- Location
- Mid-Atlantic
I am definitely down for Space Battleship Yamato references.
[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
No. Some black tea really does have a malty note to it.
(I don't think whisky or whiskey would go very well with tea anyway.)
The rest of Chapter 5 (don't ask)
kip
Legion of Badassitude Member #24601
- Location
- parts unknown
okay for those who might need help I managed to cobble together chapter 5 in one post:
Shinji's mood was not improved by the looks he kept getting from everyone else at school, ranging from pitying to amused to vaguely envious.
"It'll blow over by the end of the week," Hikari assured him. "And you would be surprised how many other kids this has happened to. Okay, not the part where it made the front page of the local paper, but my father and I play a game called 'Guess who Daddy's had in his holding cells' at parent-teacher conferences."
Shinji gave her a sidelong look. "And how many...?"
"More than you'd expect, and not just the delinquents. And that's as much as I'm saying."
Shinji was not at all sure what to make of that, but it did make him feel a bit better.
Knowing what was taking place in the Geofront would have made him feel a lot better.
"Gendo."
"Go away."
"You can't stay in there forever, you know."
"I don't plan to. Just until the gossip dies down."
"You realise that sequestering yourself in your office will only cause even more talk, don't you?"
"Why? I sequester myself in my office all the time for brooding and manly angst purposes."
"Well, it's different this time, isn't it? Everyone knows you're not doing it for brooding and manly angst purposes this time; you're doing it because you're embarrassed about getting drunk and making a complete fool of yourself in public, which incidentally is your own damn silly fault and you know it as well as I do. Now get your sorry backside out here and take the consequences like a man, because the staff meeting starts in five minutes. And if you continue playing silly buggers I'm going down to Maintenance to borrow a plasma torch and opening that door the hard way, so come on, let's be having you!"
Gendo sighed heavily. "If I unlock this door, will you stop being paternal at me?"
"I'll stop being paternal if you stop regressing to adolesence," Fuyutsuki retorted. "I was already too old for this when you still had the excuse of being too young to know better."
"Fine." Gendo unlocked the door.
Several thousand miles away, Mari Makinami was sitting in the Entry Plug of her Evangelion, managing the difficult of feat of being nervous and bored simultaneously. "Seriously, would it have been that hard to let me stream audio in here?" she complained. "Or pull up an ebook viewer in my HUD?"
"Sorry kiddo. No budget for non-essentials like that, or so they tell me. I can tune one of the backup radios into a local station if you want, though."
"Hey, that's an idea. What sort of local stations are there around here, anyway?"
"Oh, they got both kinds a' music, honey! Country and Western!" her "handler" and temporary guardian replied, doing a passable Southern accent. "Are you as sick of this place as I am?"
"Almost certainly, Dave. Almost certainly." And luckily for you, we'll both be leaving sooner than you think.
Mari felt vaguely guilty about leaving him out of the loop like this. David J. Croft (who'd really hated being called "DJ" even before Mari had shown him a certain notorious, hilariously bad work of Tomb Raider fanfiction) had been a sort of honourary older brother when she was younger, the son of one of Mum's best friends who shared her love of reading and the outdoors, and made a point of talking to her at family gatherings and standing up to a certain cousin who thought quiet and bookish Mari was a good target for picking on. In the long months following what she thought of as The Accident, when her mother died and Dad sank so deep into his grief -and his gin- that he might as well have perished too, it had been David who took her to school and made sure she had clean clothes and done all the other things a parent should have been doing. He'd also been the one to "persuade" Dad to see a proper bereavement counsellor and cut down on the drinking, by the somewhat drastic but effective expedient of threatening to report him to Child Services if he didn't. When the Marduk Institute had put her forward as a pilot candidate, he'd immediately volunteered to act in locum parentis while she was overseas for training.
Still, even though Kaoru was pretty sure he wasn't anything to do with SEELE and genuinely did care about her, the fewer people who knew what was actually going on the better. Plausible deniability might be the only thing that kept David out of trouble come the inevitable official inquiry into what was about to happen, not to mention the very unofficial one into why things hadn't happened the way the Old Men wanted them to happen.
Besides, if she told him the survival of everyone within a fifty-mile radius hinged on the Sufficiently Advanced Alien equivalent of Clippy he probably would've had a fit of the vapours, and that was before she got to the really bad parts.
The voice of one of the tech crew dragged her back to the here and now. "Okay, Miss Makinari, we're all ready out here. If the synch test goes okay we'll do some basic tests, then you can knock off and grab some lunch while we get the S2 Engine warmed up."
"Ready when you lot are!" Mari called back cheerfully.
"Understood. Setting plug depth... now. Interface language set to English. Muscular interlocks released. Synchro start in three, two, one..."
Mari reached down and muted her microphone, then took a deep breath. "Hi Mum."
* * *
"You want to what?" Ritsuko exclaimed. "Gendo, when the Committee get to hear of this-"
"It will be too late for them to do anything about it, or to retaliate without repercussions for their authority and prestige. And in any case, as operational commander this is at least technically within my authority."
"And apart from the fact it'll really annoy the Council of Ominously-Lit Placeholder Holograms, which I don't see as all that much of a drawback, I think it's a good idea," Misato added. "It'll be good for our reputation with the general public and our working relationships with the JSDF and the Ministry of Defence. The less time we spend butting heads with them, the more time we have to do what we're supposed to be doing. And more importantly, I don't want to see any more good soldiers die fighting a battle they can never win."
Gendo looked over to Fuyutsuki, the only one who hadn't yet spoken. "I share Dr Akagi's reservations, but Captain Katsuragi makes a good point. Squabbling amongst ourselves over jurisdiction and petty institutional pride benefits no one but SEELE."
"Well, that's settled then. Dr Akagi, how soon can you and your team come up with a Beginner's Guide to AT Field Theory that even the average journalism school graduate can comprehend?"
"If I gloss over the more esoteric parts, the first draft will be in your inbox by the end of the day. But I really hope you know what you're doing."
"That makes two of us," Gendo replied, smiling without humour.
* * *
"All systems go at this end. All set, Mari?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"Okay. Starting the power-up checklist now."
