Fraktal's attempts at pretending that he can write

[Fraktal]

Decided to give this thread a try after all.

This isn't the first and certainly won't be the last time a user has opened a thread for dumping their creative output into a single repository, so you all know what this is about. In my case it is especially necessary, since most of my ideas are scattered across multiple threads on both SV and SB, going back 6+ years in some cases, with not even I knowing where I posted what, only that I once thought of something like that and posted it somewhere at sometime. There is, of course, my (current) flagship project, a more sci-fi approach to Evangelion by way of a crossover with Half-Life. An unconventional pair, I know; most of my more expansive and detailed ideas tend to be highly unconventional takes on the original, as far as stations of canon go. That particular project has its own thread; find it in my sig but be advised, it gets going very slowly.

My other ideas, summarized shortly. I will update this list as I remember them and will elaborate in threadmarked posts below.

The Evangelion Odyssey: my second ever foray into fanfic writing, this was an abortive crossover between Evangelion and Battlezone. Also my first foray into genderbending, via a tomboy Shinji with a personality very similar to the NGE manga's version of Shinji. Also an adrenaline junkie and KMFDM-fan male Asuka. And a Rei who's female but definitely not normal, least of which being her habit of casual sadism. Oh, and the Evas are hover-capable powered armor instead of cyborgs, but behave just as unpredictably. ...like I said, this was my second story ever.

Maiden of the Apocalypse: my eventual take on a magical girl version of Evangelion. Caution: even darker than canon in some places. This time the Evas take the form of a surgically-implanted symbiote that grants the host a variety of abilities, including a costume that falls somewhere halfway between a Barrier Jacket and a Nanosuit. Shinji's a girl this time around too.

The One Who Calls the Gospel (working title): as a select few of my followers know, I always felt that a very underutilized character in Evangelion was Mayumi Yamagishi. Despite having the exact same psychological issues as Shinji and the two of them hitting it off like peas in a pod, they never got to interact beyond the timeframe of a single (VN) episode - which is a colossal waste, considering that the other characters' thoughts and reactions to the uncanny similarity should've been a source of much plot. This idea of mine is an attempt to remedy that.

A Man's Decision (working title): similar to the above, except this one is centered upon Mana Kirishima instead. The one character who we know without a doubt loved Shinji with no strings attached and evidence of him reciprocating is legion. My idea is a what-if scenario branching off the Special Edition ending of Girlfriend of Steel, where Shinji quits NERV to stay with Mana - but what if, as the two were waiting for the train to leave Tokyo-3 with, Gendo showed up at the train station and offered a deal?

Burning Sky (working title): what if the world of Evangelion caught a lucky break by SEELE failing to find the White Moon before the Old Men all died from old age? And what if they were replaced by an ambitious generation of futurists and venture capitalists who actually wanted to help humanity reach their full potential rather than to merely escape the clutches of their own mortality? It's helicarrier time, baby!

Lose Some, Win Some (working title): if two of my above ideas did not imply already, I happen to like the concept of Shinji Ikari being a girl. And in this case, being turned into one ends up helping her immensely down the line... Noriko Takaya would be proud.

Evangelion Wars (working title): something that came to me while I was trying to amuse myself through a relative's wedding. What if Infinite Stratos would've been a "To Be A Master" tournament series instead of a slice-of-life harem comedy? And what if we excuse the supertech with really high-level AT-field manipulation and cybernetic enhancement? Of course, the Angels have a thing or two to say about that...

Speak of the Devil (working title): if you're getting sick of all the Evangelion, here's some Gundam instead. At the final battleground of the Second Neo-Zeon War, Amuro Ray sacrificed himself to push Axis back... but felt that he still had something left to do. And thus the legendary White Devil stalks the battlefields of the One Year War, Operation Stardust, the Gryps Conflict and the First Neo-Zeon War once more...

Mobile Suit Gundam ExSEED: in a different Cosmic Era, a teenage genius finds himself caught up in a war between an immortal and a dictator-wannabe both trying to save humanity from itself in their own ways. Contains awesomeness, big explosions and Newtypes. 'And as the headless mobile suit spiraled out of control, five kilometers away, Lunamaria licked her lips and casually adjusted her sights. ''Take it to the head, bitch."'

Fires of Redemption: in a different Anno Domini, a different Trinity sibling survives Ali al-Saachez' attack. One not quite as psychotic as his siblings. And Aeolia Schenberg isn't quite as dead as Alejandro Corner thinks. The Plan is still on track. It just needs a little... adjustment.

Blow You Away (working title): as much as I generally prefer sci-fi over the explicitly supernatural, I'm willing to make exceptions if the story itself is good. Like it's the case with a certain story about a girl who can fling coils like a railgun. But this time, it's not Misaka Mikoto who takes center stage but Saten Ruiko, who discovers after the Level Upper incident that for some reason, she still has her aerokinetic ability...

As-of-yet untitled Mass Effect concept: what if Colonist!Shepard didn't manage to escape the slavers on Mindoir? What if captivity scarred her mind and body, yet her captors failed to break her resolve? After escaping and leading the Alliance right back to the slavers' den, Shepard joined the military - and a legend was born of a Vanguard like none other. One whose biotics are matched only by Subject Zero, whose shotgun is matched only by Krogan, but whose wit and lack of professionalism is matched by none.

The Unsung Heroine: not all my story ideas are based off of existing franchises. In 2055, on the eve of humanity starting test drillings on the Moon for helium-3 to solve the world's energy problems, fifteen year old Japanese orphan Kousaka Hayate finds her peaceful days of reading bootleg scans of Gundam mangas broken by a savage attack by very much real giant robots before she's taken into custody by the JSDF and press-ganged into becoming a Tracer Frame pilot herself to fight off invaders from another dimension, else she'd get shot in the head and tossed into a gutter for knowing too much. But as she finds out, she's not the only one fighting in this shadow war for survival - and the Moon might the key to everyone getting out of this alive.

Burning Void (working title): another original concept. Well, mostly original. When you're an unassuming otaku, your only interaction with girls might very well be white-knighting other people will ridicule you for. But that ridicule usually doesn't include getting chased around by 23rd century mechas on the streets of the Martian underground city you grew up in. But when you happen to be one of the top players of an online Voidstrider simulator and that pretty girl whips out Sol Federation military credentials to grant you access to a cutting-edge Voidstrider prototype... maybe showing her around on her day off isn't that bad of a price. Even if the charismatic revolutionary / public enemy no.1 terrorist leader your detractors work for happens to be her big brother. Wait, what?​

 

[Fyrstorm]

Mobile Suit Gundam ExSEED

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I've read some of the ideas on this that you've put up on the gundam thread, and it sounds pretty cool.

