Chapter Text
Jazz was having...a day. Definitely what he'd call a day that was daying. A miserable groan left him as he trudged through more sand. He knew jumping into the breach really wasn't going to be a good idea, that's why he had gone! He was the best pilot the Jaeger Corps had for surviving bad ideas.
They'd thought he’d probably get spit out in a different dimension of upside down gravity and evil giant Kaijus. And they were kinda right on the Kaiju part, but definitely not on the dimension.
"This is just a giant desert!" He whined.
~~~~~@~~~~~
Instead of the expected agony of atoms breaking or whatever Brainstorm had been raving about, he'd jumped through the breach and then just...whoop! Zap! He was falling ass first onto a floor that wriggled far too much for his liking.
He'd been surrounded by startled looking things he could only assume were the…logistics kaiju? If that made any sense?? They were roughly half the size of their typical invaders, and their scales were half as thick. There were no obvious weapons or muscles on them either.
But either way, he drew his sword on instinct the moment he saw them. The weak scales had only made it easier to slice through them with his plasma sword, his blade sinking into the meat like it was butter and cutting massive chunks off at a time. Their bodies crumpled to the ground in pieces like the world's worst meat puppets whose strings got cut.
The second the last kaiju went down and he was sure they weren't getting back up, he booked it down the first doorway he saw. He could only assume he'd landed in some kind of command center for the ugly beasts. And if that was the truth, he would take great pleasure in dismantling their operation and buy some peace time for Earth.
A few minutes of running around later, he learned that this was a very small base of operations. Only like, seven rooms total and two hallways to connect them. And on top of that, only one of the other rooms, what he assumed was their mess hall, had any other Kaiju in it. Two bigger aliens who still paled in strength compared to even a category 2 back one Earth. They'd only managed to get a lucky shot in on his left shoulder before going down like the others.
Jazz released a long breath where he still stood over the carnage. He shook out his mech to try and get some of the flesh off of it and he took a stray kaiju sized rag he was pretty sure they used for cleaning to wipe down his sword before retracting it.
Honestly the fight had felt almost eerie to Jazz's piloting instincts. Killing, what, eight kaijus and coming out with light damage to just one joint? Sure, they probably hadn't been expecting a human to come through to their side of the portal, but, really? They didn't have any guards at all, just in case? It felt almost suspicious. The kaiju had proven themselves to be intelligent enough to plan for such things.
After he made sure there were no living kaiju left, he walked back to the main portal room. It was small too, with just enough space for maybe three single pilot jaegers to mingle. The whole space folded around the portal machine that was…weirdly wet and fleshy.
Yeah, Jazz wasn’t going to look any closer at that.
Instead, he took a few pics for the far less squeamish scientists back home and moved on to what he guessed was the control panel. It had several still glowing screens over a sticking out metal shelf.
They shelf section had deep grooves in certain branching patterns that reminded him of nerves, also wet. They honestly…looked a lot like the little kaiju’s weird tentacle hands that were most of the reason they’d failed to harm his mech in the fights…
He swallowed back the vomit he could feel trying to climb up his throat when he put together how they probably interacted with said control panel.
More pictures it was, and then Jazz quickly turned to look for anything else useful. Mostly just anything else that wasn’t also alive.
Nothing. Literally nothing else was useful. Jazz had scoured the entire little base, and it was so utilitarian it made the barracks back on base look like a luxury hotel. There was only the food room, with several machines that...made food, he guessed. The storage room piled with more of the fleshy tech parts that he swiftly left, and the portal slash control room. Everything else was bare except for glass and metal tubes that he had a strong guess were the creature’s beds.
“Ughhh,” He groaned, cradling his jaeger’s head in his hands. “A tiny command base? That’s all that was on the other end of the breach? That doesn’t make any sense!” He moaned, swinging around to eye the portal room.
“There’s no way all the kaiju could even fit in this tiny base. This can’t be their main area of operations. But…I went through the main breach. Is it connected to multiple places?”
Jazz just stood there for a while, thinking. He knew this couldn’t be it, but how else would that work?
No, bad Jazz, literally the first rule of pilot boot camp is to never stop moving. He shook his head, trying to push urgency back into his being. Okay. Focus. The new problem was getting back through the portal that had nearly instantly closed behind him and giving all this information to the people who actually knew how to use it.
The first problem turned out to be that the keyboard had no keys, and no other methods of input he could find beyond the nervous system hell. And honestly even if it did there was no way he’d be able to know what any of it meant.
The screens were still on, glowing green nonsense symbols that he assumed was the kaiju’s writing. He snapped a few pictures of them too. There was also what looked like a map on one monitor.
Several blinking dots wrapped around a sphere with little geography patterns like mountains or caves, and a bunch of squiggly patterns he guessed symbolized bodies of water. Each one had a label connecting to it that was also in the kaiju language.
One of the dots was centered in the middle of the screen and bigger than the others, that must be the ‘you are here’ dot. Jazz couldn’t read any of it obviously, but he could guess…was this a whole ass different planet that the bastards owned? Cause none of this matched any of Earth’s land masses.
“You greedy uglies…you’ve already got plenty of land! Why are you trying to take ours." He hissed to himself, he leaned in, eyeing the little dots.