Kaoru glanced at the radio handset she had... borrowed from a security guard who'd been in cahoots with SEELE's embedded saboteur, and resisted the urge to swear. (She might not be that kind of Angel, but Kaoru had rather enjoyed Good Omens and identified rather deeply with the character of Aziraphael, who did not swear without a very good reason indeed.) Time was getting worryingly short, and these were some extremely delicate adjustments-
"Hey!" Oh, yes. That would be the saboteur, wondering why his co-conspirator was handcuffed to a pipe in the men's bathroom. This was most inconvenient. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Kaoru smiled in what she hoped was a pleasant yet slightly dangerous way. "Thwarting you."
The man sighed theatrically. "I suppose it figures you'd discover the concept of adolescent rebellion eventually," he remarked. "The Boss is worried about you, you know."
"Worried the brainwashing didn't take, you mean?" Kaoru retorted, with sudden heat. She gestured angrily, and whatever reply the SEELE operative might have had was abruptly silenced as the armour panel she had removed to access Unit-04's S2 Organ rose up and smote him mightily upside the head. The man collapsed like a puppet with the strings cut, and then went into a seizure. Kaoru gestured again, and with a sharp crack he was still, head lolling at a hideous angle.
Kaoru stared at the body for perhaps half a second, slightly concerned to realise she felt absolutely no sense of guilt, then decided she'd try feeling guilty about not feeling guilty once she no longer had her hands full preventing the deaths of several thousand people who'd done considerably less to deserve it than anyone high up enough in the ranks of SEELE to be entrusted with a job like this. With a shrug, she returned her attention to the S2 Organ.
I do hope this 'New Game Plus', as Kensuke put it, is being less stressful for everyone else...
Mari? Mari, is that you?
Last time I checked, yeah, she thought back, trying to feign nonchalance and not really succeeding.
Oh my God Mari I'm so sorry I love you I miss you-
Mari barely stopped herself from crying out at the sheer force of emotion that hit her. Mum! Take it easy, we don't want to give the game away!
Oh! The overwhelming sensations subsided. Sorry. It's just...
I know, Mum. I know all of it, or at least as much as Kaoru knows. Mari uttered a silent prayer that LCL meant nobody could tell you were crying. It's going to be alright. We're going beat the Angels, and then we're kicking SEELE's arses, and then we're getting you out of this thing. She paused, wondering how to project a mental impression of a smirk. Unless you're doing alright in here, in which case I'll pikey it and go see if International Rescue have any openings.
Not on your life. Do you have any idea how dull it is in here most of the time? And don't use that word, it's an ethnic slur.
Sorry. Mari chuckled mentally. You're taking this really well, by the way. Kaoru was worried you might've been a bit... what's the word?
Probably "traumatised", although I'm sure your father would put it much less delicately. And I did volunteer for this, after a fashion. Says something about SEELE that it took them four Evas to think of asking someone, "If you die, would you like us to use your immortal soul to power a giant biomechanical robot so we can use it to fight kaiju?" And even then there was nothing in the small print about them flattening you with a car when a vacancy came up!
They'll get theirs, Mari promised.
"Alright, Pilot Makinami, the S2 organ is spinning up now. Prepare for deployment."
"Okay. Ready when you are. How's my synch score looking?"
"Really damn good, as it happens. Fluctuated a little a minute ago, but right now you're holding at 89.2%. I think that's a new record. Whatever you're doing in there, keep it up!"
"With pleasure!" Mari snorted. See, if they'd just tell us these things... Anyway, this is where we have to rely on Kaoru. Hold onto your... something, because she tells me that this might feel unpleasantly like being drunk.
Two questions. 1. Was Kaworu quoting Ford Prefect at the time? 2. Didn't Kaworu used to be a boy?
The whole pronoun thing is a bit complicated. I'll tell you about it later. And I'm not sure, why?
Because when Ford said that, Arthur Dent asked him what was so unpleasant about being drunk, and then Ford replied, "You ask a glass of water."
Mari's mouth opened and closed feebly for a long moment as she tried to formulate a response. "Oh, bollocks," she said at last.
"You want me to what?" Shinji exclaimed, almost dropping the homemade vegetarian bento box he was passing Rei.
"You do not have to do anything that could possibly be construed as cuckolding Megumi," she insisted. "All you have to do is go to a movie together and buy her a soda afterwards. Hopefully it will stop her father asking awkward questions."
"And the fact that she's out of my league by several orders of magnitude won't cause everyone else to ask awkward questions?"
"She was blatantly flirting at you yesterday morning, was she not?"
"There is that," Shinji admitted. "Oh, alright. If only because I know what it's like to have your dad on your case wanting to be something you're not. And hey, being seen to be dating a guy like me has to be one way to desensitise him to the idea she prefers girls."
Rei was still trying to think of a response to that when there was an excited shout from Kensuke, who hastily maxed out the volume on the little transistor radio he'd been listening to while eating his own lunch.
"... known as an AT-Field, AT standing for either 'Absolute Terrain' or 'Absolute Terror' depending who you ask. As to exactly what it is, that is classified beyond even my authority to disclose. All I can tell you is that there are only two proven ways to penetrate it: An overwhelming brute-force approach, as our JSSDF colleagues demonstrated a short while ago..." Gendo's voice paused, and Shinji could easily picture the smug grin on his father's face at this point, "or another AT-field in close proximity, which causes some sort of counter-harmonic effect and reduces its strength. At a range of a few dozen metres it becomes almost negligible."
"Huh. So that's how that works," Kensuke said to himself.
"And you're making this revelation public how because...?" the interviewer prompted.
"Because professional pride and institutional rivalry got a lot of good soldiers killed for no good purpose, and I wish to avoid a repeat of that," Gendo replied piously. Shinji resisted the urge to raise his eyes heavenwards at the unconvincing veneer of sincerity. There was some sort of ulterior motive underneath all that, of course; his father probably had an ulterior motive in mind when deciding where to order lunch. And any positive outcome for anyone other than Gendo himself (and perhaps, arguably, Yui) was purely incidental.