Fires of Redemption: in a different Anno Domini, a different Trinity sibling survives Ali al-Saachez' attack. One not quite as psychotic as his siblings. And Aeolia Schenberg isn't quite as dead as Alejandro Corner thinks. The Plan is still on track. It just needs a little... adjustment.

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Johann? It's totally Johann, isn't it? Tell me more.

 

[KingseekerFreyr]

I REALLY want to see the Gundam SEED AU fic....

 

[Ultra Sonic 007]

So with regards to Maiden of the Apocalypse, would that be taking some inspiration from Puella Magi Madoka Magica, or is there some other magical girl anime that you were thinking of?

 

[EvaUnit01]

The Evangelion Odyssey: my second ever foray into fanfic writing, this was an abortive crossover between Evangelion and Battlezone. Also my first foray into genderbending, via a tomboy Shinji with a personality very similar to the NGE manga's version of Shinji. Also an adrenaline junkie and KMFDM-fan male Asuka. And a Rei who's female but definitely not normal, least of which being her habit of casual sadism. Oh, and the Evas are hover-capable powered armor instead of cyborgs, but behave just as unpredictably. ...like I said, this was my second story ever.

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I don't know if I'd mark out for it the way I do SCE as it stands now, but I'd certainly give it a more-than-fair shot.

The One Who Calls the Gospel (working title): as a select few of my followers know, I always felt that a very underutilized character in Evangelion was Mayumi Yamagishi. Despite having the exact same psychological issues as Shinji and the two of them hitting it off like peas in a pod, they never got to interact beyond the timeframe of a single (VN) episode - which is a colossal waste, considering that the other characters' thoughts and reactions to the uncanny similarity should've been a source of much plot. This idea of mine is an attempt to remedy that.

Click to shrink...

Fund it.

A Man's Decision (working title): similar to the above, except this one is centered upon Mana Kirishima instead. The one character who we know without a doubt loved Shinji with no strings attached and evidence of him reciprocating is legion. My idea is a what-if scenario branching off the Special Edition ending of Girlfriend of Steel, where Shinji quits NERV to stay with Mana - but what if, as the two were waiting for the train to leave Tokyo-3 with, Gendo showed up at the train station and offered a deal?

Click to shrink...

Welp, I'm certainly hyped.

Evangelion Wars (working title): something that came to me while I was trying to amuse myself through a relative's wedding. What if Infinite Stratos would've been a "To Be A Master" tournament series instead of a slice-of-life harem comedy? And what if we excuse the supertech with really high-level AT-field manipulation and cybernetic enhancement? Of course, the Angels have a thing or two to say about that...

Click to shrink...

......is this seriously Evangelion in a format closer to that of G Gundam? Because that's what it sounds like to me. And it sounds amazing.

everything else

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Can't think of new ways to say "Sounds awesome, I wanna read it" without repeating myself.

I'm especially digging the "Burning Void" thing.

 

[Fraktal]

Johann? It's totally Johann, isn't it? Tell me more.

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Yup, it is. The idea came from the tone of Johann's final words on the undubbed Japanese voicetrack: he was despairing almost to the point of tears. Thus it's not unreasonable to posit that unlike his siblings who are in it for the lulz (Nena) or the chance to wreck shit (Michael), Johann believes. He believes in Celestial Being's ideology, he believes in the cause. And if you pay attention, he was just as floored at Veda letting Ali use the Zwei as Tieria was at Veda overriding the Trial System - ergo like Tieria, Johann believed Veda was infallible, hence why he did not ever question orders to kill noncombatants.

As for how he survives, Ali manages to disable the Eins and is about to finish it off when Nena tries to chase him off. Of course, you probably know how it ends, given Ali being just as unable to resist the opportunity to kill a weak enemy as Yazan. But it does distract Ali long enough so that when he turns back to Johann to finish the job for real, he gets dropkicked off his prey by a newly-arrived Exia, with Ali dropping an F-bomb in annoyance at crossing paths with Setsuna again. I'm not rehashing the battle blow-by-blow; those two duke it out offscreen.

In the meantime, Johann is musing about the irony of the situation before getting angry at it all. According to the scenario, Celestial Being's activities were supposed to end with the world understanding their intentions and forsaking warfare, not ganging up against them with new weapons based off of those of Celestial Being. It is also at this time that his mind finally catches up to the implications of Ali being able to use the Zwei - namely, that Veda allowed him to do it. He witnesses the Exia going Trans-Am and hears Aeolia's transmission, and it is at this point that it finally ticks to him:

• Aeolia said that he bestowed the Trans-Am upon the Gundam Meisters, yet the Thrones don't have it.
• Veda shouldn't allow an outsider the use of a Gundam to kill a Gundam Meister, yet it allowed Ali to use it to kill the Trinities.
• Ergo, the Trinities were never Gundam Meisters to begin with, as far as the scenario went.

He doesn't have more time to think of it before he gets addressed by Setsuna, who chased Ali off in the background and is now holding the damaged and immobile Zwei at swordpoint. Naturally, Setsuna is none too pleased at Ali having gained possession of a Throne and questions Johann about it, who merely points him towards Michael's corpse as an explanation. Upon being asked what his intentions are, Johann bitterly replies that he has no intentions: his siblings are dead, his suit has less than 10% power left and he's being hunted by an army of Gundam knockoffs. At this point, he's a dead man walking but "even so, I'd rather get killed by a Gundam Meister than a nameless grunt who doesn't even know what he's fighting for, so just get on with it." Lasse (who is circling above in the assault container) is also of the opinion that Johann should just die where he stands after all the shit the Trinities pulled.

Setsuna, however, betrays Johann's expectations by ordering him to power down the Eins and eject the GN drive before calling Lasse over to land the assault container so that they can take Johann alive and also salvage the Eins while they're at it. Johann correctly guesses that Setsuna wants to interrogate him for what he might know and rolls with it.


Meanwhile, in a camouflaged spacecraft clinging to the Martian moon of Phobos, someone wakes up in a stasis pod and helps an old man get out of another one. The latter surmises that since Veda woke them up, someone must have taken the bait he planted at the mainframe.

