The battle for the sovereignty of North Sentinel Island
Monday, July 22, 2013
It remains a mystery why the Kaiju would attack North Sentinel Island, which lay in the waters off the coast of southern India. The tiny island was populated by an ancient people called the Sentinelese, who were hunter-gatherers with a way of life that was unchanged by modern civilisation. Why would the Kaiju choose to attack this group of people with only spears to defend themselves with instead of attacking Calcutta and making their way to Delhi?
Perhaps the answer lay in a theory propounded by an administrative clerk employed by the Survey of India, a government agency tasked with mapping the country. In a letter to the Editor of The Telegraph, he explained that the island was studied in great detail by an English naturalist whose work was unfortunately discredited completely when he claimed that the giant creatures described in the oral legends of the Sentinelese might be the same dragons that appear so frequently in European and Oriental myths. The naturalist was laughed off the stage at the The Royal Society of London and was never heard from again, presumably dying eventually in abject poverty. Could these creatures be the Kaiju, the clerk asked, instead of the mythical dragons? It is unknown if the Editor published the letter merely out of amusement, but it went by largely ignored by the readers.
Regardless of the reason, the first Kaiju attack in India happened on North Sentinel Island. The country was almost taken by surprise, as it was only a year after K-Day, and the construction of our first Jaeger, Juggernaut, was not yet complete. In many ways, that fateful day marked the beginning of the rule of Ray, who would go down in history as possibly India's greatest leader of the modern era.
Every schoolboy learns about the man who would cause political upheaval and lead a country during its time of need. Not everyone knew his story though. For he had no story. He was an orphan of no religion or ethnicity. The Indian Army adopted him in its scheme to train urchins to become soldiers. They called him Ray.
Ray would rise up the ranks quickly, eventually qualifying for the Jaeger program. He joined three other promising candidates selected to pilot Juggernaut. If he wondered which of the shortlisted four would eventually qualify to become the pilot pair, he needn't have worried. All four of them were the pilots, for Juggernaut was not a biped Jaeger like the others before him. He was a four legged colossus.
Remembering his history lessons which described medieval battles with war elephants, Ray looked up in awe at Juggernaut. He stood as tall, or perhaps taller than the American Jaeger, Gipsy Danger. Ray's eyes would widen more in surprise later, when he would realize that Juggernaut could stand up on his hind legs and raise his forelegs in the air, towering over every other Jaeger in the world. He smiled as he realized that the Asian giants, as China and India were often referred to, would use the Kaiju attacks to prove to the world how powerful they really were. If India had spent so much on building its Jaeger, he shuddered to think of what China was capable of.
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The Kaiju that made its way to North Sentinel Island was spotted on the radar by the Coast Guard. The government made its decision. The island was far too insignificant to defend. Its destruction would buy them time to finish Juggernaut's construction before the Kaiju attacks began on the mainland. That was the story that was fed to the press anyway. In truth though, Juggernaut was a white elephant project designed to use the fears of the people to spend their taxes on a colossal venture from which billions of rupees would be siphoned off by the government. Was Juggernaut actually intended to serve in active duty? Ray didn't wait to find out. Frustrated with the rampant corruption, he commandeered the public address system at the defence research headquarters, where the pilots and Jaeger crew were housed, and spoke:
"The Sentinelese might be uncivilised tribesmen, but remember this. They have never been invaded since the dawn of time. Let's keep it that way.
It's time for Juggernaut to defend his country."
It must have been a rousing speech, as the Action Stations! alarm went off across the base. Crewmen rushed to their positions, and in an hour, Juggernaut was powering up. Ray rushed to the command console where he found his co-pilots waiting. They saluted him as he entered. It was time to take charge, he realized. No elephant rode well under four mahouts. It needed a commander.
The Kaiju lay in wait near the waters of North Sentinel Island, almost as if in anticipation for a battle with a Jaeger. It took almost a day for Juggernaut to reach the island, after being airlifted from the Madras Harbour. It must have been a spectacular sight for the Sentinelese to witness a colossal machine rise out of the water and make its way to the shore, but they did not run back into the forest screaming in terror. It was at that moment that Ray realized that this was not the first time that these ancient people had encountered something that big.
Juggernaut battled with the Kaiju, creating waves of tsunamis that crashed into the shore. The Sentinelese were brave people; they watched from treetops as the water swept everything away underneath. It was when another Kaiju suddenly appeared and Juggernaut was forced into a defensive position, that the tribesmen decided to join the fight. Apparently unafraid of the behemoths around them, they climbed down to the ground, pulled out their bows, dipped their arrow tips into bowls containing an unidentified liquid, and took aim. As the Kaiju leaned on its hind legs, exposing its skin beneath the scales, they fired. Most of them found their mark. The Kaiju convulsed, apparently affected by whatever poisoned it. It lurched forward, seemingly losing consciousness. Juggernaut went in for the kill. After the death of the first one, the second was dispatched rather quickly.
