An original flavor Evangelion story in a "second season" setting: the year is 2018, and...
The Second Coming [NGE]
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1.1 Two Years Later
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
An original flavor Evangelion story in a "second season" setting: the year is 2018, and Instrumentality is over. Shinji and Asuka have been trying to keep a low profile, but that is about to change...
Part One: The Boy Who Became a Legend
1. Two Years Later
People ask me, sometimes, if there's anything I regret about my life. I try not to have regrets—or if I do, I try to learn from them, to learn how not to make the same mistakes. "But is there anything you would change?" they say. "Is there anything you wish were different?"
There was one thing, actually. I used to wish I could pass people on the street without being noticed. I used to wish I could make eye contact with a stranger and just walk on by. I used to wish I could meet someone for the first time without them saying,
"You're that boy…."
That boy. They might not have known my name, but they knew my face. They knew what I looked like and how I carried myself, and the glint of recognition in their eyes—it was unmistakable.
Like me, I guess.
But you see, some things can't be put behind you just because you'd rather forget. I learned that well one day.
I was working in a soup kitchen at the time. We were chronically short-staffed, with people coming and going on a daily basis. We had people burn themselves on the pot handles or pour out too much stock for a given meal. That was the way things were. We had people come in with the qualifications to be literary critics or materials scientists. That didn't help them learn how to bring broth to a simmer.
The newest recruit was a middle-aged man named Taniguchi. I met him on an afternoon shift at the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
"You're that boy, aren't you? You are!"
I sighed, shook my head, and said, "My name's Nakai. Nice to meet you. Do you understand?"
He nodded eagerly, beaming. It was like how, if you told a friend in school that you were interested in a classmate—that you liked her—and asked them not to say anything, they'd smile and nod and grin at you knowingly. Taniguchi's smile was like that.
"So, what do I need to do, uh, Nakai?"
He learned fast, too—not just what to say, but how to cook. He may have been unkempt—with a scraggly beard and disheveled hair—but Taniguchi cared for the soup gently, moving the ladle with deliberate caresses as he stirred.
"It's not bad, you know?" he said, once I showed him the ropes. "It's nice to make something other people will appreciate."
I laughed to myself at that. "You haven't seen the ingredients."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
I tore open a gray paper packet and dumped the contents into the broth. Dried seaweed floated in a clump on top of the broth, and a few cubes of tofu followed.
"You're kidding," he said, scoffing.
I opened a cupboard, showing him dozens of those gray paper packets.
"Take five more of these per pot. That's the standard batch."
He shook the packet with two fingers. "How many people is this pot supposed to serve?"
"Thirty, if you can stretch it that far."
Shaking his head, Taniguchi tore open another packet and stirred the seaweed and tofu into the pale yellow broth.
"Didn't used to be this way…," he muttered.
He was right about that. It didn't used to be that we had to stretch out instant soup packets to feed the hungry. It didn't used to be that a boy not even out of high school and a salaryman would cook up soup for people in a school kitchen, but that was reality. We were two men in a spacious, shiny middle-school kitchen, surrounded by polished steel stoves and ovens. The white fluorescent lights cast a glare from those surfaces, as though the past itself were looking back at us with an unwavering gaze. If you looked hard enough, you might see the distant memories of children stopping by to pick up lunches and chat with their classmates. They would've eaten just through the double doors to the cafeteria, day in and day out, never paying any mind to the food service workers in the kitchen.
As Taniguchi tended to the soup, I peered through a tiny, circular window in the double doors. There were few children in the cafeteria that day. There were mostly adults in rags or tattered clothes. Open sores and boils festered on their skin. A stereo in the corner played a tape of '70s pop music. A couple people rocked to it, but mostly, the patrons stared at the cafeteria walls, thinking nothing and feeling nothing.
"Ah, Nakai? I think the soup is ready? What do we do now?"
Taniguchi leaned over the steaming broth and turned his head sideways, watching bubbles form on the surface.
"It is ready, right?" he said.
I looked over the edge of the pot and nodded. "You can take it outside. Bowls should be under the table."
"You're not coming with me?"
"Someone has to clean the kitchen," I said with a shrug.
He frowned, but I offered him a pair of mitts to hold to carry the pot with, and he went on his way. The patrons would form a line in front of the soup pot, never sniffing with joy the food before them, never smiling as they filled their bellies.