"You mean that hologram?" – The younger man paused. – "Then it means our plan has failed."

"Not yet, my friend." – Aeolia Schenberg replied. – "It merely entered its next phase."

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And that's where the first chapter would end.

In the second chapter, Johann is being interrogated onboard the Ptolemy. Upon being asked for his real name, he replies that his codename is also his real name. Lockon calls bullshit on that on the basis that everyone's required to use a codename and not disclose their real one, but Johann points out while meaningfully looking Tieria in the eye that if you're forbidden from asking someone for their real name, you have no way of knowing whether their codename isn't the same. Speaking of which, Tieria refuses to believe the Trinities got their orders from Veda because there are no records of such and completely refuses to even consider the possibility that Veda has been subverted, even with Ali's use of the Zwei and the GN-X hunter-killer teams repeatedly catching up to the fleeing Thrones despite the Trinities deliberately keeping their particle emissions to a minimum to avoid indirect detection (referencing how the Gundams got tracked in the Trinities' debut episode) being enough evidence.

Based on the latter, Johann (correctly) suspects that there's a traitor in the organization, but Lockon dismisses him by calling him a traitor to his face. After everything the Trinities did, Lockon feels absolutely no sympathy towards Johann and when Johann bluntly asks him to his face how did he feel when his little sister died, Lockon promptly whacks Johann on the head hard enough to knock him out of his chair and insists that it's not the same before storming off. Allelujah is mildly confused about that reaction and Johann reveals that he knows why Lockon became a Meister but won't talk about it behind the man's back.

That's all I got actually written so far. What happens next is that Johann continues cooling his heels in the brig until Lockon's death, at which point Tieria physically assaults him instead of Setsuna because Ali used the Zwei to do it so in Tieria's eyes, Johann shares the blame because Ali took the Zwei from the Trinities. Johann irately points out that he told Tieria something was fishy around Veda but Tieria refused to listen, which let to Lockon having had to fight Ali half-blind, meaning that Tieria has no one to blame but himself. This only pisses Tieria off even more and the two thoroughly kick the crap out of each other before Feldt yells at them to cut it out because neither of them is responsible and Lockon wouldn't want this. This finally makes Tieria back down and collapse into himself in grief. Johann doesn't press the point either but tells the Meisters that Lockon gave up his life for the cause, so the best way the others can honor it is if they see it through the end.

Of course, time is of the essence, with the GN-X unit closing in for the season 1 final battle. With Lockon dead and the Dynames damaged too badly to be repaired in the timeframe they have, Celestial Being's fighting strength isn't exactly ideal. So Setsuna seeks out Johann in the brig and asks him if he meant what he said about their cause. Johann replies in the affirmative, so Setsuna lets him out of the brig and brings him to Sumeragi where Johann is asked to pitch in, which he accepts. The way Johann sees it, his only choices in life now are death or redemption and he may actually accomplish something out there, whereas sitting in the brig would only mean a useless death.

Problem is, Ian went over the Eins to completely disconnect it from Veda but without schematics, he can't replace the damaged power conduits between the GN drive and the GN Mega Launcher (the Eins' shoulder beam cannon) to allow it to fire like it did before. So instead he jury-rigged the cannon into the Ptolemy's particle conduits so that the Eins can snipe while perched on top of the ship like a manned turret. Johann contributes to the battle quite well like this, up until the GN-X that, in canon, shot out the Ptolemy's bridge and killed Chris and Lichty. The GN-X pilot figures out Johann's firing arc and approaches from under the ship, from his blind spot; Johann's response is to tear the Eins free and kamikaze-charge the GN-X, venting his GN drive's entire particle storage right in its face to kill the pilot with radiation but in the process completely drains the GN drive and since this is a Tau drive, not a true one, it leaves him dead in the water and drifting away from the battlefield. With his GN drive inoperable, Celestial Being can't track the Eins through drive signature, nor can Johann call them for a rescue without revealing his position to the enemy as well.

That is where the show's first season timeframe ends, with Johann reappearing alongside Setsuna during the latter's raid at the second season premiere. After being left for dead, Johann managed to manually eject the Eins' drained GN drive and replace it with the one from the GN-X he irradiated. He then dragged the GN-X to a safe location and salvaged it for parts to partially repair the Eins with; later on he even made his own custom modifications, such as affixing one of the GN-X's beam sabers to its beam rifle as a makeshift bayonet and building an improvised rifle rack on the back of the Eins' waist so that he can lug around the modified rifle without having to hand-carry it, as well as jury-rigging the GN-X's IFF transponder into the Eins to disguise it as an ESF machine outside visual range.

Sometime after he got the Eins operational, Johann contacted Fon Spaak (refer to the 00 mangas) who naturally almost put a bullet in his head, considering that the last time they met in person, the Trinities tried to take Fereshte's GN drive by force. Anyway, Johann went to Fon in order to propose a joint raid on an ESF mobile suit R&D facility built upon the ruins of the Trinities' base, the objective being to break into a vault underneath the facility the ESF hadn't found yet and retrieve the Eins' Turbulenz Pack. The raid goes off successfully and the two Meisters part ways on non-shooting terms. With the Turbulenz pack, the Eins is able to compete with newer GN-X models in terms of combat power despite its jury-rigged nature, thus when Johann eventually manages to track down Setsuna and the two run joint interventions for the rest of the timeskip, they achieve much more success than Setsuna did alone. During this time, they get to know each other's motivations better and build a healthy respect towards each other.

The second season's timeframe is only rudimentarily plotted out yet. What is known is that during the skirmish against A-LAWS, as seen in the season opening episode finale, Johann manages to take down one of the Aheads himself but the strain of combat causes the Eins' old and unmaintained GN drive to malfunction, disabling most of his weapons. Consequently, he almost gets cut down by a berserk Louise (she immediately singled him out as soon as she recognized his Throne for what it was) until Setsuna finishes off his own target and comes over to help, getting her attention long enough for Johann to disable her suit without destroying it so that he can salvage the GN drive to replace his own malfunctioning one. That proves unnecessary when Tieria arrives in the Seravee.

Needless to say, the reunion between Saji and Louise is extremely awkward, especially with Johann's presence. Louise takes the news of her parents' killer having been dead for years now ambivalently. She believes she should be downright ecstatic, but all she feels is emptiness at her revenge being denied to her like this. Well, that and a big dose of justified schadenfreude towards Johann.

