Work Text:
The people of Lore have always known that they aren’t alone.
With so many sentient species sharing the planet, it would be difficult not to know. A great many of the peoples to call Lore home had come from other places, long in the past. Even as contact with the elemental planes faded over time, as science and technology rose in prominence and the studies of magic grew less common, the knowledge of how the world worked was not lost. It has never been a mystery, to the people of Lore, whether other life was out there. It was. They knew.
When the Breach splits into being, deep beneath the Pasgur Ocean, it is somehow still a surprise what happens next.
The first kaiju makes landfall in the Kingdom of Greenguard. Over half of the port city of Helm’s Harbour is wiped off of the map in the space of a day. It tears through the surrounding farmland and makes it as far inland as the edges of the Doomwood before it is finally, finally, killed.
In the end, the entire armed forces of Greenguard are not enough. Countless bullets are fired and are not enough, countless bombs are dropped and are not enough, jets and tanks and minefields are laid on the kaiju’s projected path, and those are not enough. It takes the Dragonlords, stepping away from centuries as a purely diplomatic organisation to return to the battlefield as warriors, to shift the tide. It is their arrival to the skies, Dragonlords and Dragons, two minds as one, that brings the beast that came from the ocean floor to its knees.
(That first kaiju will, eventually, be named Airblight, for the noxious green mist which will rise from its corpse for days afterwards, blanketing the air faster than evacuation orders can be sent. Even after the kaiju is dead, the death toll will keep rising.
But nobody knows that part just yet.)
The kaiju dies. The Kingdom of Greenguard licks its wounds. The rest of the world watches and waits.
The second kaiju arrives eight months later, on the opposite side of the Pasgur.
It decimates two halos of Nieboheim before it is killed.
The third kaiju is detected before it makes landfall. This is still not enough to stop it wreaking havoc on the coasts of the Southern Empire, though the advance warning allowed for more evacuation than either previous attack got.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence.
Three times is enemy action.
The nations of Lore look to one another and, for the first time in a long time, agree that they need to work together on this one.
All focus is turning to developing some way of combating the kaiju. Three are dead so far and each one cost far too many lives to put down. Who knows how many more will come? There must be some way to fight these creatures on a fairer battlefield, some way to kill them faster.
They go over what they know of fighting the kaiju. One thing remains consistent across all three attacks; regardless of what kind of weapon is used, the kaiju always start falling faster when they have to contend with a foe engaging them and making them think. Ranged attacks and environmental hazards, they will brush off and keep moving, no matter how much they are hurt. But engaged in combat by an opponent they are forced to acknowledge…
The question, then, becomes how do we fight a kaiju?
The question is asked again and again, over and over. Methods are tried as the kaiju keep coming.
And then an archaeologist on the island of Sho’Nuff looks up at the Ruins of Kordana and asks haven’t we always wondered what these were made to fight?
As one, Lore turns to something very, very old to solve a problem that is still so very new.
The process of reverse engineering the ancient machines found all over the planet is no simple feat. There are many different kinds, in many different shapes, in oh-so-many different states of disrepair. And there are so, so many questions.
How do these pieces connect to one another? What purpose did they serve? What powered them? What materials were used? What do we know how to replicate? How were they piloted? Will this be enough?
The biggest setback, ultimately, is when the neural load of piloting proves too much for a single mind. What is the good of building a weapon nobody knows how to make safe to use? Every single example found suggests either a single pilot or no physical pilot at all – the debate rages as to whether this suggests AI or simply remote piloting and in the end, it doesn’t matter at all, because neither are feasible to replicate with the available tech regardless.
Someone remembers the Dragonlords and their dragons, two minds as one, accomplishing so much more together than they could alone, against that very first kaiju. Development turns to a two pilot system. Maybe, just maybe, the answer lies in there.
Sometimes, close enough is the best that you can hope for, with this kind of thing. They don’t need to perfectly match what they’re emulating. They just need something that works.
What little evidence persists suggests that the people who built these machines called them mecha.
When the allied peoples of Lore finally get their replicas working, they name them jaegers.