Wealthathon: Feet On The Ground
Aug. 15th, 2013 10:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeEDIT: For those of you unfamiliar with Pacific Rim, I made a spoiler-free 101 post, introducing characters, terms, and history as relevant to his crossover. Enjoy!
This prompt is for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aubergine_pilot, who wanted a crossover between Infinity Smashed and Pacific Rim (AKA: that movie where giant robots punch giant monsters). It also covers the 'runaways' square on my Hurt/Comfort bingo card and 'Teammates' on my Stuff100. Happy Wealthathon, Lee, you crazy diamond you.
Feet on the Ground
The PPDC needed its mathematicians. Giant robots looked great on TV, but they were slow and cumbersome, and they had a huge area to cover. It was numbers that told Jaegers where they needed to be, and one miscalculation could ruin everything.
Like now. Which was why Romeo Blue was in Anchorage, Gipsy Danger was in Guam, and a Kaiju was in San Diego. Diablo Intercept was on its way, but it’d still be hours before its arrival.
In the middle of this chaos, LOCCENT Officer Tendo Choi got a call from an agency in the States that he’d never heard of, offering emergency assistance. After thirty hours running on coffee, he was in no mood for diplomacy.
“Do you have a Jaeger?” He asked.
“In a manner of speaking…”
“Just keep it busy until Romeo Blue or the Peruvians get here. You are not expected to defeat a Category II in a test prototype.”
Prototype #0125 was universally known among personnel as ‘Shitheap McLargeHuge.’ It didn’t have weapons. Its operating system was obsolete. Its ‘bathroom’ was a two-liter soda bottle duct-taped to the wall, infamous for falling over at inopportune moments.
After almost three years, the procedures were ironclad. Biff and M.D. were cuffed together, chain-gang style, and marched into the cockpit of #0125. Once they were safely locked into the control braces and the cockpit door was sealed behind them, the prototype finally booted, and the braces became supports rather than restraints. Only then could Biff move enough to pull the cuff key off its hook and undo the cuff chain. The cuffs themselves never came off.
They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. They didn’t need the Pons system, or the Drift, or the Standard Thought transceivers. All they needed was metal and skin and the braces.
“Well, at least we’ll die interestingly,” M.D.’s thoughts said, tired and tasting of rust. They both knew the only way they’d live through an actual Jaeger fight. “Ready to drop me?”
Biff didn’t respond with words, just a mental brush of smoke and blood and metal that said everything he needed to. She was the berserker; he was the tactician. And as they headed towards San Diego, he knew how he’d get them out.
When the Peruvians arrived, they found a very angry, perplexed Kaiju, chewing on a mangled robot that still smashed at it with a bus. On seeing Diablo Intercept, the Kaiju dismissed the prototype as a waste of time, tossed it away, and lumbered off to experience a proper fight.
#0125 was not equipped for heavy impacts. It hit hard, bounced, rolled, and hit again. Biff braced himself and managed, but he heard something behind him snap and M.D.’s mind tear out of his grip. There was a screech of metal, a crash, and finally they came to a stop. Biff tried to turn—and #0125 went dead, freezing the braces in place. Whether it was due to damage or a system error was up for grabs.
“Kid?” His voice felt rusty from disuse.
“I don’t believe it.” M.D.’s voice was numb, disjointed. “The bathroom stayed up.”
#0125’s braces had been specifically designed to be impossible to escape without ten minutes and a can-opener, but that was before getting clobbered by an annoyed Kaiju. Biff yanked his right arm free, and after that it was just a matter of twisting and pulling until the damaged springs gave way.
M.D.’s braces hadn’t been as strong as his. Her arms were free, but the impact had smashed her against the wall, and she wasn’t trying to stand. He felt over her skin and mind, checking for damage. He fed her images of escape, running while Diablo Intercept and the Kaiju kept everyone busy. They would escape, they’d be free, and then—
A flare of agony. “AAAAAAAHdon’ttouchthat!”
A more careful feeling over to assess damage—twisted, broken, sticky wet, shit, that was bad—and she lapsed into her haze again.