As for Johann, he's welcomed back with open arms because after the stunt he pulled in his final confirmed sighting, as far as everyone's concerned, he's one of them now. Yet he feels out of place and refuses to be addressed as a Gundam Meister because he feels he's not worthy of the title, even after the Dynames' GN drive is installed onboard the Eins instead of a Tau drive in order to return it back to operational status. Johann keeps using it for a long while, fighting alongside the Meisters, until a highly unexpected event happens.

In one of the first battles with the Innovades, Johann gets attacked by an Arche Drei being piloted by an Innovade who looks very much like Nena Trinity - yet not only she doesn't recognize him, she takes offense at the implied familiarity with which he utters her name and tries to kill him, insisting that her name is Nena Two, not Nena Trinity. And she obviously cannot be Nena, as Johann saw the Drei's cockpit getting shot through with his own eyes. In the battle, the Eins is completely trashed by the Arche Drei's shredder bits, modified GN Fangs with a quartet of beam sabers mounted on a circular track and rapidly spun like a rotary saw. While Johann survives and the ruined Eins is transported back to the Ptolemy, the Turbulenz Pack is destroyed and Ian discovers while surveying the damage that the different particles from the Dynames' GN drive onboard the Eins and the Tau drive in the Turbulenz Pack mixing together have severely corroded the internals of the Eins' particle conduits, meaning that the Eins would need to have practically every single internal component working with GN particles in one way or another replaced. Even so, without the Turbulenz Pack, the Eins simply cannot contend with current-era mobile suits, so it is basically useless scrap at this point.

And thus, despite Johann's insistence that he is not worthy, he finally becomes a full-fledged Gundam Meister of Celestial Being as the pilot of the Ophanim Gundam (kudos for those who get the reference). Unlike its canon counterpart, the Cherudim, the Ophanim is less a dedicated sniper and more a sniper/heavy hybrid, similar to the Eins. Even its core weaponry is similar to the Eins as far as the "rifle plus shoulder cannon" combo goes - but where the Eins had one GN Rifle and one GN Launcher that could dock together into the GN Mega Launcher, the Eins has two GN Beam Rifles it dual-wields, plus two GN Launchers on the shoulders (one per shoulder) but unlike the Eins' weapons, these cannot dock with each other. Docking functionality is part of a later upgrade that optionally replaces the the beam rifles with GN Bazookas that can dock with the launchers - albeit instead of simply creating a pair of GN Mega Launchers, the Ophanim's Dynames-esque shoulder shields unfurl into structural supports that basically turn the entire Gundam into a giant cannon, essentially being a downscaled version of the fuckhuge stratospheric sniper cannon Dynames used once in the first season.

This mode, the GN Hyper Mega Launcher, has an adjustable power output, but anything beyond about 20-30% requires Trans-Am. At 100% output, it can momentarily match even the Raiser Sword's power at a much longer range, but doing so is so taxing on the particle supply that it not only ends Trans-Am instantly, the Gundam itself shuts down completely and needs to take a few minutes to hard-reset and cold-boot the GN drive, during which it is a completely stationary target ripe for a counterattack.

 

[Fyrstorm]

Yup, it is.
-snip excellence-

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I like it. I'm just constantly amazed by the amount of detail you always seem to put into your stuff-- it's just really impressive.

 

[Fraktal]

Well, I have been composing that post for six and a half hours...

 

[Fraktal]

...is this seriously Evangelion in a format closer to that of G Gundam? Because that's what it sounds like to me.

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Wrong impression, I believe.

G Gundam was about martial artists having duels to determine whose homeland rules the world for X years, if I recall correctly (never watched it and have no plan to). My concept has no martial arts in it - it has, however, contestants wielding weapons that are in some cases bigger than themselves. There's also no duels-only restriction concerning the use of Evas; they are very much used as weapons of war, albeit with an international treaty banning military use within five kilometers of civilian population centers. Of course, not everyone upholds that... and even those who do tend to get around the treaty by hiring PMCs instead.

 

[Ultra Sonic 007]

Wrong impression, I believe.

G Gundam was about martial artists having duels to determine whose homeland rules the world for X years, if I recall correctly (never watched it and have no plan to).

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Speaking as someone with relatively intimate knowledge of the show, the idea is that each country on Earth has a corresponding space colony (affixed with a 'Neo' to differentiate them from the nation on Earth), and the space colonies conduct the Gundam Fight to determine who will rule the world and the colonies. In this case, X = 4. This is done in lieu of conventional warfare; essentially, the Gundam Fight is the equivalent of Naruto's Chuunin Exams, with higher stakes. The nature of the Fight as a substitute for war, and whether it could justifiably be called such, is explored rather interestingly in my opinion.

Also, the space colonies and their respective Gundam Fighters embrace national stereotypes without apology. And the show is all the better for it. Example: here's Neo-Japan,



Neo-Mexico,



And Neo-America,



Complete with a ridiculously patriotic weapon:

 

[EvaUnit01]

Wrong impression, I believe.

G Gundam was about martial artists having duels to determine whose homeland rules the world for X years, if I recall correctly (never watched it and have no plan to). My concept has no martial arts in it - it has, however, contestants wielding weapons that are in some cases bigger than themselves. There's also no duels-only restriction concerning the use of Evas; they are very much used as weapons of war, albeit with an international treaty banning military use within five kilometers of civilian population centers. Of course, not everyone upholds that... and even those who do tend to get around the treaty by hiring PMCs instead.

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While the current Gundam Fight has an abundance of martial artists, that's only because Master Asia single-handedly forced the metagame in that direction by being a goddamn badass -- before his involvement, several of the previous Gundam Fights basically amounted to sniper duels (in part because of Gentle Chapman's sniping tactics being so game-breaking that he forced a metagame change - and in fact, the next Gundam Fight was delayed for almost a decade so that other countries could develop their beam weapon technology and make it competitive again).

Although I confess that we're probably rather digressing from the point.

 

[Fraktal]

Another difference is that while in the world of G Gundam, Gundam Fights are strictly non-lethal with a non-lethal instant-loss condition deliberately included into the rules, my concept isn't so harmless. While explicit fights to the death are strictly illegal, fatalities still occasionally happen in the high-level professional leagues.