Ray returned a hero, armed with knowledge that would give humanity a fighting chance against the Kaiju onslaught. He wondered if the Sentinelese had fought off these creatures before, when they might have been attacked some time in prehistory. As we now know, the Kaiju were not interested in our lush prehistoric world and decided to attack later when we reached the Industrial Age. Did they come back to North Sentinel Island to kill off the only people who knew how to kill them?
The Sentinelese compound, as we referred to the poison that we equipped our Jaeger weapons with, saved millions of lives in Kaiju attacks. Until the Kaiju evolved an immunity to it. By then, we had Indus Omega and Asura Alpha to defend us and Ray as our leader.
posted by foogarky @ 3:02 AM,
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The untold story of the Indian Jaegers
Monday, July 15, 2013
It was quite fitting that we would call our first Jaeger the Juggernaut. It was a word of an Indian origin, invented by the English to refer to a destructive and unstoppable force that crushed whatever stood before it. The Juggernaut we built towered over our people and even though they stared at him in awe, they were not unfamiliar with the idea of giant beasts used in warfare. This was the land of war elephants after all.
It was on K-Day, when the world first witnessed the terrifying sight of those behemoths we now call the Kaiju, that India began its Jaeger program, realizing that if it needed to be taken seriously as a force to be reckoned with, then it would need to defend itself against this common enemy on its own. The defence research organisations, long crippled by a lack of funds, quite remarkably stepped up to the challenge. It had taken the threat of an apocalypse to jolt a nation out of its self-destructive slumber.
Juggernaut was soon joined by his brothers-in-arms, Asura Alpha and Indus Omega. Indus Omega was a Mark-3 Jaeger, but Asura Alpha had no rank. He was a beast of a different making. It was after successive defeats suffered by humanity against the hitherto unseen Category 4 Kaiju that India decided to try something that no one else would. It was an idea born out of desperation, yet somehow we managed to pull it off. A battered, dying Kaiju was brought back to life, equipped with prosthetic Jaeger weapons in place of its missing limbs, and a command console with a human pilot installed in its brain to mind-meld with its native consciousness. We had created the unholy spawn of a Kaiju-Jaeger coupling. Against incredible odds, it worked. It was alive. It was the alpha among Asuras.
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Unfortunately though, it was India that bore the brunt of most Kaiju attacks. The abundance of ports on the coastline must have made easy targets. The Juggernaut was the first to fall, heroically defending Calcutta. He took the Kaiju down with him, detonating in mid-sea.
Indus Omega was next, tragically succumbing to a Category 4 Kaiju that attacked Pakistan, our neighbour with no Jaegers to defend itself. In times of distress, old feuds were forgotten. We had offered our help and sent in Indus Omega. He was out of his league though. Category 4 Kaiju are fearsome beasts. Indus Omega defended Karachi in a losing battle, buying time for Asura Alpha.
After Indus Omega went down, the Kaiju had barely set its sights on the harbour before Asura Alpha appeared, blocking its path. It did not stand a chance. That was the moment when we realized that we might not be able to control this monster of our own making. Asura Alpha savagely attacked the Kaiju and tore it apart, flooding the seawaters of Karachi with toxic blood.
He has not been heard from since, though we received reports that he was seen headed towards the Breach. We don't know if he made it through. Was it an attempt to go to wherever these infernal creatures came from and destroy them all, right at the source? We might never know. For now, India is safe. We have rebuilt Indus Omega. We will continue our fight.
posted by foogarky @ 1:34 PM,
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The Author
foogarky
foogarky is the pseudonym of the fictional construct who battles for supremacy with other constructed personas in the mind of a crazed individual. He describes himself as a man living in a non descript house in Rio De Janiero, Brazil with two dogs and a parakeet.
About This Blog
The Loony Lampoonist serves to parody, spoof and satirize everything that needs to be parodied, spoofed and satirized. Due to the fictional nature of this electronic journal, any anecdotes appearing here ever so often that seem to be personal in nature, would suffer from the effects of conflicting personalities, the creation of fictional events and the inclusion of non existent characters who did not make it to the big league in the author's literary works. Thus, the Loony Lampoonist is also a purgatory for characters and ideas that have missed the limelight.
