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After sorting through the jumbled memories flooding his mind, Aidan's face twisted into a grimace. The reason Ryan's body felt like absolute garbage was because of some stupid bet he'd made with Mako Mori, the woman running the Mark-3 Jaeger repair shop. The deal was simple but idiotic: if Ryan could break Mako's legendary record of 51 straight wins in the simulation pods, she'd go out with him.
Mako Mori was this Japanese engineer who'd survived a Kaiju attack as a kid. Some monster had torn through her neighborhood, killed her family, and would've gotten her too if Marshal Stacker Pentecost hadn't shown up at the last second. Pentecost adopted her after that, and she'd thrown herself into Jaeger tech like her life depended on it. Maybe it did. The woman was scary good at piloting sims - 51 wins without a single loss was practically superhuman. Now she ran maintenance on the third-gen mechs and had zero interest in dating anyone, especially not some lovesick engineer who thought he could impress her by exhausting himself in training pods.
Ryan had been pushing himself through back-to-back simulation runs for weeks, barely eating, definitely not sleeping enough, all because he thought beating her record would somehow make her notice him. What an absolute moron.
Well, that explains why I feel like I got hit by a truck, Aidan thought, rubbing his temples. This guy seriously thought sim scores were gonna win over a woman who's probably got severe PTSD from watching giant monsters eat her family.
The current year was 2022, which put him right in the middle of the Kaiju War's most brutal period. China's fourth-generation Crimson Typhoon had been operational for a few years now - that triple-armed beast was still humanity's most advanced fighting machine. But the third-generation Gipsy Danger, which used to be stationed on Kodiak Island, was currently sitting in this very Shatterdome like a 260-foot-tall paperweight.
Last year, Gipsy had been deployed against a Category-3 Kaiju called Knifehead off the Alaskan coast. The mission had gone sideways fast. The monster had torn through Gipsy's armor like it was made of tinfoil, killed pilot Yancy Becket, and left his brother Raleigh so traumatized he'd walked away from the Jaeger program entirely. The mech had been hauled back here for repairs, which Mako had finished months ago, but finding a replacement pilot team was proving impossible. Apparently, most people weren't eager to climb into a machine that had recently gotten someone killed.
Ryan's position as a maintenance engineer had given him access to way more classified intel than most people realized. The public thought Jaegers were humanity's shining technological achievement, but the reality was messier. Sure, the mechs could be built with conventional materials and engineering, but their effectiveness had very little to do with the alien corpses everyone was so fascinated by.
The Kaiju bodies were valuable, just not for building robots. Turns out giant monster organs made excellent aphrodisiacs in certain black markets, and their blood had properties that various governments were very interested in for reasons they'd rather not discuss publicly. The real breakthrough in Jaeger technology had come from understanding how to create a neural bridge between human pilots, not from reverse-engineering alien biology.
Aidan was just starting to process the full scope of this world's situation when someone started pounding on his door like the building was on fire.
"Ryan! Ryan, you in there? Come on, man, answer me!" The voice was heavily accented - Russian, definitely worried, and getting more agitated by the second. "I swear to God, if you passed out in there, I'm gonna kick this door down!"
Great. Company. Aidan dragged himself out of bed, his body protesting every movement, and shuffled to the door. When he opened it, he found himself looking at a middle-aged Russian guy who was practically bouncing on his feet with nervous energy.
"Jesus, there you are! What the hell were you doing?" The man's relief was obvious, but he was still eyeing Aidan like he might collapse at any moment.
"Just resting, Krilavich. What's got you so worked up?" Aidan leaned against the doorframe, trying to look more stable than he felt.
"Worked up? You looked like death warmed over when you left the workshop earlier. I was half convinced I'd find you passed out on the floor or something." Krilavich was a stocky guy with thinning hair, thick glasses, and the kind of beard that suggested he'd given up on personal grooming sometime around the second Kaiju attack. He looked like every stereotype of a Soviet engineer, except he actually knew what he was doing.
"Come on in. I'm fine, just tired." Aidan stepped aside to let him enter the cramped quarters that passed for living space in the Shatterdome.
Krilavich had been part of the team that built China's Crimson Typhoon before transferring here to work on Cherno Alpha, Russia's contribution to the Jaeger program. Cherno was a first-generation mech, which meant it was basically a walking tank with the grace of a drunken elephant, but it could take punishment that would turn newer mechs into scrap metal.
The thing was built like a Soviet monument - big, ugly, and absolutely indestructible. Instead of the nuclear reactors that powered most Jaegers, Cherno ran on something called a "Stun-Core 88," which gave it terrible endurance but meant the pilots didn't have to worry about radiation poisoning. The head was designed like a massive hammerhead shark, except instead of being streamlined for swimming, it was engineered to absorb Kaiju attacks that would cave in a normal cockpit.