For all their infected sores and brittle bones, they were alive, right? And I—I did my part to provide for them, unseen and unknown. I stayed behind in the kitchen, and to the beat of a distant, archaic eight-track, I straightened up the boxes of seaweed and tofu packets. I ran water—spurting, irregular water—to clean bowls from the morning meal. And if the kitchen looked clean, that was only to the untrained eye. Tiny yellow spots dotted the area around the sink and even past that. I found a few stains on the center island, too, and I kneeled down to wipe them away.
That's why, when the double door opened, I didn't see who came in. I just said, "If you need more bowls, I'll be through with them in a minute."
"Sorry, I'm not hungry."
I shot up. It was a man—a stranger in a dirty green jacket two sizes too small. Despite his haggard appearance, the man's gaze was steady and even.
As steady as the revolver at his side.
"I see," I said. "What do you want? We don't have a lot of money."
The man huffed, shaking his head. "This isn't about money."
"What then?"
At that, the man made no reply, at least not at first. Instead, he wandered the kitchen for a bit. He ran a finger over the countertop, picking up loose droplets of soup. He admired his own reflection in the dangling pots and pans.
"Why here?" he asked at last. "What are you doing here?"
"It, uh…" I backed away from him. He circled the kitchen island, following me, and I backpedaled to match his strides. "It helps people," I said.
"Does it?"
I reached for the edge of the island behind me. "I like to think so."
"It doesn't help me," he said, keeping up with me with long steps.
"It could." I gestured to the doors leading into the cafeteria. "Are you hungry?"
He shook his head. "I don't need help. If you want to help someone, help my wife."
I frowned. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the doors to the cafeteria opened. Taniguchi came in with an empty pot.
"I can't believe we got that much out of that one packet," he muttered. "All right, so, I think we might need another—oh."
The stranger hid his hands behind his back, nodding in apology. "Sorry, I was just talking with my friend here," the stranger explained. "We go way back."
Taniguchi frowned. "Is that true?" he asked me.
My eyes flickered to the revolver behind the stranger's back. There were less than two meters between Taniguchi and the stranger—a short enough distance for one man to tackle another in a couple steps, and short enough that a shot from that range would be fatal.
"It is. It's, uh, been a long time, so we're just trying to catch up."
"All right. I'll leave you two alone, okay?"
I nodded. "Great!"
Taniguchi left us, though not without one last look at the stranger. When the door shut, the stranger put the revolver at his side again. He stared at the door with narrowed eyes.
And while he was doing that, I slipped a pot from the rack above me and hid it behind my back.
"Your wife, was it?" I said, breaking the silence.
The stranger's eyes snapped back to me. "Yes," he said. "She's had a hard time finding a job. We both have."
I nodded. "I could help you with that. We know some people, recruiters—"
"No, no." The man shook his head and looked aside. "She's gone now."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"She walked into the ocean and didn't come back."
The stranger pressed the gun to the side of his head.
"And you were right here," he said. "You weren't there for her."
I put out a hand, trying to calm him down. "Hey, wait a minute. I've been trying to help; I—"
"Help? Like this?" He tapped a couple pots with the grip of his revolver and scoffed. "Does this look like helping to you? Look at all this. Look at this mess! We needed you, and you hide here. You don't even show your face! You're not helping anyone!"
"I am!" I said, stomping my foot on the floor.
"You're not." The man put the gun back to his temple. "And you can't help someone like me."
"No, that's not—" I shuddered. "That isn't—that's not fair!"
"Not fair?" The man laughed. "Does something about this seem like it should be fair to you?"
I shuddered again. I ran my fingers through my hair. "You come in here—you tell me I'm not helping people—and you don't give me a chance to make it right?"
The man tilted his head slightly, and the barrel of the gun moved a few millimeters from his skin. "What can you do?" he asked.
I circled back toward the man, approaching him between the island and the oven rack. "I don't know what exactly," I admitted, "but I can try. I can try to find a way to make things better."
"You promise that?" he asked. "You promise to try, no matter how hard it gets?"
"I do, absolutely." I nodded twice, keeping my eyes steady on him.
The man shook his head, breaking into a coy grin. "No, don't mess with me, kid. You're just saying that. You gave up on us a long time ago."
I winced. "That's not it! Honest! I did what I could when there was an opportunity. I haven't been able to do that in a while, but maybe. I didn't want to lead everyone back out here to something hopeless. I didn't want…" I gestured to the cafeteria outside. "I didn't want to lead people to just this. It needs to change; I know that. We need to make things better. I don't know how, but it has to happen."
