In 1932, Baloo’s Air Service was reincorporated as Higher for Hire, and twelve-year-old Kit Cloudkicker hired as their navigator. He began studying to become a pilot but did not qualify for “five more years." In 1934, the “Flying Dupes” incident occurred: the Higher for Hire cargo air courier unwittingly delivered a bomb to Thembrian High Marshall’s summer home. The scandal made regional headlines and uncovered a fifth column in Thembria dedicated to inciting war with Usland. Throughout 1935, Higher for Hire business nosedived as political factions formed in the city state of Cape Suzette. Many upheld a conspiracy theory that Higher for Hire was run by adherents to an empire of otters to intent on stoking a hot war among Usland and Thembria.

Then in 1936, Bombing! Higher for Higher was obliterated in a blast that flattened the entire air cargo cove south of Downtown Cape Suzette. Years later, it was revealed to be a false flag attack masking as the nationalists who believed Higher for Hire was a cover operation for Imperial otters in Cape Suzette. In fact, the false flag was officially blamed on “otter operatives who swam under the air cargo dock, affixing barrels of shimose powder to the main building foundation wall.” The true culprits were never proven or captured.

Rebecca and Kit were peeling Baloo plastered to Louie’s bar top that morning. An underaged Kit had learned how to fly and managed the plane into a landing among the wood splinter debris field a mere hours later. They landed among brown toxic smoke and fireboats draping their vails of water over a flaming foundation of a completely pulverized Higher-for-Hire. Rebecca was beside herself in grief but staring blankly at the wreckage in a newspaper side column article photo. The publicity and the ensuing Nationalist and Otter Empire loyalist sectarian violence (city hall, gambling ship, and other Downtown bombings) forced Baloo, Kit and Rebecca (with her daughter) to retreat to remote island waypoint villages at the border of the French and British mandates (long blurred since the Great War).

The three of them spent the remainder of 1936 living out of a run-down hotel and bar – where both Kit and Baloo made some money flying the Sea Duck among borderland islands. These courier runs were essential to villages surviving us the Usland government and economy was nearing collapse withering political violence and pressure from larger Imperial powers (on both sides). After a long hot monsoonal squall, radio reports came into the bar of a sort of fireball that reached into the sky from one particularly small island. Indigenous villagers on the surrounding atoll swore it was a volcano. On an evacuation run, Kit, Rebecca and Baloo could barely make out the pulverized remains of the huge bunker oil storage tanks that had once lined a natural cove. There indeed was a crittermade crater the size of a Cape Suzette secondary school. Only one craft in the whole of the South Pacific could deliver a rumored 12,000 lb. “blockbuster” at that time: the Iron Vulture. But why would Air Pirates, who’d fallen to back page headlines amidst the geopolitical turmoil, want to destroy, and not pillage?

The region devolved into a near apocalyptic and lawless landscape of blurred boundaries, with bounties, teaming bars, and apparently bombings. This made headlines as far back as London, where an aristocratic debutante fox had taken to flying as a distraction from her third failed “season.” She had grown tired of London’s tedious formalities, and the scolding she’d heard countless times for breaking into nightclubs as an eager flapper. After a brief stint as a (terrible) singer in a certain Newark bar in early 1935, she decided to leave for the storied pilots watering holes of the South Pacific. In all that time since London, she’d learned to barnstorm, fistfight, and shoot. She was rumored to have learned to swordfight while dating a Hollywoodland star in mid 1936. Still, nothing captivated her like the real danger of one South Pacific bar burning with rumors of Air Pirates inexplicable “gone mad” and bereft of their old code of conduct.

At the same time, a skinny red fox grifter from West Yorkshire had also found his way to this same bar – having been on the lam out of England (and for fear of extradition, the US). His layers of flimflammery meant one never really trusted his word, and he was all the happier to be a hemisphere where he didn’t have to care what anyone believed or didn’t. As such, he was a terrible leader and an excellent distraction.

In early 1937, a then adult Kit Cloudkicker, Rebecca, Baloo and the two newcomers from England gathered around the second-floor card table to discuss the day’s news: a whole China Clipper landed at their tiny outpost (population 100 to 200 depending on the warfage). The pilot stumbled out, exclaiming he’d diverted from a waypoint that had been destroyed by some army or air corps. A new possibility had reemerged after they’d peered from that table, through a window, and through the hot midnight monsoon. There silhouetted in the lightning flashes among the palm groves – a short, skinny weasel infamous for being Don Karnage’s second-in-command. He’d been lurking around the hastily moored Clipper – and they watched him steel it with only a dingy of a detachment. Rather than interfere, the 5 vowed to head off in the morning to the Mandate border in pursuit of an anchored clipper to find out the Air Pirates new “mission.” After five days, they found, bound, and gagged the infamous Mad Dog.

PS: The argument between Kit and the aristocratic vixen "poseur" that ensued over what to do with Mad Dog's crate was only the beginning of a long and combative rivalry.