Author's Notes: One day, my brother and I were talking about who would make good Jaeger pilots, fictional or otherwise. At one point, he mentioned Phineas and Ferb, and, well, this is where my mind went with that.

Originally, what followed was two separate chapters, but though they felt substantial at the time, upon reflection I have to admit they were pretty flimsy. In the interest of transparency, I just wanted to put that out there. The real "Chapter One" is on its way real soon, though.

Prologue

Back when we were kids, I always found myself asking this same question: "What do you want to do today, Ferb?" When we saw that news report, though, after the first Kaijū attack, the answer to that question went without saying. We looked at each other and knew exactly what we were going to do that day.

And for once, Candace didn't try to bust us. That's how scared she was.

The Kaijū, later named "Trespasser," had just destroyed San Francisco. It took three nuclear bombs to bring him down. Around the world, even in Danville, everyone mourned. They all seemed to try and forget, to move on with their lives and put it behind them. Not us, though. If there was one thing we had learned that summer, it was that if something happened once, it was probably going to happen a bunch more times.

Hearing "aren't you a little young?" from a different deliveryman every day was one thing to put up with. This was an entirely different kettle of fish.

I'm sure you know about the portal by now. Everyone does. Our first idea was to close it, but obviously that never happened. Not for lack of trying, mind you; we tried everything we could think of, but nothing would even pass through it on our end. I don't think I had ever felt so powerless before all this. We kept trying, though, in vein. In fact, we were getting serious tunnel vision. That had never happened before, but what can I say? We were under a lot of pressure. After six months, though, we really started to lose hope.

Then, the second Kaijū attacked. It only took one nuke to bring him down, just east of Manila. That was an improvement, but still not good enough. That's when Ferb and I decided, if we couldn't stop them from coming through the portal, we'd just have to do the next best thing.

Naturally, that involved giant robots.

Well, not "robots" per se. That term implies artificial intelligence, which the Jaegers don't have. They're more like suits. Giant mechanical suits, but suits nonetheless. Apparently the Japanese have a cool word specifically for that—"mecha"—but we didn't know about that at the time.

As for the name "Jaeger," we didn't come up with that either, but . . . well, I'll get to that later. It's complicated.

But yeah, we finally had a plan, and once we knew what direction to go, it wasn't much different from all of our previous projects, really. We even had a deliveryman ask "Aren't you a little young to be building a nuclear reactor?"

In retrospect, I'm kind of surprised we had a guy that would deliver Plutonium-239 right in Danville. Ferb had even come up with this convoluted plan to cheat it out of some Libyan terrorists, which would have been fun, but we were in a hurry. We had no idea when the next Kaijū would attack, so we went the simpler route.

The only real snag along the way was figuring out just how to control such a massive thing. Simple voice commands or analog control just wouldn't cut it; in the heat of the moment, against something like a Kaijū, we couldn't afford to process our thoughts and actions through some sort of middle man. We needed one-to-one control.

The neural bridge gave us just that.

But first, we tested the process out on Irving. He was more than willing to help, and we appreciate that, because things did not go well that first time at all. Controlling the Jaeger directly with one's mind seemed like the best idea ever, but one mind wasn't able to handle that kind of mental load. I don't want to sound overdramatic, but I think Irving would have died if we hadn't pulled him out as soon as we did.

I needed to do some major thinking, so I went up to mine and Ferb's room. We hadn't come so far just to give up, but I was at a complete loss.

I opened the door only to find Perry waiting for me. In a hat. On his hind legs. That was when things got weird.