Such leagues' contestants are therefore usually required to sign a pledge where they acknowledge the risk, confirm their consent and absolve their opponent of criminal liability if they accidentally strike a killing blow. With that said, deliberately executing a downed opponent you know is unable to defend themselves is still treated as murder. That's actually how Asuka's mom died, in fact, serving as Asuka's key motivation to enter the sport herself.

 

[Fraktal]

I REALLY want to see the Gundam SEED AU fic...

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Right, time for another wall of text.

Story starts with Kira's friends going to pick him up before school. In fact, Miriallia finds him sitting at his computer in his underwear in a darkened room, Kira not even having noticed that it's day outside already - not-unintentionally mirroring Amuro's first on-screen appearance in the original series (and several of his appearances in Origin episode 4). At her exasperated remark that he'd likely forget breathing if his friends wouldn't remind him of it, Kira gives a completely serious answer that even Coordinators can't consciously control physiological functions, leaving her rather skeptical about his acknowledgment that he knows she was joking.

And upon leaving the building, he immediately walks into a pillar.

All in all, Kira paints the picture of someone... not entirely 100% in the head. While the others chat around in the car, he's quietly typing on his tablet in the backseat. While the others are bulling around and reacting to Sai casually flirting at an incognito Cagalli whose appearance gives no outward appearance about her gender, Kira's buried waist-deep in a worker pod (petit mobile suit) he crashed last time to diagnose the problem. And upon fixing said problem, wanting to test it by taking the pod out for a test flight and being warned not to do it because he might crash it again, Kira's response is a nigh-infuriatingly calm "Then I'll just fix it again."

Anyway. Speaking of Sai, upon hearing that Kira is getting dressed in the scene above, he promptly tells Tolle to pay up. Turns out he has a nigh-supernatural intuition he abuses to hustle people by making bets he almost always ends up winning, having built up such a notoriety that most people now flatly refuse to make bets with him. Tolle is still willing, even though it's implied that this isn't the first time he got hustled by Sai. Later on, it's going to be confirmed that, unlike in the canon universe for which the director deliberately refused to give a straight answer, Newtypes do exist in this universe, referred to in-universe as NEXTs. Naturally, Sai is one of them and it's where he gets his intuition from. Kira also has a Newtype flash when he leaves the colony to stress-test the worker pod's engines before pulling out a music player, tuning it to the local pirate radio station (staffed by a DJ Axis) and relaxing; Athrun's team actually passes in visual range of him but he doesn't notice them. They notice him but after confirming his pod as civilian and ribbing Yzak about a past incident involving singing when he makes a comment on the radio station airing Lacus Clyne, they slip by silently.

Anyway. The Heliopolis heist goes down a bit differently. Instead of having five ZAFT infiltrators, of whom one is a faceless extra existing only to be gunned down, there are only four infiltrators because ZAFT got bad intel and thought there were only four Gundams, not five. Also, instead of attacking the factory directly, the infiltrators staked out the highway between the factory and the spaceport to ambush the convoy transporting the four Gundams (the Strike was still at the factory because its equipment hasn't been packed up yet). When the convoy reached the ambush point, Dearka sniped out the wheels of the leading vehicle with an anti-materiel rifle, Nicol detonated a set of anti-tank claymore mines set up on the side of the road, then the others stormed the convoy with one-shot recoilless rifles, magnetic mines and a flamethrower applied directly into the troop compartment of an APC. Oh, and Athrun gets surprised by a soldier but knifes him in the throat without missing a beat.

It's only when the Gundams are under their control that the jig is up about the Strike, courtesy of Dearka finding a post-it reference to its serial number in the Buster's OS developer notes (since it was developed from the Buster). Athrun then orders the others to take the loot back to the ship while he scouts around for a bit, since the Aegis got the fastest aerial flight speed and he's got Miguel covering him.

Speaking of which, Miguel entered the colony slightly behind Kira and literally almost flew into him, got startled and opened fire. Kira crashed down in the factory near the Strike and ran into Murrue who, upon seeing the Aegis flying around, curses a storm about the brass not listening to her warning not to keep the prototypes in one convoy, which leads Kira putting two and two together. Instead of being shot, Murrue's injury is caused this time around by the local OMNI forces trying to hit Miguel's GINN, missing and hitting the factory instead, resulting in her getting hit by a chunk of concrete that shatters several ribs and completely immobilizes her. Kira gets onboard the Strike to keep it out of ZAFT hands after she tells him in no uncertain terms that if they get that one too, a lot of people are going to die.

The next notable deviation from canon comes from the fact that the Strike has a Mechwarrior-style talking computer, a low-level AI the engineers implemented to solve the problem of most Naturals not having the multitasking skills to micromanage every system in a mobile suit at once. It's not sentient in any way, but it does help Kira out enough for him to figure out the controls and damage the hydraulics in the GINN. Also unlike in canon, Miguel doesn't ditch the GINN but runs away when Athrun arrives as backup. Thing is, because the Aegis is programmed into the Strike's OS' silhouette recognition algorithm as a friendly and has a friendly IFF too, Kira cannot fire on it because the AI interprets it as friendly fire and refuses the order. Athrun also has the same problem but gets around it by instead firing the Aegis' multiphase cannon into the ground in front of the Strike to kick up a dust cloud, then jumping through the cloud and letting loose a full-powered kick that knocks the Strike on its back and bashes Kira's head into the front panel hard enough to knock him unconscious. The only reason why the Strike isn't captured right then and there is because Miguel's GINN doesn't have the arm strength to carry it (Kira damaged the hydraulics) and the Aegis' battery is running low, not having been fully juiced up before being packed up for transportation (they understandably didn't expect it going into combat).

And that will be the first chapter. The second chapter would include a flashback revealing that Athrun and Lacus aren't merely in an arranged engagement but are in a romantic and sexual relationship that's common knowledge among their respective fans. Because it's not just Lacus who's famous, Athrun got his own share of posing for recruitment posters too, some of them shirtless. And Athrun is fully aware of the direction his father is politicking in and doesn't like it one bit; he's actually intent on helping ZAFT win the war before his father comes to power in order to preempt further escalation while Lacus is doing her own thing to run interference back home, but he's got no illusions about their chances. Anyway, Athrun and co. sit down to a briefing session with Rau to figure out a plan to take or take down the Strike. Notable is the fact that Rau does not authorize using the Gundams because the technicians are still sweeping those for booby traps.