“Oh. That’s my leg, isn’t it? Well, that’s disappointing…”
He took her arms, tugged gently. She didn’t even try to get up.
Getting the cockpit open would’ve been impossible but for the damage, but Biff managed to force it with a severed pipe. He came back and pulled M.D. to her feet. Pain flared sluggishly, but it was fading—not a good sign. He turned and heaved her over his shoulders, prodding her mind insistently, trying to keep her conscious. They were going to get out, they were going to be free, they’d vanish into California and everything would be okay…
He staggered out into the rubble. For a moment, the sunlight was blinding. Then his vision cleared, and he saw the sea of people.
Biff stared at the people. The people stared at him. They didn’t cheer so much as roar.
Before Biff could vanish or even try to convey the situation to M.D., a microphone was thrust in his face.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Biff stood there. “Uh.”
From over his shoulder, in a dreamy voice, M.D. said, “We are people. And we need a doctor.”
Biff slammed the door behind him on a crowd of shrieking teenage girls.
M.D. lay propped up in bed, leg sealed in plaster. She looked awful, but when she saw him, she smiled and crooned sarcastically, “Aw look. They like you.”
He rolled his eyes to conceal his relief, then rushed over to touch her. He wasn’t used to being alone in his head. The past few hours were still a jumble in his mind, images of contracts, smiling people in business suits, and plastic imitation handcuffs with the slogan, ‘for YOUR copilot!’
“What? Why on earth…?”
Teenagers. Apparently cuffing yourself to your boyfriend was the Next Big Thing.
“That’s the stupidest trend I’ve ever heard. They realize we’re not…”
He didn’t know. He wasn’t an advertising executive.
“Are they offering us money?”
Money? Southern Comfort and Johnny Walker were fighting each other over him.
“Oh wow. What’d you say?”
He let go of her hand, dumped an enormous stack of forms in her lap, then turned his back and stalked off to the other end of the room. Let her sort them out.
M.D. sighed tiredly. “You’ll have to wait. I think that fight broke me for good.”
No. She couldn’t break. “You broke? We broke, so get off your ass and tell me what to take, or we eating air tonight. That or dine with the fucking mayor or some shit, and I been smiling my ass off all fucking day.”
She started working her way through. He watched her IV drip.
“My god,” she breathed. “Have you seen this money?”
Yup.
“It’s…”
Yup.
She let her hands, with the contracts in them, fall to her lap. “Biff, we could sell out for one week, hawking booze and breakfast cereal, and we’d be set for life. We could leave the country, get away from the PIN, buy a house. A new house. Up-front!”
Yup.
She lay against her pillows, as though even thinking about it was tiring, but her voice was hungry. “You could have a kitchen, with a knife for everything, and the pots would hang on those special racks, and nothing would come from a can. I could sleep in a bed, a real honest-to-god bed with a frame. We could have a Jacuzzi.”
Biff looked up. “You care about Jacuzzis?”
“No. Still.”
“And then what?”
She turned her head to frown at him.
“We get the house, the kitchen, the Jacuzzi. Then what?”
“…We buy more stuff to put in the house?”
“And then?”
Long silence. M.D.’s expression sobered. She reached out a hand for him. He came back over and took it, looked at the IV in it, and he felt the dull throbbing ache, the weakness, and underneath, a bone-deep weariness that wouldn’t fade. “I wasn’t joking about them breaking me.”
He tried to damp down her fears. She’d be fine. She was always fine. She was the one who couldn’t die. But she shook her head.
“Too many tests. Too much time spent in a radioactive can. You know that.”
They could take the money, find doctors, find scientists…
“Pretty sure some of the richer pilots done that already. And they’re human.”
There was nothing to say. For a moment, Biff felt impotent rage. They could have more money than God, and still, still…
There was a knock on the door. Biff growled. He remembered the teenage girls. He wanted nothing to do with them.
“Leave it,” M.D. agreed.
The knock came again, louder and more firmly this time.
“Good news or food,” M.D. bellowed at the door, but her pipes lacked the usual oomph. “Nothing else.”
A stern voice came through the door. “This is Marshall Stacker Pentecost. I have a job offer and Chinese.”
