the devil, and she shall IM.
TSevier: What can I say, I'm a twenty-first century beast. My number is 777. So, our successors did us proud yesterday!
SPentecost: They surely did. Mako asked if I missed Coyote.
TSevier: How is she? Do the attacks scare her?
SPentecost: The school doesn't allow the broadcasts to be played, but Dr. Schneider tells me word gets around . She does worry. At least many of her classmates also have family in the Corps, and aren't cavalier about the danger. Her English is nearly fluent, and now she's picking up Mandarin.
TSevier: When will you visit her again?
SPentecost: Her next holiday is the end of November for US Thanksgiving, then she has two weeks for Christmas. If all goes well, I'll bring her to see you.
TSevier: Is that such a merry holiday for her to be visiting an invalid?
SPentecost; Don't talk that way, Tam. You've been in remission for six months, and she sings your praises no less than mine. Dr. Schneider reports that she's among the students who have all the mechs' stat sheets on the bedroom wall.
TSevier: Good lord, you're raising a Jaeger Fly!
SPentecost: God forbid! She and her roommate both have aspirations of piloting.
TSevier: Let's see, four years from now, they'll have a Mark-7 and have more of the technical kinks sorted out. That's quite the new wrinkle on the Jaeger-head phenomenon.
Stacker blinked. Really?! So much for Spencer and Choi having handled this professionally, if that idiotic spat with Becket was all over the network!
SPentecost: Bloody hell. I'm going to start lopping off heads.
TSevier: What for, it's not as if they could have known!
SPentecost: All the crews know that if they chatter about every idle argument in the Dome, soon it will spread beyond the Corps gossip into the media, and that's something nobody needs.
TSevier: But it had nothing to do with Lima. It'll probably be in the next report.
SPentecost: I don't understand. What are you talking about?
TSevier: Eden Assassin. What are YOU talking about?
Oops. Now he'd done it. Cringing, he tried to return to her subject.
SPentecost: Something unrelated. My mistake. What happened to Eden's crew?
TSevier: Oh no you don't, Stacker Pentecost! Spill - what happened in Lima?
SPentecost: If it hasn't reached the rumor mill, I would prefer to keep it that way, Tam. It was just a minor dispute with the medics and one of the Rangers.
TSevier: Who am I going to tell?
SPentecost: Kaori, and Kaori will tell Duc, and Duc will tell the whole bloody world.
There was a long pause before Tamsin started typing again.
TSevier: Kaori's not doing so well.
SPentecost: Damn. I didn't realize. How bad?
TSevier: Bad. It's still spreading, and it had started spreading long before the medics caught it. Duc isn't teaching at Academy this term. He arrived the day before the alert.
SPentecost: I'll email him, but if there's anything I can do at any time, call me.
TSevier: I will. As for Eden, Peter Lepp was enjoying his third visit from Jaeger-head when the alert began. When K-Watch thought the bogey might head their way, he took the stimulant blast. It worked and lasted through their deployment, but two hours ago the rebound hit, now both he and Hedy have it.
SPentecost: Doesn't Hedy get migraines?
TSevier: Yes, hence the medics' surprise. Maybe it was the ghost drift, but nobody's really sure. They're both under sedation now. The docs are worried there may be actual damage from the rebound.
Well, that was an illuminating conversation. After he signed off from talking with Tamsin, Stacker headed for the infirmary. The medical staff were mincing around almost as badly as Gipsy Danger's crew, to his annoyance. At bloody ease, I don't bite! Not often, anyway.
Faison had a team already working on the radiation issues, and unlike most of her underlings, didn't show a hint of awkwardness when he came in. Or even when he asked, "May I speak to you in your office, Doctor?"
That got soft hisses from the watchers, but he also heard the military personnel letting their breath out. They were correctly interpreting the situation: if he'd intended to reprimand her - or worse - he'd have called her to his own office, and he wouldn't be asking. She wasn't military, but she got the message even before he addressed her in private.
"I owe you an apology, Dr. Faison," he told her formally. "I shouldn't have permitted the incident with Ranger Becket to escalate the way it did, nor should I have put you in the middle of it."
She nodded, a small smile on her face. "Thank you, sir. For what it's worth, Ranger Becket has apologized to me too - several times, with decreasing coherence, but I think he's very aware he was also in the wrong."
