Aeon Entelechy Evangelion (ANE rewrite)

[sebsmith]

You wish. You don't think ES is going to give clues that aren't in the form of German poetry and Hindu hypermath puzzles, now do you?

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First, I can work with that.


Second, this was the reason I asked for the characters he wants us paying attention to, as opposed to the characters we should be paying attention to.

 

[DakkaMania]

I'm imagining that the Combat Blanks look like that mook from the beginning of Metal Gear Rising trailer.


Edit: Losing eyes seems to be a running theme among the pilots. I won't be surprised If Kaworu (and possibly Toji, Mana and Mari) had or will have some kind of eye trauma.


Edit 2: Does Dan Sylveste exists in your fic?

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I think the eye injuries are simply do to how fragile the human eye is. Bright light or a sharp object can do tremendous damage. And in an active war where shrapnel flies around and both sides make heavy use of laser and plasma weapons there isn't a short supply of opportunities to get them destroyed.

 

[Jonen C]

Eyes are windows to the soul, yes? So what does it tell you that replacements for the mark one eyeball are so very common in the New Earth Government Armed Forces (and fun with acronyms!)?
Aside from the fact that cybernetic enhancement is commonplace.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I think the eye injuries are simply do to how fragile the human eye is. Bright light or a sharp object can do tremendous damage. And in an active war where shrapnel flies around and both sides make heavy use of laser and plasma weapons there isn't a short supply of opportunities to get them destroyed.

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Yes. To add to that, since I started ANE, I've got to know a couple of people doing PhDs in optics and photonics. Lasers... are scary. A class 3B laser can blind from the reflection of the light from a non-matte surface. A class 4 laser can blind you before the blink reflex kicks in even if you're looking at a matte black surface. The weaponised lasers in this setting are... gods, you don't want to be walking around unprotected.

There's a reason that the AEE NEG has, as a standard policy, replacing the eyes of every recruit who doesn't object (the objectors get harcontacts) with Eyes. It's simply expediency. They don't do it for the AR-interface, or the IR or UV or light polarisation which an Eye can perceive. It's so that you can't fry the optic nerve, because at worst it'll force the Eye to shutdown and damage the machinery, rather than transmitting it. I stole the concept of Eyes from the things that the Coalition give their soldiers in Exultant, when they're operating in the galactic core. Oh, and there's also a balance that humans and Nazzadi with Eyes are visually the same; Nazzadi get better colour vision, humans get better night vision.

The sociological effects of Nazzadi in the military having human-level colour vision have produced a massive amount of papers from sociology departments, simply because they tend to find Nazzadi designs too bright and clashing. Some even accuse the NEG of cultural imperialism, and claim that you should turn the colour-perception down when off duty; a lot don't, because... hey, extra colour vision, but do tend to "buy human" more than they used to.

...

I have to admit at being perplexed at the people who are taking Asuka's dream literally. It's a nightmare. Even if it's based on real events, that doesn't mean that it happened as it was described. And that doesn't mean that it happened at all at all, necessarily. I mean, wouldn't it be rather uncharacteristic of me to give something like that in which the surface interpretation is the only one.

First, I can work with that.

Second, this was the reason I asked for the characters he wants us paying attention to, as opposed to the characters we should be paying attention to.

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Uh... yeah, you should assume that you should be paying attention to everyone. I have a big-and-getting-bigger spreadsheet, which I store character detail on; even if they're only mentioned in passing, a lot of the time they'll have a character appearance, name, and a quirk. It's in case I want to use them later. I like verisimilitude, so I try to make the universe a living one, rather than one which just rotates around the "Player Characters".

And, more generally, I write so people can have fun speculating, because I have fun speculating.

 

[Shinr]

I was referring to Children and their tendency to lose their Eye(s) in one way or another shortly or immediately after they are introduced.


Rei lost her eye during the test of Unit-00 and we get to view the hollow socket, Shinji's eye was indirectly plucked out by Asherah and now Asuka got nightmares about her eyes burning while she was a child.


And none of those involved lasers and shrapnel, except probably Asuka.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I was referring to Children and their tendency to lose their Eye(s) in one way or another shortly or immediately after they are introduced.


Rei lost her eye during the test of Unit-00 and we get to view the hollow socket, Shinji's eye was indirectly plucked out by Asherah and now Asuka got nightmares about her eyes burning while she was a child.


And none of those involved lasers and shrapnel, except probably Asuka.

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So... you are referring to the fact that, canonically, Unit 01 lost an eye against the Third Angel, and Rei had an injured eye in the Unit 00 test (bearing in mind that I need to injure characters more, because of the better medical tech, if they need to be injured for a certain amount of time for plot reasons)? That's... that's not a very sound foundation for a hypothesis.

Why do the Nazzadi Elites remind me of Replicas?


And I admit, I am impressed. If the NEG can pick up so many alterations to a body, there is no way a Tager or Dhoanoid should slip through that easily.

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Hmm, certainly, in a sense, the Eidelon Project is designed as a counter to the fact that Loyalist Elite are just plain Better Than You, because they're basically humans built to Migou standards. But the Loyalists in general, especially the Elite, get to look through the Eclipse Phase section on biomods, and take what they want, while the NEG has basically strictly defined lists of what they can take.


And, remember, most of what a Tager or a Dhohanoid is is a spiritual-soul-related thing, not the technological solutions of the Migou. The way you find them is completely different.


Dhohanoids, in particular, have a real problem with "I would have gotten away with it, if it hadn't been for you wretched kids! And your cat!"... which, more accurately, would be to say that babies tend to get freaked out by them, as do cats; the problem is a lot of things frighten cats and babies, so there's a lot of false positives. And C-Corp has ways around it, like the whole "transplant a Dhohanoid nervous system into their own cloned body, and they won't show up until they transform, and the cloned flesh gets warped".

Soooooo, anyone want to make bets on how annoyed Asuka is going to be when she figures out Shinji did all this with zilch training? Side bets include whether or not she's more pissed at him or his superior officers about it.

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True fact. The D-Engine is soon going to be replaced by the Asuka-Engine, which can produce nuclear yields from a sealed case about the size of a human being. You fuel it by feeding in the Third Child's synch ratio, and kill count, and other such things.

 

[Winged Knight]

True fact. The D-Engine is soon going to be replaced by the Asuka-Engine, which can produce nuclear yields from a sealed case about the size of a human being. You fuel it by feeding in the Third Child's synch ratio, and kill count, and other such things.

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My word, it could have potentially infinite power!


Migou 1: Wait... so those silly monkeys have actually weaponized getting pissed off? In the form of a little girl?

Migou 2: See, this is one of the many reasons why we're even bothering with this backwater. These guys are nuts.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Come on, people, a little more speculation and trying to slot things together. It is the fuel which... um, fuels my authorial fires. I mean, no-one's even tried to guess the difference between AEON, ENTELECHY and EVANGELION chapters yet.

On the balance, I thought that was an improvement. It could have used some more detailed polishing, but generally speaking it had better flow and pacing. I'll be honest though, I wasn't really 'sold' on Asuka for the most part - there were moments where I thought you were hitting the mark (Asuka asking Kaji about his exploits for the day = great), but a lot of the time I just wasn't feeling it. That's not really a mark on you, mind. You don't have Miyamura Yuko on your side, and as a character Asuka burns in the hearts of all old timey otaku. These are big boots to fill when it comes to characterisation: complain though we might about Shinji, his interactions with Asuka are often priceless.

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I know. There was just something I couldn't quite grab about her, while having to do new material. Reading it myself (which, admittedly, might be something about being the author, so I know what I was thinking when writing it), there's something a little mechanistic about it, as if she's just producing Asuka-like dialogue in response to external stimuli, as opposed to other characters, who have this odd little internal personality running inside my head, which produces dialogue on its own more naturally. It's an odd sensation, that.


Basically, the defining note I had to myself when writing this chapter (which really exists for her, well, that and infodumping about the Migou), was "Very Nearly As Good As She Thinks She Is".


And, yes, I would like to thank you for the advice after last chapter. I did specifically go through, and trim out most of the parenthesises, and rework quite a bit of the more factual parts, to make them flow better. It's nice to see that it had some effect.

Also, I don't know about anyone else, but everytime 'grey-green' showed up, I saw 'red'.

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... I may be saving that for an important in-universe moment, so that she can properly become the Red Devil.

 

[lancelot]

Before Asuka runs into Shinji, I would really suggest Kaji being smart enough to not let Asuka know just how 'extensive' Shinji's training really was so that she doesn't stick her foot in her mouth and humiliate herself.


If that happened Asuka would, mental help or not almost always feel defensive because of that first impression and lash out at Shinji for whatever real fault she could find.


Or at least that is what I think.

 

[Shockz]

I mean, no-one's even tried to guess the difference between AEON, ENTELECHY and EVANGELION chapters yet.

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Didn't you tell us at some point? Way back at the end of the ANE thread, maybe? I remember that AEON chapters are the "worldbuilding" ones, showing Shinji or someone else's everyday life (giving the readers a sense of what it's like to live in the Strange AEON), and EVANGELION chapters are obviously the ones with Big Epic Battles (usually Harbingers vs. EVANGELIONs). Don't quite recall what you said about the ENTELECHY chapters, though I suspect they're focused around The Big Conspiracy (you know, whatever whatshisname was referring to when he said it was time for ENTELECHY to begin).

 

[Shinr]

How much NEG can legally get away with the cyber and bio modifications?


Edit: What is a nature of Unit-02 combat tentacles? Is it magic, a part of the EVA or Asuka's Stand projected through the EVA?

 

[Shinr]

Imagine reading a version of Murder on the Orient Express where the train explodes in mid setup. Then, it might be harder to build up as much enthusiasm for a new version, purportedly better than the first.

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The ANE thread took almost a 3/4 of a year (from November to July) to get to the 14th page before it started to get really active when Operation CATO started, though. So I wouldn't call it a lack of enthusiasm, just simply the fact that we are simply reading the same but very refined and distilled version of what we already red and speculated a year ago.


Edit: On the bright side, this thread is almost guaranteed to be free of all that off-topic nonsense that tends to plague the Nobody Dies thread. Poor Gregg.


Edit 2: I'm assuming that everything from late ANE is viable here, so how did the NEG were able to bring the GODSPEAR to the orbit despite the Migou superiority?


Edit 3: What is a difference between a Project and the Group? And just how many are there spin-offs of the original Evangelion Project/Group? (Engel, Herkunft, Achtzig and possibly Amunet are the known ones)

 

[EarthScorpion]

Edit 3: What is a difference between a Project and the Group? And just how many are there spin-offs of the original Evangelion Project/Group? (Engel, Herkunft, Achtzig and possibly Amunet are the known ones)

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Ah, yes, the formal difference between a Group and a Project is never really stated, but it's well defined concept in my notes. Basically, a Project is the base unit of Ashcroft pushing-the-edges-of-current-technologyness. A Project is an association of researchers linked around (theoretically, although they tend to bloat, because science isn't need) a single facet of technology. For example, probably the oldest and largest of the borderline Projects (there are other mainstream ones, which do things like work on computer designs, or nanofactories) is Project Herkunft, which is actually older than the New Earth Government. Naturally, as time goes on, they start to generate spin-off things, as sub-facets prove productive, and the importance of the central Project often starts to diminish. A Group, therefore, is an administrative link between multiple closely related Projects, normally named after the first of the Projects; the Hekunft Group, for example, is composed of Project Herkunft, Project Eidelon, Project Icarus, Project Paragon, and so on, while the Evangelion Group has Project Evangelion, Project Magi, Project Marduk, and so on.


Now, things get a little more complicated, as, technically, by Ashcroft rules, Project Engel and Project Achtzig, as spin-offs of Project Evangelion and Project Magi respectively, should have come under the Evangelion Group, instead of being separate Projects, and then separate Groups. But, well, the original Project Evangelion ended... poorly, and so, in a sense, this was people jumping ship, trying to salvage technology. And it was in... certain group's interests that such useful technologies not be too tied, officially, to the Evangelion Group. For example, the Engel Group certainly has the resources and knowledge to recreate the original Project Evangelion, but they haven't, because they don't have the highly-skilled manpower for such a high attrition Project, especially when Dr Miyakame, as a member of the original Project, lost so many friends and colleagues to it. Of course, the fact that until recently, it was viewed as a legacy Project, useful for what it produced, waiting until the MP model could be refined and approved, may have had something for that.


Moreover, there are also Projects which never become Groups, simply because they were tightly defined enough that they never generated spin-offs, like Project Ngoubou; there's also the Armacham Group, which is basically Ashcroft's pet internal security force (and does all the Section 2 stuff from canon Eva), and which doesn't have any internal Projects, but is instead divided up in military-style units and rankings.

 

[Shinr]

I imagine that the relationships between groups and projects tend to get strained, especially when the products of one particular project tends to be in demand by everybody (like Achtzig with their cyber-mods needed by at least Herkunft, Engel and Eva projects).

there's also the Armacham Group, which is basically Ashcroft's pet internal security force (and does all the Section 2 stuff from canon Eva), and which doesn't have any internal Projects, but is instead divided up in military-style units and rankings.

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From the multi-billion corporation with its own army in FEAR to just a rent-a-army in AEE.


With all these C&C characters I'm reminded of that mock-RTS discussion way back in ANE thread, where the Replica faction was broken.

 

[Cavalier]

Well, if one wants speculation and wild guessing, there are certainly a few points that remain opaque to me. Am less sure if they are to others.

The prologue. No doubt there is some deeper meaning to putting the poem there and it certainly has a haunting element to it that fits well with the story. Possibly encoded there are some clues, though more likely it provides a foretaste of the themes of AEE. Looking through the whole Duino Elegies or the broader work of Rilke would be rewarding for itself but probably not for finding foreshadowing except in the vaguest possible sense. I do wonder if the prominence of German is because Earth Scorpion likes the language, because it is linked to the occult (among many other associations) by stereotype, or because 19th century Romanticism in Germany produced a lot of melancholy literary-philosophical works. The latter two obviously being directly related to the content of the story.

Moving on, it's obvious the conversation that follows is set in Gendo's office, after a massacre, in what may be the future or the past or an alternate universe. There is one woman, ghostly pale with white hair and gray eyes, who has apparently participated in or carried out the massacre. It would seem to be Rei, though this Rei has more of a personality than we've seen out of her to date. The dark haired woman who names herself Gilgamesh and may or may not have instigated or taken part in the massacre is more obscure. There is obviously some kind of relationship between the two, in appearance and mannerism, and given who and what Rei is related to that is scary. Certainly the darker-haired woman had enough force to not be bothered by Gendo's elaborate defenses and could dispel and scare bound ENEs trivially. Alma Wade is of course a suspect, but again her dialogue doesn't seem to match what little of Alma is known. She seems to be looking for something missing, probably the equivalent of Adam, that is missing; because the white-haired girl took it? Is the darker-haired girl, perhaps, Yui Ikari?

Then there's the nature of the Evangelions. Way back in ANE I speculated that they were derived from Cthulhu himself. I did this because of some difficult to interpret material in the viewpoint of the various Heralds, particularly the version of Shamshel. El and Baal there seemed to be expys of Adam and Lilith as well, though the condition of El suggested it was either not a Chuloid being or had been very, very effectively contained. Certainly there was some suggestion of conflict between the two, and the gigantish Star-Spawn Shamshel, daughter of El and bearer of his children, was a bit upset about someone usurping his position as Priest of the Great Old Ones. Since Cthulhu was known as the Priest he could have been the usurper or the usurped. And descriptions of the beings underneath the Eva armor seemed to be roughly Cthulhoid, so the NEG locating Cthulhu and using his erm... whatever to clone the Evangelions seemed a possible avenue. That was reinforced by the way the Shoggoth reacted to Unit 02, and the implication that the Migou would go into a frenzy if they knew what the Evangelions actually were. And the irony would fit with the way the Order of Dagon was made of fail in the series. On the other hand, the appearance of ANE in the Nobody Dies crossover included waking up Cthulhu, which suggested he was both free and potentially active, without NEG precautions against either.

Obviously, none of that need apply here. Still, the Evangelions are some kind of Eldritch Abomination and given their general layout, something Star Spawnish seems most likely. Cloned, lobotomized Cthuloid entities that have consumed the souls of the pilots' mothers. Well, except Unit 00, since who knows what's up with that and the MP units even in canon?

And while we're on it, the various groups and projects. Herkunft is Project Origin, which developed the Replica forces and which I would guess is minimally changed. Parapsychic Perseus commanders activate the otherwise soulless and non-sapient Replicas, who do a bunch of Blindsight stuff because consciousness is less efficient than ingrained instinct. And they don't get AWS or blanch at dealing with various horrors and superior foes, which is admittedly an actual huge advantage. I'm not sure what the exact technique used for the command and control is, especially since "soulless" doesn't describe what actually distinguishes the Replicas from the normal Homo subspecies. And of course it's all related to Alma Wade, whose DNA is rather an important factor in Rei and Paxton Fettel, and possibly in Kaworu. Though of course that too could change. The other freaky hangers-on to Herkunft, like Commander Orpheus, may or may not be back so speculation about any of that stuff is pointless.

Amunet is obviously derived from Herbert West's Reanimation fluid. LCL is sourced from there, so one can presume it is a variation of his discovery. Which naturally carries some ominous overtones. Achtzig does cybernetics and the Ghost in the Shell side of things. Ngoubou is a word for rhinoceros in a local Cameroonian dialect and also a purported cryptid Ceratopsian from the same area. Judging by what little context it was introduced in, it seems to be involved in developing techniques to reduce the fear response and perhaps AWS rates involved in exposure to ENEs. One can presume the methods are not particularly ethical. Magi of course is obvious, as is Engel.

 

[EarthScorpion]

This, incidentally, is a picture taken in Antarctica recently.


So... how screwed are we that the Antarctican ice appears to be bleeding LCL? We'll just have to see how the albino penguins react.



Real story here

 

[NHO]

EarthScorpion. You are evil. Also, while you are eldritch abomination, you know humans damn well. Too well.

Are you going to subject them all to fate worse that death? AEE already successful.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Query: Are the TITANS sapient?

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Good question, and one which the Achtzig Group isn't quite sure of. They can pass most Turing Tests, it's true, but so can a lot of LAIs, simply through having massive heuristic databases of responses and contexts. Ari, Shinji's muse, is deliberately is set not to operate at maximum immersiveness, simply because he's had it since he was a child, and LAIs for children are capped, because it's felt that it's unhealthy for them to start treating a programme as if it's a real person. The part of the TITAN you interact with is simply an interaction LAI, dedicated to being an interface between humans and the other parts. They feed input and commands to the rest, and they're fed information to output by other programmes. The TITANs are a derivative of the MAGI; the Ouranos system in the Evas, like the one for Unit 02, Gehirn, are proto-TITANs (hence why they're LITANs; they're Limited, rather than Total), but they take the "Conflicting Components" part of the MAGI to the next level. Rather than three supercomputers, they're composed of orders of magnitude more dumb programmes.