Still, if he'd decided that letting the JSSDF get their heads handed to them like something out of a paint-by-numbers Godzilla rip-off didn't serve his goals then this could only be a...
"... Stay tuned for a series of exclusive interviews with the three brave young people who pilot the Evangelions into battle."
"Son of a bitch!"
* * *
"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?"
(In other news, I have an original short story on sale. Check it out on Smashwords here. Also available from Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and iBooks.)
"There's rather a lot to unpack here," Ritsuko remarked dryly, "but for the time being, let's focus on the fact your Evangelion is talking to you."
"That's not normal, then?" Mari replied.
"Good question. We've had what you might call mixed results communicating with their Cores during sychronisation. Pilot Ikari claims his mother attempted to contact him, but... Well, he wasn't very receptive at the time. When Pilot Soryu tried, the results were not especially good. And as for my sister, given who is actually in Unit-00 I'm afraid to even ask."
"You have a sister?"
Ritsuko sighed. "I guess Kaworu didn't know about that, then." She condensed the known and suspected details of Rei's true heritage into a few terse sentences. "And then Gendo decided it would be a good idea to stuff her in an Evangelion," she concluded.
Mari took a moment to absorb this. "Your workplace is a bloody soap opera, do you know that?" she concluded.
"Yes. Yes, I do. Anyway, returning to the topic at hand, I expect we might be better off asking Kasumi some questions directly. Do you think she'd be willing?"
"Give me a list and I'll pass it on during the next synch test. Can't promise she'll be able or willing to answer all of them but I'm happy to try."
"That works. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out a more direct method at a later date. Anyway, I suppose the next question I should ask pertains to one Kaworu Nagisa..."
Mari snorted. "Where do I even begin to talk about Kaoru..."
Gendo sat at his desk, staring into a cup of surprisingly good cafeteria coffee and pondering how best to adjust the Scenario to take this into account, despite a throbbing headache that was only partly down to last night's festivities. A fourth Evangelion and pilot was a welcome development, even if the timing could definitely have been better, but he had a feeling the Committee were going to be less than receptive to his assurances that he had nothing to do with Unit-04 teleporting several thousand miles-
His cellphone began ringing, the shrill electronic warble uncomfortably loud in the caverous silence of his office, and Gendo almost spilled his coffee in his haste to pick up. "Ikari."
"Good morning, Commander. I am Kaoru Nagisa, but you may know me better as Tabris. Your son and I are... acquainted."
"So I have heard. I believe I have you to thank for Unit-04 making a rather impressive entrance to the Geofront earlier?"
"You're welcome. It's good to know someone appreciates my flair for the dramatic. Anyway, I cannot be certain this line will stay secure indefinitely so I must be brief. I will do my best to arrange further deliveries of equipment, but I'm afraid selecting pilots is down to you. Pilot Ikari or his comrades will be able to tell you the names of three potential candidates who are already read in on certain... unique circumstances, upon which I shall not enlarge over the telephone." There was a slight pause. "I don't suppose you have much reason to trust me, given who and what I am and what Shinji has undoubtedly told you about the terms on which we parted, but nevertheless we ultimately share the same goal. Better we work together than at cross purposes."
"Perhaps. Depending, of course, on whether you know what my goal actually is," Gendo replied guardedly.
There was a deep sigh from the other end of the phone. "Let me put it more plainly, then. Help me stop that mad old fool Keel and his cronies from destroying human life as we know it forever, and I will drag your wife out of Unit-01 by the hair if that's what it takes."
"Deal," Gendo said, without a moment's hesitation.
"I'm glad we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Oh, yes. Before I go, Commander, my... associate would like you to corroborate some information about the identity of the British representative for the Committee. I shall put you on speaker."
"Certainly."
There was a muffled beep. "When you are ready, Commander."
"This is Ikari. I'm afraid I must confirm that yes, the rumours are true. As to how and why he of all people got the job, I would theorise that it happened the same way he got every job he's ever had: Pure nepotism. And while we're on the subject, in case you were wondering, the yellow press was correct about the Russian representative as well."
"Hell's bells," a second voice said quietly, in English.
"That's about how I reacted as well when I found out. Anyway, I shall not detain you further." Gendo hung up, sat back in his chair, and smiled for the first time in longer than he cared to recall. "I can work with this," he decided.
David Croft wished, not for the first time that day, that the cheap motel room they were hiding out in had a minibar. "Vladimir Putin I kind of saw coming," he said, half to himself, "but Mark Thatcher?"
"Like the man said," Kaoru replied, "it was largely his mother's doing."
"Hah. Now that I have no trouble believing at all. In fact it explains quite a lot. Now, what was all that about 'further deliveries of equipment' that you were arranging?"
Kaoru smiled. "That promises to be something of an adventure..."
David sighed. "I'm not going to like this, am I."
Kaoru told him. David really did not like it.
The first thing Kasumi Makinami had done after finding herself in the Core of an Evangelion had been to redecorate a bit. Well, strictly speaking the first thing she'd done was to swear wholeheartedly and take a solemn oath to make the entirety of SEELE's Inner Council very sorry indeed for pulling this stunt, but redecorating was the first proactive thing she'd done. One of the few upsides to her present predicament was that she could shape her environment at will, as long as she could form a sufficiently strong mental picture of what she wanted. That by itself wouldn't have been much help, but to her surprise she'd discovered that as long as Unit-04 was connected to the datalink umbilicals she could tap into the Internet; how or why this was possible she hadn't the faintest idea, but she suspected that Yui Ikari had made some sort of arrangement at the design stage.
At any rate, once she'd figured out that useful trick it had been fairly easy to create a pleasant environment, and Kasumi had amused herself by going to fansites for The Sims and decorating exclusively with content from the modpacks until it started to give her existential angst. Still, the result was a nicely-furnished house set in an extensive garden in the English countryside, complete with geographically and seasonally appropriate birdsong and weather that mirrored real-life conditions in the approximate area she was simulating.
Researching that part had taken most of a week and been surprisingly hard to set up, but at least it had passed the time. Time was something she had far, far too much of in here.