"Also." So she wasn't denying that Stacker had played a role in it, which meant it wasn't just Choi and Spencer's biased fondness for Becket at play. So, I really did let myself get drawn into a pissing contest with a bull-headed teenager during alert. One of the more inglorious moments in this Marshall's career. "Is he improving?"
Faison toggled up the security feed to the dark room, and studied the image. Raleigh had shifted onto his side, though Yancy was sitting up in the chair at the bedside, still faithfully trying to soothe him. "I think we're finally on the back end of it. The worst ran twenty-three hours - the entire length of the engagement," she added. "Yancy's exhausted. Sir, did you hear what happened to Lepp and Keres in Russia?"
He nodded. If she hadn't refused to give that treatment, we'd have both of Gipsy's pilots seriously ill now. "I haven't seen any medical reports. Is the stimulant blast going to be deemed unsafe?"
She pulled the reports up so fast that she obviously had been reading them already, then said slowly, "I don't think so. I've looked at the scans from Pete and Hedy; so far there haven't been any seizures or bleeds. The rebound is just setting yet a new height for the Ranger pain threshold." She shot him a hard look. "While all the Rangers will need to be made aware, I don't see any need to rub Raleigh's nose in it."
"I had no intention of doing that." Still, maybe in the future when the younger Rangers tried to overreach, it might still be wise to remind them that it wasn't their own health and safety at risk. Even if the people under their protection didn't move them, risk to their partners might.
"How's our Becket boys doing?" Bruce and Trevin asked the Gipsy crew at breakfast.
Coffee cup in each hand, Tendo yawned heavily before saying, "Looks like it's finally wearing off, damn brain cells. They're still in the dark room, but Rals managed to get some fluids down this morning."
The twins sighed in relief, counting their blessings that they'd never piloted a Jaeger other than Romeo. They had looked in on Raleigh and Yancy the night before; Raleigh had still been in agony, and Yancy... well. "Has big bro gotten any rest?"
Almost everyone from Team Gipsy made the same sheepish, rueful face. "You know how he gets," said Nikki Harris. "He won't sleep if Raleigh's hurting. It's been more than a day, and he's still pacing around to keep awake. We've all tried, offered to take over so he can lie down. He just won't."
"Once Raleigh gets to sleep, Yancy will," said Carolina Olivares.
"Or he'll drop," Cady muttered.
"How'd it go, Cady? We adore him, but sometimes we just wanna knock his head against the wall?" Nikki said. "That goes for both of 'em."
Carolina chuckled and swatted her arm. "Such is life, Bonita. And as we now see after thirty-six hours, stubbornness to the point of stupidity runs in that family."
She had a point. When Bruce and Trevin went down to the infirmary after breakfast, they found Raleigh finally asleep rather than just doped into a stupor, and Yancy dozing in his chair with his head on the edge of Raleigh's pillow.
"How's our favorite troublemakers, Doc?" they asked Dr. Faison.
She looked them up and down and deadpanned, "You both look fine to me."
"Oh, snap!" snickered a nurse.
They mock-pouted, and Faison waved them off. "They're both asleep, at last. Raleigh Becket just set a new record for duration of a Jaeger-head attack, but I have a feeling Pete Lepp and Hedy Keres are going to snag that title shortly."
The twins grimaced at each other. "Yeah, we've heard. That blows."
Another of Faison's staff muttered, "And unlike Becket, Lepp actually had a good reason. No justice."
"What did I tell you, Martín?" Faison snapped before Bruce or Trevin could react. "That whole incident involved adult officers acting like juveniles; anyone who drags it out is on report, so spread that around!"
"Yes, ma'am. Sorry," the orderly slunk away.
The doctor eyed Bruce and Trevin. "That goes for you two too, and the other teams."
They held up their hands in unison. "You know we like Rals, ma'am. Maybe he did deserve a kick in the ass, but he got one in spades already. We don't kick people while they're down."
After another day, the Beckets were up and about, to everyone's relief. As far as Bruce and Trevin could tell, nobody was really giving Raleigh a hard time. Maybe even the medical staff with grudges recognized what Raleigh's friends did: kiddo was already beating himself up and didn't need anyone else piling on.