How the eventual battle will go is still up for grabs, but it is certain that the ZAFT team will attack in GINNs that fail to inflict any damage to the Strike - something Rau, being a NEXT himself, expected, hence why the plan was to lure the Strike outside the colony, then destroy it with bunker-buster ordinance. Problem is, after multiple close calls, Miguel loses his temper and lets loose with the bunker-buster ordinance inside the colony. Heliopolis isn't destroyed, but it is still heavily damaged and completely decompresses, giving the Archangel the chance to slip away. Miguel survives the battle but as soon as he steps out of his GINN, he's instantly detained by MPs because the sheer magnitude of collateral damage he wrought with his reckless move isn't something that can be just swept under the rug; ZAFT, being spacenoids themselves and especially after Junius Seven, do not look lightly upon trashing a space habitat this badly, so he's sent back to the homeland to stand court-martial for war crimes.

 

[KingseekerFreyr]

*snip*

Click to shrink...

I NEED...

I WANT...

Still, I don't want to rush you.

 

[EvaUnit01]

I NEED...

I WANT...

Still, I don't want to rush you.

Click to shrink...

This is a perfectly normal reaction to have once amita gets rolling.

 

[Fraktal]

Not related to any of my previous ideas: at the end of Supreme Commander, the UEF manage to fire Black Sun. With their leadership decapitated, the Aeon are plunged into disarray while Brackman is on the run from the UEF Black Sunning every single planet he's spotted at. He ultimately decides to undertake an extremely risky gamble and, with his most loyal followers in tow, enters a quantum gate QAI rewired to connect to another universe. Thus the Cybrans are thrown through time and space, beyond the bounds of reality...

...and come out of the Omega 4 Relay.

"Fascinating..." - the suited form muttered as she walked around the glass tube, red light from the machinery buried into the almost desiccated brain glinting off her visor. - "The melding of organic and synthetic, flesh and metal, at such a high level... I haven't even conceptualized that this was possible before."

"Yes, yes..." - Dostya grumbled warily. - "Just don't touch anything."

"Don't be too hard on her, child." - Brackman chided her. - "It has been so long since a fellow scientist has showed interest in my work. So long indeed." - He turned back to the quarian. - "Admiral Daro'Xen, was it? I feel we have much to learn from each other... much to learn. Oh, yes."

Click to shrink...

 

[Fraktal]

Time for more shit to bore you guys with. More of that Gundam SEED AU.

If you recall, after the Heliopolis incident the Archangel crew pulled off a ruse where they crafted a decoy that looked like the Archangel on sensors, launched it on the most obvious route towards Earth then made a run for it while Rau and co. were busy with the decoy. What I'm planning is a similar situation - except when the first sensor blip turns out to be a decoy and Rau and co. dash for the second one with fangs out, that one turns out to be a decoy too, meaning that the Archangel is still at Heliopolis. Yet by the time they double back to sweep the area, the Archangel is already gone, having shut down everything except passive sensors and life support in order to minimize emissions enough to evade detection at long range.

This triple-level feint was actually Sai's idea and Rau is quite amused when he finally puts two and two together. Amused enough to break out into laughter while everyone else is sharing confused looks, in fact. They do eventually catch up with the Archangel but it takes time, during which Kira familiarizes himself with the Strike's armaments and has his first run-in with a Flay quite different from canon. Here, her daddy's girl tendencies manifested in the form of her wanting to go into politics herself, for which reason she's been attending a psychology course at the social science faculty of the same college Kira and co. attended. As a result of her throwing herself into the subject material, she is not only fully sane but is extremely good at reading people. As in, she can profile someone's personality and current mental state from merely observing their body language, which she can then use to semi-accurately guess how and what to say to effectively pull their strings. She and Kira never met face to face before this point but Kira did observe her from afar (not to the point of actively stalking, merely subtly keeping an eye on her whenever she was nearby); he does know her by name, though, as well as that Sai is one of her ex-boyfriends - she broke it off because his NEXT intuition was driving her nuts from not being able to figure out how he was doing it, NEXTs being an extremely niche theory considered pseudoscience by professionals.

Anyway, Flay initially seeks out Kira simply to strike up a casual conversation to stave off her boredom but almost immediately notices that his behavior is sharply different from everyone else's and it's not his can-barely-spit-out-a-word-to-the-girl-he-secretly-likes thing. It draws her curiosity and she's subsequently drawn to him by that curiosity in order to figure out what makes him tick. It would be revealed much later that when Kira was a child, his parents took him to a psychologist to find out why is he so quiet and withdrawn compared to other kids of his age; said psychologist eventually replied that his best guess is Asperger's but can't confirm it beyond doubt because Coordinator science still haven't entirely nailed down how mental disorders mix with cerebral gene mods, so it could just as well be the mods acting up.

The plot between Artemis and the arrival on Earth hasn't been planned out completely, but Kira doesn't go AWOL to help Lacus escape. Instead, Lacus sticks around until Orb. It is also planned that after Flay's dad kicks it, she does not go into femme fatale mode because her knowledge of the workings of the human mind makes her instantly recognize irrational behavior for what it is and curb it in. Yet it's not perfect: when the BuCUEs show up while Kira is still out cold, Flay actually jacks the Strike to fight them herself, only to get kicked around and be completely useless until she forces herself to calm the fuck down and think it out logically. She feigns the Strike's combat damage as being worse than it actually is and when one of the BuCUEs takes the bait and swoops in for a finishing blow, Flay shanks it with the knife she palmed earlier, having realized that reading a mobile suit's movements to anticipate the pilot's actions and bait them into giving up the advantage isn't that different from reading a person's body language and applying pressure at the right places and times to make them slip up and say something they normally wouldn't have (something politicians do all the time).

That said, Badgiruel still verbally tears her a new asshole for that stunt and orders Flay thrown into the brig to cool her head down, but Murrue countermands it and instead orders that Flay is not allowed to be in the hangar anymore without an escort to keep her from pulling this again. And she indeed doesn't though sometime during the Indian Ocean arc, Flay asks Kira to teach her how to properly handle a mobile suit because she doesn't want to be dead weight. Y'see, during the Archangel's resupply in orbit, one of the items loaded onto the ship was a disassembled 105 Dagger intended for Mu. However, as Mu feels more at home behind the controls of a Skygrasper than a mobile suit and no one was forcing the issue, the 105 Dagger remained unused and is available for Flay's use. Badgiruel is naturally against it and even Murrue is skeptical until Flay points out that while nobody else noticed because Kira is so good at internalizing his emotions, constant combat broken only by him sleeping, eating and spending the rest of his time tweaking the Strike has driven him dangerously close to a stress-induced mental breakdown. He needs something to distract him and blow off steam with in order to not go crazy and Flay is basically volunteering to play therapist for him while also improving their combat strength. When exactly Flay starts going into combat alongside him is up for grabs but she does it at least once before Orb. She's not very skilled at it but she plays it smart.