"Better how?" he yelled.
"I don't know how, but it needs to be good enough that…" I looked aside, fumbling for words. "That people feel they can stay in this world!"
The man raised an eyebrow. "I see. So that's what you think, huh?" He laughed, taking his eyes off me. "I thought so. All you needed was a little push, and you'd show what still mattered to you. Good. I'm glad for that."
"I'm glad too," I said, daring to smile. "So—"
The man raised the gun.
He raised the gun and pointed it at me.
He lined up his eye to the barrel, and he put his finger on the trigger.
I shrank down; I threw the pot from behind my back and crouched!
BA-CLANG!
Metal ripped at my shoulder; I fell back into the row of cabinets behind me. The pot fluttered across the room and clattered on the tile. My arm burned like a lava flow.
"I'm so glad," the man said. "That makes this easier."
"Wha—why?" I cried. "I told you exactly what you wanted to hear!"
But the man was implacable. With narrow, focused eyes, he offered neither answers nor mercy. He towered over me by the kitchen island, and he leveled the revolver on me again. My eyes crossed to see the tip of the barrel, and all else about the scene—the splatter of blood on those stainless cabinets; the gunman's steady, emotionless face—faded from view. There was just the tip of the barrel left in my sight.
And a glow—the glow of a girl who shouldn't be. From the far corner of the kitchen, she watched us, a silent observer of history.
Rei Ayanami watched us—the girl who never should've been, in the green-and-white uniform of a school that no longer existed.
How fitting it was, that the girl who had lived and died for us would reappear as a phantom, a mirage of my pain and suffering, just as I was about to die, too.
And like a good assassin, the gunman didn't make me beg for my life. He aimed for my forehead, and—
BANG!
I shut my eyes, then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about shutting my eyes.
Then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about not having time to think about shutting my eyes, definitely.
So why was I still alive?
The gunman seemed as perplexed as I was. He turned the revolver aside, opened the chamber, and spun it. He snarled, gritting his teeth, and he shot again:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
Four ear-splitting shots—they swamped my hearing with a high-pitched hiss. I was half-deafened, but I was still alive.
The gunman snarled. He turned the gun over, holding it by the barrel. He raised the gun overhead and turned grip down to club me into submission.
Thud! There was a thud, but I couldn't find it with the noise in my ears. My eyes darted about the room, and then, I saw it: the double doors to the cafeteria had slammed on their hinges. Taniguchi barged in. He swung the soup pot like a meteor hammer!
The pot struck the gunman's head and rattled in Taniguchi's hand.
"It's all right; we got him! We got him, Ikari!"
My body slid down along the back cabinets. Somewhere, Taniguchi was yelling for police and paramedics. The shooter lay on his side and clutched his head woozily.
Rei Ayanami? No one saw anyone like her.
As for me, I lay there, among the cold metal cabinets and utensils, as my blood seeped away. I'd given my body for the world before. What was a little blood?
Unfortunately, the paramedics arrived shortly and thought I didn't need to give any more. They stuck me with needles to take care of the pain, and they wheeled me past the shooter to an ambulance, but I tugged on one of the medic's sleeves as we went by.
"Sir?" said the medic.
"I'd like to speak to someone," I said.
The police had taken the shooter to the main cafeteria. With a dark blue bruise on his forehead, he sat with his head hanging low and his hands cuffed behind his back.
My throat was dry, but I cleared it and said, "Why did you do this?"
The shooter looked up, through the strands of hair that had fallen around his face, and he spat on the floor.
But in doing so, he exposed some black ink on the side of his neck.
One of the officers pulled down the man's jacket collar, showing the tattoo for all to see: a triangle, upside down, with two sets of eyes in columns running through it—two on the left and three on the right.
The mark of Instrumentality's architects, of Seele.
"Take care, Ikari," he said, grinning. "Our eyes are watching you."
Some things can't be put behind you because you'd rather forget them, you see. You can run away from them and put those memories in the past, but if you're not careful, those things you flee from will grow and grow in the dark, into a cancer that reaches out from where you cannot see.
Part One: The Boy Who Became a Legend
1. Two Years Later
People ask me, sometimes, if there's anything I regret about my life. I try not to have regrets—or if I do, I try to learn from them, to learn how not to make the same mistakes. "But is there anything you would change?" they say. "Is there anything you wish were different?"