Faison informed the Rangers as a group of the "latest development" in the Jaeger-head front: that the rebound was so severe from the stimulant blast that it could nail the other partner even if they'd been thought immune. Bruce and Trevin didn't bother pretending they weren't watching for Raleigh's reaction (and in their defense, neither did Rey and Isabel Khouri.)
He went dead white and barely said a word to anybody for the rest of the day.
Two days later, Eden's jockeys were reportedly on the mend. Gipsy's left hemisphere, on the other hand, wasn't. Raleigh seemed downright depressed, and damn if that didn't put a shadow over the whole city of Lima. Yancy, still tired and drained from his marathon nursing session, was frustrated and stressed.
"He's taking too much on himself. That's how this whole thing got started."
"You accusing Rals of taking too much on himself?" Christian Warner snorted. "If that ain't the pot callin' the kettle blond!"
Grooooan.
"Or Strawberry calling Sunshine blond," Tendo suggested.
More groans.
"And here, ladies and gentlemen, we have the finalists for the new position of Gipsy Danger's Punner-in-chief, so cast your votes!" announced Antwan. "What's he said when you've talked to him, Yance?"
Yancy shuffled, avoiding their eyes. "Not a lot. Just that he almost got me back in the dark room. Dammit, I've forgiven him; it wasn't that big a deal! Just stupid posturing, and nobody got hurt, but he won't forgive himself!"
"It'll have to come from somebody else, then," said Tendo.
"Carolina tried."
"Hm." Antwan clapped his hands. "So if not Mom, let Dad take a shot. Well, I am old enough for both of you!" But Yancy winced, and he wrinkled his nose. "Just stuck my foot in my mouth, didn't I?"
Laughing wearily, Yancy waved him off. "Not really, man. Not to me. I'll buy you all the drinks in Lima if you can get him to chill."
"Trust a son of the islands, my friend! The only way I could be more qualified is if I'd worked at Disneyland." Antwan strutted off.
Team Gipsy and Team Romeo exchanged looks. Tendo shrugged. "Well, if talking to him doesn't work, Antwan'll just break out the weed. God bless Jamaica."
Raleigh retreated to the edge of the Lima Dome grounds to escape everybody's stares and well-meaning pep talks, and found himself next to the memorial that had been built to Talon Tasmania. They'd been assigned officially to Australia, but at the time they'd gone down, they'd been under Lima's command. It was beautiful, a sculpture built in a group effort by three artists: one from Ecuador, one from Argentina, and one from Australia. It was close enough to the fence that civilians could leave flowers nearby. There were a lot of fresh ones, which meant people were visiting regularly even eighteen months after the fact.
He cleared off the dead greenery and waterlogged mementos just for something to do, and then sat studying the inscription as if staring at it would reveal some hidden message.
In defense of all mankind. It was part of the dedication ceremony for the Jaegers, a play on the old Apollo 11 line.
What was I trying to defend? Ego. And he'd made a complete ass of himself in front of everyone, pissed off Pentecost, and nearly got the chief medic into trouble. And Yancy...
Scuttlebutt was that Hedy Keres had been down with the Jaeger-head rebound longer than her husband, even though she was a migraine-sufferer who should've been immune. They'd been in the hospital for four days after Razorfin was killed.
Raleigh had nearly brought that down on Yancy. "Rals, it's okay!" his brother kept insisting. "Yeah, the thing in the infirmary was dumb, but you're not gonna do try it again, and nobody got hurt! I forgive you, kiddo, let it go!"
But even hearing those words out loud, all Raleigh could hear was a voice snarling in his own head. You stupid fucking piece of arrogant shit, look what you almost did! You don't deserve him, you don't deserve Gipsy, you're not worthy of any of this.
"Becket, Becket, Becket!" A familiar merry voice and islander accent broke through his self-recrimination, and a familiar looming silhouette came through the sun towards him. "Really, man? Are you blaming yourself for this now too?" Antwan gestured to the memorial.
Raleigh snorted. "No, but until now, people didn't nag me over here."
"Then come on, because I'm gonna nag you." Antwan tipped his fisherman's cap to the memorial with one hand and hauled Raleigh along by the the arm with the other. Caught off guard, Raleigh was too busy trying not to face-plant on the concrete to get away from him. Antwan dropped his voice and said sheepishly, "I put my foot in it to Yancy earlier, I think."