Hence... no part of the TITAN is sapient. Every single LAI that makes up the network can be used separately, can be taken apart, every part of their code can be understood, and was written by a human being for a specific function. They're just high end LAIs, run in a network, on dedicated hardware designed for optimal performance for each programme, some parts hard-wired in. You can take them apart, and you won't find a single programme or part designed for sapience; efficiency, yes, and impartial evaluation of threats and tactics, yes, but nothing that should make them into a "person".


But is it sapient? Good question. Because they have... personalities, based on oddities in how they were structured, and on different ways that they were tested in performance. COEUS is conservative; it "hates" to lose, and will aim to minimise losses. They think they can trace it down to a programme shift in one of its threat algorithms, that returns a higher cost to a loss of assets than, say, RHEA, but they're not sure. Their personalities shift if you even change how their hardware is connected together, and MNEMOSYNE ceased to function when they took it apart, and put it back together identically; they were forced to wipe it clean, and recreate the starting conditions, and the second attempt created a rather different "personality" for the TITAN, despite how it was connected the same.


Basically... if they're sapient, it's in the emergent relationship between the mass of LAI programmes, not in anything that makes them up. And that makes it very hard to judge, because you don't interact with whatever emergent consciousness there is, you interact with the interaction LAI. It would be a lot like trying to talk to a human being by talking to the cluster of nerves which controls its mouth.

 

[EarthScorpion]

By request, the "team photo" as it currently stands for AEE. And, yes, Unit 00 as it stands is currently white. Don't you know, that's the standard colour for an Evangelion which hasn't passed basic field testing yet?

Also, Rei likes white.

 

[Shinr]

Nice, even though Shinji's and Asuka's plugsuits were supposed to be of darker shade and Rei's plugsuit looks almost pink in contrast with her skin.


Then again, photoshopping Sadamoto's detailed artwork is a lot harder than the almost screenshot-like and less detailed artwork that is currently on Aeon Natum Engel's TvTrope page.

 

[Vehrec]

I still say that putting cammo-of any kind at all on something that big is like trying to build a stealthy spaceship. You just aren't going to succeed.

 

[EarthScorpion]

I still say that putting cammo-of any kind at all on something that big is like trying to build a stealthy spaceship. You just aren't going to succeed.

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Actually, considering that an A-Pod is a reactionless thruster, and D-Fridges can be used as a perfect refrigerator, actually you can get stealth in space in this setting, or at least a fair approximation against a foe who can't feel the holes that you're ripping in the higher dimensions just by packing all that technology into such a small space. That... that wasn't the best of examples.

Also, we put camo on modern warships, and they're larger than Evas. True, it might not be as detailed as the stuff that an infantryman wears, but we do not, and I cannot stress this enough, paint them bright red.


But more generally, this is a symptom of the fact that they're still treating the Evas as if their main opponent will be a technological foe; they're still equipped to fight the Migou, because their funding still has to be justified to people who don't know about the real reason. Who knows, it might just turn out that the elaborate layers of Elder-Sign fractal camouflage, mirrorgloss and heat-disappation materials, designed to take laser fire, kinetic penetrators and plasma weapons, might not be an optimal choice against something which uses melee and brute-force AT-Fields, and they might have to revert to a more brute-force armour design, reliant on solid bulk. Maybe even there might be a planned dramatic moment, when they're sent out in their canonical (well, apart from Unit 00 still being white, because it just looks better like that) colours. Who knows.

 

[Vehrec]

But more generally, this is a symptom of the fact that they're still treating the Evas as if their main opponent will be a technological foe; they're still equipped to fight the Migou, because their funding still has to be justified to people who don't know about the real reason. Who knows, it might just turn out that the elaborate layers of Elder-Sign fractal camouflage, mirrorgloss and heat-disappation materials, designed to take laser fire, kinetic penetrators and plasma weapons, might not be an optimal choice against something which uses melee and brute-force AT-Fields, and they might have to revert to a more brute-force armour design, reliant on solid bulk. Maybe even there might be a planned dramatic moment, when they're sent out in their canonical (well, apart from Unit 00 still being white, because it just looks better like that) colours. Who knows.

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...The Migou. Who probably have more multi-spectral scanning gear than Cthulhu and Nyarthlotep put together, orbital superiority and surveillance, the exact same kind of space-time monitoring you were talking about earlier, and if all that fails, probably some sort of sorcerous divination to find exactly the kinds of things that are under all that armor.


The day that camo is effective against them is the day that I move in with the Unspeakable Roommate and everyone else from Ow My Sanity. And I have no intention of moving into a lovecraftian harrem anime with a loli-shoggoth lord.

 

[EarthScorpion]

Hmm. Last update, 6th of July, at 01:00. This update, 17th of July. 26,095 words in less than two weeks. Pretty good, hmm.


Chapter 8


Rei 01, Something White / As if just there, though an immortal, she felt cruel pain.


EVANGELION

~'/|\'~​

Every Angel is terror. And yet,

ah, knowing you, I invoke you, almost deadly

birds of the soul. Where are the days of Tobias,

when one of the most radiant of you stood at the simple threshold,

disguised somewhat for the journey and already no longer awesome

(Like a youth, to the youth looking out curiously).

Let the Archangel now, the dangerous one, from behind the stars,

take a single step down and toward us: our own heart,

beating on high would beat us down. What are you?

The Second Duino Elegy

Rainer Maria Rilke

​

~'/|\'~​

A Day That Has Past

A Time Which Is Now


Representative Gendo Ikari stared at the projected screen. He adjusted his glasses, pushing them back up onto the bridge of his nose.


"Activate."


"What's the first thing you remember?"

The buzz of the Technical Centre started up again. Status updates came from all the technicians, staring down at the white-painted behemoth that stood, restrained to the wall, before them.


"Connect internal power supply to all circuits," ordered Dr Akagi. "Initialise connection of exterior power in T-minus twenty seconds."


Feeling rather useless, Major Misato Katsuragi, Director of Operations for Project Evangelion, and the woman who would be responsible for tactical command of this Unit if this test succeeded, did the best thing she could, and crossed her fingers. One hand unconsciously crept to the bulge under her uniform, where her cross-shaped necklace hung .


"What is the first thing you remember?"

"Main power system connected," reported Lieutenant Ibuki, heading up the team of nine Operators running in full immersion mode, down in the Magi tanks. "Activation system online. We are ready to begin adjustment of attunement pattern at your signal, doctor."


"Who are you?

Dr Ritsuko Akagi looked around the observation chamber. The Representative stood closest to the diamond viewing plates, Deputy Representative Fuyutsuki taking up his customary position just behind the younger man. In a very real sense, despite the fact that she was the Director of Science for Project Evangelion, and the Director of the Evangelion Group (as was customary for the eponymous Project of a Group), the Evangelions were not hers. Both men, the former a prodigy sorcerer who had climbed the ranks of the Foundation with almost indecent speed, the latter a legend in the field of arcanobiology, as the man who had done the first systematic study on the variant hominids known as 'ghouls', were much more tied to it than she was, had been involved in it longer than she had. It was theirs.


The woman ran her tongue over her lips, and swallowed, watching the digits count down in her harcontacts, time-as-volts ticking down until the critical activation voltage was hit.


This Test Pilot Candidate shouldn't fail. Not like almost all the other ones before her.


"Who are you?

"It's reached," announced Lieutenant Aoba, the man leaning forwards towards his screen, his long hair tyed back, for once, in a ponytail. "Attunement is in process. Synchronisation is non-zero... 0.04... 0.13... rising."


"We're getting some fluctuations here," Maya's voice, coming in over the speakers in the room, said. "She's... no... we're stabilising. Subject is forming an EFCS Type-1 Attunement. Synchronisation is... clarifying second order harmonics... third order... yes, we have a stable animaneural wavefunction."


"Who are you?"

"Start Phase III," ordered Dr Akagi.


"Who am I?

"Plug is level 2. Beginning test sequence."


"LITAN feed is clear... reports from in-Unit correlate with external feeds."


"Feeding external power to non-vital systems. Right arm... left arm... all limbs are powered."


"Releasing limited motor controls. D-Brakes are operating at full capacity."


Slowly, ponderously, like the upswing of some vast pendulum, Unit 00 raised its head, to stare directly at the onlookers. It was just an illusion, though; it couldn't actually see them. Not through the reflective surface. Could it?


Was it really just staring at its own reflection?


"Absolute borderline in... 0.5..."


"Who are you?"

"... 0.4..."


"Who are you?"

"...0.3..."


"Who are you?"

"...0.2..."


"Get away from her!"

"...0.1..."


"..."

"I know who you are."

"The pulses are flowing back! Chaotic breakdown in AN-waveform!"


"EFCS-2! Mode has flipped to EFCS-2! No... back to EFCS-1!"


"Synchronisation is constant!"


"What?" Dr Akagi spun, to stare at the unfortunate civilian technician. "That doesn't even make sense! Abort! Break the connection!"


Straining, the white giant fought against its bonds, the dimensional technology that wrapped over its hull trying to keep it in place. It was fighting a losing battle. A deep-bass roar, that shook the gut and the walls alike, emanated from the beast as it fought its bonds. Its one red eye swept from side to side, with jerking, wrenching motions. The deep crackle of breaking ceramics accompanied each jerk of its head.


"D-Brakes are failing! We have an AT-Field! Systematic breakdown of r-state differenatiation!"


"Abort!" barked Dr Akagi. "Operators, break all connections, raise plug to level 0."


A cacophony of screams buzzed through the speakers, made mechanical by the limits of the technology. In Ritsuko's harcontacts, the icons for four of the operators went yellow; two more were a fatal red.


"My...m-my DMIN is stable," blurted out Maya, the pain evident in her voice, "b-b-but the Unit just attacked the retrieval process. My... my... that wasn't the LITAN... only just enough time to cut before it broke thr..."


"Mute the Magi link," ordered Gendo Ikari, coldly, the LAIs complying with his orders and silencing the Operators. "Cut external power, blow the D-Engines."


The shutdown of the external power was immediately effective. Together, the legs and the arms slumped loose, swinging back down to slam into the wall, tearing chunks out of it as they impacted again and again. The head still wrenched, that same bass roar filling the air, but then the charges placed on the D-Engines mounted in the torso blew, shattering the power sources safely. The design for such tests was quite clear; it should always be possible to cut all power. All that the Evangelion, when set up like this, had access to at this moment were the life-support batteries, and they were on a completely different power circuit to the armour systems.


There was a communal sigh of relief from the observation room, now that the Evangelion was now back under control, and a set of blessings for the people who had been careful to ensure that the Unit failed-to-safe.


An almost animalistic cry of rage and terror and pain, made worse by the fact that the voice that cried out was unmistakably human.


"No!" A shrieked exclamation.


White fog; surrounding, enveloping, obfuscating everything.


"What are you doing with her?"

"You will be a god among men."

Evidently, someone had forgotten to inform Unit 00 of this.


In a single, terrible motion, it tore itself loose of the wall, the barrage of broken connections and constraints impacting like an artillery bombardment against the other side. Fighting the inertia-thieves of the D-Brakes, the vast body slammed itself back into the wall, crushing the sophisticated technology with sheer bulk. The shift in its inertial mass only aided it, as it pushed off from the wall and crushed its front in the same manner.


In terror, the onlookers stared, and the one vast eye of the Unit stared back.


"Initialise TCP-7!" ordered Representative Ikari, the red eye reflected in his own orange glasses.


Softness, gentleness, calm. All was fogged light, but it did not matter, for two vast hands held her, and rocked her from side to side.


A children's rhyme, fumbled by someone who only half-remembers the words.

"You will show men that they do not need gods."

And then she was plunged into warmth and darkness.

Roaring, screaming, Unit 00 began to scrabble at its own back with fingers locked into claws. With another impact which shook the room, it pushed backwards into the other wall, and that was enough, for the superstructure snapped of this armoured shell, designed to take a point-blank nuclear blast. It had been ravaged impossibly by the impact with a cleanness which brute force should not have achieved. The containment protocols that Gendo Ikari had ordered were already kicking in, as jets of hard-setting plastic began to coat the white a dull brown, but it seemed unlikely that they would be enough.


[WARNING! AT-FIELD DETECTED!] reported a dumb LAI, audible even over the tumultuous chaos of the titan's violence.


Yet it seemed that escape was not the beast's goal, even as the bass took on a strange, shrill whistling.


Black and white blur to make grey, a finger retracts.


The damage done to its own back was enough to get a finger under the armour plating that protected the plug.


The look of horror on the bearded man was indescribable. "Rei! No!" he yelled, face as pale as death.


"I see you."

With both hands, the titan tore at its own back, reaching up and around with inhuman flexibility. With both hands, it flensed the white plating, and tore at its own implants. With both hands, the flagellant sought its own plug. Gory ichor, dark and septic, ran down, to swirl and mix with the constraining fluid, but the beast did not care, and indeed the shrill noise began to ululate, in a cacophony that sounded all too much like celebration.


"My baby..."

One vast finger crushed the exposed end of the entry plug.


And the beast went limp. Legs now sealed in hard-setting plastic (though the onlookers now doubted how effective it would really be), it fell backwards, pivoting at the knees, to slam into the floor with one last terminal impact. Wounded, self-maimed, the fallen titan lay upon its back, dark seas of ichor and tainted plastics pooling around it like some perverse cloak around its white hide.


"Rei!" roared Gendo, in a cry of horror, as he sprinted out of the control room, his glasses falling from his face to land with a snap on the ground. Ritsuko watched him go, and glanced down at the fallen Evangelion, before screwing her eyes shut. She did not see, minutes later, Gendo rush across the floor of the test chamber, only wearing a protective suit because the medical team behind him had forced him to put one on as they waited for the airlock to cycle.


No, she knew how badly she had failed.


Standing behind the behemoth, the man could see the damage in a much more personal way. He was already knee deep in the dark blood of the Evangelion, and was having to wade against the slowly decreasing flow. The transparent faceplate of the suit was blacked out in wide areas, the autocensors doing their best. With a few words, he overrode them, to turn down the filter level. The LAI's protests were ignored; he needed to see what he was doing. Hooking his fingers into the fibrous musculature and broken armour of the Evangelion, he began to climb, up to the partially protruding plug.


The end of the metallic cylinder was a mess, crumpled and crushed by the two impacts. By his estimation, a third one would have wrecked it completely. The second might have been enough, he thought, with a sinking heart, but those thoughts were discarded as he clambered along the plug, a crumpled metal ladder barely enough of a foothold for feet slick with ichor. The damage made it easier to balance on top of the cylinder, but he was still perilously close to slipping as he made his way down it.


With his suited hands, Gendo grabbed the twisted metal around the largest tear in the outer shell of the tube, and pulled. The metal was sharp, and the gloves of the containment suit, although insulated, were not enough. Screaming into the helmet as blood seeped from his palms, he levered open the shattered plug, and clambered inside, screaming again as the edges tore at his back.


The remnants of the LCL that pooled in the nooks and crannies were much redder than normal.


Rei was on her back, still in the pilot's seat, almost inverted from the angle at which the Eva lay. This was not by choice; the control yokes were crushing her midsection, the structure of the plug warped and bent such that they were rammed into her abdomen. It was, in fact, probably the only reason she had not been thrown free by the impact with the ground. Her plug suit, just the undersuit for the test, was lacerated all over; red blood welling up white fabric and white skin. Her breaths were laboured, wet-sounding; she had evidently managed to hack up enough LCL to have marginally functional lungs, but the red drool which stained her lips pink told Gendo just at sight that her lungs had been severely damaged by the effort. It was a marvel that they hadn't collapsed.


And then there was her face. Almost unconsciously, he had been skipping over her face, which lay limp against the headrest. Because one eye, her left one, was a ruined mess, perforated by shrapnel, the ruined eye spilling forth from the socket. The other eye was closed.


Gendo Ikari had seen worse. But he had not seen much worse for someone who survived, and not in a long time.


"Rei," he gasped, through the pain in his hands and his back. "Rei? Are you alive?"


Slowly, wonderfully, the intact eye crept open, a dilated pupil nevertheless focussing on him. She gurgled something through ruined, fluid-filled lungs.


The man smiled, even as the rescue team climbed in behind him, having coated the edges with plastic to make them safer, and widened the hole. "Good," he said, before turning his attention to the others. "Get her to an LCL tank," he ordered. "Keep her alive." And with that said, he collapsed, as the pain overcame him.


The first medical team called for a second one.

~'/|\'~​

24th September, 2091

"Well, I'm rather surprised," Ritsuko said, running down the details in the file on the desk in front of her. "I will, of course, defer to your expertise in your field, Dr Tam, but..." she left the statement hanging.


"No, no," the younger man said. "I'm really rather surprised, too. I did not expect this at all. But," he shifted in his seat, in front of Ritsuko's desk, "well, he's mostly bored. Well, and a little irritable from the sympathetic burns, but that's natural." He snorted. "Most people tend to be."


"I see," the blond said, running her eyes over the file. "Well, we'd always suspected that the EFCS-1 would provide better anti-AWS shielding than the Type-2," she said, almost to herself, "but this... well, we'd need a bigger sample pool before we could say so."


"I believe the relative lack of trauma... um, especially the psyche-corpus animaneural synthesis issues that arose due to the sudden and traumatic loss of the eye, this time, was also a contributing factor. From conversations with him, he was much better able to come to terms with the fact that he has mild sympathetic burns which match with the injuries, than experiencing the muted pain of the loss of an eye, without actually doing so."


Ritsuko looked up at him, gazing at the younger man with blue-encircled eyes. All of those were reasonable suggestions; the man had been a prodigy of a medical doctor, before transitioning to psychology after a nasty family-related incident, after all. That was why he had been assigned to Project Evangelion. "Maybe," she said out loud. She wasn't willing to commit to anything. "But, you believe that he can be released from observation?"


"Well," the man licked his lips, "erm, it would be more accurate to say that observation can be reduced to the standard day-to-day level..." he glanced at his superior, "oh, you meant that? Then, yes, he can be released from the Observation bay."


"Good." Ritsuko signed the document, and handed it over. "Well, I'm sure Misato will be pleased," she said.


"And you aren't?" The tone was questioning.


Ritsuko rolled her eyes. "Please. This isn't the time for that. But I wouldn't call myself pleased, no. Satisfied, yes. It's important to remain detached when considering these things." She held the gaze of the brown-haired man. "We all know the issues with getting too involved in matters which are important, don't we, doctor?"