Currently, she was stretched out on a large paisley sofa with the tablet she usually used to interact with the world (or at least the internet), a pot of tea on the table nearby and The Chris Evans Breakfast Show assaulting her ears through the speakers of a vintage hi-fi in the corner of the room. "Bloody SEELE can have me offed and shoved in here but they can't be arsed to do something about whoever thought this was a good replacement for Wake Up To Wogan," she muttered, not for the first time. "There's no justice in the world."
"Not the sort of thing one wants to be confronted with before the first coffee of the day, true," a new voice remarked.
"Yaaaah!" Kasumi jumped several inches in the air and fell sideways off the sofa, narrowly missing the coffee table. "What in the bloody- Naoko?"
"Morning Kaz. Sorry to barge in but you don't seem to have a doorbell."
"Yeah, I don't really get guests often," she replied. "Didn't know I could, in fact."
"Only now you're in the same hangar as another Evangelion. Yui sends her regards by the way, or at least she would if she wasn't still sulking because her spawn has exactly as many issues as you'd expect him to after being left in the care of Gendo. Honestly, what either of us saw in that wretch I have no idea in hindsight, and I suspect it's at least 50% his fault Ritsuko's decided she's a lesbian and started shagging her sysadmin."
"You're hardly in a position to comment on anyone else's parenting skills," Kasumi replied, with some asperity. Then something registered with her. "Wait, does that mean Gendo really-?"
"Traded me in for the new model? After a fashion. She was a better match for him than I was, although that's not saying much: I think they might have made a go of it if he wasn't still hung up on Yui. But this Maya girl seems like a good sort, so I can't complain too much."
"I suppose not," Kasumi replied. "So, anything particular bring you here, or did you just want to get caught up over a brew?" She hadn't been especially close with Naoko back in the day, and very little of what she'd heard secondhand after moving abroad had put her in a very good light, but at this point she'd be glad of anyone to talk to.
"Something like that. Although I could do with something rather stronger than tea, if you don't mind." Naoko held a glass under the spigot of a boxed wine carton that had definitely not been on the coffee table a moment ago.
"At this time in the morning?"
"Why not? Time has very little meaning in here, you know."
Kasumi had no good rebuttal to that.
(And that's a wrap for this chapter. For my next trick, Ramiel!)
"It'll blow over by the end of the week," Hikari assured him. "And you would be surprised how many other kids this has happened to. Okay, not the part where it made the front page of the local paper, but my father and I play a game called 'Guess who Daddy's had in his holding cells' at parent-teacher conferences."
Shinji gave her a sidelong look. "And how many...?"
"More than you'd expect, and not just the delinquents. And that's as much as I'm saying."
Shinji was not at all sure what to make of that, but it did make him feel a bit better.
Knowing what was taking place in the Geofront would have made him feel a lot better.
"Gendo."
"Go away."
"You can't stay in there forever, you know."
"I don't plan to. Just until the gossip dies down."
"You realise that sequestering yourself in your office will only cause even more talk, don't you?"
"Why? I sequester myself in my office all the time for brooding and manly angst purposes."
"Well, it's different this time, isn't it? Everyone knows you're not doing it for brooding and manly angst purposes this time; you're doing it because you're embarrassed about getting drunk and making a complete fool of yourself in public, which incidentally is your own damn silly fault and you know it as well as I do. Now get your sorry backside out here and take the consequences like a man, because the staff meeting starts in five minutes. And if you continue playing silly buggers I'm going down to Maintenance to borrow a plasma torch and opening that door the hard way, so come on, let's be having you!"
Gendo sighed heavily. "If I unlock this door, will you stop being paternal at me?"
"I'll stop being paternal if you stop regressing to adolesence," Fuyutsuki retorted. "I was already too old for this when you still had the excuse of being too young to know better."
"Fine." Gendo unlocked the door.
Several thousand miles away, Mari Makinami was sitting in the Entry Plug of her Evangelion, managing the difficult of feat of being nervous and bored simultaneously. "Seriously, would it have been that hard to let me stream audio in here?" she complained. "Or pull up an ebook viewer in my HUD?"
"Sorry kiddo. No budget for non-essentials like that, or so they tell me. I can tune one of the backup radios into a local station if you want, though."
"Hey, that's an idea. What sort of local stations are there around here, anyway?"
"Oh, they got both kinds a' music, honey! Country and Western!" her "handler" and temporary guardian replied, doing a passable Southern accent. "Are you as sick of this place as I am?"
"Almost certainly, Dave. Almost certainly." And luckily for you, we'll both be leaving sooner than you think.
Mari felt vaguely guilty about leaving him out of the loop like this. David J. Croft (who'd really hated being called "DJ" even before Mari had shown him a certain notorious, hilariously bad work of Tomb Raider fanfiction) had been a sort of honourary older brother when she was younger, the son of one of Mum's best friends who shared her love of reading and the outdoors, and made a point of talking to her at family gatherings and standing up to a certain cousin who thought quiet and bookish Mari was a good target for picking on. In the long months following what she thought of as The Accident, when her mother died and Dad sank so deep into his grief -and his gin- that he might as well have perished too, it had been David who took her to school and made sure she had clean clothes and done all the other things a parent should have been doing. He'd also been the one to "persuade" Dad to see a proper bereavement counsellor and cut down on the drinking, by the somewhat drastic but effective expedient of threatening to report him to Child Services if he didn't. When the Marduk Institute had put her forward as a pilot candidate, he'd immediately volunteered to act in locum parentis while she was overseas for training.
Still, even though Kaoru was pretty sure he wasn't anything to do with SEELE and genuinely did care about her, the fewer people who knew what was actually going on the better. Plausible deniability might be the only thing that kept David out of trouble come the inevitable official inquiry into what was about to happen, not to mention the very unofficial one into why things hadn't happened the way the Old Men wanted them to happen.
Besides, if she told him the survival of everyone within a fifty-mile radius hinged on the Sufficiently Advanced Alien equivalent of Clippy he probably would've had a fit of the vapours, and that was before she got to the really bad parts.