At Orb, the command staff discusses things and comes to the conclusion that taking Lacus to JOSH-A would be equivalent to serving her to Blue Cosmos on a silver platter, not to mention that Kira simply knows too much to be left alone himself, even after all he's done. Even Badgiruel agrees because while she is a model soldier, she's not stupid and knows full well what Blue Cosmos would do to Lacus (and what ZAFT would do in retaliation). So what happens is that Lacus is let go at Orb and Kira accompanies her to the PLANTs, with Lacus telling her people that Kira helped her escape and she's taking him with her so that her father can thank him in person, plus the Archangel crew telling their own superiors that the "escape" was actually a set-up intended to get Kira onto the PLANTs so that he can gather intelligence among the enemy without suspicion.

Of course, Rau doesn't believe that for even a microsecond but rolls with it anyway. And around this time, Orb engineers have finished relocating Heliopolis to low orbit for easier access via mass driver after they've finished surveying the damage and are ready to receive repair materials.

 

[Fyrstorm]

Always good to see more SEED AU stuff! I liked the first post, and I like this post as well! Unfortunately, I've only seen up to about episode 15, so I have no frame of reference for anything past that beyond what basics of the plot I know. Still, that won't stop me from enjoying this!

 

[Fraktal]

Yeah, speaking of that... an idea came to me yesterday involving everyone's favorite racist asshole, Muruta Azrael. I've been planning on expanding his role in my AU; more on that later.

What came to me now is to have him survive the war and show up again in the Destiny timeframe. How that will happen exactly is still up for grabs, considering that by current plan, he's at ground zero of a high-yield antimatter explosion. But what is certain is that he'd take Neo Roanoke's place in the cast. And instead of the eyes-and-forehead-only Char-style horizontal mask, he'd have a vertical one covering the entire left half of his head, with some of his hair from the right side slung over it in an almost punk style.

And unlike Neo who pretends to care about his underlings, Destiny-era Azrael has no qualms about casually executing people who fail him, Darth Vader-style. His underlings do wonder, from time to time, how he's capable of casually snapping a guy's neck with that white gloved hand of his, but are too afraid to ask the man himself.

It ultimately turns out that whatever happens to him at Jachin Due destroys his left leg, both of his arms, most of his ribcage and the entire left half of his skull. That mask of his isn't a mask; it's what keeps his oral, nasal and cranial cavities (including his brain) from being exposed to the open air. Despite his grievous injuries, though, Mr. I-Won't-Lose kept going on sheer hatred long enough to get retrieved by his own side, whereupon he used his wealth and connections to basically turn himself into the Cosmic Era equivalent of Adam Jensen. The rationale behind this being that while Blue Cosmos hates genetic engineering, they might tolerate cybernetics on the grounds that a cyber-augmented Natural was originally, and still is, just a Natural with some extra bling, whereas Coordinators were (to them) never human to begin with; where the canon Extendeds being treated like trash would fit into this rationale is that the Extended procedure alters something that would be perfectly functional otherwise (making them not so different from Coordinators), whereas Azrael simply replaced the bits he lost but kept what he still had.

To emphasize this, Azrael's right leg is still his original organic one and he has no intention of having it lopped off and replaced, even though it limits his running, jumping and falling endurance to human limits, makes his body unbalanced due to his artificial left leg being heavier and presents a weak point Cagalli would exploit at one point by shooting him in the one leg still capable of feeling pain. He also has two other weaknesses: extended, intense physical activity causes a heat buildup that spikes his body temperature to the point where the synaptic interlocks between his nervous system and his augs begin glitching out and lagging - and bone shards from the destroyed portion of his skull are lodged in his brain too deep to be safely removed, forcing him to drug himself constantly to stave off epileptic seizures. Similarities with the Extended are not entirely coincidental.

Remember Blue Cosmos' hypocrisy in harping about Coordinators but then making the Extendeds? This version of Azrael would be the very embodiment of that.

Or maybe Blue Cosmos does take issue with cybernetics as well but Azrael is beyond the point of caring?

 

[EvaUnit01]

Sure, but can Azrael 1v1 Carazzo Ronah?

 

[Fraktal]

In or outside a mobile weapon?

 

[EvaUnit01]

I was mostly thinking outside. Given the whole, y'know, "Carazzo Ronah can breathe in space!" thing he's got goin' on due to his own cybernetics.

Although I suppose inside a mobile weapon would also be a pertinent question.

 

[Fraktal]

Outside, Carozzo's main advantage over regular humans is his raw strength and bulletproof arms. In fact, might not even the latter; all we see is him failing to react to being shot in the arm, which doesn't necessarily imply an augmented arm. It could just be his sense of pain having been dampened, possibly by his Cyber-Newtype treatment.

Azrael might not be able to breathe in vacuum without a helmet (maybe neither can Carozzo) but when it comes to raw strength... I didn't compare him to Adam Jensen for no reason. As for durability, Azrael's fleshy bits are naturally just as fragile as an ordinary human, but his augs are bulletproof. Furthermore, I considered him being able to deploy a fold-out shield from his forearm with the capability to phase-shift for a few seconds, allowing it to withstand multiple hits from a high-caliber sniper rifle or a single direct hit from an RPG without damage (though fragments from the explosion hitting his fleshy bits still hurt like a bitch). I just don't know whether it's even possible to miniaturize the technology that much, or whether his forearm can hold a powerful enough battery to allow even those few seconds.

Inside, though... if Carozzo shows up in the Rafflesia, Azrael is in serious trouble because Carozzo is suicidally insane enough to not give a damn about the gimmick of Azrael's personal ride.

 

[Nolrai]

I frankly don't know enough about Gundam to understand what is...the point of your AU's but they sound cool.

I want to hear more about Maiden of the Apocalypse. Do you have any ideas where you would take it?

 

[Fraktal]

Yup.

