Born May 25th 2001 and raised in Tolaga Bay, a small town on the East Coast of New Zealand's North Island. Ngaio grows up surrounded and supported by her iwi. When her parents are busy with the motel they own, she's got aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents and older siblings to look after her.
The first three Kaiju attacks seem far away from this tiny town. It takes the attack on Sydney for the New Zealand Government to start encouraging people to move inland, fearing an attack in this country with kilometres of coastline. Though some Tolaga Bay residents move, Ngaio's iwi refuses to leave their ancestral land.
Noticing that air forces have been involved in the Kaiju attacks, Ngaio joins the Gisborne Squadron of the Air Training Corps (ATC) the next year (as soon as she's old enough), determined to keep Kaiju well away from Tolaga Bay so that her family won't have to leave. It's pointed out to her that no one sends Air Cadets on real military work, but she figures it's good preparation for when she's old enough to join the Air Force. No one takes this seriously. Besides, the ATC teach Ngaio some discipline as well as the flying, which her parents think is nice. (The forty-five minute drive to Gisborne, not so much.) It's also pointed out to her that one month before she joined, a Kaiju was killed by this new thing called a Jaeger instead of by airstrikes, but Ngaio dislikes the idea of someone else romping around her head, thinks helicopters look cooler than Jaegers, and would like to point out that there were still helicopters there helping the Jaeger. Thirteen-year-old logic is the best logic.
Teenage hormones are a thing, with boys and a couple of girls. With the high turnover in ATC, no one really cares about fraternization. She barely scrapes Achieved grades at school, but tries harder in things she suspects she'll need in the Air Force, like physics and PE, and she enjoys kapa haka after school when it doesn't clash with Cadets.
The only reason Ngaio never gets promoted to NCO is because she applies to the Royal New Zealand Air Force aged seventeen, and Under Officers need to be at least eighteen. The Sydney Shatterdome opened on her birthday and the RNZAF has started sending pilots over as part of the Anzac forces*; she thinks it's meant to be. Most people support her, but her parents, balking at the thought of their youngest dropping out of her last year of high school to go off to war, initially refuse to let her go before realizing they can't stop her.
Ngaio moves to RNZAF Base Woodbourne and begins Initial Officer Training; the discipline from her Air Cadet days does indeed help. When she starts training as an Air Warfare Officer, she tells everyone who'll listen and even those who won't that she wants to fly in the Kaiju fights.
With the regular Jaeger victories and the funding cuts to the Jaeger Program, Ngaio isn't deployed to the Sydney Shatterdome until she's twenty and a Flight Lieutenant. Learning to fly a Jumphawk is easy given her experience with the RNZAF's helicopters, but she doesn't see real combat until the kaiju Ceramander attacks Hawai'i. It's terrifying and exhilarating and Ngaio feels like she's making a difference. The experience reaffirms her total faith in the Jaeger Program in a time when it's losing public favor. She flies on in support of Striker Eureka's deployments.
On New Year's 2024, she sacrifices her patriotically anti-Australian principles starts a relationship with an Aussie boy who's on the Shatterdome staff (it's totally not fraternization if he's not military).
Within three weeks in 2024, there are two kaiju attacks in New Zealand. Ngaio is vindicated and terrified all at once, and spends a week at home before coming back in time to fly in Brisbane during another attack.
The Sydney Shatterdome closes, and Ngaio moves to the only remaining Shatterdome in Hong Kong, agreeing to try long distance with the Aussie boy.
As the baby of her immediate family and one of the youngest in her generation of her extended family, Ngaio is used to getting what she wants. On one hand, this makes her very determined when it comes to the big things: Once she gets an idea into her head, she will do it, even if no one takes her seriously (see: deciding at age twelve to protect her iwi). On the other hand, she whines when the little, inconsequential things don't go her way (waaaah the cafeteria ran out of her favorite salad dressing); if she had been old enough for social media at the height of #firstworldproblems, it would have been her most used hashtag.
Ngaio is idealistic, and the war hasn't been enough to shake her hope. Even as the world loses faith and takes funds from the Jaeger Program, she still believes in saving the day, that each life they protect and each day her iwi stays in Tolaga Bay is worth the time away from home, the money, the work. On a more micro level, she believes the best of people and trusts very readily; when it comes to people she cares about deeply, she has a total blindspot and thinks they can do no wrong. She takes broken pedestals personally and has a history of gullibility.
Until Air Cadets, Ngaio never had to defend herself, thanks to growing up A) with older family members to stick up for her, and B) in one of New Zealand's very few Maori majority areas, where she's experienced little racism. As a result, she doesn't handle criticism well: She can hold it together in professional contexts, but if it's personal, she snaps back with increasingly ad hominem/"your mum" arguments. Either way, once a critic's out of earshot she calls them haters, and then later she has a drop in confidence for the next few days, acting subdued compared to her usual.
'Usual' is sunny and outgoing, happy to talk to strangers when she finds herself on her own: At the very least, people she doesn't know probably have interesting stories. When the absence of her family, her main support network, hits her, they'll be a good distraction and hopefully her new friends. She gets bored easily and likes to cut loose and have a good time, even if it's with something other people might think is crazy or dangerous. It never quite occurs to her to think ahead further than "is that legal": For most of her life she's always had someone around to tidy up after her, so Ngaio's pretty happy to fly by the seat of her pants.
However, she knows there's a time and a place for that behavior, and she is all business when it comes to flying. The second the Kaiju sirens go off, Air Force Ngaio comes to the forefront and playtime Ngaio stays on base. Even beyond her ideas about protecting her tribe, Ngaio found a genuine passion in flying and put in the work to get there. However, it should be noted that despite her training, Ngaio's better at following orders than giving them.
The world outside Tolaga Bay (or on a more worldly day, the East Coast) has always seemed pretty far away from Ngaio's life. Sure, she's got a sister in Wellington, her Air Cadets Squadron was in Gisborne, and she's traveled around the country for some Cadets training courses, but besides that, she's used to thinking pretty small and pretty local. Back home she never really thought about things for too long unless they affect her family, friends, maybe town, maybe East Coast region; since joining the Air Force, it's only really extended to her Base/Shatterdome and maybe the surrounding city. Ngaio remains pretty oblivious to world events.
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