The voice of one of the tech crew dragged her back to the here and now. "Okay, Miss Makinari, we're all ready out here. If the synch test goes okay we'll do some basic tests, then you can knock off and grab some lunch while we get the S2 Engine warmed up."
"Ready when you lot are!" Mari called back cheerfully.
"Understood. Setting plug depth... now. Interface language set to English. Muscular interlocks released. Synchro start in three, two, one..."
Mari reached down and muted her microphone, then took a deep breath. "Hi Mum."
* * *
"You want to what?" Ritsuko exclaimed. "Gendo, when the Committee get to hear of this-"
"It will be too late for them to do anything about it, or to retaliate without repercussions for their authority and prestige. And in any case, as operational commander this is at least technically within my authority."
"And apart from the fact it'll really annoy the Council of Ominously-Lit Placeholder Holograms, which I don't see as all that much of a drawback, I think it's a good idea," Misato added. "It'll be good for our reputation with the general public and our working relationships with the JSDF and the Ministry of Defence. The less time we spend butting heads with them, the more time we have to do what we're supposed to be doing. And more importantly, I don't want to see any more good soldiers die fighting a battle they can never win."
Gendo looked over to Fuyutsuki, the only one who hadn't yet spoken. "I share Dr Akagi's reservations, but Captain Katsuragi makes a good point. Squabbling amongst ourselves over jurisdiction and petty institutional pride benefits no one but SEELE."
"Well, that's settled then. Dr Akagi, how soon can you and your team come up with a Beginner's Guide to AT Field Theory that even the average journalism school graduate can comprehend?"
"If I gloss over the more esoteric parts, the first draft will be in your inbox by the end of the day. But I really hope you know what you're doing."
"That makes two of us," Gendo replied, smiling without humour.
* * *
"All systems go at this end. All set, Mari?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"Okay. Starting the power-up checklist now."
Kaoru glanced at the radio handset she had... borrowed from a security guard who'd been in cahoots with SEELE's embedded saboteur, and resisted the urge to swear. (She might not be that kind of Angel, but Kaoru had rather enjoyed Good Omens and identified rather deeply with the character of Aziraphael, who did not swear without a very good reason indeed.) Time was getting worryingly short, and these were some extremely delicate adjustments-
"Hey!" Oh, yes. That would be the saboteur, wondering why his co-conspirator was handcuffed to a pipe in the men's bathroom. This was most inconvenient. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Kaoru smiled in what she hoped was a pleasant yet slightly dangerous way. "Thwarting you."
The man sighed theatrically. "I suppose it figures you'd discover the concept of adolescent rebellion eventually," he remarked. "The Boss is worried about you, you know."
"Worried the brainwashing didn't take, you mean?" Kaoru retorted, with sudden heat. She gestured angrily, and whatever reply the SEELE operative might have had was abruptly silenced as the armour panel she had removed to access Unit-04's S2 Organ rose up and smote him mightily upside the head. The man collapsed like a puppet with the strings cut, and then went into a seizure. Kaoru gestured again, and with a sharp crack he was still, head lolling at a hideous angle.
Kaoru stared at the body for perhaps half a second, slightly concerned to realise she felt absolutely no sense of guilt, then decided she'd try feeling guilty about not feeling guilty once she no longer had her hands full preventing the deaths of several thousand people who'd done considerably less to deserve it than anyone high up enough in the ranks of SEELE to be entrusted with a job like this. With a shrug, she returned her attention to the S2 Organ.
I do hope this 'New Game Plus', as Kensuke put it, is being less stressful for everyone else...
Mari? Mari, is that you?
Last time I checked, yeah, she thought back, trying to feign nonchalance and not really succeeding.
Oh my God Mari I'm so sorry I love you I miss you-
Mari barely stopped herself from crying out at the sheer force of emotion that hit her. Mum! Take it easy, we don't want to give the game away!
Oh! The overwhelming sensations subsided. Sorry. It's just...
I know, Mum. I know all of it, or at least as much as Kaoru knows. Mari uttered a silent prayer that LCL meant nobody could tell you were crying. It's going to be alright. We're going beat the Angels, and then we're kicking SEELE's arses, and then we're getting you out of this thing. She paused, wondering how to project a mental impression of a smirk. Unless you're doing alright in here, in which case I'll pikey it and go see if International Rescue have any openings.
Not on your life. Do you have any idea how dull it is in here most of the time? And don't use that word, it's an ethnic slur.
Sorry. Mari chuckled mentally. You're taking this really well, by the way. Kaoru was worried you might've been a bit... what's the word?
Probably "traumatised", although I'm sure your father would put it much less delicately. And I did volunteer for this, after a fashion. Says something about SEELE that it took them four Evas to think of asking someone, "If you die, would you like us to use your immortal soul to power a giant biomechanical robot so we can use it to fight kaiju?" And even then there was nothing in the small print about them flattening you with a car when a vacancy came up!
They'll get theirs, Mari promised.
"Alright, Pilot Makinami, the S2 organ is spinning up now. Prepare for deployment."
"Okay. Ready when you are. How's my synch score looking?"
"Really damn good, as it happens. Fluctuated a little a minute ago, but right now you're holding at 89.2%. I think that's a new record. Whatever you're doing in there, keep it up!"
"With pleasure!" Mari snorted. See, if they'd just tell us these things... Anyway, this is where we have to rely on Kaoru. Hold onto your... something, because she tells me that this might feel unpleasantly like being drunk.
Two questions. 1. Was Kaworu quoting Ford Prefect at the time? 2. Didn't Kaworu used to be a boy?
The whole pronoun thing is a bit complicated. I'll tell you about it later. And I'm not sure, why?
Because when Ford said that, Arthur Dent asked him what was so unpleasant about being drunk, and then Ford replied, "You ask a glass of water."
Mari's mouth opened and closed feebly for a long moment as she tried to formulate a response. "Oh, bollocks," she said at last.
"You want me to what?" Shinji exclaimed, almost dropping the homemade vegetarian bento box he was passing Rei.
"You do not have to do anything that could possibly be construed as cuckolding Megumi," she insisted. "All you have to do is go to a movie together and buy her a soda afterwards. Hopefully it will stop her father asking awkward questions."