The man took the signed document, gathering it to him, to hold, almost as a protective barrier. "Yes," he muttered, before blinking. "Thank you, Dr Akagi, for your time," he said, more formally. "I'll be off then."


"Yes," Ritsuko said, her head already lowered to the progress report for Unit 00.

~'/|\'~​

"Potenejactakrona what!" the little black-skinned, red eyed girl screamed at him, remarkably active for someone only just out of intensive care, before continuing to babble at him in an incoherent pidgin of Nazzadi and English. Her friends, clustered around the bed recoiled from the invective. A nurse rushed over at the outburst, obviously worried that she was going into convulsions or that some other medical emergency was occurring. "No, I'm fine," Kany told the orderly, panting, teeth locked together. "But my brother is an idiot!"


The man stared at the boy through narrowed, suspicious eyes. "She's still on the mend," he told him, in a somewhat patronising tone of voice. "Do not agitate her, or I'll have to ask you to leave."


Toja winced. How, exactly, had his sister's friends managed to talk him into coming with them, to explain everything? How was it that he had been persuaded by a bunch of nine-year olds?


"I am fine, by the way," said the dark-haired one, Imi, the girl who had been the reason for him running out.


"And what did you think you were doing, huh?" continued Kany, turning her head to stare at her friend. "Why'd you run out! You know we're not meant to!"


"I did not run out..." The little girl blinked under the glare from the red eyes. "Oh. Because I needed my injectors, and they don't keep spares down in the bunkers, only under the desk. It was necessary." She seemed almost pleading. "You know I need them. Otherwise I get very ill."


The little nazzady relented a little. "Well... maybe. But," she yawned, "but it was silly of both of you. Well, it was silly of you, Imi, and stupid of you, bro."


There was an awkward pause. It wasn't helped in Toja's books by how much Kany managed to sound like their mother had. The voice was younger, higher, but the intonations were near identical.


Toja raised his hand slowly. "Um... can I have back my manuprokedi? Since you're out of the tube..."


She shook her head.


"Awwww, come on. Why can't I?"


"Punishment! For making me worry like this when I'm sick and all that."


"I am sorry," he said, the guilt hitting him again, dropping his head.


"You should be!" Kany drew a breath, and seemed to calm down a bit. "Now, come on... not my stupid brother... but what have I missed?"


A boy grinned. "There hasn't been any school at all," he said, "'cause the school building got damaged and stuff... I can see it from the observation place, and there's a big tent thing whole area, and silvery dust everywhere. And really cooooool machines sucking it up. So we get to just do stuff."


Kany pouted. "Bleargh. I'm still in this bed, haven't relearned to walk yet, and I'm not even missing school."


A little girl, her hair platinum blond, poked him in the side, while the conversation continued. "Well, I think it was pretty cool," she whispered to him, gazing up at the tall boy with eyes that he suddenly realised were adoring. "And tonnes of us agree. You're totally like some kind of fairytale prince, coming back with..." she giggled, "Princess Imi and stuff. Of course, Imi isn't a very good princess. She played the witch in the school play," she informed him, with all apparent seriousness.


"Ah," was all that Toja could manage.


"So... you know, if you're looking for a princess..." The ten-year old, her t-shirt covered in childish entopics, smiled shyly at him, then headed over to the rest of the group.


This was... awkward. Of all the consequences of leaving the bunker, he had never expected his little sister's friends getting a crush on him to be one of them. A talk with the FSB over the breach of Bunker Security, yes, an immediately scheduled meeting with a counsellor from the Health Service to look for any instability induced by the exposure to the being (fortunately fairly small, and Toja could live with bad dreams), yes, immediate scans, for the second time that day, for any contamination, yes.


At least one nine-or-ten-year old getting a crush on him, no. And there was another thing that he'd have to do, too, because of what had happened on that Wednesday.


He was going to have to handle them both like a man would handle them.


For this problem, Toja ran away.

~'/|\'~​

25th September, 2091

Of all the unfair things in Shinji Ikari's life, the fact that the Academy has classes on Saturday morning had to be pretty low down the priority list, all things considered. It wasn't as if he wasn't used to it, after all; the Academy back in Toyko-3 had been the same. But this morning, of all mornings, he really didn't enjoy the sight of children who went to other schools who were getting to hang around in normal clothing, not the high-collared black overcoat of the Academy, and make remarks at him and the other students on the maglev.


I mean, it's not like they even need to be up this early, he thought to himself. For me to see them on the way to school, they'd have had to get up that early, and not chosen to lie in at the weekend. Are they doing it just to rub it in our faces?

And talking of rubbing in faces, Shinji had been somewhat surprised when the boy who had punched him in the face, and that one with glasses who had been hanging around with the rather attractive Nazzadi girl, came up to him, with a special request. In fact;


"Actually, why are you here?" Shinji asked the human boy, Kensuke. "I mean, you didn't hit me..."


The brown-haired boy blushed slightly, and glanced sideways at Toja. "He said he'd hit me if I didn't come to apologise too," he explained. "It's... it's sort of my fault that he found out, because Taly and me were the ones who sort of worked out a link."


"So why isn't she here?"


Toja gritted his teeth. "I couldn't really threaten her in the same way as Ken, here."


Shinji raised his eyebrows. "Chivalry?"


Kensuke shook his head, with a hint of a grin creeping onto his face. "Nope. She'd kick him in the balls again. She's... she's kinda heavily into her martial arts. 'Specially hun zuti."


"We're getting off topic," Toja said somewhat hastily, with what Shinji suspected was a hint of remembered pain creeping into his expression. The boy straightened up again. "Mr Ikari," he said, in a formal manner, "I want you to punch me. So that we'll be even."


"In that case, shouldn't I punch you twi... no, I'm not going to get started on that." Shinji blinked. "Why? I mean, I know why I want to punch you, but why do you want me to want to punch you?"


"See! You want to, so just do it!" The boy's jaw was stiff, his eyes closed.


"But..." Shinji drew back his fist, but paused, wavering. "I... it... it's not the same," he said out loud, trying to work through the mess of feelings and emotions. "I mean, it was sort of my fault."


"Rubbish!" Toja snapped. "It's all my fault. I'm a hot-headed idiot who never thinks about anything. You need to do it, I want you to do it, and it's kinda the only way to be fair!"


The Japanese boy's hand wobbled, moving back and forth. On (and with) one hand, he actually did want to punch this guy. But... this would be in cold blood. It was completely different to snap, and try to attack someone which angry, to just going and punching someone.


"Do it! As hard as you can! Don't hold back!"


He... he actually wants to be hurt? Why? That doesn't make sense. And... and how dare he force me into this kind of situation! This is just a normal school day, and I'm being forced to think about whether it's okay to hurt someone when they tell you do. Why does this happen to me!

The blow, as it happened, went low, into the taller boy's stomach, who doubled over with a meaty-sounding oooof. Hands on thighs, the other boy began to wheeze, falling to his knees.


"You've got a nasty streak," Kensuke said, shock creeping into his voice. "Right in the gut? Not cool." He paused. "Not cool at all."


Shinji, meanwhile, was staring down at the boy before him, guilt and just a smidgeon of self-satisfaction blended together. The very presence of the self-satisfaction, however, was causing it to get diluted. Because, in the boy's self-image, he wasn't the sort of person who'd do that. And yet he just had.


"Why...the...gut..." croaked out Toja. "Meant... to be face."


"You didn't say that!" protested Shinji.


"I..." he started coughing, "I... thought... obvious."


"Not to me!" Shinji said, wincing. He paused for a moment, before adding, "And... um, well, I didn't want to hurt my hand!"


Toja continued to cough.


"Skulls are hard," Shinji continued, realising how pathetic he sounded.


The Nazzadi boy began to emit a burbling noise. It took a few seconds, before Shinji could work out that it was, in fact, laughter, which grew stronger as Toja pulled himself upright, face still taut with discomfort.


"Nice one," the boy croaked. "Teach me to tell someone to do it as hard as they can, and not hold back."


Kensuke smirked. "That's what she said," he said, almost automatically.


"Shut up, Kensuke."


Shinji stared at the pair. "You're mad," he said, slowly. "You're... you're mad. Utterly, utterly mad."


Toja was still clutching his stomach. "Yeah," he said, looking up, "but at least we're now even." There was something in his eyes that Shinji couldn't recognise. "Listen," he said, "I... um... I got stuck outside... on Wednesday. Not outside outside. But in a surface building. A school."


Shinji felt his stomach boil with sudden terror. "... I," he blinked. "What... happened?" he said softly.


There was a sudden expression of shock on Toja's face. "Oh, no," he said hastily. "No one got hurt. But... um, I saw it."


Shinji relaxed, a sudden rush of adrenaline making him shake. "Don't say things like that," he said. "I don't want to think that I've hurt people."


"No... no, what I mean to say is, right, I saw how that thing you're in is like.


The brown-haired boy grinned, weakly. "Thank you," he said, relief in his voice. He paused. "Uh... why were you stuck outside," he asked, gingerly. "Was it just an evacuation thing, or..."


Toja blushed, a slight darkening of his face. "Um... no," he admitted. "I ran out to look for someone in the class who'd gone missing."


Shinji felt his eyebrows raise without prompting. "That's pretty brave," he ventured. "I mean, I probably wouldn't have the guts to do it."


"No, it was just stupid. It may have looked brave... I just wasn't thinking." The Nazzadi boy blinked. "Can we just put everything behind us?" he asked.


Unnoticed, unobserved, a white-haired girl watched the scene through dead grey eyes, no expression on her frozen face.

~'/|\'~​

"Rei Ayanami." The muse's voice was calm, emotionless; disturbingly similar to the subject of discussion, thought Misato with a shudder.


Ritsuko caught the brief twitch of emotion, and nodded, sympathetically. "Pause briefing," she instructed the system. "I know, yes?" she said. "Spend time around her, and you start hearing her voice everywhere," the scientist said, a hint of dark humour in her voice.


"I was trying to make a point, Rits," the Director of Operations said. "Resume briefing... pause briefing." She glared at the blond. "And don't pause my muse without my permission," she added. "Resume briefing."


"The subject is sixteen years old; date of birth: 5th of November, 2074. Subspecies: Homo sapiens sidoci. Genetic parents: classified. Subject was recovered in raid on cult organisation aged 4, and, after evaluation, was placed in state custody pending further investigation. Subject was inducted into newly formed Test Pilot programme as the First Child immediately upon programme formation in 2083, following discovery by Project Marduk that she possessed the appropriate characteristic factors. She is the exclusive and designated pilot of Evangelion Unit 00, the Prototype Model. Her current legal guardian is Representative for Europe, Gendo Ikari. The rest of her personal history is classified. Her psychological profiles are classified; a redacted file may be viewed separately. The subject possesses intuitive extranormal waveform manipulation capabilities, as is universal among her subspecies. These capabilities are classified; a redacted file may be viewed separately, and they have all been classified as non-dangerous and non-invasive."


"I think that's enough," said the Major, her tone controlled. "Now, Director of Science, why don't you explain why your Director of Operations has almost no knowledge of one of the assets she has to command?"


Ritsuko sighed. "Misato..."


"Don't 'Misato' me. You've dodged this point before. I saw what happened at the last Unit 00 activation test, and things destabilised in a way that they never have even looked like they might for Shinji or Asuka. The next activation test is scheduled for next Wednesday, and I might be kinda worried that it might happen again."


"You presume I have any more knowledge about her," the scientist retorted.


"... well, yes. The Project Marduk is part of the Evangelion Group. That means they report to you."


Ritsuko gritted her teeth. Misato could have both a rather perceptive mind and a highly functional memory when she put her brain to it. "And certain details are sealed even beyond what I can view. Yes, I do know more about her, but those are technical issues. I mean, I could ask for permission to release the details on... on the details of how her medichines react with her immune system, say, but I'm not exactly sure how useful it will be for you, so..."


The black-haired woman ran her hand through her hair. "Sorry, Rits," she apologised. "I'm just a little... worried."


She received a sympathetic nod in return. "I understand. But... please, don't take it out on me. We don't think it should happen again; the issue last time... well, we're not sure what caused it, but we suspect it may have been mental instability in the pilot."


"Mental instability?" echoed Misato. "In Rei?"


"Yes."


"But," the dark-haired woman searched for the right words to use, "from what little I've... that I know of her, she's seemed fairly stable. Not necessarily at the same point of balance as anyone else, of course, but..."


"No. She's... she's disturbed at a deeper level; more that you'd think. And she's sensitive to extranormal phenomena. She might have been affected by the... hah, by the harbingers of Harbinger-3. That kind of thing is not what you want when you're trying to attune to a highly sophisticated ACXB organism."


The New Earth Government Army officer shot a glance at her friend. "You do know that there are already suspicions that the failed activation test was what caused Asherah to show up, yes?" she said bluntly.


"That's ridiculous," Dr Akagi replied, with the same lack of prevarication. "We have had failed activation tests for all the completed Evangelions. And Harbinger-level threats failed to show up each time. You're just displaying classic observer bi..." she was interrupted by the muse, and a simultaneous vibration of something in Misato's pockets.


"Major Katsuragi to Communications Room 13. Major Katsuragi to Communications Room 13. This is a High Urgency call; ID number 05-02-65-32-98. Major Katsuragi to report immediately to Communications Room 13."


"Oh-five, oh-two, sixty-five, thirty-two..." muttered Misato to herself, as she straightened up. "That's the Unit 02 code. And 13 is one of the q-lines." She blinked. "I'm off; this is important. That's directly from," she pulled the PCPU out of her pocket, "yes, I thought so. That's Captain Martello's code, and it's got... it's got an override-seal from Vice Marshall Slavik himself." Almost reflexively, she tucked her hair back behind her ears, and adjusted her collar slightly. "I'll see what it is."


"I hope it's nothing important," Ritsuko said. Both women could hear the doubt in her voice.

~'/|\'~​

The remains of Harbinger-4, Eshmun, were pooled in two separate vile, incoherent messes at the bottoms of Containment Chambers 09 and 10, in the Vault. It had been blown in half by that first ambush, after all, so they had been recovered separately. The fact that the whole creature would have been too large to fit in either of the chambers was only an added bonus, and had led to several new planned engineering projects which would be large enough. And 'pooled' was the operative word; with the death of the creature, it had lost cohesiveness at a dramatic rate, the beast decaying and rotting, as its structure disintegrated. Perhaps worse, its elevated r-state was decaying back down to a 1-state, throwing out high-energy variant r-state particles, in a parallel to more conventional radiation.


There were no people down in the Vault, working on the studies. It just wasn't safe, even in full ANaMiNBC gear and added sorcerous warding. They were getting through teleoperated drones at a prodigious rate as the circuitry and hulls gave way under the bombardment.


Of course, Dr Akagi wasn't too unhappy about this. A little bit annoyed at the fact that she wasn't getting to carry out a proper dissection, but she could live without exposure to high-energy high r-state radiation. And because she had not been so exposed, she would continue to do so. "We're discovering all new things about high variant r-state physics," she 'explained' to Shinji and Misato, standing by the vast autocensored screen that was giving a sight into the progress in the vacuum-filled rooms. "The CCs are all set up as high end particle detectors for exactly this reason. I mean, the MAGI say they've seen a 512-state proton for the first time ever, and its behaviour means that we've just shown Imonike was right all along, and Juarez was wrong."


"But what have you found out about the Harbinger?" Misato asked, hands in pockets. Once again, she was in a more formal version of her normal uniform, because the NEG had other, more senior officers on-site, and she was not enjoying it. She would really rather be dressed normally... well, actually, she'd rather be back in her pilot's suit which were really comfortable, but that wasn't an option anymore, and she wasn't on the frontlines.


Ritsuko smoothed down her lab coat, a garment which, given what they were dealing with, would only really protect her from a coffee-based accident, and glanced over at the screen. "Not as much as we might have liked," she admitted. "From what we can tell, from the state the remains are in, there was internal differentiation of layers, but only one thing which approximates an organ, as we would know it. Of course, that matches up with the feed from Unit 01, doesn't it, Shinji?"


The boy, who had been drifting along in the mists of confusion, trying to understand and doing poorly at that goal, blinked, and refocused his attention away from the almost-hypnotic sludge which both parts had degraded into. "Um... excuse me?" he asked.


"There weren't any internal organs in Harbinger-4, were there? Apart from the core-equivalent?" the scientist asked rhetorically.


"Not that I can remember," the boy said, slowly. "But... well, I wasn't thinking that clearly."


"Yes... well, that is somewhat understandable." Ritsuko shrugged. "Anyway, the current hypothesis is that the Harbinger we see is akin to a puppet vessel for a greater being which exists in greater-than-three spatial dimensions. Hence, it really doesn't need anything beyond a core-equivalent, in the same way that your little finger doesn't need lungs or a heart or... or anything apart from the connective tissue and blood vessels and the like, which in this analogy is the core-equivalent."


Shinji stared down at the screen. A spider-like robot, all its many limbs dedicated manipulators, slowly descended from the ceiling, trailing its thread of power-cable behind it. Anchoring itself onto the outer carapace, it began to cut at the material. Despite the degradation, it really wasn't getting anywhere. "I can't believe I killed that thing," the boy said to himself. "Is that what we really have to fight. Well," he paused, "I say 'we', but... never mind. Why didn't the outer shell-thing fall apart in the same way?" he asked, louder.


"That's a good question, Shinji," Ritsuko replied. "We're... not sure. It might be that it's only decaying due to r-state relaxation, compared to the rest, which is liquefying. We've actually got what might be structures in the outer carapace, which... well, it would suggest a biology completely unlike anything we're familiar with."


"No, really?" muttered Misato, who was ignored.


"We're just having problems taking samples," Ritsuko admitted. "Even when we do manage to extract specimens, the effects of removing them from the still-altered r-state of the region around the body, down to a 1-state environment, just massively speeds up the decay." She paused. "They might be designed... well, I say 'designed', but that doesn't mean intent... they might be there to enhance AT-Field generation. The properties of the regions that we suspect there might be structures... well, I don't even know where to begin."


"Oh," Misato said, a sudden glimmer of understanding in her eyes, "this is the kind of matter is sort of like a wave and sort of like a particle, right?"


Dr Akagi fixed the other woman with a long hard stare. "Yes, Misato. It does, in fact, display properties exhibited by both classical particles and waves, at least at the quantum level. In fact, we have a super-special name for that very special kind of matter. It's called... matter."


"Oh."


"I mean, that isn't even arcane physics. It's just quantum physics. That's barely a step above classical mechanics."


"Mbneah." Misato flapped a hand at the scientist. "There's no need to be condensing."


"You mean 'condescending'," Ritsuko replied automatically, to a slight smirk from the black-haired woman. "Although I can try to explain condensed matter physics to you if you..." her eyes narrowed. "I see what you did there."


Shinji quite deliberately said nothing. It seemed to be serving him well.