There was one thing, actually. I used to wish I could pass people on the street without being noticed. I used to wish I could make eye contact with a stranger and just walk on by. I used to wish I could meet someone for the first time without them saying,
"You're that boy…."
That boy. They might not have known my name, but they knew my face. They knew what I looked like and how I carried myself, and the glint of recognition in their eyes—it was unmistakable.
Like me, I guess.
But you see, some things can't be put behind you just because you'd rather forget. I learned that well one day.
I was working in a soup kitchen at the time. We were chronically short-staffed, with people coming and going on a daily basis. We had people burn themselves on the pot handles or pour out too much stock for a given meal. That was the way things were. We had people come in with the qualifications to be literary critics or materials scientists. That didn't help them learn how to bring broth to a simmer.
The newest recruit was a middle-aged man named Taniguchi. I met him on an afternoon shift at the kitchen, and his eyes lit up.
"You're that boy, aren't you? You are!"
I sighed, shook my head, and said, "My name's Nakai. Nice to meet you. Do you understand?"
He nodded eagerly, beaming. It was like how, if you told a friend in school that you were interested in a classmate—that you liked her—and asked them not to say anything, they'd smile and nod and grin at you knowingly. Taniguchi's smile was like that.
"So, what do I need to do, uh, Nakai?"
He learned fast, too—not just what to say, but how to cook. He may have been unkempt—with a scraggly beard and disheveled hair—but Taniguchi cared for the soup gently, moving the ladle with deliberate caresses as he stirred.
"It's not bad, you know?" he said, once I showed him the ropes. "It's nice to make something other people will appreciate."
I laughed to myself at that. "You haven't seen the ingredients."
"Huh? What do you mean?"
I tore open a gray paper packet and dumped the contents into the broth. Dried seaweed floated in a clump on top of the broth, and a few cubes of tofu followed.
"You're kidding," he said, scoffing.
I opened a cupboard, showing him dozens of those gray paper packets.
"Take five more of these per pot. That's the standard batch."
He shook the packet with two fingers. "How many people is this pot supposed to serve?"
"Thirty, if you can stretch it that far."
Shaking his head, Taniguchi tore open another packet and stirred the seaweed and tofu into the pale yellow broth.
"Didn't used to be this way…," he muttered.
He was right about that. It didn't used to be that we had to stretch out instant soup packets to feed the hungry. It didn't used to be that a boy not even out of high school and a salaryman would cook up soup for people in a school kitchen, but that was reality. We were two men in a spacious, shiny middle-school kitchen, surrounded by polished steel stoves and ovens. The white fluorescent lights cast a glare from those surfaces, as though the past itself were looking back at us with an unwavering gaze. If you looked hard enough, you might see the distant memories of children stopping by to pick up lunches and chat with their classmates. They would've eaten just through the double doors to the cafeteria, day in and day out, never paying any mind to the food service workers in the kitchen.
As Taniguchi tended to the soup, I peered through a tiny, circular window in the double doors. There were few children in the cafeteria that day. There were mostly adults in rags or tattered clothes. Open sores and boils festered on their skin. A stereo in the corner played a tape of '70s pop music. A couple people rocked to it, but mostly, the patrons stared at the cafeteria walls, thinking nothing and feeling nothing.
"Ah, Nakai? I think the soup is ready? What do we do now?"
Taniguchi leaned over the steaming broth and turned his head sideways, watching bubbles form on the surface.
"It is ready, right?" he said.
I looked over the edge of the pot and nodded. "You can take it outside. Bowls should be under the table."
"You're not coming with me?"
"Someone has to clean the kitchen," I said with a shrug.
He frowned, but I offered him a pair of mitts to hold to carry the pot with, and he went on his way. The patrons would form a line in front of the soup pot, never sniffing with joy the food before them, never smiling as they filled their bellies.
For all their infected sores and brittle bones, they were alive, right? And I—I did my part to provide for them, unseen and unknown. I stayed behind in the kitchen, and to the beat of a distant, archaic eight-track, I straightened up the boxes of seaweed and tofu packets. I ran water—spurting, irregular water—to clean bowls from the morning meal. And if the kitchen looked clean, that was only to the untrained eye. Tiny yellow spots dotted the area around the sink and even past that. I found a few stains on the center island, too, and I kneeled down to wipe them away.
