Oooh. That schism between Ruby and Yang and the White Rose Jaeger sounds interesting…
Okay, so gonna quickly clarify that Ruby and Yang’s Jaeger was not the White Rose Jaeger, so I’ll talk about enabler now and the white rose Jaeger later.
Ruby and Yang were two of the first Jaeger pilots of their generation. The prior generation, STRQ, had been the rock stars of the first generation of Jaegers, and as such, there were high expectations for Ruby and Yang. Hell, in a world where drift compatibility was hit or miss, it says a lot that the two got into Beacon’s Ranger training program basically immediately, without intense screening for if they were drift compatible.
Naturally, Ruby and Yang lived up to most of their expectations, excelling in simulations, and eventually real combat. For a year or two, the two were the front line when it came to Vale’s anti-Kaiju operations.
…then things started deteriorating.
See, Drifts, above all else, require trust. The more trust you have for your partner, the more you let in, the better your aura merges, the better you coordinate your Jaeger, and the better you fight.
And Ruby and Yang…started pulling apart. The two obviously spent a lot of time together, but as they got older they started going their own paths, making their own friends.
While a level of drift compatibility isn’t super quantifiable, their aura levels were somewhat quantifiable, and they noticeably lowered. It wasn’t noticeable at first, since their fighting prowess meant their aura rarely got low enough for that to matter.
But eventually it got to the point where their combat performance was really affected.
…and there was another thing.
Around the same time, Ruby began dating for the first time.
The girl Ruby dated was a lovely junior Atlas technician named Ciel Soleil, and as the first girl Ruby dated, she really really didn’t want Yang to know details about her personal life.
So she…left that information out when they were drifting.
Additionally, Yang started getting involved with the wrong crowd. As a Jaeger pilot she got free drinks in every bar in Vale, and she took liberal, liberal advantage of that. To the point where she began having serious substance abuse problems.
Ruby knew, of course, and covered for some of Yang’s faults. Likewise, Yang knew who Ruby was dating, but not necessarily anything else.
However, things came to a head after a particularly bad fight. A Category 3, a Kaiju they would’ve easily dealt with before, got in several brutal hits that almost depleted their aura entirely, and the neural link fed all that pain right back into Ruby and Yang.
Both were…shall we say…not in good spirits. Ruby lashed out at Yang for piloting a Jaeger while drunk. Yang lashed out at Ruby for not having her head in the game.
Words were exchanged, and both left with feelings hurt. Ruby went to her room to sleep, Yang went to the bar.
Unbeknownst to Yang, one of the reasons Ruby had been off her game that day was because she’d broken up with Ciel earlier in the week.
And while Yang was binge drinking at the bar closest to Beacon…a certain Atlesian Technician happened to be drinking in the same bar.
Ciel, for her part, didn’t know who Yang was. Ruby tried to keep her work life away from the woman, and for the most part she respected that. Plus, it’s not like Yang looks particularly similar to Ruby.
Yang, for her part, knew exactly who Ciel was. She was just too drunk to care.
A few too many drinks in, and a few bad decisions later, Yang woke up in Ciel’s apartment…sans clothes.
Upon waking up sober, Yang immediately regretted what she did, and raced back to Beacon.
To her credit, once she got back to her room and puked her guts out, she called Qrow, who helped her get treatment for her addictions.
By the time they were next called up (which was a fair while later given the damage their Jaeger had sustained in the last battle) Ruby had cooled off and recovered from her breakup. Yang had also genuinely made great strides in her own recovery from alcoholism.
…but they still didn’t trust each other.
And when you’re taking on a Category 4 that’s already torn through one Jaeger, you can’t fuck around like that.
They got bodied by the Jaeger, taking damage left and right, until their aura was almost depleted.
At the last moment, Ruby cut her comms and begged Yang to let her in. They needed to drift, fully, or they were going to die.
…Yang reluctantly agreed.
Nobody really knows what happened inside of their Jaeger. They killed the Kaiju, and some observers even though that Ruby and Yang would be back to true form.
…but when they got back, Ruby’s face had tear stains on it, and Yang’s was somber.
About an hour later, Yang sent a memo to Vale’s high command, stating that she and her sister were no longer drift compatible with each other, and she was taking an extended leave of absence from the Jaeger program.
Their Jaeger, for its part, was horribly damaged, and would need extensive repairs.
And in the meantime, Ruby would need to find a new partner to pilot it with.
Fortunately, a young drift compatible heiress from Atlas was already making her way to Vale…