"Oh?" Great, as if Yance doesn't have enough to worry about.
"I, ah, said I was old enough to be your dad. He said it's all right, but..." Antwan wrinkled his nose as they came to a stop under the few trees still standing on-base. "Bad?"
Oh, was that all? Whew. "Nah, not really. Our dad died last year, and... well, we weren't his biggest fans even before then. If Yance says it's all right, then it's... oh." He'd been had. He sighed. "You played me, mon capitaine."
Antwan laughed and clapped him on the back, nearly knocking him over. Guy really didn't know his own strength (or he did and just didn't care.) "Seriously, it did really happen, but now I'm glad I asked you. Come on, Sunshine, forgive yourself. Your crew misses you, and so does your brother."
"I know. I'm not trying to bring everybody down, buddy." Raleigh leaned against one of the trees. "It was just so damn stupid. Me and my Jaeger-sized ego." He looked miserably at the older man and confessed, "I hate being out of action. I miss Gipsy. The simulator's not the same."
"I get that. We all do. If she was here, ready to go, and the kaiju went somewhere else, that's all right. Knowing that she's not, and she couldn't be if the bastards came this way, that's different." Well, whaddaya know. He may not have made Ranger, but he really does get it. "Feeling helpless doesn't come easy to anybody. Even less nowadays."
Talking to Antwan wasn't a magic pill that took away all the guilt, but Raleigh did feel better afterward. For the others' sake, especially Yancy's, he put more effort into smiling and laughing again, even if his heart wasn't always in it. It didn't always fool the crew (and never fooled Yance) but the rest of the Dome staff seemed more at ease.
Raleigh also caught Yancy perusing the latest reports on the after-effects of Jaeger-head, and discovered, to both of their chagrin, that "general depression and lethargy for anywhere from seven to ten days following an attack" was a documented symptom.
"I'm getting better," he told Yance after pointing that out to him. "It's been six days, and I'm... getting over it. All of it, including the stupid part that I can't blame on my nerve cells," he added.
Yancy hugged him more gently than necessary. "Good. All this flailing's hard on my old bones. Let's see if the man in charge'll let us go off-base, huh?"
They got a pass from a completely-straight-faced Pentecost (but also with mock-suspicion from Dr. Faison and the duty MPs.) Raleigh wasn't really up for crowds, blaring music, and dancing yet, and Yancy knew it without him having to say. So they didn't invite the crew and headed for quieter part of town, wandering around the historic district without their bomber jackets, just wanting to be a couple of guys on the street rather than celebrities.
It was spring down in the Southern Hemisphere, sunny and breezy without the usual Lima fog, and they didn't even need to talk, just wandered where they wanted side-by-side, checking out girls and admiring buildings. Raleigh's hobbies had always been planes, trains, and automobiles, but along with comics, Yancy had a thing for architecture, and Raleigh could almost hear him studying the different eras visible in the older part of town.
They picked a restaurant, ordered food to share, and wandered through two different museums and parks always stopping at the exact same time to look at things and handing each other things without having to ask. But it still wasn't until late evening that they realized they were majorly ghosting.
So much for being out of practice without Gipsy.
"So much for being..." They blinked at each other, then started to laugh.
They wound up in a little hole-in-the-wall bar near the engineering school; a group of girls recognized them and bought them a round. By mutual unspoken decision, they split up with their favorites... until the girls and their friends realized there was a four-way, trilingual conversation going on in two non-adjacent booths.
"It's true?! That urban legend that the pilots are telepathic?!" Yancy's admirer exclaimed.
"Not usually," Yance admitted.
"Not like this," Raleigh confirmed. "Outside the Jaeger or the simulator."
Giggling, the women crowded around them and made them put away their phones, and move out of each other's sight then subjected them to the predictable "psychic" tests with playing cards, "how many fingers am I holding up.
They passed them all with flying colors. It was the same sort of thing they'd done back after making the first cut: cognitive tests of the drift. However, Raleigh and Yancy had gotten so used to it that they'd forgotten just how weird it was for people outside the Jaeger Program to hear about, let alone see it in action. Gradually, the giggling stopped, and the girls started exchanging nervous looks.