Like I mentioned before, Shinji's a girl in this one. More upbeat too, thanks to living as Mana's stepsister. But of course, the situation is not that simple.

You see, shortly after the Hakone Geofront was discovered, the initial survey stumbled upon a dormant Iruel which was studied over the years and eventually reverse-engineered into a semi-organic, semi-nanite symbiote, the form the Evas take in this story. However, during the research program, an accident happened and Yui Ikari's mind was touched by... something no human mind was meant to be touched by. She didn't die but progressively became more and more driven to carry the Eva project to completion, almost to the point of crazed obsession. At the end, she started performing agonizingly painful experiments on her own infant daughter to increase the child's compatibility with the symbiotes - and eventually, Gendo couldn't take it anymore. He grabbed Shinji and ran. Away from NERV, away from Yui, away from everything.

He eventually remarried to Mana Kirishima's similarly single mother, changing his and Shinji's name to hide from Yui. So Shinji grew up in a loving family, but a few years before the story begins, Gendo suddenly developed cancer and passed away. The Kirishimas suspected Yui's hand in it but as it later turns on, Yui actually didn't have a hand in his death: SEELE offed him via polonium poisoning as retribution for bailing out on them. Yui also knew all along where Shinji and Gendo were but saw no reason to recall Shinji until necessary.

And thus the story begins with Shinji having just gotten home from school one day when a pair of MIB types deliver a "Come." letter from Yui. She chooses to answer the summons, partly to see what her biological mother wants and partly so that noncompliance won't antagonize Yui into more drastic measures.

Naturally, Shinji walks right into Sachiel's attack and literally soils herself in fear from it, only for Rei to come to the rescue. But when Shinji understandably proves reluctant to be carried bridal-style by someone flying through the air like a human rocket and demands to be put down, Rei promptly drops her onto a tree canopy and engages the Angel by herself, eventually taking it out. Afterwards, Shinji is being guarded as she's idly watching the post-battle cleanup... but as soon as she dozes off from a combination of boredom and having had enough excitement for one day, Yui shows up, injects her with a sedative to keep her under and has her carried off for immediate symbiote implantation surgery without her consent.

Shinji wakes up after the surgery and is promptly press-ganged into joining up because now that a symbiote has been shoved into her, her body is now technically NERV property. She's naturally none too happy about it and it's not because she hurts all over and is running a very high fever, which she's told is normal.


Details on the symbiotes. As mentioned above, it's a nanotech organism surgically implanted just beneath the sternum; it's not externally visible but can be felt by touch if one knows where and what to look for. After implantation, it irreversibly roots itself into the host, growing tendrils that spread all over the body and directly tap into the nervous system, making its removal impossible and fatal for both the symbiote and the host. Through the connection, the host and the symbiote share an emphatic link, revealing that the symbiote is artificially intelligent on about the same cognitive level as an infant. It cannot speak but can nonverbally communicate with the host through emotions and flashes of images and concepts. Ironically, while in canon, the Evas are the mother figure to the pilot's child figure, this time the situation is reversed: symbiotes see their host as their mommy and combine that affection with eager and innocent compliance when it comes to hurting back anyone who hurt mommy.

Aside from granting improved durability and rapid healing, all symbiotes also have a personal Dirac Sea for storing practically infinite amounts of matter, allowing the girls to carry arbitrary amounts of hardware without being weighed down. One particular and distinctive use of this ability is a cross between a battlefield uniform and a robe, visually appearing to be made of cloth but having a definite metallic touch. This costume is made entirely out of nanites and is capable of completely dampening even a direct impact by a heavy artillery shell into a mere bruising hit by way of limited shapeshifting and AT-hardening, on top of allowing the wearer to fly at supersonic speeds, deploy AT-fields and extend AT-fields alongside the blade of a nanite-treated melee weapon's edge to allow a human-sized weapon to bisect entire skyscrapers in one swing.

Use of the costume, however, is... not exactly convenient. It normally resides within the symbiote's storage space and is equipped by it directly teleporting onto the user's body. The inconvenience comes from the fact that the process disintegrates any matter that happens to be in the way, including clothing. If a deployment is imminent, the girls can don skintight undersuits so that they can transform and de-transform without modesty issues but if they get caught by surprise and need to transform in a pinch, they have no choice but to hide somewhere and strip if they want to wear their current wardrobe ever again.

A more problematic issue of the transformation is that in order for it to work properly, the girls have to undergo regular "body tuning" wherein they stand naked inside a high-precision laser scanner that constructs a millimeter-accurate virtual model of their bodies for calibrating the costume with. Attempting to transform without calibration is very dangerous because if the calibrations are off (because, for example, the girl put on some weight), the costume's teleportation will disintegrate any flesh that gets in the way and can accordingly flay the user alive. The costume itself has a maintenance mode where it can be taken out of storage without equipping it, allowing it to be handled as if it was regular clothing.

Two additional big drawbacks are present, although the girls are naturally not told. One is that because the symbiote is partially technological and hooks into the host's nervous system, symbiote hosts are highly vulnerable to EMP because the pulse feedbacks directly into their brain. Even one zap causes instant paralysis, debilitating pain and lingering aftereffects not unlike a weak epileptic seizure; multiple zaps in close succession can kill.

The other, much more horrific drawback is that the symbiotes do not have an S2 organ. Accordingly, they sustain themselves on a slightly more conventional power source - namely, direct matter-energy conversion. The problem is their fuel of choice: the symbiote's nanites harvest the host's flesh for fuel. Transformation acts as a power limiter for the symbiote: while the host is not transformed, the symbiote's energy expenditure is dialed down to minimize effects on the host. As fatty tissue is consumed first, all the girls notice is that after symbiote implantation, they have to increase their daily calorie intake by about 20% to avoid losing weight (and considering what is one of the primary components of a female breast, it could be taken as a very twisted breastfeeding metaphor). But if they transform for more than a couple of hours, they'll start internally bleeding. Since the symbiote is programmed to keep the host alive by any means necessary, in very extreme cases, it could theoretically munch the host all the way down to a disembodied set of vital organs and the host would still be alive and conscious, but nobody knows for sure because it never happened. What would be implied to have happened once is that Kensuke had an older sister who worked for NERV as a test subject and died from her malfunctioning symbiote prototype going grey goo and leaving nothing to bury, with NERV hushing it up as a mysterious disappearance.

Have more to say about this, but it's late and I have work tomorrow.