Biff and M.D. exchanged glances. The name meant nothing to them, but the accent wasn’t US, and the smell of the food was starting to waft under the door. Biff inhaled. Rice, basil, beef…
She glanced at him and with a sigh, he got up to answer the door.
The man on the other side towered over them both. His posture was military, his demeanor dignified. In his hands was a large bag. He handed it to Biff, who opened it and tossed a carton to M.D. Normally she tore into food like a wolf, but she didn’t seem able to summon the energy.
“I’m with the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, training new Jaeger pilots on Kodiak Island,” Pentecost said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“So you’re who we were testing McLargeHuge for, all those years.” M.D. said, struggling with the carton. “Thanks for the food. You can go now.”
Pentecost didn’t move. “I understand you have issues with the PIN.”
“We have issues with a lot of people,” M.D. replied, placing a hand on the stack of contracts off her lap. “And we have plenty of offers.”
“You misunderstand me. I could not care less about where you’re from or what you can do, as long as it involves piloting a Jaeger as well as you did today. Do that for me, and the PIN can’t touch you.”
Biff and M.D. exchanged glances.
“We lost,” she said.
“In a malfunctioning prototype, you lost. In a Jaeger, you’d win.”
“McLargeHuge was a Jaeger.”
For a moment, Pentecost looked pained, as though the idea of even being associated with Shitheap McLargeHuge deeply offended him. “No. It wasn’t.”
“Oh, so you’ve fixed the bottle problem.”
“I ain’t training with nobody but her,” Biff added.
“Why would you? Of all the issues you had today, compatibility didn’t seem to be one of them. With us, you can have amnesty, a steady job, be a part of something bigger than yourselves. Or,” he said, sending a sharp glance at the stack of contracts, “keep your feet on the ground. It’s up to you.”
He handed them a business card, nodded to them, and left with a, “Enjoy the food.”
Biff and M.D. sat there, cartons forgotten. Biff twisted his fork in his hands, then reached for her. Careful not to jar the IV, he toyed with the cuff still on her wrist and asked.
She smirked. “Houseplant,” she told him, and under the exhaustion, there’s the brass he knows so well. “Did you think I’d say no?”
And they smiled at each other.
This prompt is for
aubergine_pilot, who wanted a crossover between Infinity Smashed and Pacific Rim (AKA: that movie where giant robots punch giant monsters). It also covers the 'runaways' square on my Hurt/Comfort bingo card and 'Teammates' on my Stuff100. Happy Wealthathon, Lee, you crazy diamond you.Feet on the Ground
The PPDC needed its mathematicians. Giant robots looked great on TV, but they were slow and cumbersome, and they had a huge area to cover. It was numbers that told Jaegers where they needed to be, and one miscalculation could ruin everything.
Like now. Which was why Romeo Blue was in Anchorage, Gipsy Danger was in Guam, and a Kaiju was in San Diego. Diablo Intercept was on its way, but it’d still be hours before its arrival.
In the middle of this chaos, LOCCENT Officer Tendo Choi got a call from an agency in the States that he’d never heard of, offering emergency assistance. After thirty hours running on coffee, he was in no mood for diplomacy.
“Do you have a Jaeger?” He asked.
“In a manner of speaking…”
...
“Just keep it busy until Romeo Blue or the Peruvians get here. You are not expected to defeat a Category II in a test prototype.”
Prototype #0125 was universally known among personnel as ‘Shitheap McLargeHuge.’ It didn’t have weapons. Its operating system was obsolete. Its ‘bathroom’ was a two-liter soda bottle duct-taped to the wall, infamous for falling over at inopportune moments.
After almost three years, the procedures were ironclad. Biff and M.D. were cuffed together, chain-gang style, and marched into the cockpit of #0125. Once they were safely locked into the control braces and the cockpit door was sealed behind them, the prototype finally booted, and the braces became supports rather than restraints. Only then could Biff move enough to pull the cuff key off its hook and undo the cuff chain. The cuffs themselves never came off.
They didn’t say anything. They didn’t need to. They didn’t need the Pons system, or the Drift, or the Standard Thought transceivers. All they needed was metal and skin and the braces.