Oops, I think we overdid it.
Yeah, they'd creeped everyone out. This was the first time in weeks that either of them had really had a chance to think about getting laid (or at least thought it might get worked into the schedule), but obviously it wasn't going to happen with any of this crowd.
Back at the Dome, they were intrigued by it enough that Yancy wandered down the hall to ask the pons techs about it, and Raleigh went to the rec room to show off. "Hey, Sunshine!" exclaimed Cady, playing chess with one of Amazon Delta's crew. "You're looking better."
"Feeling better, we hope?" added Carolina.
"Yeah, but get this: Yance and I are ghosting all to hell, stronger than we've ever been. We just freaked out a bar full of girls," Raleigh told them.
Isabel Khouri looked over her shoulder from her laptop. "Hm? When did you last drift?"
"Before Razorfin. I mean, we ghost a little all the time, get vibes, but not like this - it's like a full handshake! He's gone to ask the pons guys about it..." Raleigh looked through Yancy's eyes and knew without even having to think about it. "Now they're going to the infirmary."
They soon had an audience of PPDC personnel who were more delighted and less alarmed, and Dr. Faison got more animated than any of them had ever seen her. She practically tackled them into the scanners and peered over the techs' shoulders. "They're not punking us," she informed the onlookers. "See that?" She pointed to the lines on the monitors. "That's a full-blown neural handshake, ninety-eight percent. They could pilot Gipsy without being in her - no, that was not an invitation to try."
Raleigh and Yancy pouted in unison – and Raleigh was in the other scanner room.
"Hot damn!"
"Somebody ask Bruce and Trev if they've ever done that."
"They're sailing with Rey," said Isabel. "He and I haven't done this, but we haven't drifted as long as you two." She poked Yancy in the ribs, and everyone oohed and aahed when Raleigh jumped and yelped along with him.
Once Dr. Faison and the pons techs finally let them go, they spent a couple of hours coming up with ways to exploit their party trick, primarily by "psychic" games and then sparring blindfolded in the Kwoon. "That... is... AWESOME!" Tendo was gleefully filming them.
As Yancy departed for the showers, Nikki Harris sidled up to Raleigh with a sly grin. "What, you looking for a vicarious threesome?" he purred in her ear.
She laughed. "I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't occur to me. How long's it gonna last?"
"No clue. Maybe you'd have to plug us into the pons and unplug us manually." He winked. He (and Yancy) had a feeling she was mostly pulling his leg - that might be a little weird for them too.
Nikki confirmed with by backing off and concluding, "One at a time's enough for me. No offense to Yancy."
She smirked, but Yancy one-upped her by yelling from the showers: "None taken!"
"OH, HOLY SHIT!" Nikki shoved Raleigh, getting yelps of protest from him and laughter from the milling crew. "Confine your asses to quarters, that's fucking creepy! You damn Rangers!"
"Hey, you started it!" Raleigh whined, dodging her swats.
"Quit beating up on my brother!" Yancy bellowed - still through a closed door.
"Dude, that really is creepy!" Cady Spencer flicked Yancy with a twisted towel, listening for Raleigh to say "ow."
They did more or less confine themselves to quarters, partly so they wouldn't creep anyone else out and also so the crew would quit poking and prodding them. They spent the rest of the night playing chess, to an endless series of draws.
When they woke up in the morning, they were back in their own heads. The final diagnosis of the neurologists and pons scientists was "a spontaneous handshake brought on by neural firing."
The final conclusion of the non-scientists was: "weird."
October 2018…
The mood in the Lima Shatterdome lightened after the Beckets' ghost drift episode, but the ultimate result of the Razorfin engagement wasn't as good as everyone hoped. Tidal Dragon's reactor design was deemed unsafe, and her pilots were forced to retire much as Stacker and Tamsin and the Jessops had been. The brass kept it quiet, but the medics passed around the sad fact that several of the chopper crews were facing lifelong radiation exposure complications - or worse.
"Damn, I loved Dragon's design. That steam blaster was so cool," the engineers lamented.
"Apparently, the saltwater just created too much corrosion in the shielding. Poor guys, one shot and then done."