That's why, when the double door opened, I didn't see who came in. I just said, "If you need more bowls, I'll be through with them in a minute."
"Sorry, I'm not hungry."
I shot up. It was a man—a stranger in a dirty green jacket two sizes too small. Despite his haggard appearance, the man's gaze was steady and even.
As steady as the revolver at his side.
"I see," I said. "What do you want? We don't have a lot of money."
The man huffed, shaking his head. "This isn't about money."
"What then?"
At that, the man made no reply, at least not at first. Instead, he wandered the kitchen for a bit. He ran a finger over the countertop, picking up loose droplets of soup. He admired his own reflection in the dangling pots and pans.
"Why here?" he asked at last. "What are you doing here?"
"It, uh…" I backed away from him. He circled the kitchen island, following me, and I backpedaled to match his strides. "It helps people," I said.
"Does it?"
I reached for the edge of the island behind me. "I like to think so."
"It doesn't help me," he said, keeping up with me with long steps.
"It could." I gestured to the doors leading into the cafeteria. "Are you hungry?"
He shook his head. "I don't need help. If you want to help someone, help my wife."
I frowned. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could speak, the doors to the cafeteria opened. Taniguchi came in with an empty pot.
"I can't believe we got that much out of that one packet," he muttered. "All right, so, I think we might need another—oh."
The stranger hid his hands behind his back, nodding in apology. "Sorry, I was just talking with my friend here," the stranger explained. "We go way back."
Taniguchi frowned. "Is that true?" he asked me.
My eyes flickered to the revolver behind the stranger's back. There were less than two meters between Taniguchi and the stranger—a short enough distance for one man to tackle another in a couple steps, and short enough that a shot from that range would be fatal.
"It is. It's, uh, been a long time, so we're just trying to catch up."
"All right. I'll leave you two alone, okay?"
I nodded. "Great!"
Taniguchi left us, though not without one last look at the stranger. When the door shut, the stranger put the revolver at his side again. He stared at the door with narrowed eyes.
And while he was doing that, I slipped a pot from the rack above me and hid it behind my back.
"Your wife, was it?" I said, breaking the silence.
The stranger's eyes snapped back to me. "Yes," he said. "She's had a hard time finding a job. We both have."
I nodded. "I could help you with that. We know some people, recruiters—"
"No, no." The man shook his head and looked aside. "She's gone now."
"Oh, I'm sorry."
"She walked into the ocean and didn't come back."
The stranger pressed the gun to the side of his head.
"And you were right here," he said. "You weren't there for her."
I put out a hand, trying to calm him down. "Hey, wait a minute. I've been trying to help; I—"
"Help? Like this?" He tapped a couple pots with the grip of his revolver and scoffed. "Does this look like helping to you? Look at all this. Look at this mess! We needed you, and you hide here. You don't even show your face! You're not helping anyone!"
"I am!" I said, stomping my foot on the floor.
"You're not." The man put the gun back to his temple. "And you can't help someone like me."
"No, that's not—" I shuddered. "That isn't—that's not fair!"
"Not fair?" The man laughed. "Does something about this seem like it should be fair to you?"
I shuddered again. I ran my fingers through my hair. "You come in here—you tell me I'm not helping people—and you don't give me a chance to make it right?"
The man tilted his head slightly, and the barrel of the gun moved a few millimeters from his skin. "What can you do?" he asked.
I circled back toward the man, approaching him between the island and the oven rack. "I don't know what exactly," I admitted, "but I can try. I can try to find a way to make things better."
"You promise that?" he asked. "You promise to try, no matter how hard it gets?"
"I do, absolutely." I nodded twice, keeping my eyes steady on him.
The man shook his head, breaking into a coy grin. "No, don't mess with me, kid. You're just saying that. You gave up on us a long time ago."
I winced. "That's not it! Honest! I did what I could when there was an opportunity. I haven't been able to do that in a while, but maybe. I didn't want to lead everyone back out here to something hopeless. I didn't want…" I gestured to the cafeteria outside. "I didn't want to lead people to just this. It needs to change; I know that. We need to make things better. I don't know how, but it has to happen."
"Better how?" he yelled.
"I don't know how, but it needs to be good enough that…" I looked aside, fumbling for words. "That people feel they can stay in this world!"
The man raised an eyebrow. "I see. So that's what you think, huh?" He laughed, taking his eyes off me. "I thought so. All you needed was a little push, and you'd show what still mattered to you. Good. I'm glad for that."
