"Yes, ma'am," with a blink and a furrowed brow and a bit of surprise at being called by his first name instead of a barked cadet or Jaeger after so many hours of drill instructors. She's a little different, huh? She's also pretty damn enthusiastic about all this, and not in a way he's used to hearing. Fascinating or not, the fact that the kaiju are so acidic has made fighting them all the more dangerous, doesn't it? Even once they're dead, they can still kill scores of people for days and days afterward.

"What do you need the specimens for?" he asks, impulsively, without waiting for permission to speak, because it's still easy and it'll take more than a few days to beat military deference into his head. It's not like they can learn to kill a kaiju any better from a tiny lump of flesh, can they?