"And the fact that she's out of my league by several orders of magnitude won't cause everyone else to ask awkward questions?"
"She was blatantly flirting at you yesterday morning, was she not?"
"There is that," Shinji admitted. "Oh, alright. If only because I know what it's like to have your dad on your case wanting to be something you're not. And hey, being seen to be dating a guy like me has to be one way to desensitise him to the idea she prefers girls."
Rei was still trying to think of a response to that when there was an excited shout from Kensuke, who hastily maxed out the volume on the little transistor radio he'd been listening to while eating his own lunch.
"... known as an AT-Field, AT standing for either 'Absolute Terrain' or 'Absolute Terror' depending who you ask. As to exactly what it is, that is classified beyond even my authority to disclose. All I can tell you is that there are only two proven ways to penetrate it: An overwhelming brute-force approach, as our JSSDF colleagues demonstrated a short while ago..." Gendo's voice paused, and Shinji could easily picture the smug grin on his father's face at this point, "or another AT-field in close proximity, which causes some sort of counter-harmonic effect and reduces its strength. At a range of a few dozen metres it becomes almost negligible."
"Huh. So that's how that works," Kensuke said to himself.
"And you're making this revelation public how because...?" the interviewer prompted.
"Because professional pride and institutional rivalry got a lot of good soldiers killed for no good purpose, and I wish to avoid a repeat of that," Gendo replied piously. Shinji resisted the urge to raise his eyes heavenwards at the unconvincing veneer of sincerity. There was some sort of ulterior motive underneath all that, of course; his father probably had an ulterior motive in mind when deciding where to order lunch. And any positive outcome for anyone other than Gendo himself (and perhaps, arguably, Yui) was purely incidental.
Still, if he'd decided that letting the JSSDF get their heads handed to them like something out of a paint-by-numbers Godzilla rip-off didn't serve his goals then this could only be a...
"... Stay tuned for a series of exclusive interviews with the three brave young people who pilot the Evangelions into battle."
"Son of a bitch!"
* * *
"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?"
(In other news, I have an original short story on sale. Check it out on Smashwords here. Also available from Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and iBooks.)
"There's rather a lot to unpack here," Ritsuko remarked dryly, "but for the time being, let's focus on the fact your Evangelion is talking to you."
"That's not normal, then?" Mari replied.
"Good question. We've had what you might call mixed results communicating with their Cores during sychronisation. Pilot Ikari claims his mother attempted to contact him, but... Well, he wasn't very receptive at the time. When Pilot Soryu tried, the results were not especially good. And as for my sister, given who is actually in Unit-00 I'm afraid to even ask."
"You have a sister?"
Ritsuko sighed. "I guess Kaworu didn't know about that, then." She condensed the known and suspected details of Rei's true heritage into a few terse sentences. "And then Gendo decided it would be a good idea to stuff her in an Evangelion," she concluded.
Mari took a moment to absorb this. "Your workplace is a bloody soap opera, do you know that?" she concluded.
"Yes. Yes, I do. Anyway, returning to the topic at hand, I expect we might be better off asking Kasumi some questions directly. Do you think she'd be willing?"
"Give me a list and I'll pass it on during the next synch test. Can't promise she'll be able or willing to answer all of them but I'm happy to try."
"That works. Hopefully we'll be able to figure out a more direct method at a later date. Anyway, I suppose the next question I should ask pertains to one Kaworu Nagisa..."
Mari snorted. "Where do I even begin to talk about Kaoru..."
Gendo sat at his desk, staring into a cup of surprisingly good cafeteria coffee and pondering how best to adjust the Scenario to take this into account, despite a throbbing headache that was only partly down to last night's festivities. A fourth Evangelion and pilot was a welcome development, even if the timing could definitely have been better, but he had a feeling the Committee were going to be less than receptive to his assurances that he had nothing to do with Unit-04 teleporting several thousand miles-
His cellphone began ringing, the shrill electronic warble uncomfortably loud in the caverous silence of his office, and Gendo almost spilled his coffee in his haste to pick up. "Ikari."
"Good morning, Commander. I am Kaoru Nagisa, but you may know me better as Tabris. Your son and I are... acquainted."
"So I have heard. I believe I have you to thank for Unit-04 making a rather impressive entrance to the Geofront earlier?"
"You're welcome. It's good to know someone appreciates my flair for the dramatic. Anyway, I cannot be certain this line will stay secure indefinitely so I must be brief. I will do my best to arrange further deliveries of equipment, but I'm afraid selecting pilots is down to you. Pilot Ikari or his comrades will be able to tell you the names of three potential candidates who are already read in on certain... unique circumstances, upon which I shall not enlarge over the telephone." There was a slight pause. "I don't suppose you have much reason to trust me, given who and what I am and what Shinji has undoubtedly told you about the terms on which we parted, but nevertheless we ultimately share the same goal. Better we work together than at cross purposes."
"Perhaps. Depending, of course, on whether you know what my goal actually is," Gendo replied guardedly.
There was a deep sigh from the other end of the phone. "Let me put it more plainly, then. Help me stop that mad old fool Keel and his cronies from destroying human life as we know it forever, and I will drag your wife out of Unit-01 by the hair if that's what it takes."
"Deal," Gendo said, without a moment's hesitation.
"I'm glad we could come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Oh, yes. Before I go, Commander, my... associate would like you to corroborate some information about the identity of the British representative for the Committee. I shall put you on speaker."
"Certainly."
There was a muffled beep. "When you are ready, Commander."
"This is Ikari. I'm afraid I must confirm that yes, the rumours are true. As to how and why he of all people got the job, I would theorise that it happened the same way he got every job he's ever had: Pure nepotism. And while we're on the subject, in case you were wondering, the yellow press was correct about the Russian representative as well."
"Hell's bells," a second voice said quietly, in English.
"That's about how I reacted as well when I found out. Anyway, I shall not detain you further." Gendo hung up, sat back in his chair, and smiled for the first time in longer than he cared to recall. "I can work with this," he decided.
