Despite the gleam all around, the cookies were stale, like old church lady cookies from after the sermon, the ones she could buy along with her dog food cans for dinner. Better to give cookies at two dollars a pop, than to give nothing, or worse, something as unsweet and modern as Chicken inna Biscuits. But, after too many hours awake off-set by rationed breakfasts, stale cookies had the same comforting effect as the ones in the basement of the First Methodist back home. 

Ribsy sighed, thumbed the play button on her media stick, then watched the small screen light up. One hand occupied with cookies, she set the player on her knee, then captured the dangling headphone and stuffed it into her ear before gathering the player back up and bringing it close enough to watch. The saturated, sixties color was harder to see, not to mention resolution of older stuff didn't hold up so well when miniaturized, still, she knew the movie by heart and her brain filled in the gaps her eyes couldn't quite pick up. 

As the triumphant, tinny music filled her ear, the crunch of cookie her skull space, for a moment, she transported herself back to her six year old self, on the brown shag carpeting, watching the large screen as the first shinto shrine came on screen. A land as fantastical as her unicorn books, she didn't mind so much the clumsy dub job or the lack of color sense because here was a land in which her dreams came alive. People looked like far off elves, black haired with pixie faces or round peach shaped heads. All wore magician robes and the women were as thin as her twelve year old sister was. Men ran about, bow-legged and with fierce Spock-like eyebrows, shouted curses at one another, while children rushed about with bare bottoms and left her giggling on the pillow she'd stolen from the fort she'd made an hour before. 

Best of all, in her memory, was the moment her father walked into the living room, smelling of axle grease and beer. He reached for her, lifted her off the floor and high over his head. 

“What're you watchin' munchkin?” he peered under the veil of her hair as she giggle wildly overhead. His dark brows looked like the men in the movie but not so fierce and he grinned in childish wonder, matching her. “Hell, haven't seen this in a long time. C'mon pickle-spit. Let's get some popcorn.” 

“Mom!” they'd called together and before the mountain broke open and the statue wreaked its havoc on the villagers in their elven town, they had finished a whole bowl of popcorn and two sodas apiece, had watched a statue destroy buildings, lit by a furious green background until, like a fairy tale king in her books, was finally stopped by touch of the heroine's purifying tears on his great, stone boots. 

It was the first time she'd heard the word, “kaiju.” She liked the way it rolled off her tongue and while the other girls used jumprope around one another's middles and played ponies, she used a plastic viking hat from the dollar store and played kaiju with the boys who made forts out of pine needles and ran around with sticks. 

It was also one of the few things in her life she could share alone with her dad. The kaiju movies, the Gozillas and the Motharas, the Daimajin, were for “geeks like us,” and the rest of the family left them well enough alone when they curled on the couch or on the floor with calls for popcorn or illegally out of the dining room bowls of Rocky Road ice cream. Her childhood was softened by the nearness of monsters, made bearable because no one quite knew what to make of a pretty, red headed girl who wanted to play foot ball and who never got over her initial discomfort with bathing in the locker rooms in junior high. 

Then again, it wasn't as if she knew what to do with herself either. In that small Wisconsin town of six hundred, being gay was a sin and being undecided? Well, that just about made things impossible to explain. Granted, it was easier to hide her adolescent leanings because she could date Jory Kelp for six months, but it left her with a feeling that something in her silence was a lie by omission, just because she wouldn't have minded breaking up with Jory for his older sister who was a senior at the time and did Ribsy's hair for the Susie Hawkins dance and who smelled like something floral and edible at the same time. 

College got easier, but the half-light of childhood was impossible to pierce and make whole when she didn't tell her mother that she couldn't come to Thanksgiving that year because Terry was actually Terri, but instead had to make up something about a research assignment for a professor. 

When the San Francisco attacks came, Terri had become Mike and Ribsy called home every few weeks just to let the “fam” know how she was. San Francisco was far from Wisconsin, though, and in the distant way the terrorist bombings of a decade earlier had been, no one back home felt the loss as deeply as Ribsy who had spent three weeks there the summer before with a group of friends. Her mother talked of Mrs. Dalton's son being in San Francisco but he was all right, thank the Lord. Ribsy didn't share how Paul's dad and little sister were still missing. 