"Hey! Akagi!" someone called from behind them. Ritsuko shuddered, her face falling. Taking a deep breath, she turned around, her face set in a mask of professional neutrality.


"Dr Robinson," she said, with a nod, to the woman, her skin so dark she could have almost passed for a Nazzadi. That illusion was shatterd by her eyes, a human brown, with the beginnings of crow's feet marking their edges. "Doctor Malia Robinson, Deputy Director of Science for Project Engel," she said, her voice lowered, to her two companions.


"Hey! How's it going, Ritsuko?" the other woman asked, in her native Nigerian accent.


"Fine. Just fine," the blond said, just slowly enough that it could not be taken as being rude. She paused. "This is Major Misato Katsuragi, Director of Operations for Project Evangelion," she added, gesturing to the black-haired woman, while subtly trying to move to divert attention away from Shinji.


"Pleased to meet you," Misato said, stepping forwards to shake the other woman's hand.


"Katsuragi... Katsuragi, oh yes," Dr Robinson said, and Misato's face stiffened slightly at that. "You're with the Army, yes? Which wing? I'd have to say, I'd have thought that they'd have had a Navy person for Director for Evangelion, given the strategic value of those things?" Her intonation turned something which wasn't really a question into one.


"I used to be a mech pilot," Misato explained. "It was decided that the actual command skills required for an operation involving the Units is more like those needed for land-based mecha than a naval ship, or even someone with the Marines."


"'Specially since the Marines are cutting down on their mecha component," Malia said with a nod. "Pleased to meet you too, by the way; I'll have to get proper communications set up with our DDoO Europe. I suspect you'll end up having to work with us a lot, given how much we get used as spearhead forces, which, from what I've heard from the Eastern Front, worked really well for you today." She smiled. "It's nice to see our older brother Project getting some respect."


"Parent Group," Ritsuko muttered, just loud enough for Shinji to hear. Out loud, she added, "So, how is your Project's research into Eshmun going?"


The other woman grinned, in a brilliant half-crescent of perfect teeth. "Amazingly. The other half of the torso; the part the Navy and static defences blew up, not the bit you got? Well, we've found several clusters of unhatched eggs. It's a god-send, even above the live specimens. Anton's got me heading up the work on the new Species, after my successes with the Hamshall and the Ish. And just looking at the combat data from the parent organism," she let out a thin whistle, "well, damn. I think the Shamshel... that's what we're calling the Species by the way... it's going to be an excellent super-heavy gunship, and that's," the grin turned slightly predatory, "a tactical role that the Migou are going to tearing out their cilia out over."


"If you can get it working," Ritsuko pointed out.


"Well, yes, that's always the caveat emptor, and all that." Dr Robinson frowned. "I don't mean caveat emptor. I think I mean ceteris paribus." She shrugged, an expansive gesture. "How are you doing?"


Dr Akagi smiled too, a slightly sickly expression. "We have several core fragments; damaged, of course, because it was necessary for the Evangelion to kill the target, but we're already getting data from them." Well, what the MAGI were actually returning was 601 "Insolubility" errors, even with an Operator diving with them, but that was data. Of a sort. "The r-states that thing was operating in, though... you know we've probably just disproved Juarez from its decay patterns."


"No way." The other woman blinked. "Let me guess. 512-state proton deflection?"


"Yes."


"That was always going to be the big test for Juarez. Guess that leaves us with Imonike, then. Which is... kinda annoying. The maths is less elegant," Dr Robinson said, with a pout. "Well, I really look forwards to you publishing. As in... actually, please do it soon. If we're going to be dealing with it these things, then our team is really going to need your data on the behaviour of high r-state elem-n-ents."


"Of course," Ritsuko said, the corner of her mouth twitching. "


They watched the Deputy Director of Science for Project Engel depart.


"I like her," Misato remarked. Shinji secretly agreed; the other woman had seemed pleasant enough, and, well, now that he actually had to fight against these things, the term "super-heavy gunship" was being linked to "more stuff shooting at the thing that's trying to kill me," and "more targets for the thing that's trying to kill me," to his approval.


Ritsuko rolled her eyes. "You would," she said. "God, I hate that woman. Just... so... damn... bubbly. And she's from Engel, of course. She's like fingernails on the blackboard of my mind."


There was silence. Then;


"So, what's written on the blackbo..." began the black-haired woman.


"Shut up, Misato. The blackboard is not important. It is a metaphor."


The black-haired woman glared at her. "I get that," she said, somewhat snippishly. "I was just trying to inject some levity into the place."


"Levitate in your own time." The scientist pinched the bridge of her nose. "I'm sorry, that was uncalled for. But if I can dodge Dr Robinson until the analysis is done, I'll be a lot less stressed."


But Shinji was no longer paying attention. Over on the other side of the room from the screen, he could see his father on the other side of a window.


He was smiling.


He was talking to Rei Ayanami, her arm still in a cast, but all other signs of her injuries gone.


She was smiling too, a faint curl up of the side of her lips.


Down by his side, Shinji's hands balled into fists. Through narrowed eyes, he stared at the scene, as the Director of Science and Director of Operations droned at each other about irrelevencies that the boy no longer cared about.


His father never smiled at him. He never even talked to him unless he wanted something.


This was unfair.

~'/|\'~​

26th September, 2091

The two boys stood before the door. It was a normal-looking door. No fanged maw, biohazard warning symbol, disturbingly organic sphincter or inscription of "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate" adorned the portal.


It was still somewhat intimidating.


"You ring," muttered Toja.


"No, you," was Kensuke's devastatingly scathing and witty retort.


They continued to stand there.


The bespectacled boy rubbed his arm. "Man, security is tight here," he said, idly. "They actually did a blood check, not just a skin-scraping, just at the dome entrance. And here..."


"Look, are you going to do it?" the Nazzadi growled. "No. Then I guess I'll just have to use my superior manliness to... argh."


The door had opened, without anyone touching it. This would have been sinister, had it not been for the fact that a dark-haired, and very attractive, woman with Japanese features stood in the doorway, one hand still raised to the interior controls. "Yes?" she asked.


Both boys immediately stood to attention. And it would be crass to mention that this applied in both senses of the word. "Um..." eventually Kensuke managed to stammer. "Uh, we were wondering if Shinji was here."


Toja suddenly paled, a change which went entirely unnoticed with his complexion. Was this the right address? He'd got it off Hikary, who had been rather approving of his 'attempts to be nice to a person at an unfamiliar school', which just indicated that word of the punching incident hadn't made its way to her. He could tell that, because he could still hear, and was not shell-shocked from several hours of shouting from an angry class representative.


Luckily, the woman smiled. "I'm afraid he's out at the moment," she said.


"Oh," said Kensuke, his gaze descending, before rising back to her face with a regularity that Galileo could have admired. "Do you know when... um... when he'll be back?"


She shook her head, ponytail whipping behind her. "No, I'm afraid not," she said. "Why do you want him?"


"We were going to see a film," Toja said, self-consciously running a hand through his hair, "and we were wondering if he wanted to call. To come. I meant come. With us."


She favoured them with another smile. "I see." The smile shifted into a frown. "Why didn't you just call him, text him, or... well, do it any way that wouldn't mean that you end up having to go through the security at this place."


"We didn't know about the security," Kensuke said, grinning. "And he didn't reply to the email to his Academy account, and we couldn't find his number in the public lists. So we thought we'd just come over and ask."


The woman blinked once, and then nodded. "Oh, yes. Yes." She paused, as if considering things. "I can get you it," she said, after some deliberation.


Kensuke nodded enthusiastically. "Yes please. Thank you, Mrs Ikari."


The temperature suddenly dropped by about twenty degrees; the arcology air, kept a little cooler in this residential dome, suddenly freezing against the skin. Misato narrowed her eyes.


"I am not Mrs Ikari," she said, trying to keep the annoyance out of her voice. "I'm Shinji's guardian." She paused. Yes, they deserved it. How dare they suggest that! There was no way she could be Shinji's mother; did she look like the kind of person who'd have a teenage pregnancy like that; the kind of irresponsible mother who wouldn't even screen their birth? She sincerely hoped not. She didn't look a day over thirty!


That was completely separate, in her mind, from the fact that she was chronologically thirty one.


"Yes," she continued, "I'm Misato Katsuragi, Shinji's guardian. And you would be," the overlay in her Eyes gave her their names, as well as a considerable batch of personal information, "Kensuke Aida and Toja Suzuhari. Your names have come up in connection to a certain..." she gave a deliberate pause, "... incident I was made aware of." A series of clicks emanated from her hands held behind her back, which absolutely in no way whatsoever brought to mind, say, the sound of breaking bones. "If I hear of any more such incidents, there will be... consequences. If Shinji's surveillance team suspects any more incidents might maybe be about to happen, the consequences will be much more immediate, though no more painful in the long run." Misato leaned forwards, smiling. Unlike her previous smiles, it was not a pleasant smile. It displayed a little too much incisor for even the comfort of a Nazzadi, let alone a human. "I'm pleased we could have this chat." And then her demeanour returned to normal. "So... shall I just get his gridlink?"


The details were given, and the two boys were left standing, once again, in front of the closed door. On the inside, Misato leant against it with a thump which was not transmitted.


I'm sorry, but what? 'Mrs Ikari'? It says my name next to the door! Damn teenage boys and their predictable attentions! I mean, seriously, did they think I was old enough to be his mother? Or, in fact, that I was married to the Representative? I mean, it's possible she hastily added mentally, that he could be a very nice person and a real charmer, and the mere fact that I haven't ever seen a trace of it in his technocratic bones... oh, and the fact that Shinji and him have real issues... is just a persona, but, seriously? There's a limit to the benefit of the doubt. I don't think I know anyone who's actually spent time around him who'd go throw themselves at him. Damn teenage boys and their... stupidness.

She sighed again. She didn't look that old, did she? An innocent wastepaper bin received an almighty punt, which did make Misato feel better, although it failed to make up for either the blow to herself image, or the sudden and more immediate pain in her foot.


She would probably have been somewhat reassured to hear the conversation on the other side of the door, and she would have, had the door not been soundproofed and designed to take an RPG without breach.


"Wow," Kensuke managed.


"Wow," Toja agreed.


"Wow," Kensuke expanded, before switching to a more conventional vocabulary. "That was... so hot. Shinji is living with a woman with breasts and legs and... and everythingnessocity like that."


Toja slapped the other boy on the back, a little bit harder than might have been needed. "Yeah," he agreed. "There's no justice in the world."


"You can say that again! He gets a giant robot and a totally hot chick as his roommate. I mean... that figure, and she's military too... that attitude." He flipped out his PCPU. "The figure alone would be enough to get her the coveted AAA rating, but the way she did those warnings... I think she's going to be the first AAA+... no, AAA ++!" he said, marking it down. "What did she say her name was... oh, it's right by the door."


"... okay, I found that talk a bit scary," Toja admitted.


"You just don't appreciate the sublime beauty of a woman in uniform," the bespectacled boy said.


"She wasn't in uniform."


"She was. In my mind."


It should probably be noted at this point that the image in the boy's head would not have been a very practical combat uniform; quite apart from the lack of ANaMiNBC protection, which would have instantly doomed the wearer, the heels were eminently impractical, and the exposed midriff, low-cut neck and miniskirt would have utterly ruined what little concealment the garment provided.


"Well... she's probably not going to come out again," Toja said, with reluctance. "You phone him, and tell him about the film." He paused. "'Course, he might actually be doing something... she did say he was out. At least we tried."

~'/|\'~​

The maglev ride was smooth and silent, as it always was; the only noise the hiss of air around the train. The only outside forces felt by Shinji Ikari, immersed as he was by the music in his headphones, were the accelerations in and out of stations, and, beyond that, the slight, omnipresent rotation, as the Fifth Circle Line looped around the city. Unlike many of the other train lines, the various Circle lines, all the way from the First, at the top down to the lowest, remained at the same depth; a cyclone and anticyclone which ran all hours of the day.


"This is Ellersmer Court," the recorded voice played. "This is a Fifth Circle Line train, towards Whitborough Dome. Please allow passengers to leave the train, before you board."


The movement of people, getting off. The movement of people, getting on. They flowed, and yet, to the eyes of the brown-haired boy, sitting here, eyes on the other people for lack of a better place to stare, he could discern no change.


With one last blast of trumpets, the current song came to an end. Slowly, quietly, the thin, gentle melodies of the violins gave the start to the next one.


"Krehaba estel soli footbali serakroni sanginoji abismi," a loud-mouthed Nazzadi, slurring his words somewhat, proclaimed, "Chelsi... absul hi abisakroni adisi radski!"


"Zy kokrehakrony," a woman standing next to him, in the same bright blue shirt, agreed. "Absul footbalazi... serakroni suluperukredoneyakroni , absul serabi suluperukredoneyabi, pla absul serakausi suluperukredoneyakausi."


I'm sure you had fun, Shinji thought, irritation in his mental voice, as he turned up the volume, to drown them out, even if you thought the game was bad and the players are overpaid. But, seriously, can you please talk more quietly?

He didn't say anything out loud, of course. Not only were they both bigger than him, but they looked drunk. There was no point in a confrontation; they would be gone soon, and he'd still be here, so what did it matter? In fact, yes, they had open cans of beer with them. A little voice in Shinji's head gloated at the fines they'd be facing, because the watcher LAIs monitoring the CCTV cameras would have seen that and flagged their faces, but, still, it was irritating.


Shinji sated his annoyance by rolling his eyes at the girl sitting opposite him on the train, accompanied with a sideways glance at the pair. The dark-haired girl, who looked to be about his age, merely stared back without a change in expression, which suddenly made him feel more embarrassed. She was sitting next to an amlata, built like an athlete, and Shinji suddenly had a sinking feeling that he was accidentally flirting with someone's (very attractive, a treacherous part of his brain noted) girlfriend. Actually, they both looked vaguely familiar; he thought that he might have seen there somewhere around the Academy.


Oh no. Just when I thought the situation couldn't get any more embarrassing. To escape any further mishaps, he dropped his gaze, staring down at the screen of his PCPU, and just hoping that the world would leave him alone.


"This is Little Delhi," the recorded voice played. "This is a Fifth Circle Line train, towards Whitborough Dome. Please allow passengers to leave the train, before you board."


As they pulled out from the station, Shinji hazarded a look up. Phew, he thought, the football people got off. And the girl, too. That social minefield had been evaded, even if her boyfriend had stayed on the train. He flicked the volume back down, and sat back, as the music of Beethoven filled his ears.


*bleep* "Shinji has mail."


Or at least it did, before his muse decided to inform him of it, subverting his music to do so. He really hoped it was something important to bother disturbing him. Then again, Ari was running high-end anti-spam filters, so she did tend to catch pretty much everything that wasn't important.


He checked. It was a... well, an almost wary-sounding message from the human boy from yesterday, Kensuke, asking if he wanted to come see a film with Toja. They were meeting in Dome 3, in the Eddington cluster.


A few presses, to get to the map, and... yes, he had thought so. If he got off at Sideware, and then took the inclinator up to Third Tier, he'd be in the right dome. Shinji shrugged. It was going to be easy for him to do it, and he'd have to think up a reason for why he didn't, which would be harder than just doing it. If he were to be perfectly honest, it wasn't like he was doing anything vitally important. Just as long as he was back at Misato's for six, because they were having dinner with Dr Akagi...


Why not?

~'/|\'~​

The room was a vast cylinder, rising far above, just as it could, through diamond plates in the floor, be seen to plummet far below. The full height was unseen; the white light from the lit areas ended before this hollow space, deep below the depths of the Earth did. It was not a pure white, though, because for every light, there was a path which took it through the transparent sphere, divided into eighths by the metal bands which ran around its equators, which hung in the centre of the room. The orb refracted the light which shone through it with an uncanny radiance which spoke of its adamant nature, and was filled with a blue fluid which could be seen to move by the patterns of bent light, much like light shone through waves in an aquarium. The chamber was suspended by a cobweb of threads no thicker than a spider's web, the other, more visible profusion of flowing cables and arcane, in both senses of the word, equipment there for its function, not for its structure.


And speaking of its structure, if one were to look into the onion-like layers of the globe, and at the walls of this place with an electron microscope, one might see the warding circles, inscriptions and other anchors for sorcerous containment procedures which covered every square micrometer.


Rei Ayanami floated naked in the warm tank of fluid, eyes closed, hair drifting around her like seaweed. Curled into a ball, she twitched slightly, mouth moving with unheard words. Around her, the pale blueness swirled, cycled frequently to prevent her from depleting the oxygen. It was LCL, true, but not LCL as used in the entry plugs of the Evangelions; this was, quite apart from being a different colour, thinner, and, in the areas away from her body, almost an aerosol, never quite sure on whether it was a liquid or a gas.


It was, after all, designed for a rather different purpose.


A twitch, and she spasmed, straightening to full rigidity with her spine curving back, an unseen jet of fluid expelled from her lungs to send the blueness swirling and twirling. Slowly, slowly, she curled up again, only for, only a few minutes later, the process to repeat, her mouth open in an unheard, or perhaps, ignored, scream.


With a lack of care in her eyes, Dr Ritsuko Akagi flicked her gaze up, the light painting her harcontact-lit eyes blue-within-blue, before returning back to the feed, to deal with more important matters. Eventually, though, she was satisfied.


"Prepare for chamber evacuation," she ordered the girl. In response, mutely (or maybe not? How could one tell, when no sound seemed to escape the sphere?), the girl swam into a position which would leave her on her hands and knees when the vessel was cycled, as, indeed it did, the LCL drained away and replaced by air.


Kneeling, a gush of blue-to-clear liquid rushed out of Rei's mouth, as she coughed it out of her lungs, only for the fluid to effervesce and boil away before it hit the floor, the unhealthy-looking mist pulled out of the chamber too.


"Cycling chamber," Ritsuko noted.


"That went well," Ritsuko told her. "As far as I can see, there were no issues with this first test after your synchronicity accident." She paused. "Did you feel anything different or wrong?"


"I did not, Dr Akagi," the girl replied, hands still by her side, making no attempts to cover herself. Ristuko handed her a paper robe, which would last her until she got to the decontamination showers, to wash out the remains of the LCL-variant which still tinted her hair blue and coated her skin in a thin layer which made it look even colder than usual.


"Good." The blond paused. "The Unit 00 restart test is on Wednesday. You are to attend school as normal; it is not scheduled until 16:00."


"I understand, Dr Akagi." Rei sneezed, the thin wisp of blue fog dispersing before the older woman could even recoil.


Ritsuko had the feeling that she was forgetting something. "We will schedule the next session for... the third of October," she said, making note. "That's next Sunday."


"Yes, Dr Akagi." The girl continued to stand there, unmoving since she had donned the paper gown, no hint of movement from her own conscious volitation. The sneeze didn't count.


"That will be all, Rei," Ritsuko said.


"I understand, Dr Akagi." The girl paused, shifting slightly. "Dr Akagi?" she asked, raising one hand slightly.


"Yes, Rei?" the scientist asked, with a hint of interest.


"Why did you deem it necessary to have me stand-by for the Harbinger-4 incident, when I had not successfully synchronised with Unit 00 without a synchronicity incident? It was not necessary to have me do so, and any attempt to have me do so would have had unknown success." If there was curiosity in the girl's voice, Ritsuko could not read it. "It was not time then, and it was not necessary."


"Because we couldn't be sure that Test Pilot Ikari would be successful," Ritsuko explained, any interest she could have before drowned by the... the Rei-ness of the question. "If he had been incapacitated, it would have been necessary to eliminate the Harbinger, and, as a secondary objective, salvage the Test Model."


"But it was not necessary."


"No, it turned out not to be necessary," Ritsuko admitted. "To be honest, we did not expect Shinji to perform... well, to perform well. He's been a bit of a surprise."


"He has surprised you?" the girl replied flatly.


"Yes. Compared to the Second Child, the Third is woefully under-trained, and yet he's a prodigy in the field of AT-Field manipulation. It's a surprise."


"The Third Child. Acedia. Test Pilot Ikari. Shinji Ikari. He is the son of Representative Gendo Ikari, and Dr Yui Ikari."


The scientist waited for the girl to continue. She did not do so.


"You can go, Rei," she said, framing the statement as an order.


"Dr Akagi."


"Yes, Rei?" she asked, frustration creeping into her voice.


"Why are you surprised?"


The woman blinked, the lit harcontacts painting her eyelids purple as she blinked. She really wanted a smoke right now. "Because he's defying the predictions made on you, the Second Child, and the other failed test subjects," she said. "Now, if you'd just..."


Rarely, almost uniquely, Rei interrupted her. "I did not mean that," she said. "What I meant was, 'Why are you surprised?'"


Ritsuko frowned. "I just told you."


There might have been a hint of sadness in Rei's eyes as she answered, the doctor thought. "You did not understand. I am not surprised." And with that said, she turned, and headed for the exit that would lead her to the showers.


Then again, that might just have been excessive and wilful anthromorphism, the woman thought with a hint of spite.

~'/|\'~​

The sirens were wailing with the high pitched scream of a newborn infant. Most of what could be seen on the mainscreen was the red of destroyed assets; prime among them, the flanks of capital-grade charge beams now entirely silenced.


A woman screamed; a high-pitched shriek of terror. "Contact!" she managed. "C-c-contact!"


"My god," a young man, his temples still streaked with grey despite his age, muttered, staring at the screen in front of him. "God! No! It's... it's still coming! It just came out of nowhere! Why didn't you detect it?"


Her face streaked with sweat, the Captain in charge of the facility ran in, her red eyes narrowed. "Report!" she barked. "What the hell's going on? It's hell on earth outside!"


"C-captain!" the man stammered. "An unknown object... maybe two hundred metres in diameter... just appeared in low earth orbit. And that's only after it destroyed the defences. We think it must have had some kind of arcane field protecting it from detection!"


"Impossible!" the Captain snapped. "Nothing that large could be warded against detection in that..." and her face fell. "No," she said softly, expression suddenly wracked with fear. "They're back, aren't they?"


"I can't say. But... but they're launching smaller objects. We can't stand against them." The man looked up, tears in her eyes. "We just can't. We couldn't see them. Oh, God, why? What does science exist for!"


"Stow your bellyaching," the Captain snapped. "I'll tell you what science is there for! It's there for truth, for beauty, and for the realisation of the imminent potential in all things! And, most importantly, it's there for giving us tools, whether to find out more about the world, or killing those who would kill us. Because," the nazzady said, breaking the glass on the wall to remove a fire axe, "the Migou may have made me, and their Loyalists may have called us monsters when we rebelled. But let me tell you this. I've read Frankenstein since then! And it's in the nature of so-called monsters to destroy their makers!" She pointed up at the screen. "Look at that! Tower 07, by the Elder Thing City, is still operational! It's just not firing! So we're going to go there, and start it up again! For Earth! For Human and Nazzadi alike! And for the honour of the Antarctica Defence Forces!" She grabbed an automatic grenade launcher from a rack. "Saddle up, men, because the 27th of December, 2073, is a day which the bugs are going to remember for a very long time!"


There was a cheer from the soldiers huddled in the room, and a mass checking of weapons.


"You're... mad," the desk operator shouted. "It's minus 50 out there! And they're still bombing!"


The Captain glanced back over her shoulder. "Then the fireballs will keep us warm."


"I thought I said I didn't want to go see a film about military stuff," Shinji muttered along the aisle to the other two, as patriotic music swelled.


Toja looked uncomfortable, as he leant forwards. "Uh... yeah, sorry about this," he whispered back, his eyes reflecting the light like a cat's in the darkness. "I... would rather have gone to see something else, too. But he," he jerked his head towards Kensuke, who was sitting in the middle, "had already paid for the tickets."


"But it's not even that good," Shinji hissed. "I've seen this story before. And the script is terrible."


"Shush, you two," said Kensuke, who was still avidly staring at the screen. "This is awesome. You do know, right, that this is all Live Action, no CGI at all? It's amazing! They used real military equipment, even old stuff from the start of the war for everything. I've never seen such a realistic use of conventional explosives to fake a nuclear blast."


The other two boys stared at him. "You mean you didn't see if the plot was any good?" Shinji managed.


"Why?" Kensuke frowned. "It's really pretty."


Toja's palm collided with his forehead. "Last time I let you buy tickets," he muttered. "Next time, we're going to see Snake Fist IV."

~'/|\'~​

Shinji was in a mixed mood as he got home. Some of the parts of the film, the ones which hadn't been full of laughable dialogue or pretty explosions had been a little too close to home for his preferences. He'd heard that kind of controlled panic in the voices of other people, in the Evangelion Group, in training. He'd looked away at those points, especially when the bombardment had begun.


Of course, the events of December 2073, the so-called "First Strike", had been a Migou attack against the Antarctican polar defences, the first blow in the Second Arcanotech War, which would properly begin the next year as the Migou Hive Ship arrived complete with escorting fleet. The first landings had been in Antarctica, which had not even been contested thanks to the damage done by the First Strike. But at least it had been a Migou thing, not anything to do with Harbingers or anything like that, so that had numbed it a little, disassociated it a little from what they made him do. Hah, Shinji thought, if I couldn't do that, I basically couldn't watch anything.


He checked his watch; good, yes, he was still back before the deadline at six. Only a short search was needed to find his keys, which weren't actually mechanical keys, and the door slid open.


The... it wasn't even a scent in the air anymore, more a taste, hit him in the face like a fist. A sensation which he was, regrettably, familiar with. Coughing, choking, he stepped back outside, and sucked in a breath of clean arcology air.


It, whatever it was, was even making his eyes water, just from the smell. Taking a tentative sniff, he could smell burning paper, chilli... yes, there was certainly chilli, maybe some kind of curry powder stuff... and that was when his endurance gave out, and he retreated back to safety.


"Ari," he instructed his muse, pulling out his PCPU, "phone Misato." If she didn't respond, he should probably start getting worried, because peeking his head inside, he could see what looked like hints of smoke. Well, there would have to be. There had to be some point where a smell stopped being a smell, and started being a smoke, or maybe a vapour. Shinji couldn't quite remember the difference between the two, from Chemistry.


There was a sound of sizzling and bubbling from the other end of the line, as Misato picked up her PCPU, and, using that peculiar tone of voice which people use when they're holding the handset between their shoulder and the side of their head, said, "Heya, Shinji! I was starting to wonder when you'd call. Where are you?"


"Outside." Either she was in a full medieval dungeon, complete with boiling oil, or she was probably in the kitchen, Shinji was forced to conclude.


"Oh. Let me just turn that down... wrong way... down! 'Kay. 'Kay. Right." She paused. "Oh, right? Why? Are they not letting you through security? Your card should still be synched with your profile, right?"


Shinji shook his head, briefly wondered who he was shaking his head at, given that he was on the phone, and said, "No. I mean...right outside the entrance to the flat. I've got it open... are you alright in there?" he asked, with some anxiety. "I can smell smoke. Is there a fire?"


"Not anymore!" Misato said, cheerfully. "There was a leee~eeetle accident with some chilli I was frying with the beans, but that's all okay."


The boy relaxed. "That's good, because..."


"... and the packaging is totally extinguished!" Misato added. "Although who'd sell real chillies in a paper bag like that, I'd like to know," she added in a darker voice. "You can't microwave it at all, even though it looks like you should be able to!"


"Okay." Shinji blinked, lost for words. "Right." She's cooking she's cooking she'd cooking a little voice in his head wailed, but he managed to keep it away from his vocal cords.


He could hear Misato humming tunelessly, as something sizzled. "So, Shinji, did you have fun today?" she asked.


"Yes," he said. "Um... well, the film wasn't that good, but, yes."


"How were your friends?"


Shinji wasn't quite sure that he'd chose to describe them as friends quite yet; associates, certainly, with a view to a potential upgrade later, but you really couldn't say that when less than a week ago, one of them had punched you.


"Fine."


"They dropped 'round, you know?" Misato mentioned, an innocuous tone in her voice. "I had a talk with them in my capacity as Director of Operations... which was not what I wanted to do on a Sunday, 'cause I managed to get a day off... and I don't think you'll have any more trouble with them."


Yes, Shinji did know. Mainly because when the other two had asked what he had been doing, he had ended up explaining why he had got into the habit of just occasionally going out, and riding the Arconnect for hours at a time. It was something he'd done back in Toyko-3, too, because sometimes he just had to get away from people, to relax, and a house with one excitable little girl, and one very excitable little girl, was not a place where you could do such a thing.


And then he had made the mistake of using the line, 'And sometimes Misato is a bit exhausting to be around', which had been interpreted as two teenage boys, who believed that a double entendre could only have one meaning, would interpret it. There had been much discussion of the attractiveness of his guardian from the other two parties involved, with no appreciation of the fact that she was a slob, even when he explicitly pointed it out.


Shinji just knew this was going to get annoying.


"But... uh, Shinji, it would probably be easier if you'd come in, you know," Misato added. "I mean, I could do with some help, and some of us have been working hard in the kitchen." Shinji could smell it. If she'd been working hard in there, she hadn't been working at cooking something edible.


No, that wasn't fair, he corrected himself. She hadn't been succeeding at working at cooking something edible.


"Um, okay, I'll be in a moment," he said, as he disconnected. No, thinking of it, a more appropriate descriptor would be 'lied'. He was just going to wait out here for a while, let the air cycle a bit, before he'd come in, and try to help salvage dinner.


"Oh, hello Shinji!" called out Dr Akagi from behind him, the click of her heels a solid sound. He turned, noting that he didn't think he'd actually seen her out of what he was going to call 'scientist clothing' before. The loose blouse and trousers looked somehow wrong on her, compared to the more common lab coat, or more specialist equipment. And the fact that her harcontacts were off, that her pupils weren't rimmed with a blue gear... that was odd. "Why are you out h... oh, God, what is that smell?" Her eyes suddenly widened in recognition. "H-has Misato been cooking?"


Shinji winced. "I think so. And... um, when I called her, she said she'd burned it, too."


Ritsuko nodded. "It smells familiar. She went through about... about three months at university," she explained, "after a... difficult break-up trying to teach herself how to cook." She glanced at Shinji's expression. "No, I don't get the chain of logic behind that decision, either. As I recall, I ended up spending most of my time in the library to avoid the way the flat smelt." Her eyes narrowed. "Well, that and the tissue boyfriends."


"Tissue?" Shinji frowned. "I don't recognise the... what, were they all... oh. I see. Something to sob into and then throw away?" There was still a lot of doubt in his voice.


"Something like that," Ritsuko said diplomatically. The actual line of logic behind the nickname had actually been that they were only good for a few blows, before they were discarded, and more covertly, that they were rather... limp. The blond had not had a high opinion of the other woman's taste in men. "But," she added, changing the topic, "did she say what she was making?"


Shinji shook his head. "No. She said something about beans and chilli, though, and it was sort of implied that she went and bought ingredients, rather than nanofac stuff."


The woman's eyes went blank for a moment. "Right," she said. "In that case, Shinji, do you like Nazzadi food?"


The boy frowned, shifting his posture to lean against the wall a little more. "What kind?" he asked.


"What do you mean, 'what kind'?"


"Well, it's not all the same. At all," Shinji said, with authority. "You've got the Traditionalist stuff (although, even then, you can split by Colony Ship), you've got nazzadanfrazzi nutrenti... that's the stuff which takes inspiration from pre-existing human styles, but then twists it, and there's at least one version of that for every culture, and then there's the mess of ineveti nutrenti styles, which... well, you can't really..." he trailed off, as he found the blond staring at him. "Gany, my Nazzadi foster mother, was the one who taught me to cook, and did most of the cooking," he explained. "Um... you kind of pick this stuff up."


"I'd always thought it was just food," Ritsuko said, slowly. She had to confess, that was a side to the Third Child she hadn't seen before. "You know, quite a lot of sauces, tendency to add spices, quite a lot of protein. That kind of food."


Shinji rolled his eyes. "Yes," he said carefully, "in the same way that all Japanese people eat is sushi."


There was a snort from the woman, along with a shrug. "Okay, then. I get your point. But you'll be fine with it?"


"Yes." Well, as long as it's well done, he thought, privately.


"In that case," Ritsuko pulled out her PCPU, "... favourites... bookings... yes, they've got space for a party of three." She tapped the screen a few times, before raising one finger to her lips, with a gesture for Shinji to be quiet, and selecting a call. "Hello, Misato," she said, into the device. "Uh, huh." A pause. "Oh, I got out of work a while ago, I've just got to your dome, so I'll be with you in a few minutes. The bookings are for 18:30, so we should be able to make the reservation." Another pause. "Wait, what? I thought we were going out. I was making the bookings, and we'd be meeting at your place... you've been cooking. Sorry, I wouldn't have done it if I'd known, but... no, really, I insist. It is a really good place, I assure you... yes, it does have a good bar," she added, with a glance down at Shinji. "Sorry, we should probably both have been clearer..." she laughed, "... yes, I know exactly what you mean. I'll see you in a few minutes. Bye... bye."


The PCPU was returned to a pocket. "And that, Shinji," she said with a smile, "is how you handle Misato." She winced. "Do me a favour, though. Next time she suggests one of these things, either make sure we're going out, or don't let her in the kitchen. I'm no longer a student, much as I hate to admit it, and I don't think my stomach can cope with it anymore."

~'/|\'~​

"... so I said, 'yes, that is what I said'!" Misato leant back her head, and roared with laughter. Shinji and Ritsuko exchanged embarrassed looks with each other; a situation only made worse by the looks that the other patrons were giving them.


"I happen to like this restaurant," the blond muttered, "and I'd prefer to not be banned."


"Oh, lighten up, Rits!" The woman paused, as she took a mouthful of food. The particular dish she had, fermoja flakorpa, was a solid Traditionalist meal, meant to be eaten only with a knife and the pastry provided. Misato was wilfully ignoring that, and had obtained herself a fork, just as she was ignoring the fact that, technically, this meal was only meant to be eaten by men over the age of 27. Of course, that latter detail was ignored by all but the most Traditionalist, but the way that she then went to look for where they kept the condiments would have produced wider annoyance.


Ritsuko shook her head, with a hint of sorrow in the motion, as she watched her friend go.


"Thank you for doing this," Shinji said, as he sliced the leaf-wrapped protein on his plate into thin slices.


The blond flapped a hand at him. "No problem." She paused. "Of course... are you sure that you want to stay with her, though?" she asked. "I mean," the woman blinked, "I know you were placed with her, but... after smelling that cooking, there's no need you need to have your life ruined by a bad flatmate."


Shinji sighed. "I don't really get her," he admitted. "Sometimes, when we're talking... it's like we're not even in the same room. I just don't get how she can be like she is." He shrugged. "It's fine; there's no need to go to all that trouble. I'll survive."


"Well..."


"... if only because I've taken over cooking and cleaning duties," he added, with dark humour.


Ritsuko laughed. "I did the same at university," she admitted. "She's always been, for as long as I've known her, a slob, and a useless chef, and... well, she can only have got worse." The last words were said with a seriousness quite unlike the rest of the sentence.


Shinji frowned. "Huh?"


The scientist's eyes widened, fractionally. "Oh," she mouthed, silently. "You don't know?"


"Know what?"


Ritsuko frowned. "This is awkward. I don't know how much I should really say, as her friend, but..." she licked her lips. "Misato was with the Army... one of the best mecha pilots of her generation," she explained, picking her words carefully. "She made Captain after keeping the remnants of a brigade together and fighting for 23 days after they'd been cut off in the Fall of China, behind Storm lines, with only enough state-nullifiers to keep away state-sickness for fourteen... and even those weren't designed for how high the states were getting as the Leng POLLEN expanded. State-sickness does... funny things to your brain... random excitation of the atoms into higher r-states, and there's only so much that arcanotherapy can do. And then it happens again, when you leave, as they decay back down, and radiate out the energy. She came out lightly. Only the loss of most of her sense of smell and taste." Yes, that would do for an explanation. It wouldn't do to mention everything. For one, they were eating. For two, it was... private.


The boy paled, and poked at his food, suddenly much less hungry. "So," he said, glancing over at Misato, who was leaning over the buffet table, picking up bottles of brightly coloured flavourings, "the reason she puts so much stuff on everything she eats..."


Ritsuko nodded, gravely. "Yes."


"That's horrible." And Shinji now felt terrible for finding it amusing.


"Of course, she still can't cook," Ritsuko pointed out. "But now... she can't even really taste or smell it. She probably couldn't even smell the apartment, and because she has implanted Eyes, they wouldn't have been watering as much. So she does this just to taste anything."


"Oh." There was an uncomfortable silence, which was only broken when Misato put the bottles of red, blue, clear, and red-with-what-looked-like-chilli-seeds-in-it down on the table, and began to liberally apply them.


"Ah, that's better," she said with a grin. "Want to try a bite?" the dark-haired woman said to Shinji, with a grin, proffering her fork forwards.


Shinji shook his head mutely, and poked at the slices on his plate.


"Wimp," she said, with a grin. "A real man should always be willing to try something once."


Ritsuko rolled her eyes. "What, you mean like Pola? As I recall, he let you drive for him once. And then left you."


Misato pouted. "He was terrible in be... being a good passenger," she said, with a sideways glance at Shinji.


"Misato. He was in training to be a fighter pilot."


"So?"


"He'd had the Grade One implants. He shouldn't even have been physically capable of getting motion sick."


"So? He said the real issue was being that low, which just goes to show that he wasn't all that good."


The blond raised her hands. "I'm just saying, there are some things you shouldn't try."


Just then, both womens' PCPUs chimed. "If this is an emergency, I'm going to kill someone," the black-haired woman growled. "Oh, good," she added, after checking, in a lighter tone.


"Yes, I was a little worried, but it seems to have gone smoothly. And not a moment too soon."


"Hmm?" Shinji asked, or at least made a quizzical noise.


"We were having Zero-Two moved from where it was, to another place," Ritsuko said carefully, choosing her words because they were in a public place. Well, she happened to know that a non-negligible fraction of the clients here were Armacham Internal Security guards, but the point still remained. "And that's all I'm going to say... and Misato will say, too." She snapped her fingers, and reached for her handbag, rummaging through it. "Although... that reminds me. She handed him a black sealed tablet, about the size of his hand.


"What is it?"


"Turn it over." He did; the other side was emblazoned with 'Secure Biometric Data package'. There was a transparent window on the front. Through it, he could see a picture of Rei Ayanami. "It's her new Ashcroft Ident Card; her only one expired. Some of her access rights are dependent on this."


"Why me?"


"Maybe because you'll see her at school tomorrow, while I'm working," the woman said, a hint of irritation in her voice.


Shinji could accept that this was a fair point. He glanced back at the picture. It was even taken against a black background; it had been found that sidoci ended up overexposed and bleached when taken against a normal white one. Tilting the sealed package, the familiar face shifted as the angle he was looking at it changed. Idly, he ran one hand along his jaw, squinting at the hologram of the girl.


He looked up to find both women staring at him, smiling faintly. Well, Ritsuko was smiling faintly. Misato had a look on her face which would probably have run afoul of pre-NEG decency laws in some parts of the world.


"What's the matter?" asked the dark-haired woman, a slight lilt in her voice. "You seem to be looking at Rei's face very intently."


"What? Um..."


"Oh, come on, it's sweet," she continued. "This way, you have a nice little excuse to talk to her. And then, maybe..."


"It's not..."


"You might even get to see her house," Misato added, a salacious grin on her face.


Ritsuko blinked suddenly, her face rigid. "There's no need to tease him quite so much," she told her friend, mock-sternness in her voice.


"Yes! Thank you! A sane..."


"... of course, you still need to tease him a little," Ritsuko continued, the grin creeping back in.


Crossing his arms, Shinji slumped back down, his face taking on the caste of a martyr.


"Make sure you remember, Shinji," the blond said. She sighed. "She tries, you know."


"Who?"


"Rei. But... well," she ran one hand over her face, "much like your father, sometimes I think her problem is that she can't see the little things in front of her. She can't see the trees for the forest... and, yes, I mean it that way around. And she's not very good at it."


"At what?"


"Ignorance."

~'/|\'~​

Her handbag made a solid thump on the floor, as Ritsuko dropped it, and turned to check that the security systems had turned back on properly. Satisfied that they had, she slipped her shoes off, and, socks squeaking on the hard material, stepped into her kitchen.


Twelve eyes reflected the light from the hallways back at her, an inhuman yellowish-golden glint. The blond sighed.


"What are you doing in here, sitting around in the dark?" she asked, flicking the light on.


There was a mewing, as the cats protested at the sudden change in their conditions. The woman glanced over at their bowls. Ah. Yes, that made sense. She'd forgotten to fill up the dispenser robot; the football-like unit waiting at its charging point. They had drunk all their water, and would be wanting food. Stepping over to the bowls, she reached down to pick up the dishes, only for her fingers to be batted away by one of the cats.


"Major Zero? What are you doing?" she asked the cat, a handsome Havana Blue tom. Quite unlike their ancestor breed, the Persian Blue, the Havana Blue was actually, blatantly blue. The genetics labs of Cuba had been busy with genetically modified pets even before the First Arcanotech War; the specific breed was one of the oldest ones, an experiment into pet colouration which had tweaked the genes which decided coat colouration, carried on the X-chromosomes. Its fur was an almost-synthetic blue, never encountered in nature, and it had been rather pricy as a result. The Havana Blue was always provided with full geneline history, and the numbers were highly restricted, with a long waiting list.


It had been Ritsuko's little act of rebellion to let the Sergeant breed with Kiko, a perfectly normal mongrel tabby. She didn't care about the genelines, or the fact that she was diluting the stock. Their kittens would thank her, for one, because the cat breeders, even with the aid of genetic modification, tended to keep the lines too closed-in for her liking. Plus, the tortoiseshell from the litter had been adorable, its spiky fur a mottled grey, orange, black and blue.


The cat mewed at her, staring at her with its red eyes, and batted at her hand again. The human sighed. "Do you want foot or not?" she said, as she straightened up. The cat trotted out of the kitchen, waiting for her at the door. "Okay then," she said to the cat, "be that way."


A series of splashes of water was followed by the rattling sound of her filling up the dispenser robot. Shortly afterwards, she emerged from the kitchen, carrying a cat under each arm, because they had insisted at batting at the ball-like robot which was trying to fill their feeding bowls, rather than actually let it give them it. For all that she liked her cats, they could be rather stupid.


Making her way through to her box-like study, she found the large blue cat occupying her chair. She'd left the door open again, obviously, and they always found their way through, to the most comfortable chair in the house. Booting up the machine, her Grid workspace appeared, followed by the sound of its internal processor whirring to life. She picked up the tom from the seat, and sat back down, keeping the cat on her lap. Major Zero didn't protest; in fact, he flopped over her knees, stretching, a fair purr vibrating her legs.


Reactivating her harcontacts, Dr Ritsuko Akagi resumed work. The Unit 00 start-up test was this Wednesday, after all, and she wasn't going to get work done by having meals in restaurants.

~'/|\'~​

 

[EarthScorpion]

Iä! Iä! Iä Yog-Sothoth, the Key and the Gate, for suddenly that which had been one was now two, more manageable Chapters!




Chapter 9

Rei 01, Something Black / The other upon Saturn's bended neck she laid

EVANGELION

~'/|\'~​

"Trust no friend without faults, and love a maiden, but no angel."

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing​

~'/|\'~​

27th September, 2091

Without exception, everyone who passed the entrance examination to get into an Ashcroft Academy was a high achiever. The schools prided themselves on it; there was a reason that the global academic league tables were utterly dominated by these schools. They cherrypicked the brightest from mainstream education with generous scholarships, and were rumoured to conduct pre-admission genetic screening which was then taken into account in the acceptance process. The children there were disproportionately xenomixed and genofixed.

And despite this academic brilliance concentrated in one place, not one person had been able to deduce the logic behind how the Physical Education sessions migrated around the week. This week, they were Monday afternoon. Last week, they had been Tuesday morning. The week before that, Thursday morning. The general consensus was that the timetabling LAI was mad, with a minority report that the PE teachers were all a bunch of bloody-minded sadists who took too much pleasure in detentions issued for lack of the proper kit.

Up and down the pitches in front of the main buildings, a mass of boys thundered. Tight white T-shirts were covered by red or blue bibs, as they fought for primacy, and short shorts were splattered with mud as the studded boots tore up the natural turf. With a flick, a blue-bibbed player passed it to a tall, brown-haired boy who, pale legs flashing in the lightstrips in the dome ceiling, tore off up the field, outpacing or outwitting those reds who might have tried to obstruct him.

"Damn it, Dathan, pass the ball!" a boy, in a perfect position for a cross into the penalty box, yelled.

The taller boy ignored them, and, with a flick, sent it straight at the goal with a quite scary velocity, to barely be brushed aside by the fingers of the goalkeeper; fingers which were now in considerable pain. In the chaos around the goalmouth, the ball went out of play, and, luckily for the red-bibbed players, it was their goal kick.

Of course, the people on the pitch were predominantly the first team players from the six classes with PE scheduled at this time. The rest were sitting around at the sidelines, where they were meant to doing exercises. However, the teacher who had been covering them was currently escorting two boys, who'd managed to run head-first into each other, to the nurse's office, and so they were currently being simultaneously apathetic, indolent, salacious and libidinous.

Whoever had decided to give the school swimming pool a glass front which was visible from the playing fields was worshiped as a minor god by much of the male population of the school, or at least the ones old enough, and inclined to find girls interesting. For one, they had single-handedly, in their pursuit of architectural aesthetics, managed to negate the work done in dividing the sexes when there was swimming, to avoid any possible problems with body issues imposed by social pressures.

With a synchronised splash, the five girls standing at the end of the pool dived in. At the other end, the previous set climbed out, dripping down onto the clean white tiles. One wrapped her arm around another, mouth moving in unheard laughter, and there were sighs from the male onlookers.

"I like the view," Kensuke said, in a voice which was approaching sexual harassment merely in intonation, as he nudged Shinji in the ribs.

"I-I don't know what you mean."

"You cannot fool me!" declared Kensuke, with deliberate pomposity. "You, too, are looking for an answer to that eternal..."

"... well, since the 2060s..." Toja interjected, sitting on the other side of the boy.

"... eternal since the 2060s problem too, my friend. It has puzzled generations of men, driven them to madness... and stuff. But what is that problem, I hear you ask?"

Shinji squinted. "I feel you're going to tell me."

"Nazzadi or human! Which is hotter!"

"It's a hard one," a Nazzadi boy, his hair dyed white, said, as he leant back. "And if you say, 'That's what she said', Ken, I will thump you."

"Come on, Ala. Would I do..."

"Yes. And have."

Shinji nodded. "It is true."

"I hate you guys."

"Don't worry," Enitan, the dark-skinned boy on the other side of Toja, said with a smirk. "We hate you too. But, back to the topic at hand," he stroked his chin. "Difficult indeed. Humans are shorter, which is cuter..."

Toja snorted. "You only say that 'cause you're short and don't want a girlfriend who's taller than you. You know how much I'd have to bend down to kiss some of those people?" He paused. "Not that I'd mind, if they were hot, because that's a sacrifice worth making, but still..."

"Ah, but we're forgetting the big divide," Ala pointed out. "More fat; yes or no? Nazzadi are thinner, but humans have bigger boobs, and are more curvy... which I just find..." he shook his head. "Well, look at Panary." Gazes were indeed directed at the girl, her wet black hair tied back into a ponytail, as she stood at the end of the pool, waiting for her signal. "Sure, she might be tall and thin, but look! I mean, if I wanted someone tall, thin, muscled, and with no boobs, I'd go ask Dathan out."

Enitan snorted. "Get ready to fight both Jony and Ferdina for him, then."

"That wasn't serioooous."

"Even if he asked you out?"

"Yes! God, were you not listening to me? She's gotta actually," he made gestures in front of his chest, "be shaped like a girl, you know? That was the whole point of the comparison. Plus, you know, I'm a nazzada. So I know what my teeth are like. Like chisels, that's what. And... well, that's a real downside on a girl."

There was collective male wincing from all but Shinji, who had tuned out the conversation a while ago. He couldn't help but feel that the whole conversation was more than a little sordid. It was already a little dubious to stare; did they have to make commentary too? It made the whole thing rather uncomfortable. They really didn't spend enough time around women... no, that didn't make sense. It wasn't as if all the other lessons were gender-segregated.

Shinji was of the rather smug opinion (which he would, of course, never mention to anyone) that he just had a healthier, which was to say, less objectifying, attitude to the fairer sex. Because when one is raised by two women, one of whom works for the FSB, one discovers that objectification is not strictly viable, unless one wants to have why it is wrong explained in detail.

Of course, that didn't stop him staring over at the pool, too. Over at the pale figure, dark blue swimming costume a stark contrast to her chalk-coloured skin, who sat at the end of the pool, legs clutched up against her chest.

Rei Ayanami. Who was she, really? He didn't know. Oh, they called the First Child, and sometimes, when they were talking to military people they referred to her as Invidia, but he didn't know anything about her. He didn't know where she lived, what she did in her free time, how she felt about having to pilot, what she was like as a person... in a purely professional sense, he hastened to reassure himself. Although, of course, she was very attractive, in a sort of special way; there was something about the way that snow-white skin just looked good on a girl, and from this viewpoint, he could see that she had an excellent figure. The thought had occurred that he would get to see her in a plug suit at some point in the very near future. It was a nice thought.

But of course, that wasn't why he was interested in her. Honestly. This was a more professional (and the word felt strange to him) interest. Sure, it was possible that something more might be achievable, but that was only a distant prospect. This was just getting to know someone who, after all, also piloted a forty-metre giant robot; someone else who would understand the stress and the punishing training schedule they inflicted on him. He was... he was taking the initiative.

There were things, though, that he had picked up from the others in the class; they said she was asocial, cold, that she never chose to interact with people unless it was necessary and that she had been like this ever since she joined the class, back in first year. Some of the girls had apparently tried multiple times to get her more involved; he had heard mention of attempts by Hikary, Taly, that brown-haired bookish one who sat at the back... no success. Although it was admirable of them to try. She did look... isolated, sitting there, her legs raised up like a barrier to the world around her. Lonely, and yet there was something about her that left him ill at ease, a darker voice added. Maybe it was because she seemed to be able to make his father smile, when he couldn't.

He really hoped it wasn't some kind of unconscious bias against sidoci. He didn't want to think of himself as the sort of person who had a problem with them.

Someone said his name. He switched his attention back to the conversation.

"Huh?"

There were mutual smirks all around. "I said," Toja said, "I think Shinji agrees that xenomixed is best."

He stared at them in confusion.

"You were staring," the boy said.

"At Rei Ayanami," Kensuke added, unnecessarily.

"N-n-no," Shinji stammered.

Enitan rolled his eyes. "We're not blind, you know. The world doesn't shut down when you're not paying attention." He paused. "Well, if it does, it creates memories that make it the same as if it didn't..."

"But what part were you staring at, hmm?" Toja interrupted, as he leant in. "Her breasts, perhaps?"

"I think you can definitely say she takes after her human side, if you know what I mean," Kensuke said, waggling his eyebrows. "Or maybe her calves?"

"Or her thighs?"

"Like I said," Shinji stammered, pushed off balance by both the interrogation, and the fact that they were leaning in from both sides, "that's not it. Really."

"... in that case," someone muttered, "we should take away your man card. Because not staring at something like that..."

"Then what were you looking at, huh?" Toja said, drawing even closer.

"After all, we know you're bad at lying," the bespectacled boy added

"Your faces are too close," muttered Shinji, through clenched teeth. "And... I was wondering why she's always alone. Why she never does anything with anyone."

"Because she's... like that."

"All sidoci are a bit like that. You can't really get in their heads."

"Always been like that."

"Kinda creepy."

"Don't know why some of the girls keep on trying to get her to do stuff. She's made it clear she's not interested."

"She's Rei. That means she... she acts like Rei."

The chorus of advice and answers was as useless as everything else had been.

"Plus, you know, by the way?" Toja nodded, face serious. "The whole 'Why are you so lonely', and wanting to be the one who does stuff with her? Doesn't work. At all."

"Which is a shame," Kensuke added, "'cause she's a solid AA+ on my list of girls."

"Well, yeah, you know there's a study, right," Enitan said, "and... I read it, and it turns out, that xenomixes all have that sex factor... don't look at me like that, that's what they called it, and the study found that, whether they're amlati or sidoci, they're like ten percent hotter than other people."

"Yeah, because anything which uses the word 'sex factor' is totally a reliable study," Ala said, rolling his eyes. "Mind you," he said, eyes searching for a certain amlaty, and not finding her, "it's true. They do just get the balance right, you know."

Shinji tuned out again, only for the teacher to get back and start shouting that they should be on their feet, that this was 'physical education', not 'sitting around education', and other such witticisms beloved of the PE teacher. Who was wearing a lab coat, for some reason.

The boy blinked. Oh yeah, he thought, as he pulled himself to his feet. We were sitting around because he had to take people to the nurse's office. Shinji had sort of forgotten that.

He also had a feeling he was forgetting something else. Oh well. It probably wasn't that important.

~'/|\'~​

"The time is 18:04. Shinji has mail. There is one new voice message from Dr Ritsuko Akagi. Begin voice message. 'Shinji, did you remember to give Rei her card? It's important. If you have already, thanks.' End message. There is an attached file. Do you wish to add this to your reminders?"

Shinji groaned. That was it. Flicking through the attachment, he noted that, yes, Dr Akagi had sent him the girl's address. He looked up at the wall, looking for a clock which wasn't there; a pointless endeavour, since he did already know the time. Idly, he highlighted the physical address.

"Ari," he instructed the muse, "get directions."

The instructions flowed up onto the screen. Shinji frowned. She lived pretty high up, in one of the shallow domes feeding off from one of the older clusters. Maybe forty-five minutes in rush hour, as the estimate stated. He didn't really want to do this.

But he probably had to. He had been asked, yesterday, and Rei would probably have problems without a valid card. And... well, he had wondered where she lived. This was an excuse, right? Well, not an excuse, it was a duty. In fact, he was helping her out by sacrificing his time, which made it acceptable.

Confirmed in his self-righteousness, which was still failing to drown out his nerves, Shinji headed off. Then he stepped back in, and left a note for Misato on the table, telling her where he had gone. And then decided that she'd probably knock it off when she dumped stuff on the table, or just not see it, and sent an email as well. Then he left, only to return to grab something to eat on the way; it wasn't as if there was a paucity of junk food in the apartment. Places where she lived seemed to generate it in the same way that dishes left in the sink generated mould. In fact, there were some dishes in the sink, left to soak from the abortive cooking attempt the night before. Maybe if he just cleaned them first...

No. He wasn't delaying, but he should just go and do it.

If only he could convince himself that the squirming in his stomach was a completely irrational response to an errand which would take him to a pretty girl's house.

~'/|\'~​

In retrospect, Shinji felt, as he stared around the dome, he probably should have started to get, if not suspicious, a little wary when the warning signs started to pop up, his muse alerting him that the entire dome was private property and that he would not be admitted unless he had a valid reason. Still, that had been within the bounds of possibility. The Geocity had similar warnings, although he hadn't suspected them from a place like this, so high up. Likewise, if it was like that, then it would make sense that there wouldn't be much traffic heading in from the larger domes in the cluster. Even the enhanced security at the dome access point was logical; it made sense that the place would be protected, if it was a private dome, although he hadn't expected to see quite so many powered armours, or the slight nooks in the wall which, by his reckoning, concealed turrets. Still, he had passed the brain scans, the blood checks, and the phone-call down to the Geocity to check that he had a legitimate reason to be here, and he was into the dome where Rei Ayanami lived.

But it was so quiet in here. The only noise was the faint buzz of power cables, and the near silent movement of air from the life support units. Above, the top of the dome was sky-blue, the light strips imperfectly imitating natural sunlight, despite the fact that, outside, it was probably already notably evening. Shinji didn't really know; he had never lived outside the regular twelve hour day-night cycle of an underground arcology, had not ever even been a surface resident, or one of the inhabitants of the very shallow domes, lit by transmitted sunlight from the surface. The place seemed hollow, empty, even more so than the Geocity, which was at least alive in its vastness. This dome was not; stark white buildings forming a circular canyon around the edges, looking down onto the smaller buildings in the centre, and the recreational area. If one could call this a recreational area, Shinji thought. It was maybe ten metres by ten metres, a small square of grass, with a single tree planted (or, from the looks of it, transplanted, given its age) in the centre.

Someone had hung a swing on the tree; a crude construct of two lengths of rope, and a plastic pseudowood plank. The brown-haired boy gave the swing a push, and watched as the pendular motion exhausted itself. He shivered, a motion which flowed into a retrieval of his PCPU from his pocket, to check the address on the map he had generated.

Where was everyone? He almost snorted, at the realisation of another horror film cliché. Where were the cats, too? If films taught you anything, it's that when the cats, colonies of which were kept in every dome for their innate sensitivity to extra-normal entities as well as for more mundane, anti-pest issues, disappeared, something odd was happening. Maybe this whole thing was a trap, maybe it hadn't been Dr Akagi at the dinner, but instead some sinister, evil shapeshifter, which stole the forms of its victims, and was merely luring him here to consume him too...

Shinji shook his head. He was being silly. Obviously, this was an Ashcroft owned-dome, which they leased out to younger employees, who'd still be at work at this time. He was being silly, and letting his imagination creep him out. He should be rational about this.

The problem was that his imagination was both very productive, and somewhat disobedient. And his rationality would have been pleased if it could have just seen someone else. Just for reassurance. No, he was being silly. This was just nerves from going around to an unfamiliar girl's apartment. So what if it was quiet? That was a good thing in a residential dome, especially considering how lively the areas he had been through to get here had been. It was the change which was putting him off, not anything rational.

Rei's apartment was one of the ones on the outer loop, the vertical wall of buildings that encircled the inner space, and which the access tunnel had led through. Naturally, things being as they were, she lived on the opposite side to the one which he had taken. Stepping up to the entrance to her block, the door sliding open as it detected the visitor ID they had given him at the checkpoint, Shinji glanced at the occupancy list, just to check that he was really at the right place.

Yes, there it was. 'Flat 402: Ayanami, Rei'.

And that was it. All the other name spaces, blank. There were ten or so flats per floor on the list; the last one listed was 609. And of that, the only one occupied was 402.

Fortunately, the inside of the apartment building was clean, well lit, and in good condition. It was just as well. Shinji was beginning to get jumpy, and, to name a completely arbitrary example, if there had been a mysterious leaking stain on the ceiling, just above the entrance, he would probably have decided that enough was enough, and just given Rei the card tomorrow at school. Still, despite that, as he got into the lift, his finger hovered over the '400' button for a few seconds, before he pressed it. And, it had to be said, the slight flicker in the light in the lift really did not help matters. Still, he arrived at his destination entirely safe.

"401... 403... huh?" Shinji was getting a little disturbed by now. There didn't actually appear to be a room 402. This was... oh, wait. Yes, there it was. All the odd numbers ran along one side, all the even along another. That... that made a lot more sense. A short burst of nervous laughter escaped his lips, and echoed along the white-painted corridor. He really had to get his imagination under control. Stepping forwards, he swallowed, and knocked on the door.

"Hello?" he called out. Maybe there was a hidden microphone or something, because I can't see a panel next to the door.

The door swung inwards silently. Through the gap, he could see a stark white hallway, a door at the other end, which suddenly seemed a lot longer than it... Shinji put one hand to his forehead, suddenly feeling lightheaded. He shook his head, eyes screwed shut, and looked up again, leaning into the door, which opened fully, a slight 'clunk' marking when the handle hit the wall. No, it was just a hallway. His stomach growled; most days, he would have eaten by now. It would probably make sense to grab something on the way back, he thought, before looking closer at the scene before him. There was a pair of shoes sitting just inside the door, next to an empty bin, and a pair of socks. That was somewhat reassuring.

"Hello? Rei? It's... um, it's me. Shinji Ikari." He blinked, heavily. "The Third Child," he ventured, in case she didn't remember the name. She might not. It wasn't as if they'd talked.

No response. Well, in that case he should probably find somewhere to leave it for her, and then leave. Should he shut the door properly behind him? She might be around at someone else's house, and forgotten her key, but on the other hand, it wasn't safe to leave the door open. Slipping off his shoes, he stepped inside, walking on tiptoes. He was just going to find a place to leave the card, and... well, maybe he was a little curious.

To his left, he poked his head into what turned out to be the kitchen. It was approaching Misatoan levels of untidiness. What it lacked in empty cans of beer, it made up for in discarded pizza boxes and food wrappings. Shinji frowned, the cook in him subtly disappointed that she appeared to live off fast-food and nanofactory meals, rather than actually cooking. It wasn't that hard, despite the fact that everybody else seemed to find it too much effort. And this wasn't a place to leave the card, certainly, not with all the junk around. He stepped back into the hallway, and pushed the door to the main room open.

His first thought was What's with the colour scheme?

His second thought was Yuck, it's messy in here. Are those... bloodstained bandages? And blood on the pillow, too?

His third thought was largely incoherent, because he realised that three of the four walls were not painted with a sort of black pattern. They were painted white, just like the fourth wall, to his left, which looked fresh. No, the patterning was writing.

It wasn't scrawled, scribbled writing. No, it was the precise and methodical writing of someone who had taken a great deal of care over what they did. He couldn't recognise all of the characters; there were the phonetic and phonemic symbols of Reformed English, though even then the words were not all familiar, there were kanji, hiragana and katakana, and there were sections in what looked like Greek; at the very least, he recognised the symbols from science lessons.

Uneasily, he was pretty sure that some of it was like the sorcery-related stuff in his father's office. Those bits were typically labelling the diagrams and sketches, interruptions in the flow where turbulence rained, and characters wrapped and swirled around the new shapes, warped from their neat lines.

With a sick fascination, Shinji leant in. It really was very pretty, in an aesthetic sense, each linguistic transition seemingly chosen for some sense of elegance. He traced his finger along one line; the writing felt smooth, and slightly oily on the white paint. Some kind of pen, he suspected; a suspicion which was confirmed as his fingertip smudged the elegance. Hastily he withdrew it, leaving a grey streak on the sharply delineated divide.

Watching the sun rise he read, the Queen of Μάτια and the Blinded Prince wait for us at the end of everything. There was then an section he couldn't understand, in an alphabet he couldn't even recognise, before it resumed in kanji. It has always been an inevitability that unity and oblivion will conflict, for they are the same thing, and they are both born of the soul. Our ties and it switched back to RE, connect us all to one another. Our ties make us σκλάβοι and that is how it must be, for who would chose to be wild and free, beyond καλό και το κακό? It is the final decision we all must take. If we chose to be so, we cease to be us.

Shinji shivered, and with an act of will, looked away. Three of the four walls were like that. The last was freshly white. No, no it wasn't, he realised. There were the first creeping signs of a new diagram snaking around onto the blank canvas, over by the bed.

The bed. Yes. The bed. Stop looking at the walls. Compared to them, the rest of the room was as messy as the kitchen. There were bloodstains on the bed, and the covers were yellowed. And these defects were made worse by how bare, and how bright the rest of the room was. If it had been ill-lit, these sins could have been concealed. Shinji sniffed. And there was a scent to the air, a scent of metal and blood and... something else.

The room stunk of LCL.

Gritting his teeth, that familiar smell rolling off his nostrils and onto his tongue, he stepped further into the room, walking on tiptoes. He swallowed his mouthful of saliva, which tasted as everything did, of LCL, and looked around for somewhere to leave the card. There. There was a chest of drawers over by the bed, which seemed to have a few personal possessions on it. That would be a good place. And then he could get out of here.

He reached into his bag, and took out the card, still sealed in the protective, anti-tamper wrapping that Dr Akagi had given it to him in, and, hand hovering, looked for the most obvious place. There were books, actual, physical books, not readers, stacked neatly. The dust-jackets were dull, pictureless; the font on the spines was that sharp golden writing that Shinji had always thought of as an academic typeface. There was a medicinal box with a scrapelock on it, merely labelled MEDICATION TYPE-4A. Peering through the transparent front, he could see layer after layer of syringe. Some of them had been used; he could tell from the red safety cap covering the tip, compared to the unused whites.

That was a good place, he decided, before frowning. He should probably leave a note, too, to explain it showing up. It would be rather odd for it to suddenly just appear. Leaning on the surface, he took a piece of paper from his bag, and wrote;

Rei,

I was told by Dr Akagi to bring you this. It's a new Ashcroft Ident card; she said your old one had expired. I did knock, and call, but you didn't answer, and the door was open. You might want to keep it closed.

I'm sorry if this is rude.

He paused, then continued, rather than signing it off immediately.

Good luck on the upcoming Synchronisation Test. I hope it goes well, and look forwards to training with you

Shinji Ikari

He reread the note. Yes, the 'I'm sorry if this is rude bit' was certainly in the wrong place. It looked like he was apologising for wishing her luck. He amended it to read, 'I'm sorry if this is rude. to let myself in like this,' and then put his pen back in his bag, which left the final thing on the chest of drawers. A pair of deactivated arglasses rested on their side. One of the sides hung uselessly, the hinge obviously broken; a weakpoint, compared to the composite-diamond display.

"Are these Ayanami's?" Shinji said to himself, staring at his own brightly lit reflection in the surface. He couldn't really see her wearing a model like this; something small and oval-shaped, maybe, or one of the circular full-eye ones, but not this older, and expensive model, which looked exactly like a pair of corrective lenses.

Actually, they looked like a very good quality model. They'd certainly still work, despite the broken frame...

Shinji fought with temptation for a moment, and lost.

The arglasses, despite the broken hinge, still fit as well as they would have normally, which was to say that they were perhaps a size or two too large. Reaching up, he felt around the frame until he found the activation button, and they turned opaque, the lens whiting out, the three rotated triangles of the Ashcroft Foundation showing exactly who had made them, and programmed their OS. Blinking, he noted the small black test in the bottom right of both lens.

Property of Gendo Ikari. Invalid Retina.

Frowning, he turned around, noting that the lenses had whited out again. What was Rei Ayanami doing with a pair of his father's arglasses?

Oh, wait, no. They weren't opaque anymore; he could see the way they highlighted objects in the room in red and green. No, the white opacity directly in front of him, almost toe to toe, was a dripping wet, naked Rei Ayanami, a white towel draped over her shoulders. She was staring at him

The next few seconds were... confused.

There was certainly a bit when Rei reached out and tried to take the glasses back.

There was certainly a bit when Shinji instinctively recoiled, and screamed in a manner not dissimilar to a little girl, before bouncing off the furniture and straight back into Rei.

There was most certainly a bit where her knee ended up going into his crotch as they fell together. Because that bit hurt.

But no matter what happened, it ended with the drenched Rei on her back on the ground, her hair spread around her like a bridal veil, Shinji leaning on top of her, one hand on something rather warm and one on the cold floor, and one pair of blue eyes locked on one grey pair.

The two stared at each other, unmoving.

Shinji mental processes were largely incoherent with terror at this point, because he'd just been caught in someone's house and they're her glasses andohGodshe's naked and I'montopof her... Oh, and he was in pain, which was not helping with matters,

Motion still failed to occur.

"Why are you not moving?" Rei asked, her tone no different than she might use if someone were blocking her way at school.

With a yelp, Shinji recoiled up, as he realised that the wet warmness beneath his left hand was her breast. His motion carried him back into the wall, both hands raised in an instinctive protective gesture. What had just happened? What did he think he had been doing? Oh, why hadn't he moved earlier?

Rei lay there, arms still spread, her only movement to tilt her head towards him. With a horribly guilty feeling, the boy could see the pink creep over her right breast, in a rough hand-shape; paler than it would be in a human, because her skin was actually pigmented white, but still there. And still those black pupils stared at him, the only real contrast on a body of whites and greys, with only hints of pink around her eyes, lips, and... down below.

"Do not smudge the wall," she said. With a second yelp, Shinji sprung away from the wall, the black markings on the back of his white shirt and the smudges on the wall proof that the instruction had come too late, only to knock back into the chest of drawers.

With a series of thuds, the pile of books and the box of syringes cascaded off, onto the bare floor.

"Sorry!" gasped Shinji through clenched teeth, face screwed up into a mask of contrition. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry sorry sorry," he sucked in a breath, "really really sorry."

Slowly, her unclad state apparently unimportant to her, Rei pulled herself to her feet. Stepping up to Shinji, still trailing water in a path he could now see led back through another door in the room, she bent over, to pick up the sealed medical box, and place it back on the chest of drawers. Next to it, she placed the arglasses, fingers reaching around the edge to turn them back off.

"Pick up the books," she instructed him. "My hands are wet."

Shinji nodded frantically, realised that the act of looking down might be misinterpreted, and tried to find a safe place in the room to look. This was remarkably hard. Eventually, he settled his gaze on the white wall, over by the head of the bed. "Okay, right away," he babbled. "I'm really sorry, by the way. Sorry. Um. Sorry."

The girl ignored him, as, out of the corner of his eye, he saw her bend down again, to pick up the towel phew, and wrap it around her hair, which hung down to her shoulders when wet, suddenly a lot longer, and making her look peculiarly un-Rei like to him.

The boy crouched, and started picking up the books; thick, heavy tomes. German Poetry 1910-1925, Volume II, he read. The Pnakotic Manuscripts: Vol. IV. The Pnakotic Manuscripts: Vol. V. Die Verborgenen Geheimnisse: Die Grundlagen der arkanen Technologie. Shinji frowned. He only knew a little bit of German, a necessity when living with a sorceress, because the Lorenzian School made use of it, and so he had been expected to know enough to know what not to touch, but he was pretty sure that this was one of the foundational books of modern arcane physics. Straightening out its dust jacket, he glanced at the pages it had landed open at.

There was a diagram taking up one page, with that certain quality which suggested it had originally been hand-drawn. It was... odd; he squinted, trying to understand exactly what he was looking at. It looked vaguely like a mesh of cogs, but some of the cogs were sharing teeth with other cogs, intermeshing and yet discrete and unconnected, depending on how he looked at it. The mass of text on the other page, printed in a very small font... well, he could maybe understand one word in every ten. He suspected that even if it had been in English, Japanese or Nazzadi, he wouldn't have got much more than one in three.

And then there were the annotations. In the same hand as the writing on the walls. Some entire sections had been crossed out in red, and replacement text crammed into the margins.

Shinji didn't dare look any further, because this looked like something extra-normal related, or at the very least sorcerous, and when living with a sorceress, he had had it drummed into his head that you do not read books lying around which look like that. Instead, he put it back on the pile, and glanced over to see a Rei Ayanami, now, mercifully, at least in a bra and wearing underwear, staring at him, hair still wrapped up in the towel. It would probably have helped more if the undergarments hadn't been white, skin-coloured for her, and she hadn't still been wet, which was already inducing translucency.

"What is it?" she asked.

Shinji stared over at the safe wall again. "Um... uh." He swallowed, tasting the scent of the LCL in the air. "I... uh, that is, yesterday Dr Akagi asked me... that is, told me... um, asked me to give you this new Ident Card but I forgot at school. So I came around. And..." he trailed off.

Rei moved in front of his safe line of vision, to sit down on the bed. He shifted his gaze to the floor, noting the trails of wet footprints that crisscrossed the room. That, and the large damp patch where she had fallen. He could feel the dampness... the warm dampness on his clothing.

"I had an examination with Dr Akagi yesterday," Rei said, from somewhere outside his line of vision. "Why did she not give it to me then?"

"I-I-I guess she forgot," Shinji hazarded.

"Forgot?" Rei asked, her tone dead.

"Probably." Shinji swallowed. "And then... um, I knocked, and the door was open, and I called but you didn't answer so I came in and I thought you might be out or having dinner with neighbours and I left you a note and it was with the card which I put on top of the white box thing," he sucked in a much-needed breath, "um... and I'm sorry." He swept his eyes onto the floor around his feet. Where was it? It had been there, and then the box had fallen off... had been knocked off.

"I have no neighbours." She paused. "I was in the bath," she said, the words somehow utterly disconnected from the previous sentence.

"Oh... um." Yes, that made sense. He'd have heard a shower, after all, but... yes, head under water, it made sense. Oh, there it was. He stooped down, and picked up the card, still sealed in its packaging, and the slightly damp note. Then, eyes squinting, biting his lip, he walked over to Rei, staring at the towel wrapped around her hair, which seemed the safest place, and thrust both in front of him. "So here they are!" he said, in a voice which seemed far too loud in this quiet place.

Silently, Rei took them from him, and then stood up, stepping around him, to put them back on the chest of drawers, on top of the pile of books.

"So...I'll be off then," he added, rapidly. "Silently... I mean, I'm sorry for everything."

There was the sound of a lid being removed from a pen. "Why?" Rei asked.

"I didn't ask before I came in. I should have... just put it through the door or something," Shinji said, backing away towards the door, arms briefly pinwheeling as he almost slipped on a discarded shirt, leaving a footprint in the middle of it. "And... um, I just... never mind."

There was no response. The pale girl was hunched up against the wall, black pen in hand, correcting the damage done to the markings on the wall by his clumsiness. Slowly, the towel slithered down off her head, letting her damp hair hang loose over her face. She didn't seem to care.

"Sorry again," Shinji said, by means of farewell, as he closed the door slowly. His steps out of the flat were careful, measured.

Then he slumped down against the wall in the corridor, fist in mouth, and started whimpering, as all the suppressed nervous tension unleashed itself.

What the hell just happened?

~'/|\'~​

The process of rationalisation had already begun by the time that Shinji got home.

Well... she might have the Nazzadi attitude to nudity, he thought. Yeah, that makes sense. I'm just being insensitive by objecting to it. I should try to be more open-minded. And I was distracted and didn't hear her... no wonder I freaked out, just a little bit well, more than a little bit, he had to admit, when I saw her behind me like that.

Now... how to deal with the writing on the walls and the fact that she's reading arcane texts?

It was fighting an uphill battle.

Misato was seated at the table, still in her uniform, poring over printed out documents and dataslates alike. Her Eyes were twitching at unseen images, scanning from left to right. An empty plate, the remains of one of the meals that Shinji had prepared and left in the fridge, was on her left, a pair of grease-covered chopsticks resting on top.

With a small noise, the Major made a few small notes in the margin of one dataslate, and then returned to work, her eyes flicking across nothingness. She blinked once, and then her eyes focussed on the boy in front of her. She seemed tired as she rubbed her eyes.