"You sure you're alright? Because you've been looking rough for weeks now." Krilavich settled into the room's only chair, which creaked ominously under his weight. "Look, I get that you're trying to impress Mako, but this whole simulation marathon thing is insane. You know she's not interested, right?"
Aidan adjusted his glasses, still getting used to having his vision artificially corrected. "Yeah, I'm starting to figure that out."
"Good, because honestly, that woman's got walls built around her that make Cherno's armor look like paper. She's been through hell, and she's not looking for some engineer to sweep her off her feet. She's looking to kill as many Kaiju as possible before they kill her." Krilavich's expression softened slightly. "Trust me on this one - I've seen enough people try to get close to her, and it never ends well."
The truth was, the entire Jaeger program was walking a financial tightrope. Each mech cost tens of billions to build and maintain, and the PPDC was already starting to make noises about "alternative solutions" to the Kaiju problem. There were rumors about some massive wall project that would supposedly keep the monsters out of populated areas, which was about as realistic as stopping a hurricane with a screen door.
"Actually, forget about Mako for a minute. You brought the Blue Star blueprints, right? Let's talk about something that might actually matter." Aidan was eager to change the subject away from Ryan's disastrous love life.
"Now you're talking sense." Krilavich immediately perked up, pulling a rolled set of technical drawings from his jacket. "But I gotta warn you, the funding situation is getting ugly back home. Moscow's asking why we need a third-generation mech when Cherno's still operational."
Russia's second-generation Jaeger, Eden's Assassin, had been destroyed six months ago during a double Kaiju event near Sakhalin Island. The pilots had managed to take down one Category-3 before the second one tore their mech apart. Since then, Cherno Alpha had been Russia's only line of defense, and the old mech was showing its age.
Blue Star was supposed to be their next-generation replacement - faster, more agile, and equipped with nuclear power systems similar to Gipsy Danger. But the project was hemorrhaging money faster than anyone had anticipated, and Russian officials were getting impatient with the lack of results.
"The problem is, we're trying to build something that combines Cherno's durability with Gipsy's mobility, and the engineering challenges are insane," Krilavich spread the blueprints across Aidan's small table. "The power requirements alone are giving me nightmares. We need enough juice to move 1,800 tons of mech at combat speed, but the reactor design keeps failing stress tests."
Aidan studied the drawings, letting Ryan's technical knowledge guide his analysis. The design was ambitious but flawed - they were trying to brute-force solutions instead of thinking outside the box.
"What if I told you there might be a way to solve the power problem without using traditional nuclear reactors?" Aidan looked up from the blueprints. "Something that could give you more energy output with a fraction of the size and weight?"
Krilavich's eyebrows shot up. "I'd say you've been spending too much time in the simulation pods and it's affecting your brain. But I'm listening."
"I've been working on some theoretical designs for a completely different kind of power source. Clean energy, incredibly efficient, and small enough to fit in spaces where you'd never be able to mount a reactor." Aidan was thinking about the Arc Reactor technology he'd learned from Tony Stark's designs. "If I could prove the concept works, would Moscow be interested in funding a prototype?"
"If you could actually build something like that, Moscow would probably give you a medal and your own lab." Krilavich leaned forward, suddenly very interested. "But Ryan, you're talking about revolutionary technology here. The kind of breakthrough that happens maybe once in a lifetime. You sure you're not just running on too much caffeine and wishful thinking?"
"Maybe. But what if I'm not?" Aidan met his gaze steadily. "What if we could build Jaegers that don't need massive reactor chambers? Mechs that could operate for days without refueling, with power systems so reliable they'd never fail in combat?"
Krilavich was quiet for a long moment, studying Aidan's face like he was trying to figure out if his friend had completely lost his mind. "You're serious about this, aren't you?"
"Dead serious. But I'm gonna need time to work on it, and I'm gonna need access to materials and fabrication equipment that aren't exactly standard issue." Aidan rolled up the Blue Star blueprints. "Think you could buy me some time with the Moscow bureaucrats? Tell them we're exploring revolutionary power solutions that could change everything?"
"I could try. But if this turns out to be some wild goose chase, we're both gonna be looking for new jobs." Krilavich stood up, tucking the blueprints back into his jacket. "How long do you need?"
"Give me two weeks. If I can't show you a working prototype by then, we'll go back to conventional reactor designs and pretend this conversation never happened."
"Two weeks." Krilavich shook his head, but he was smiling slightly. "You know what? Why not. This whole program is crazy enough already. What's one more impossible project?"
After Krilavich left, Aidan sat alone in his cramped quarters, thinking about the massive undertaking he'd just committed himself to. Building an Arc Reactor from scratch, in a world that didn't have access to Tony Stark's genius or advanced materials, was going to be incredibly challenging.
But if he could pull it off, it would revolutionize not just the Jaeger program, but energy production across the entire planet. And in a world where humanity was fighting for its survival against interdimensional monsters, that kind of technological advantage could mean the difference between victory and extinction.
Time to get to work.
Plz Throw Powerstones.