Even with the world having moved on, there was still talk in the streets of it being the beginning of a purge which, had she been a good Wisconsin kid, she might have been able to brush off as crazy talk. Because of the Terri's and Kyra's in her life, she couldn't help but take it a little more seriously and despite neither of her parents being that closed minded, it still strained telephone conversations back home. 

She wasn't military, but she had an almost degree in engineering so when the call went out and the first of the volunteers were sent to try out the newest protection against the kaiju (how the word had changed itself around, twisted itself around her memories), a jaeger – the marvels of technology. She had intended to finish her degree and then try to get onto the technical staff, but the promise of being on the inside, watching history happen, had her lined up and begging for a way in. She could wield a mean welding torch if need-be. 

A sign-up turned into a quick psychological and aptitude eval, which morphed into concerned hums and more testing, then more. She laughed about it on the phone to her dad. “They tested me all the way into being a candidate, Dad.” 

“Candidate for what?”

“Fighting those fucking bastards. We can finally stop them.” 

Then they shipped her to Alaska, ran she and a handful of others through final tests, informed her it would be a regular thing, and stuffed her into a room off of a work-out space with a dozen others like her, and gave her stale cookies. Which, she had to admit, she'd eaten because somehow, it had reminded her of those basements from when she was a kid. 

“The Giant Majin, huh?” a deep voice broke into her business and she glanced sidelong at the man who had looked over her shoulder. He gave her a slow smile, easy going, which she liked immediately. “I used to watch that when I was a kid. Go and do my table top with the other geeks and then watch monster movies.” 

“Oh yeah? So you still trying to prove to the world that you're all a B.A. Dragon Necromancer?” she let her head fall back, set the player down on the seat and handed him the other headphone. 

He settled in against her side, warm and solid and human, and chuckled in a way she thought women must have found irresistible. “I was actually into World of Darkness, so it was a Grump Redcap, if you ever did Changeling.” 

“Nah,” she shrugged, “I wasn't enough of a geek to do any role-playing crap. But I had friends who were.” 

“You were probably a cheer leader then,” he laughed. 

“Fuck off, man. No, but I dated one, once.” 

“Oh?” he lifted one brow, “Tom or Tessie?” 

“Actually, she was a Janice and it was only for a few weeks. She got scared someone would find out and she broke up with me.” 

He nodded and didn't seem phased at all, but then, he hadn't really been hitting on her, she knew. They had far bigger, more important things to be doing than playing footsie under the tables. 

“Welcome, new Candidates,” a man at the front of the room called out and the pair of them went obediently into silent mode. She did, however, keep the movie going. He handed her the earphone back and gave her a friendly smile before he returned his attention to the introduction. 

When they moved out, following, en masse, a pissed off blonde Lt. Murphy, the guy came up alongside her. They were almost the same size which said nothing about him and a lot about her. She was six foot one and he had to be six three, so they were almost eye to eye. Most guys found that disconcerting, but it didn't phase his interest at all. 

“Owen Davis. My friends call me Badger.” He grinned and she noticed that his teeth were the kind of white only dentist's kids and Hollywood stars had. 

“You're more like a stork. Okay, I'll bite. What's with the name?” 

“When I was in college, I always stocked up on crap food that you couldn't get at the cafeteria. And I'd moved on from monster movies after table top, to Firefly and stuff like that. So my buddies would come in and ask for things and I'd break out in a fake cockney accent. So they took to calling me Badger, after the fence in the show.” 

“Gotcha,” she offered her hand. “Ribsy. Dad named me Amanda Tucker, but I named myself Ribsy when I was seven. After the Beverly Cleary-” 

“...Cleary book, yeah,” Davis took her hand with a sheepish grin. “I used to read those to my sister's kids. “Cute. Nice to meet you, Ribsy.” 

“Davis,” she reciprocated. “So, what'd you think of that whole scene in the prep room back there?” 

“You mean between Clemens and Murphy? I don't know. Guess, you get stuck waiting as long as they have and I'd guess you rub a few folks the wrong way. We'll be at one another's throats before you know it.” 

“You and me? Get lost. Not gonna happen. I can tell we're best buds already.” She shoved at him and heard him chuckle even as the group slowed and she turned her attention to the blonde woman head of them.