They had to be other bases, right? Why else would they all be marked the same as the ‘you are here’ dot. They might have portals too if they’re all connected to the breach.
God he hoped so...he had no idea how to even start turning this one back on, if it even still worked. He'd thrown one of the monsters into it during the fight and it was kinda...crooked in a way it hadn't been before. At least it looked like it, but what did he know.
"Okay...closest next dot is like," he paused to guesstimate based on how small the builds icons were, "a hundred-ish miles away?? Oh that'll be a long walk." he groaned.
~~~~~@~~~~~
So yeah, here he was wandering blindly through the world’s most boring alien desert just praying his nav systems didn’t break along the way while he sweat his ass off.
Exciting stuff.
Also, as it turned out, sitting in a giant metal tin can, which was baking under desert sun and temperatures made for a very hot situation. Even with life support keeping him from really getting hurt.
His suit and helmet were disgusting, the material clinging to any skin they could find. The worst part was how it dripped against the spinal connection, ugh. He shuttered as another bead of sweat slowly traveled down the chain of metal and wires unfolded from his back.
He tried in vain to pull at least part of the neckline off. And it did give him sweet relief for half a second, but the tight material just stuck right back when he let go. And as a bonus, he was still wired in to Big Bitsy for the action, so his mech, too, tried to pick at clothes it didn't wear.
Hah, jaegers in giant clothes, his heat fogged mind giggled at the idea. He couldn't actually hear himself over Bitty's straining systems, but he knew he was laughing, and that the sound probably had a rougher edge than he'd have liked.
What would they even wear? They still gotta move well for combat...maybe toga type robes? But that would just get caught in joints... jumpsuits?
The word punched a painful snort from him. Invoking the image of jaegers in track suits racing each other for the killing kaiju Olympic gold.
He wandered for a long while in a kind of daze. Watching the twin suns of this strange planet slowly fall and hoping that they took his heat stroke with them.
All of his remaining mental energy was devoted to keeping one giant foot in front of the other. The red sand beneath him liked to shift, put any weight on it and it would slither away like offended snakes, eager to see him stumble.
The sun eventually set in a gorgeous blaze of purple and gold he didn’t think was possible back on Earth. He watched it go on for maybe almost a full hour, definitely much longer than a sunset back home. This planet either had to be really big, or really slow.
Thankfully the heat did leave with the sun, and he could finally wipe the sweat off himself once he found his towel. He disconnected from his mech and resisted the urge to just tear off the entire suit. Then he'd just have to put it on again and that would be even worse, he'd be damp instead of truly dry. He only had one replacement suit too, buried way back in one of the cockpit’s compartments, and he was saving it for when he could wash this one.
He settled for just taking off his helmet and gloves.
Gods that felt good. He groaned in relief, rubbing the towel over the now available skin until it felt raw. Finally. He sighed heavily as he stood there, the weight of the day really settling in now that he had stopped moving.
He was exhausted, sore, and filthy. His muscles protested every shift, feeling half a wrong turn away from snapping, and his head ached. A dull throb behind his forehead that he knew from experience precursed a migraine from staying linked to his jaeger for too long. He very much should have been home in bed by now, not wandering an alien planet to find his way back.
But that was the risk one took when they agreed to jump into an alien portal.
It was too dark to keep walking anyways, his mechs flood lights barely made a dent in the night sky here.
Guess he was sleeping here tonight and going again in the morning.
Once he felt cleanish, he dropped the towel into what he deemed the "dirty" corner for the time being, linked in again just long enough to sit his jaeger down, and then reached for his emergency sleeping bag. Thank goodness every jaeger was required to have survival supplies for a few days in case a pilot got stranded after a fight.
Alright, nap time!
~~~~~@~~~~~
Jazz had figured he'd wake up the next morning because the alien suns had come back up to boil him in Big Bitsy like a lobster.
Instead, he shot up with a yelp because he was being flung sideways.
He scrambled to get detangled from his sleeping bag, shouting curses he barely even registered. Then the world lurched again, this time throwing him in the opposite direction.
The momentum slammed him into the floor hard and he swore he saw stars for a minute.
He groaned, but there was no time to wallow in pain, he was being moved! By something he had no idea about!
He jumped up again, frantically grabbing onto his pilot sync rig as the jaeger bounced around like a trampoline from hell. He held on tight, taking shaky steps against the violent swaying until he could pull himself close enough to the rig wiring for it to register and tie him in automatically.
A dozen metal tentacles hiding the connecting circuits unfurled, grabbing onto the magnetic joints in his cybernetic implants where his pilot suit revealed them. Then they secured the connection physically, the heavy locks thunking into place made him shiver.
He winced as the wiring locked into his spine next, they tied directly into sensitive nerves and it felt like fire burning down to his soul, but he didn’t have time to grab his helmet.
The piloting rid chimed on as the arm raised him up off the rattling floor, his hub interface glowed bright with red emergency messages that it was being moved by an unknown force.
He slammed on the visual activation button as Bitsy’s limbs powered up. The cameras fizzled static for a long, painful second before they finally connected to his real eyes.
What he saw wasn't the kaiju he expected, it was...a giant face?
What.