In early October, Carolina Olivares urgently called a meeting with Stacker and the PR liaisons for Amazon and Romeo. "I've just received a very disturbing tip, Marshall, about an article that's about to be published."
One look at her tablet, and Stacker's heart thudded into his guts. "I take it this is... not a tabloid?"
Olivares sighed. "Not the most reputable paper, no, but also not a supermarket tabloid. And that will be the threshold for the mainstream outlets taking on this subject."
"Dear God," Romeo's liaison murmured, peering at the image. "What a nightmare."
"It could be worse," Olivares pointed out. "They could have evidence."
"You don't think they do?"
She shook her head. "If they did, it would have exploded before now. This is a fishing expedition, but it will still be upsetting for the Rangers and their families."
"How long until it's released?"
"Less than a day."
"Get the Gages and the Beckets in here. They deserve to hear it from us first." Stacker turned to Amazon's liaison. "Fill in the Khouris, and ask them not to go far. Their fellow pilots will need their support."
"You know they'll have it," he said firmly, and left already on his phone.
Stacker looked wearily at the two liaisons. "This was always going to happen, wasn't it?" They both nodded.
It was inevitable. The Rangers have a powerful and strange bond. People speculate, and the unscrupulous will exploit it if they can. And in his heart of hearts, Stacker couldn't help but wonder himself if maybe, in some cases, there might be a kernel of truth. It doesn't matter. Even if there is, we owe it to them to protect them.
The Gages and the Beckets arrived with a lot of noise right until they were outside the office door. Stacker had once grumbled to Olivares that the Gages seemed to have regressed from all discipline. She'd replied that the drift stripped pretenses away. There hadn't been much he could say to that.
At least the four men shut their mouths and straightened up once they came in, and the tension registered on them at once. "You paged us, sir?" asked Bruce Gage, shooting curious glances at Olivares and his own liaison.
Stacker nodded. "Rangers, I'm afraid a very unpleasant media storm is about to descend. We wanted to warn you in private." He nodded to Olivares, who handed them her tablet.
A colorful, professional collage of photographs of Ranger teams - all the siblings and cousins, of which there were many - was the backdrop for a blaring headline: The Jaeger Program: A HotBed of Incest?
To be continued...
Coming Next Weekend: And our heroes thought the media harping over their dating lives was bad! Fallout spreads from scandal and sensationalism, and Stacker and his fellow senior officers race to circle the wagons around their pilots... and their families. But the next kaiju attack reveals to Team Gipsy that the Jaeger Program has more than just paparazzi to worry about...there is also danger closer to home in Chapter Thirty-Four: Somebody's Eyes!
PLEASE don't forget to review!
Original Character Guide
Peter Lepp and Hedy Keres: Rangers of Eden Assassin, Russia's Mark-2. Estonian Air Force pilots who met after K-Day when the PPDC was formed. They were part of the first "open admission" class of the Jaeger Academy in early 2016, and fell in love during training and later married. Peter was among the VERY unlucky pilots to suffer multiple attacks of Jaeger-head, but as a migraine sufferer, Hedy was believed immune until now.
Reynaldo ("Rey") and Isabel Khouri: Rangers of Amazon Delta, a Mark-3 Jaeger jointly funded and built by Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Brazil. A married couple from Guayaquil, Ecuador in their early 30s. Reynaldo is of Lebanese descent, and Isabel is mestizo.
Carolina Olivares: Gipsy Danger's Public Relations Representative, Mexican-American, mid-60s, crew den mother.
Antwan Ferrier: Gipsy Danger Personnel Coordinator, directs Whiskey Gamma, a team of Strike Troopers. The eldest of Team Gipsy after Carolina, Jamaican national, nicknamed Capitaine by the crew because he used to work on cruise ships.
Christian Warner: Gipsy Danger drivesuit technician, late 20s, African-American from Atlanta, GA, attended academy with Beckets and his sister, Chloe, who is now in K-Watch.
Nicola Harris: Rescue/recovery EMT with Whiskey Gamma, one of Gipsy Danger's strike trooper teams, age 21 from San Diego, CA, black/Latina. Occasionally has a casual hook-up with Raleigh.
Cady Spencer: Gipsy Danger LOCCENT Technician (along with Tendo Choi), Filipino-American, age 27 from Portland, Oregon.