Pacific Rim Adjacent Terrafell Thoughts
Because I once read that every fandom needs a Pacific Rim AU, and I am nothing if not determined to be Terrafell's fandom. I have a vague idea that I might have posted something like this before, but Tumblr's search function says I haven't, so...hopefully this post is sufficiently different from any previous posts that may or may not exist. XD
I know most of the time fandoms like to make their romantic couples drift compatible, but I think that Morwen and Gavrel actually aren't. Partly because Gavrel in his current state wouldn't be able to drift with anyone due to repressed trauma that would have him following the rabbit every. darn. time, but partly just because they are so very mentally different.
No, Gavrel is drift-compatible with Atticus. This was discovered not in the official sparring ring but because Atticus tripped Gavrel in the mess hall and Amelios saw the ensuing food fight and immediately dumped them into a Jaeger together because neither of them could get a hand up on the other and nobody else had ever been able to get a hit in on either of them. They both hate it. They hate it so much. They catch themselves walking in step and deliberately stop for half a second to change the rhythm but they stop for the same amount of time so they're still in step. Atticus tackles Gavrel. Gavrel noogies Atticus. Atticus bites him. The only time they can work together without getting into a slap fight like children is in combat, where they are terrifyingly effective.
Lekjun and Ae-Ra are, of course, a brother-sister pilot team and very good at it. However, they seem to go out of their way to cause property damage in any city their tiny backwater country has ever disagreed with, which is a lot of countries, which means they only get deployed to weird remote locations or when absolutely nobody else is available.
Kaera and Atticus were drift-compatible once. They were both teenagers. They piloted an abandoned Jaeger to defend the little town they were living in, and they fought off the monsters, but the Jaeger was torn to pieces and Atticus left Kaera for dead. She has never forgiven him. She would probably have been drift-compatible with the man who found her in the wreckage and taught her to fight, but they never got the chance to try. She is now a Jaeger mechanic fuelled by pure rage. Everyone knows better than to suggest that she so much as exist in the same room as Atticus, let alone try to get into a Jaeger with him again.
Casimir is definitely the base mad scientist. He's also the base medic. More than one person finds this concerning, but nobody else who is capable of doing his job has a strong enough stomach for it.
Peles...I think Peles might be the base commander? He's weird and ominous but he's good at keeping things running and eventually everyone adopts him as their creepy dad marshal. He is drift-compatible with Casimir, but Casimir is absolute pants at combat unless! he's on a boat. As you cannot take a Jaeger on a boat without sinking the boat, this means that the risks of putting the two of them in a Jaeger massively outweigh the rewards, most of the time.
The Vanced family can all pilot each others' Jaegers and they swap drift partners like it's a game of musical chairs. They have all swapped mannerisms with each other subconsciously and are nigh-impossible to tell apart, but they're also all great company. They collectively manages the pilots on a day-to-day basis, I think. Anything that isn't a big enough deal to involve Peles, you take to a Vanced. Any Vanced. If he/she can't fix it, he knows who can. It's not a military chain of command, though they know how to fake one if anyone outside the base comes knocking, but it works really, really well.
Bishop and Izzat are drift-compatible but not people-compatible. Don't touch them. Don't look at them. If you have to look at or touch one of them, make it Izzat; at least he won't stab you.
Amelios is not officially in charge of any of these people. Officially, he is some form of bureaucrat. Nobody knows quite what kind. Practically, he is the only thing standing between the pilots (gifted, necessary, incredibly undiplomatic) and political stupidity that would probably annihilate the world by taking them out of action. He can drift with anyone, in theory. In practice, the last person he trusted enough to be anywhere near a psychic bond with died five years ago because Gavrel sacrificed him in a desperate play to stop a monster. Atticus has never forgiven Gavrel for this because said person was also his foster-father. Amelios is Fine About It because he has higher priorities. (He is not actually fine, but he's also never gotten over anything in his life and he manages to function anyway so it doesn't make as big a difference to him as it does to Atticus.)
Morwen has to be the plucky but gifted newbie, of course. She...hm. I feel like her tendency to blow herself up takes the form of solo piloting adventures in this world, but I'm not 100% sure how that should happen. I'll say that she lives in a coastal town and somehow a monster manages to deactivate a Jaeger within a very short distance of the shore, and the pilots use the escape pods but that takes them too far away from their mech to get back in time to save the town. Enter one determined Morwen with a car battery and the power of grim determination. She jump-starts the Jaeger somehow and fights the monster off, barely, but then she passes out due to neurological strain. The pilots return and rescue her, and she wakes up on base with Casimir looking after her (which is why she likes him and thinks he's helpful rather than being put off by his mad scientist side). She bonds with Gavrel and starts pulling him out of his post-Arcturus depression, but it's painfully obvious to everyone that the two of them are not drift compatible and not going to be, even though Morwen is a better pilot than she has any right to be. She also manages to bond with Atticus, and this forces Atticus and Gavrel to be around to each other, which leads to the food fight which leads to them being assigned together as pilots.
One thing I have not figured out is who Morwen actually ends up being drift compatible with in this world. Does she join Atticus and Gavrel's team somehow? Three-person Jaegers are a thing. Or does she end up working with one of the many Vanced cousins? Perhaps she even worms her way into a father-daughter relationship with Amelios and the two of them end up piloting a Jaeger together to everyone's collective confusion.
@scleroticstatue @exploding-the-wine-cellar @kanerallels @accidental-spice @sunflowergardens-world
@sweetcardamom @awwyeah-rambles let me know what you think...