David Croft wished, not for the first time that day, that the cheap motel room they were hiding out in had a minibar. "Vladimir Putin I kind of saw coming," he said, half to himself, "but Mark Thatcher?"
"Like the man said," Kaoru replied, "it was largely his mother's doing."
"Hah. Now that I have no trouble believing at all. In fact it explains quite a lot. Now, what was all that about 'further deliveries of equipment' that you were arranging?"
Kaoru smiled. "That promises to be something of an adventure..."
David sighed. "I'm not going to like this, am I."
Kaoru told him. David really did not like it.
The first thing Kasumi Makinami had done after finding herself in the Core of an Evangelion had been to redecorate a bit. Well, strictly speaking the first thing she'd done was to swear wholeheartedly and take a solemn oath to make the entirety of SEELE's Inner Council very sorry indeed for pulling this stunt, but redecorating was the first proactive thing she'd done. One of the few upsides to her present predicament was that she could shape her environment at will, as long as she could form a sufficiently strong mental picture of what she wanted. That by itself wouldn't have been much help, but to her surprise she'd discovered that as long as Unit-04 was connected to the datalink umbilicals she could tap into the Internet; how or why this was possible she hadn't the faintest idea, but she suspected that Yui Ikari had made some sort of arrangement at the design stage.
At any rate, once she'd figured out that useful trick it had been fairly easy to create a pleasant environment, and Kasumi had amused herself by going to fansites for The Sims and decorating exclusively with content from the modpacks until it started to give her existential angst. Still, the result was a nicely-furnished house set in an extensive garden in the English countryside, complete with geographically and seasonally appropriate birdsong and weather that mirrored real-life conditions in the approximate area she was simulating.
Researching that part had taken most of a week and been surprisingly hard to set up, but at least it had passed the time. Time was something she had far, far too much of in here.
Currently, she was stretched out on a large paisley sofa with the tablet she usually used to interact with the world (or at least the internet), a pot of tea on the table nearby and The Chris Evans Breakfast Show assaulting her ears through the speakers of a vintage hi-fi in the corner of the room. "Bloody SEELE can have me offed and shoved in here but they can't be arsed to do something about whoever thought this was a good replacement for Wake Up To Wogan," she muttered, not for the first time. "There's no justice in the world."
"Not the sort of thing one wants to be confronted with before the first coffee of the day, true," a new voice remarked.
"Yaaaah!" Kasumi jumped several inches in the air and fell sideways off the sofa, narrowly missing the coffee table. "What in the bloody- Naoko?"
"Morning Kaz. Sorry to barge in but you don't seem to have a doorbell."
"Yeah, I don't really get guests often," she replied. "Didn't know I could, in fact."
"Only now you're in the same hangar as another Evangelion. Yui sends her regards by the way, or at least she would if she wasn't still sulking because her spawn has exactly as many issues as you'd expect him to after being left in the care of Gendo. Honestly, what either of us saw in that wretch I have no idea in hindsight, and I suspect it's at least 50% his fault Ritsuko's decided she's a lesbian and started shagging her sysadmin."
"You're hardly in a position to comment on anyone else's parenting skills," Kasumi replied, with some asperity. Then something registered with her. "Wait, does that mean Gendo really-?"
"Traded me in for the new model? After a fashion. She was a better match for him than I was, although that's not saying much: I think they might have made a go of it if he wasn't still hung up on Yui. But this Maya girl seems like a good sort, so I can't complain too much."
"I suppose not," Kasumi replied. "So, anything particular bring you here, or did you just want to get caught up over a brew?" She hadn't been especially close with Naoko back in the day, and very little of what she'd heard secondhand after moving abroad had put her in a very good light, but at this point she'd be glad of anyone to talk to.
"Something like that. Although I could do with something rather stronger than tea, if you don't mind." Naoko held a glass under the spigot of a boxed wine carton that had definitely not been on the coffee table a moment ago.
"At this time in the morning?"
"Why not? Time has very little meaning in here, you know."
Kasumi had no good rebuttal to that.
(And that's a wrap for this chapter. For my next trick, Ramiel!)
- Location
- Canada
Well if you mixed it with cream first...
As far as I know (Or, as far as Cocktail Chemistry told me) mixing three things: Spirits, milk and tea wouldn't end well.
Except you filtered the whole thing and basically have cleared milk punch.
7734
Trust and verify.
- Location
- Philmont
Rye works best in my experience, mixed with a heavy oolong or breakfast tea.
- Location
- Germany
- Pronouns
- He/Him/They/Them
Woah, Jake is on fire! Not sure if I should get the hose or a few more logs.
I'm vaguely apprehensive about Naoko's views on Maya's and Rits' relationship. The possible eventual meeting of the Doctors Akagi ought to be... interesting.
Please tell me they cleared things up with Kimiko afterwards - or at least are going to, depending on when the fake-date happened and when we are now.
Great updates and I'm looking forward to how they trash Rami-chan...
Shinji is going to try and MT the damn particle beam, isn't he? Oh hell
I'm vaguely apprehensive about Naoko's views on Maya's and Rits' relationship. The possible eventual meeting of the Doctors Akagi ought to be... interesting.
Pretty sure Asuka might've been caught by surprise as well... if she didn't overhear them at some point in the bathrooms.
Please tell me they cleared things up with Kimiko afterwards - or at least are going to, depending on when the fake-date happened and when we are now.
Great updates and I'm looking forward to how they trash Rami-chan...
Shinji is going to try and MT the damn particle beam, isn't he? Oh hell
- Location
- Australia
(Comes in like a fortnight late but with a mug of tea)
Oh snap, I missed a bunch of updates. Or at least commenting on them!
I hope your mental health's been better latelybut please put this on the absolute backburner if anything comes up, your wellbeing comes infinitely before 'a bunch of schmucks on the internet getting good characterization', darn it.
I've nothing else to add at the moment (I, uh, need to do a re-read and catch myself up on stuff lmao) but I'm so excited to see where this goes!
Oh snap, I missed a bunch of updates. Or at least commenting on them!
I hope your mental health's been better lately
I've nothing else to add at the moment (I, uh, need to do a re-read and catch myself up on stuff lmao) but I'm so excited to see where this goes!
