It would
help, but I'm vastly more familiar with
Rebuild canon and relying mostly on the wiki and other fanfics, so... yeah.
Anyway, update!
"S2 organ fully initialised, sixty seconds to output threshold."
"Roger. Dropping my cable now." Mari hit the switch to jettison the umbillical. "On batteries."
Five minutes? What are they using, ten million pound-shop AAs?
Beats me. But you can see why they're so desperate to get the S2 Engine working. A giant robot that needs an extension cord is kind of embarrassing.
Mari put Unit-04 through some standard warm-up exercises, then walked towards the weapons range. She wasn't exactly sure what Kaoru's tweaks were going to do, but if there was some sort of energy backlash then she wanted to be well clear of the rest of the complex in case someone got hurt. "How's the S2 Engine doing?" she asked.
"Almost at the threshold. Remote switchover in fifteen seconds."
"Roger." Mari realised she was squeezing the control yokes in a white-knuckle grip, and forced herself to relax.
Mum?
Yes?
Even if this all goes tits-up, don't feel guilty. I love being a Pilot and I'm truly grateful to you for giving me the opportunity.
Her mother was still trying to formulate a response to that when the battery meter flickered from 04:11 to 88:88... Then glitched out, as warning messages started covering her HUD. Unit-04 began vibrating, subtly at first but rapidly building to the point where she could barely see the warning lights anymore. An ominous hum filled the Entry Plug, gaining pitch and volume along with the vibrations until-
With a noise like ten thousand people saying "foop" and a small puff of inexplicable LCL-coloured smoke, Unit-04 abruptly vanished.
"Well," Kaoru said to nobody in particular, "that went quite splendidly, if I do say so myself."
"Oh, did it now," someone said coldly, and Kaoru felt a stern grip on her shoulder.
Very carefully turning around, she beheld a man in his mid-twenties wearing a NERV jumpsuit with the coloured shoulder-flashes of a NATO officer on detached duty. He did not appear to be in a terribly good mood.
David Croft drew his sidearm and placed the muzzle under Kaoru's chin. "Would you be so good," he said, surprisingly calmly given the circumstances, "as to tell me just what the hell is going on?"
Kaoru just sighed.
* * *
"A little warning would have been nice," Shinji grumbled, as the Pilots and their guardian took the elevator to the Command Centre. "And why the hell do I need a tie for this? It's a
radio interview."
"Because the
Japan Times are sending someone to take some photos for the big feature article and I want you all looking your best," Misato replied firmly. "Now hold still." She adjusted the knot of his tie so that nobody could tell he didn't have the top button done up, at least from a distance. "If this is gonna be a regular thing you might need to go up a collar size."
"It had better not be!"
"It could be worse," Rei pointed out. "If my sister had not vetoed the idea, we would have been asked to pose in our plugsuits as well."
"There's still gonna be photos of you
in your plugsuits," Misato added. "They want to run a dummy launch for the cameras. But definitely no cheesecake poses."
Rei nodded. "That is acceptable."
The initial setting for the photoshoot was on one of the observation decks overlooking the lake in the centre of the Geofront. The photographer was a man about Gendo's age with collar-length hair who Shinji found vaguely familiar, wearing a battered leather vest over a denim jacket. He introduced himself as Mr Shinjo and busied himself setting up a camera tripod. Shinji leaned on the railing and gazed out across the water, wondering why he suddenly felt nervous...
Then he remembered. Last time he'd seen the lake from this angle, they'd been about to take on Zeruel. He remembered Asuka rushing in headlong, desperate to prove herself, only to be cut down. Rei risking her life (or one of them) without a second thought on a suicide mission from the Commander. Himself...
A shutter clicked behind him, making Shinji jump and forcing his attention back to the here and now. "You okay, kid?" Mr Shinjo asked, looking a little concerned.
"Fine!" he said hastily. "Sorry, you startled me."
The photographer looked at him for an uncomfortably long moment, his expression unreadable. He looked as though he were on the point of saying something, but before he could do so there came a noise like ten thousand people saying "wop". Unit-04 appeared in another inexplicable puff of LCL-coloured smoke, about twenty metres above the surface of the lake. It hung there for a fraction of a second, just long enough to look down and realise what was about to happen and flinch in surprise, then plunged straight into the water.
By the time everyone got there the new Evangelion had crawled out of the water, and was lying facedown on the shore with the Entry Plug partially ejected. Its pilot was standing beside the emergency descent rope shouting into a cellphone.
"Kaoru yous fuck'n divvie! Yous can warp time and space ter teleport me 'alfway across de planet but yous can't make sure ay land ed solid ground? Er at least come out less than sixty foot in de...? Wa'? oh, or'rite, put 'im ed. David, take de gun outi Kaoru's lughole, she's still useful." She paused. "Am sound, David. Got dunked inna lake and made ter look a rite prat, but nothing's cewk. Ma says 'iya, by de way."
"She is speaking English, right?" Shinji said slowly.
"I...
think so," Misato replied. "And it sounds like whoever she's talking to has Kaworu at gunpoint."
"I like them already."
Mari took the phone away from her ear for a moment. "You two had one hell of a messy breakup, didn't you?" she remarked in Japanese.
"Oh, for... No we did not! Kaworu and I did not have a thing! Why does everyone think we had a thing?" Shinji complained.
Mari had calmed down enough to be intelligible to people who don't speak fluent Angry Scouse. "Dave, I've got to go. We'll talk about all of this later, but don't shoot Kaoru until we do something about SEELE trying to end the world. Bye." She hung up her phone. "Sorry about that, everyone. My guardian was panicking a bit. Anyway, I'm Mari Makinami and this is Unit-04. I'm sure my mum would be saying hello as well if she had vocal cords at the moment. Anyway, I hate to be a bother, but could I borrow a dressing gown, please? I don't feel decent in just a plugsuit."
Misato and her pilots exchanged looks. "It's going to be one of those days, isn't it?"
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