In an office in Neo Seattle's Command Centre, a young man sits at desk, alternating between staring at several monitors showing a pitched battle from multiple angles, to the tablet he was working on. His hair is messy, his beard unkempt, but his eyes gleam with a crazied sort of energy as he works.
Most of his colleagues considered his habit of planning for Kaiju clean-up before the fight was over to be bizarre and possibly pointless, but he didn't much care. It was better to have at least some idea of what needed to be done ahead of time, rather than delay and let the caustic stuff damage the environment more than necessary. Even with the new decontamination towers, quick clean-up was important.
So he watched, typed, and sketched, his eyes rapidly flicking from the screen to his tablet, and back again, his plans spawning, evolving, and dying in time with the flow of combat and the spilling of Kaiju blood, losing himself in the work. He was always happiest when he was multitasking. It left less processing power to spend thinking about how throughly his world had been turned upside-down.
He still wasn't entirely sure how he'd ended up as the head of the Kaiju clean-up crews. Oh, he knew how he joined the cleaning crews, alright. Driven by his knowledge of chemistry, his horror at the damage the Kaiju could do to the environment around them, his curiosity about Kaiju biology, and, most of all, a burning need to feel useful, he'd foolishly volunteered to deal with the aftermath of Tacit Ronin's duels. The Science Division would have been his first choice, but he was under-qualified for any role where his ideas might be heard, given how the apocalypse wiped out his student records, and his lack of a diploma. So, Kaiju clean-up it was.
His experience handling chemicals, as well as his strict, somewhat obsessive adherence to safety procedures, served him well in his new job. His insistence on others doing the same...probably played a role in his elevation to team leader. It was this new role that pushed him into his current habit, and the result of that habit was that his team was faster at clean-up. He also encouraged his crew to make suggestions for ways to improve things, which had paid off in further speed increases. Ones that ended up spreading to the rest of the crews.
...Okay, so maybe his getting this job wasn't quite as inexplicable as he sometimes thought. Still, he could quite rid himself of the suspicion that someone wanted him in this position for less-than-noble reasons. Maybe they wanted to see him fail out of spite for whatever reason, or maybe they just wanted to drown him in paperwork.
The latter seemed plausible, given the initial deluge when he took his position. However, if that was the case, the joke was on them. His new position came with minions (who had, to his surprise, been perfectly okay with the title, and later even insisted on it), and he abused this shamelessly, shoving as much paperwork as possible onto them. Even though this was by no means enough to keep him from doing any paperwork, he certainly wasn't swamped, either.
And, while the paperwork did lessen his free-time, his new rank had finally spurred him into recording the ideas he'd had floating around for ages, now that he was more confident he'd be listened to. There were a lot of them. He'd always been creative, but the Kaiju had kicked his idea-generation into overdrive, with all the amazing abilities they displayed. The response had been more positive than he dared to hope for. He'd heard that some of his ideas had even caught General Highwind's attention.
No, overall, things were going surprisingly well, given that the world had ended. Not just for him, either. Neo-Seattle was doing better than anyone had expected, in the beginning. But the Council was good at what they did. And if they were a bit...eccentric, well, that only meant he'd fit right in, if he ever joined them.
The young man smiled slightly, watching the raging battle, and all the pools of Kaiju Blue he'd have to figure out efficient removal for. Not to mention all the Kaiju parts to identify, tag, and clean up enough to let Retrieval do it's job.
Well, at least he wasn't going to get bored anytime soon.
*****
Apologies if this sucked. I don't do a lot of prose. Honestly, it's kind of a new thing for me. My previous 'omakes', with one exception, were written in stage-note format, and we're basically just jokes. I don't have a particular fight in mind for when this happens. One of the ones that went well, obviously. TRverse!Nixeu would be a hell of a lot less amused if he was watching, say, the Kaizoku fight.