“Well, at least we’ll die interestingly,” M.D.’s thoughts said, tired and tasting of rust. They both knew the only way they’d live through an actual Jaeger fight. “Ready to drop me?”
Biff didn’t respond with words, just a mental brush of smoke and blood and metal that said everything he needed to. She was the berserker; he was the tactician. And as they headed towards San Diego, he knew how he’d get them out.
...
When the Peruvians arrived, they found a very angry, perplexed Kaiju, chewing on a mangled robot that still smashed at it with a bus. On seeing Diablo Intercept, the Kaiju dismissed the prototype as a waste of time, tossed it away, and lumbered off to experience a proper fight.
#0125 was not equipped for heavy impacts. It hit hard, bounced, rolled, and hit again. Biff braced himself and managed, but he heard something behind him snap and M.D.’s mind tear out of his grip. There was a screech of metal, a crash, and finally they came to a stop. Biff tried to turn—and #0125 went dead, freezing the braces in place. Whether it was due to damage or a system error was up for grabs.
“Kid?” His voice felt rusty from disuse.
“I don’t believe it.” M.D.’s voice was numb, disjointed. “The bathroom stayed up.”
#0125’s braces had been specifically designed to be impossible to escape without ten minutes and a can-opener, but that was before getting clobbered by an annoyed Kaiju. Biff yanked his right arm free, and after that it was just a matter of twisting and pulling until the damaged springs gave way.
M.D.’s braces hadn’t been as strong as his. Her arms were free, but the impact had smashed her against the wall, and she wasn’t trying to stand. He felt over her skin and mind, checking for damage. He fed her images of escape, running while Diablo Intercept and the Kaiju kept everyone busy. They would escape, they’d be free, and then—
A flare of agony. “AAAAAAAHdon’ttouchthat!”
A more careful feeling over to assess damage—twisted, broken, sticky wet, shit, that was bad—and she lapsed into her haze again.
“Oh. That’s my leg, isn’t it? Well, that’s disappointing…”
He took her arms, tugged gently. She didn’t even try to get up.
Getting the cockpit open would’ve been impossible but for the damage, but Biff managed to force it with a severed pipe. He came back and pulled M.D. to her feet. Pain flared sluggishly, but it was fading—not a good sign. He turned and heaved her over his shoulders, prodding her mind insistently, trying to keep her conscious. They were going to get out, they were going to be free, they’d vanish into California and everything would be okay…
He staggered out into the rubble. For a moment, the sunlight was blinding. Then his vision cleared, and he saw the sea of people.
Biff stared at the people. The people stared at him. They didn’t cheer so much as roar.
Before Biff could vanish or even try to convey the situation to M.D., a microphone was thrust in his face.
“Who are you? Where did you come from?”
Biff stood there. “Uh.”
From over his shoulder, in a dreamy voice, M.D. said, “We are people. And we need a doctor.”
...
Biff slammed the door behind him on a crowd of shrieking teenage girls.
M.D. lay propped up in bed, leg sealed in plaster. She looked awful, but when she saw him, she smiled and crooned sarcastically, “Aw look. They like you.”
He rolled his eyes to conceal his relief, then rushed over to touch her. He wasn’t used to being alone in his head. The past few hours were still a jumble in his mind, images of contracts, smiling people in business suits, and plastic imitation handcuffs with the slogan, ‘for YOUR copilot!’
“What? Why on earth…?”
Teenagers. Apparently cuffing yourself to your boyfriend was the Next Big Thing.
“That’s the stupidest trend I’ve ever heard. They realize we’re not…”
He didn’t know. He wasn’t an advertising executive.
“Are they offering us money?”
Money? Southern Comfort and Johnny Walker were fighting each other over him.
“Oh wow. What’d you say?”
He let go of her hand, dumped an enormous stack of forms in her lap, then turned his back and stalked off to the other end of the room. Let her sort them out.
M.D. sighed tiredly. “You’ll have to wait. I think that fight broke me for good.”
No. She couldn’t break. “You broke? We broke, so get off your ass and tell me what to take, or we eating air tonight. That or dine with the fucking mayor or some shit, and I been smiling my ass off all fucking day.”
She started working her way through. He watched her IV drip.
“My god,” she breathed. “Have you seen this money?”
Yup.
“It’s…”
Yup.
She let her hands, with the contracts in them, fall to her lap. “Biff, we could sell out for one week, hawking booze and breakfast cereal, and we’d be set for life. We could leave the country, get away from the PIN, buy a house. A new house. Up-front!”
Yup.
She lay against her pillows, as though even thinking about it was tiring, but her voice was hungry. “You could have a kitchen, with a knife for everything, and the pots would hang on those special racks, and nothing would come from a can. I could sleep in a bed, a real honest-to-god bed with a frame. We could have a Jacuzzi.”
Biff looked up. “You care about Jacuzzis?”
“No. Still.”
“And then what?”
She turned her head to frown at him.
“We get the house, the kitchen, the Jacuzzi. Then what?”
“…We buy more stuff to put in the house?”
“And then?”
Long silence. M.D.’s expression sobered. She reached out a hand for him. He came back over and took it, looked at the IV in it, and he felt the dull throbbing ache, the weakness, and underneath, a bone-deep weariness that wouldn’t fade. “I wasn’t joking about them breaking me.”
He tried to damp down her fears. She’d be fine. She was always fine. She was the one who couldn’t die. But she shook her head.
“Too many tests. Too much time spent in a radioactive can. You know that.”
They could take the money, find doctors, find scientists…
“Pretty sure some of the richer pilots done that already. And they’re human.”
There was nothing to say. For a moment, Biff felt impotent rage. They could have more money than God, and still, still…
There was a knock on the door. Biff growled. He remembered the teenage girls. He wanted nothing to do with them.
“Leave it,” M.D. agreed.
The knock came again, louder and more firmly this time.
“Good news or food,” M.D. bellowed at the door, but her pipes lacked the usual oomph. “Nothing else.”
A stern voice came through the door. “This is Marshall Stacker Pentecost. I have a job offer and Chinese.”
Biff and M.D. exchanged glances. The name meant nothing to them, but the accent wasn’t US, and the smell of the food was starting to waft under the door. Biff inhaled. Rice, basil, beef…
She glanced at him and with a sigh, he got up to answer the door.
The man on the other side towered over them both. His posture was military, his demeanor dignified. In his hands was a large bag. He handed it to Biff, who opened it and tossed a carton to M.D. Normally she tore into food like a wolf, but she didn’t seem able to summon the energy.
“I’m with the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, training new Jaeger pilots on Kodiak Island,” Pentecost said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“So you’re who we were testing McLargeHuge for, all those years.” M.D. said, struggling with the carton. “Thanks for the food. You can go now.”
Pentecost didn’t move. “I understand you have issues with the PIN.”
“We have issues with a lot of people,” M.D. replied, placing a hand on the stack of contracts off her lap. “And we have plenty of offers.”
“You misunderstand me. I could not care less about where you’re from or what you can do, as long as it involves piloting a Jaeger as well as you did today. Do that for me, and the PIN can’t touch you.”
Biff and M.D. exchanged glances.
“We lost,” she said.
“In a malfunctioning prototype, you lost. In a Jaeger, you’d win.”
“McLargeHuge was a Jaeger.”
For a moment, Pentecost looked pained, as though the idea of even being associated with Shitheap McLargeHuge deeply offended him. “No. It wasn’t.”
“Oh, so you’ve fixed the bottle problem.”
“I ain’t training with nobody but her,” Biff added.
“Why would you? Of all the issues you had today, compatibility didn’t seem to be one of them. With us, you can have amnesty, a steady job, be a part of something bigger than yourselves. Or,” he said, sending a sharp glance at the stack of contracts, “keep your feet on the ground. It’s up to you.”
He handed them a business card, nodded to them, and left with a, “Enjoy the food.”
Biff and M.D. sat there, cartons forgotten. Biff twisted his fork in his hands, then reached for her. Careful not to jar the IV, he toyed with the cuff still on her wrist and asked.
She smirked. “Houseplant,” she told him, and under the exhaustion, there’s the brass he knows so well. “Did you think I’d say no?”
And they smiled at each other.