"Heya, Shinji," Misato said, with a weak smile. "I got the note, by the way, and the email."

"Good."

"Did you give her the card?"

Shinji swallowed, and nodded. "Uh huh."

Misato grinned wider. "You know, it was pretty silly of you to forget to do it at school, huh? Guess you wanted to have an excuse to go around to her house early?"

The boy shook his head mutely. Misato began to respond, but then focussed, properly focussed on his expression.

"What's wrong?" she asked, more gently.

"Did you know she reads arcane books?" he blurted out.

Misato frowned, looking for one of the documents in front of her. "Yes... here it is... yes. It's been tagged to her file; she's been allowed access to the censored versions of... well, there's a long list here." She glanced back up at Shinji, her face warm. "It probably was quite disturbing to find it out that way."

"And that she writes on the walls?" The boy's tone was almost pleading, although he didn't know which way he preferred it. That they did not know about it, and Rei was secretly disturbed, or they did, and they had deemed it acceptable.

Misato nodded once, her face stony. "I've seen the pictures. That... that must have been a shock. If it helps, the psychiatrists say that it's harmless, and she's never shown any other harmful tendencies, violent or otherwise. And, of course... I was a little disturbed when I first saw the pictures, but Ritsuko pointed out that she can't, physically, do sorcery. She's a White. They're parapsychics so they can't be sorcerers. It's safe." Standing up, she put one arm around Shinji's shoulders, slightly awkwardly. "We probably should have thought it through better, or at least got you to interact before now, huh?"

"I'm... I'm sorry. It's... I should have given it to her at school," Shinji explained, not moving closer to the one-armed hug, but not recoiling, either.

"We're all flawed, Shinji," Misato said, staring at him. "We all forget stuff." She paused. "And how did you get all the black stuff on your back?" she asked, as glanced around his shoulder.

He looked back. "Oh... um, I backed into a wall, and it was dirty."

"You might want to get changed, then... probably should, anyway. I think the bathroom's free, if you want a shower... I cleaned it up." At Shinji's confused expression, she wrinkled her nose. "Pen-Pen was sick. And you smell of sweat... did you have sports today?"

The boy frowned. "Can birds even be sick?" he asked, ignoring the comment at his personal odour.

"Evidently, this one can," the woman said drily.

And, indeed, the bathroom smelt slightly of sick, and even more of the... concoction that Misato had brewed up yesterday, even when the rest of the apartment had largely been ventilated. Shinji could make some educated reasons for exactly why the albino penguin had been sick, but he was not going to, after the revelations at the meal.

Although it seemed that Pen-Pen was not as smart as some people would have had him believe, if he had willingly consumed that substance; Shinji hesitated to call it food.

Being very careful to lock the door behind him, after ensuring that the room was penguin-less, Shinji stripped off, running the shower to let it warm up as he folded up his trousers, and saw the full state of the shirt. Yes, the white back was completely covered in the smudged black pen markings. If he'd been wearing the coat from the uniform, the markings wouldn't have been noticeable, but he'd have to have been an idiot to wear his uniform like that, out of school hours, up to such a high elevation. Academy students had a certain reputation which worked against them in poorer areas, as a bunch of rich, stuck-up, genofixed children of Ashcroft technocrats. Shinji would like to try to argue that wasn't the case, but as he objectively filled three of the four criteria by any standards, he was not the best representative for their case.

He suddenly realised why Toja must be so insistent at not following the school uniform policy. Hadn't he said that he lived in one of the surface arcologies? It must be unpleasant for him, having to make that commute every day.

Checking the temperature with his hand, he withdrew it instantly, and added more cold to the blend, until it wasn't actively painful. Stepping under the shower, he let the warm water roll down his head, darkening his hair which hung limp over his face, running in rivulets down his shoulders and over the small of his back, the warm feel of her breast under his hand.

Shinji looked down. "Damn it," he muttered. He shouldn't be turned on by that; he should be disturbed. And yet he had most physical evidence that he was.

That went horrifically, horribly, inutterably wrong, was Shinji's foremost conclusion from that little escapade.

~'/|\'~​

29th September, 2091

Rei was not at school on Tuesday. Shinji considered this a blessing; it might be better to get the explanations and more apologies out, before things could fester, but he didn't want to confront her at all. If he could never see her again, it would have been perfectly acceptable to him in his current mindset. Neither was she there on Wednesday morning, which was a relief for Shinji, and he spent the classes feeling rather more cheerful than he might otherwise have been. This state of affairs was only aided by Toja's sense of impending doom, and wailed protests of 'What did I do to deserve a bunch of nine-year girls crushing on me?' He and Kensuke did do their best to 'reassure' him by pointing out that he could apply for a different Social Work Programme for the Spring Term, which only bought further groans.

However, such a thing could never last, for the Unit 00 Synchronisation Test was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, when he had to be down in the Geocity. And when Rei Ayanami stepped into his otherwise-empty lift, both of them on their way down to the areas assigned to the Evangelion Group, his luck ran out.

The trip down was filled with awkward silence, the two figures in the black overcoats of the Academy standing at opposite corners of the box. Perhaps foolishly, the boy tried to break the quiet.

"I'm... I'm really sorry for Monday," he said. "I-I-I just want you to know, it was all an accident, especially the... the touching." He blushed bright red, as he realised just how that comment sounded.

She did not turn to look at him. "You have already expressed such sentiments."

"Yes... well, I want you to know that I'm sorry."

"Why are you sorry?"

Shinji screwed up his eyes. "Because it was all my fault... and..." he trailed off.

"Will your sorrow change anything?"

"... no, but..."

"Then why be sorry?"

"Because I'd be a bad person if I didn't!" he snapped, before instinctively recoiling. "Oh... I'm sorry."

"You have already expressed that sentiment. Today."

Shinji fell paused, and tried to change the subject. "I know you're going to be trying the reactivation experiment today," he said.

Rei said nothing, still not making eye contact with him.

"I hope it's successful this time," he added.

The silence at her end of the conversation continued.

"Aren't you... scared of getting into Unit 00 again?" he asked. "I would be. Terrified. I'm scared of Unit 01 as it is, and nothing that bad... as bad as what happened to you, has happened to me in it."

"Why?" The word was soft.

"Excuse me?"

A pause. Then, "Why should I be scared of Unit 00?"

"Because... um... well, I saw how injured you were on that first day. Aren't you scared that it will happen again?"

"No." He saw her eyelashes flicker up and down, as she blinked slowly. "Fear would increase the chance of a synchronicity accident. So I am not scared."

The boy couldn't help but marvel at the self-control shown there. And be a little scared at the fact that she had just said that fear could cause synchronisation accidents, of course. Because if that was true, and considering his first time... Shinji suddenly got the feeling that there was a universe's worth of razor blades just a hair's breadth from his skin, which were just waiting to fall.

With a feeling of deceleration, and a ping, the lift came to a halt, far down in the guts of the Geocity. The area here was one of the vast hallways, the ones which an Evangelion could probably crawl through. Shinji mentally paused. In fact, that was almost certainly their purpose; transporting the things around. Stepping out of the lift, he followed Rei, the sounds of their footsteps utterly lost in the immensity of the space, having to job every few steps to keep up. She walked quickly.

And for once, Rei initiated the conversation.

"You are Representative Ikari's son," she said, her tone not a question.

Shinji nodded. "Yes."

"You must trust your father's work."

The boy blinked heavily. "Why?" he retorted. "He never gives me any reason to trust him! He never cares; only uses me! I certainly won't trust him because he happens to be related to me!"

Rei Ayanami's footsteps ceased, and she turned, no, flowed around, suddenly facing him. "Do not speak about Representative Ikari that way," she said, the corners of her eyes narrowing fractionally.

"Why not? He's my fath..."

The blow was not so much a slap as a full-on punch, her knuckles impacting with the soft tissue of his cheek. Blinking hard, mouth hanging open, Shinji slowly raised his hand to his face. He hadn't even seen her move. And that really hurt. Fall on her when she was naked; no response. Make negative comments about his own, useless, child-soldier-using father, and...

"Mnghui," he managed, to the figure that was already striding off. "Oww. Um... I'm sorry?"

There was no response from the pale girl.

~'/|\'~​

Compared to the first activation test, the air in the control centre was buzzing with nervous tension. Only Gendo Ikari, alone, seemed proof against the concern, his gloved hands folded behind his back.

"Inform me when the Operators are prepared," he ordered Dr Akagi, not looking her way.

"Yes," she nodded. Inwardly, she winced. The Operators... well, they had done their best to reassure the heavily cyberised computer technicians, but, to be honest, they were scared. Two of them had died in the last test; three more were in a vegetative state. Only one of the ones who had not disconnected before the Evangelion had broken through their defence barriers was back on duty, and, for obvious reasons, he was not permitted to assist today. Running one hand down her spine, she shook her head slightly. The Operators all seemed so young to her. Not as young as the girl in the Evangelion, though.

Ritsuko resumed her preparatory work. The conditions for this test were quite unlike the ones which had prevailed last time. While before it may have been merely been secured to the wall, this time it was sunk to its waist in a variant of the dark RCL fluid used in the Evangelion bays. This time, if it tried to break free, it would be treated as Dante's Satan, its legs immobilised in flash-frozen memomorph. Its arms were spread out wide, to minimise the leverage it could gain, but they were under no illusions that it would stop the beast. Not now. No, they would begin with the restraint fluid, and move up to, should it prove insufficient, detonating the shaped charges placed on the Units limbs, to sever key muscles.

The Representative opened a communications channel to the white Evangelion.

"Rei."

A quiet response. "Yes, Representative Ikari."

"We will begin by inserting the LCL. Are you prepared?"

"Yes. There will be no synchronicity accident this time. It is necessary that I successfully synchronise with Unit 00, therefore I will."

"Good." He closed the connection. "Flood the plug," he ordered. "Monitor her mental state at all times, even before the experiment begins. If there are any signs of recurrence, abort immediately."

"Yes sir."

Shinji was standing away from the workfloor, on the raised observer's platform. Beside him, Misato stood, her face pensive, a cup of coffee clutched in her hand. She took a long, slow sip, staring intently at the screen. Although this was being carried out in one of the test chambers, it wasn't being carried out in the same test chamber as the one which the room overlooked. What if the Evangelion had gone for the exposed window, it had been asked? What if it had turned on its surroundings, rather than itself?

The consequences would have been catastrophic.

"We should never think of the Evangelion as just another war machine," Misato said to herself, softly, almost unheard of over the babble. "It's not. I've seen Engels out of control. But last time... this was a wholly different thing." She snorted. "Or maybe an unholy different thing."

Shinji narrowed his eyes at her. "Thanks a lot for your reassurance," he said, his tone bitter. "Given that, you know, we're watching someone who's already lost control once before..." he paused, "... and come to think of it, so have I!"

"No, that's what I mean," Misato said, raising her voice. "The rampant Engels... they acted like Unit 01 did. They attacked things... anything that wasn't from their Species... that's a base-organism, by the way, in the same way that all the Evangelions use the same base. But Unit 00... it hurt itself. It was really trying to get the Entry Plug out."

"Yes, my father really did a wonderful job when he... did whatever he does with them, I'm not quite sure," said Shinji, his rousing condemnation somewhat ruined by the uncertainty at the end. "Why should I trust his work, when I don't even know what they are or what he did?" he added to himself, staring down at the man. A thought struck him.

"What?" asked Misato, who had missed the last part.

"When did my father start wearing gloves?" he asked.

Misato leant against the railing, and took another drink. "The Unit 00 start-up test," she explained. "The Evangelion... it tried to crush its own entry plug. Partially succeeded, too."

"But... the Entry Plug is covered in armour," Shinji protested.

"Yes." The word was said with a dreadful finality.

"You mean..."

"It slammed into the wall until it managed to crack the plating enough to get a finger under it, and then it started ripping its own back apart," Misato said, a distant look in her eyes. "It just managed to expose the plug, and crush the end, when it finally deactivated. And then it fell over backwards, because its knees didn't lock up." She shook her head, staring at the boy. "Your father was the first one down, with the rescue team. He managed to get up onto the Evangelion, crawled out onto the plug and levered it open, around one of the tears. His hands... they got horribly cut up on the edges, and his back too, when he crawled through. And the Evangelion was bleeding too, so the blood got into the wounds, and... well, they managed to save his hands. Or I heard he did, managed to pull out some sorcery to cleanse the wounds." Misato took a sip. "There's a lot of tales about him. I'm sure he has people spread some of them, because I can't believe that they're all true."

"He... did all that?" Shinji asked, feeling slightly numb. "But wasn't that only a few days..."

"Before Asherah showed up, yes. Everything that first day, he was doing it on just enough painkillers to allow him to think clearly."

Shinji leant his chin on his arms, resting on the balcony, and stared again at his father.

The bearded man spoke. "We're going to try reactivating Unit 00," he ordered. "Start the first connection."

"Connect the external power supply."

"Voltage has passed the critical point."

"Understood," reported Penny Epouvantable, the red-haired civilian Operator who was heading up this dive. "Subject has passed Phase II. We're getting a stable EFCS Type-1 Attunement. Animaneural waveform is... stable."

"Start Phase III," ordered Dr Akagi, her stomach a tight little ball of acid and fear.

"Plug is set to level 2. Beginning test sequence."

"LITAN feed is clear... reports from in-Unit correlate with external feeds. Maintaining monitoring."

"The series of pulses and harmonics are normal."

"Feeding external power to non-vital systems. Right arm... left arm... all limbs are powered."

"Releasing limited motor controls. D-Brakes are operating at full capacity."

There was a terrible moment of silence, as everyone's eyes were locked on the bar. Rising, rising, falling, rising, nearing the point of absolute borderline.

With an almost cheerful bleep, the bar passed the given value.

"Stable connection formed!" the message came from the Operators.

There was a pause, a moment of silence.

And then everyone relaxed, as the bar did not retreat.

"Unit 00 has activated."

A window opened from in Unit, to display Rei's face, an even paler heart shape within the cowl. "Activation is successful," she announced. "I am waiting for your permission to begin the interlocking test."

"Roger. Go ahead, Test Pilot Ayanami."

Shaking her head slightly, an adrenaline-smile in her exhausted face, Ritsuko made her way up to the observation balcony.

"Congratulations," the Major said, with a professional nod, and then Misato smiled. "Well, you did it, Rits."

"Well... we'll see, but it looks hopeful. The tests are probably going to go on for..." Ritsuko tapped a button on her PCPU, to bring up the schedule, "... well, let's put it this way, I'm not getting any sleep tonight, and Shinji, you won't be seeing Rei at school tomorrow." The blond sighed. "You can go home... and you too, Misato. It's just, as you'd put it, 'boring technical stuff', and as I'd put it, 'vital test work to ensure that pilot synchronisation is calibrated correctly'."

"I thought you just dumped people in the Eva and hoped for the best," said Shinji, a slightly bitter note in his voice. He couldn't have stopped himself for free access to every IP database on the pla... okay, he could have stopped himself for that. But he couldn't have stopped himself for some very large, but not too large, prize.

Ritsuko did not snap back. It would have been easier had she done so. "It's okay, Shinji," she said, in a quiet, almost dead voice. "We can just delete all your pilot data we spent weeks building up, and let you go in a default, guessed setting every time, because we got lucky with you on the first time. And then you'll be lucky if you only get hurt as badly as Pilot Ayanami did on the activation test on the sixteenth of August. We can do that, if you like."

Shinji winced. "Sorry," he said, already cringing inside. "I didn't think..."

"No," the scientist said. "You didn't. Off you go. Some of us have work to do."

"Lay off him, Rits." Misato's words were calm, controlled, and quiet. "That's not needed."

The scientist blinked. "I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head. "I'm just... I'm just relieved that this didn't go wrong like last time. And still might go wrong." She sighed. "I sometimes forget that you're not like Rei," she explained. "You're not used to it. This. Everything. And you have the right to object."

Shinji nodded silently.

"But... yes, you should both get some rest," she said in a quieter voice. "Someone might as well, and this place is going to be humming with stressed-out scientists, engineers and technicians for the next... God knows how long. Aeon, probably. So... like usual, but even more stress."

~'/|\'~​

30th September, 2091

Shinji was shaken awake, by a Misato with a jacket thrown on over her nightclothes. "Shinji, wake up!" she shouted at him, her face deadly serious. "Get out of bed now!"

The boy squinted in the light. "Gah." He shook his head. "What's happening?" he asked, sitting up, as Misato yanked off his covers, dumping an armful of clothes onto his lap. "What time is it?"

"Get up, get dressed. We're needed down in the Geocity now. Emergency call. And it's about half-three in the morning."

With a groan he swung his legs out of bed. "Why?" He blinked, as something struck him. "Did something go wrong with Rei's test?"

Misato shook her tousled hair. "No. But they've found Harbinger-5. Or rather, it's shown up. In Eastern Europe."

Shinji was suddenly wide awake, and fumbling at his top. "Is it... coming this way?" he asked. "And... um, can you look away, please?"

"Yes and yes," Misato said, turning around to leave the room, to get dressed properly herself. "There's security in the living room, and they've put some coffee on. We can drink it in the IFV, right?" she added, a slight lilt in her voice.

Shinji couldn't help but smile slightly. It was a weak, trembling and rather tired expression, true, but a smile nonetheless.

~'/|\'~​

Above, the night sky was filled with stars. They did not twinkle, and they did not shine; they were cold, distant points of light. If there were children's tales told of these stars, they were the kind which were censored and bowdlerised, all to keep from infant minds from the terrible truths of the cosmos. The darkness of the void reached from horizon to horizon with no hint of dawn; terrible, unreachable, anathematical to light, which died in its Stygian majesty.

And the land below was the same. Black, glassy crystal covered every surface, was every surface. The stars below reflected the stars above, distorted and warped them until not one familiar constellation could be seen, and an onlooker could not tell what was up, and what was down.

But, slowly, the eyes adjusted to the darkness, to the lack of contrast, to the dead beauty of this place. And that was when the true horror crept in. Because in among the monoliths of black crystal, resplendent in their five-fold symmetry, the other shapes could be seen. Buildings of opaque black crystal. Trees of black crystal which blossomed into leaves of black crystal. The scattered chess-pieces of the army of the gods, all without White to oppose them. The eye adjusted, and then it did not believe, for to believe that this alien landscape was one which had so recently been just another battlefield in the Aeon War was too much to accept.

And in the precise centre of this darkness, something hung. It was only visible through omission, for it did not reflect, and it did not glisten and gleam and shimmer in the cold light of the stars. Slowly it span, as if observing what it had wrought here. There were ten faces to this being; ten vast conguent kites that interlocked to form one pentagonal trapezohedron.

Slowly it span. All too slowly.

It was here.

It was time.

~'/|\'~​