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
Seems likely. (I can make a perfectly good Indian curry by myself, so the only kind of curry sauce I'd buy in a jar is a Thai one, so I wouldn't actually know
)
- Location
- The Midlands.
Chapter 5 is now up at AO3, for those who prefer that venue. Link's in my sig.
Oh, and I just realised I never got around to posting this here: r/wholesomevangelion
Oh, and I just realised I never got around to posting this here: r/wholesomevangelion
Last edited:
- Location
- The State of Denial
[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
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...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
It's not much, but it's something. "There's rather a lot to unpack here," Ritsuko remarked dryly, "but for the time being, let's focus on the fact your Evangelion is talking to you." "That's not normal, then?" Mari replied. "Good question. We've had what you might call mixed results...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
The first thing Kasumi Makinami had done after finding herself in the Core of an Evangelion had been to redecorate a bit. Well, strictly speaking the first thing she'd done was to swear wholeheartedly and take a solemn oath to make the entirety of SEELE's Inner Council very sorry indeed for...
forums.sufficientvelocity.com
Yeah, I had to power slog through the pages to find them because the jump from 5.1 to 6.1 didnt make much sense to me. It was like 'in Median res', but without ever getting back to the beginning.
Edit: The new XF2 links are new and scare me. >.> I thought they'd just be normal url links.
- Location
- Altamonte Springs, FL
In the words of Christine Daaé, "Not quite, monsieur."is 5.2, I guess?[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
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...
is 5.3 as well, maybe?[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
It's not much, but it's something. "There's rather a lot to unpack here," Ritsuko remarked dryly, "but for the time being, let's focus on the fact your Evangelion is talking to you." "That's not normal, then?" Mari replied. "Good question. We've had what you might call mixed results...
5.4 ish? Perhaps?[Evangelion] Doing It Right This Time
The first thing Kasumi Makinami had done after finding herself in the Core of an Evangelion had been to redecorate a bit. Well, strictly speaking the first thing she'd done was to swear wholeheartedly and take a solemn oath to make the entirety of SEELE's Inner Council very sorry indeed for...
Yeah, I had to power slog through the pages to find them because the jump from 5.1 to 6.1 didnt make much sense to me. It was like 'in Median res', but without ever getting back to the beginning.
Edit: The new XF2 links are new and scare me. >.> I thought they'd just be normal url links.
This is the complete chapter, in multiquotes (minus 5.1):
- Location
- On a powder keg, next to a fire
I just managed to read the Chapter 5. in its entirety on AO3 (and noticed I missed some updated on the way), and must say that:
Mari is fun to read, Kaoru is appropriately enigmatic (and clearly enjoying confusing everyone), not to mention seeing Gendo depart his original persona so much is hilarious (the short talk between them is great). It's a great fun chapter, thank you!
Only thing I missed was the A/R/S interaction, but it makes sense, since the focus was on introducing new characters and making the scene bigger. I just eagerly await their return, though.
And of course I'm going to pay special attention to Evangelion Interior Decoration story thread and the "How are the souls doing?" part of the story
Mari is fun to read, Kaoru is appropriately enigmatic (and clearly enjoying confusing everyone), not to mention seeing Gendo depart his original persona so much is hilarious (the short talk between them is great). It's a great fun chapter, thank you!
Only thing I missed was the A/R/S interaction, but it makes sense, since the focus was on introducing new characters and making the scene bigger. I just eagerly await their return, though.
And of course I'm going to pay special attention to Evangelion Interior Decoration story thread and the "How are the souls doing?" part of the story
Sir Plusse
Overly Vicious Quester
- Location
- Kansas
Pretty sure we've all been there.
Anyway, I, for one, will try to be EXTREMELY careful how I word things (assuming I post anything, that is).
Really should pay more attention to stuff.
Don't forget that the Ice cap has it's own gravitational pull so the sea level near it will actually get lower.
Not as seriously as the Irish.
THAT DOES NOT SOUND LIKE A SURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM KAORU! IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING YOU SHOULD LEAD WITH!
I prefer Coco. If I am to drink tea, I prefer Green with salt.
We'll know for sure how well Kasumi assimilated if she starts quoting Monty Python during battle.
Don't forget that the Ice cap has it's own gravitational pull so the sea level near it will actually get lower.
Not as seriously as the Irish.
THAT DOES NOT SOUND LIKE A SURMOUNTABLE PROBLEM KAORU! IT SOUNDS LIKE SOMETHING YOU SHOULD LEAD WITH!
I prefer Coco. If I am to drink tea, I prefer Green with salt.
We'll know for sure how well Kasumi assimilated if she starts quoting Monty Python during battle.
grommile
nasty-minded old cynic
- Location
- NERV-Mercia
- Pronouns
- Traditional/Animate
The way I hear it, Monty Python goes down really quite well with the Japanese anyway. Something about island nations at the edge of a continent with a sense of humour rooted in wordplay and social stratification.
- Location
- On a powder keg, next to a fire
Also, a propensity for tea, conquest, and having the head of the country as the head of religion.
- Location
- The Midlands.
On a lighter note, if you didn't see it elsewhere on the forum, "tsundere pizza" is now a thing.
Sounds like it's right up Misato's street, doesn't it? Although since it's essentially the same concept as "chilli cheese bites" expanded to an entire pizza... You know what, I actually kind of want to try it.
Sounds like it's right up Misato's street, doesn't it? Although since it's essentially the same concept as "chilli cheese bites" expanded to an entire pizza... You know what, I actually kind of want to try it.
FlyingScanian
Tea Addict
- Location
- Land of Eternal Night
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Seems like it will be painful going in and painful going out, with very little deredere in the middle. I think I'll pass.
[now, where's a good NOPE! gif?]
[now, where's a good NOPE! gif?]
Except the pizza had frozen vanilla ice cream inside their crust, it would be too much tsun. You can never undetestimate even Jalapeno too much.
Chayenne or Asian paddy chili, in other hand....
Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
Spare the cheese, I'll take the full tsun! 🤤
Maybe I won't need pepper sauce for that one....
Last edited: