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Pac Rim AU
Jul. 24th, 2016 07:42 amSophia Leandros, like many, fell into debt to a Bone Collector, one of the opportunists who collected pieces and stripped carcasses of the fallen Kaiju to sell on the black market, really the only market that someone like Sophia knew. This particular Bone Collector had been -and still was- a brilliant geneticist, though one that had been disbarred for unethical human experimentation on the city's homeless population. Of course, the experiments continued once he'd made a name for himself on the black market, and Sophia became the next in a long list of victims.
She was a surrogate, a carrier for an embryo that was mostly human, but had enough Kaiju DNA spliced in to make things interesting. This experiment was an unrivaled success. Of course, the geneticist never got to see it, arrested again before Sophia came to full term, leaving her with an infant that she didn't know what to do with, and one that developed at an almost alarming rate, almost twice as quickly as her previous child (and the one she actually claimed as her own). This prompted moving as often as they had to while Cal was growing, though he seemed to slow back to a normal development speed in his early teens, just in time to lose Sophia to the destruction of a Kaiju attack, not that it was any great loss to anyone involved.
It was a few years later that the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, desperate enough for trainee pilots, admitted a then-19-year-old Niko and his supposedly-18-year-old brother to the Academy. The military training worked well for Niko, and not so much for Cal, though he tolerated it in the effort of staying with his brother. On the one hand, there was Niko who was a star student, in the upper percentile of all of his classes, even history, which Cal detested, and on the other there was Cal who was only just skimming by in everything except combat training.
Cal had anger issues, always had done, but Niko managed to keep those tempered for the most part and they could count on one hand the number of times that Cal had gone off on someone who hadn't pushed him to it first, and sure, he had nightmares, but almost everyone did, and most people could ignore the fact that he had a tendency to wander the halls looking lost within an hour of Kaiju proximity alarms going off, it was weird, sure, but it could also just be a coincidence.
She was a surrogate, a carrier for an embryo that was mostly human, but had enough Kaiju DNA spliced in to make things interesting. This experiment was an unrivaled success. Of course, the geneticist never got to see it, arrested again before Sophia came to full term, leaving her with an infant that she didn't know what to do with, and one that developed at an almost alarming rate, almost twice as quickly as her previous child (and the one she actually claimed as her own). This prompted moving as often as they had to while Cal was growing, though he seemed to slow back to a normal development speed in his early teens, just in time to lose Sophia to the destruction of a Kaiju attack, not that it was any great loss to anyone involved.
It was a few years later that the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, desperate enough for trainee pilots, admitted a then-19-year-old Niko and his supposedly-18-year-old brother to the Academy. The military training worked well for Niko, and not so much for Cal, though he tolerated it in the effort of staying with his brother. On the one hand, there was Niko who was a star student, in the upper percentile of all of his classes, even history, which Cal detested, and on the other there was Cal who was only just skimming by in everything except combat training.
Cal had anger issues, always had done, but Niko managed to keep those tempered for the most part and they could count on one hand the number of times that Cal had gone off on someone who hadn't pushed him to it first, and sure, he had nightmares, but almost everyone did, and most people could ignore the fact that he had a tendency to wander the halls looking lost within an hour of Kaiju proximity alarms going off, it was weird, sure, but it could also just be a coincidence.