"I'm glad too," I said, daring to smile. "So—"
The man raised the gun.
He raised the gun and pointed it at me.
He lined up his eye to the barrel, and he put his finger on the trigger.
I shrank down; I threw the pot from behind my back and crouched!
BA-CLANG!
Metal ripped at my shoulder; I fell back into the row of cabinets behind me. The pot fluttered across the room and clattered on the tile. My arm burned like a lava flow.
"I'm so glad," the man said. "That makes this easier."
"Wha—why?" I cried. "I told you exactly what you wanted to hear!"
But the man was implacable. With narrow, focused eyes, he offered neither answers nor mercy. He towered over me by the kitchen island, and he leveled the revolver on me again. My eyes crossed to see the tip of the barrel, and all else about the scene—the splatter of blood on those stainless cabinets; the gunman's steady, emotionless face—faded from view. There was just the tip of the barrel left in my sight.
And a glow—the glow of a girl who shouldn't be. From the far corner of the kitchen, she watched us, a silent observer of history.
Rei Ayanami watched us—the girl who never should've been, in the green-and-white uniform of a school that no longer existed.
How fitting it was, that the girl who had lived and died for us would reappear as a phantom, a mirage of my pain and suffering, just as I was about to die, too.
And like a good assassin, the gunman didn't make me beg for my life. He aimed for my forehead, and—
BANG!
I shut my eyes, then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about shutting my eyes.
Then I thought I shouldn't have time to think about not having time to think about shutting my eyes, definitely.
So why was I still alive?
The gunman seemed as perplexed as I was. He turned the revolver aside, opened the chamber, and spun it. He snarled, gritting his teeth, and he shot again:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
Four ear-splitting shots—they swamped my hearing with a high-pitched hiss. I was half-deafened, but I was still alive.
The gunman snarled. He turned the gun over, holding it by the barrel. He raised the gun overhead and turned grip down to club me into submission.
Thud! There was a thud, but I couldn't find it with the noise in my ears. My eyes darted about the room, and then, I saw it: the double doors to the cafeteria had slammed on their hinges. Taniguchi barged in. He swung the soup pot like a meteor hammer!
The pot struck the gunman's head and rattled in Taniguchi's hand.
"It's all right; we got him! We got him, Ikari!"
My body slid down along the back cabinets. Somewhere, Taniguchi was yelling for police and paramedics. The shooter lay on his side and clutched his head woozily.
Rei Ayanami? No one saw anyone like her.
As for me, I lay there, among the cold metal cabinets and utensils, as my blood seeped away. I'd given my body for the world before. What was a little blood?
Unfortunately, the paramedics arrived shortly and thought I didn't need to give any more. They stuck me with needles to take care of the pain, and they wheeled me past the shooter to an ambulance, but I tugged on one of the medic's sleeves as we went by.
"Sir?" said the medic.
"I'd like to speak to someone," I said.
The police had taken the shooter to the main cafeteria. With a dark blue bruise on his forehead, he sat with his head hanging low and his hands cuffed behind his back.
My throat was dry, but I cleared it and said, "Why did you do this?"
The shooter looked up, through the strands of hair that had fallen around his face, and he spat on the floor.
But in doing so, he exposed some black ink on the side of his neck.
One of the officers pulled down the man's jacket collar, showing the tattoo for all to see: a triangle, upside down, with two sets of eyes in columns running through it—two on the left and three on the right.
The mark of Instrumentality's architects, of Seele.
"Take care, Ikari," he said, grinning. "Our eyes are watching you."
Some things can't be put behind you because you'd rather forget them, you see. You can run away from them and put those memories in the past, but if you're not careful, those things you flee from will grow and grow in the dark, into a cancer that reaches out from where you cannot see.
Last edited:
- Location
- JRRI Camp, Idaho
Man, I remember reading the original version of this fic a long time ago. Trippy. The biggest issue I had with it back in the day was the mountains of exposition, if I remember right. Or maybe it just moved kind of slow? Either way, this is a huge improvement over that and the pacing is sublime. Glad this got a reboot.
There's only one sentence that read kind of weird to me:
Otherwise, dig it.
There's only one sentence that read kind of weird to me:
'Growled' does enough work by itself, making the simile a bit redundant. It's really just a nit-picky thing on my part, though, and it's not like I'm an expert.
Otherwise, dig it.
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Thinking something along the lines of "like a bear that couldn't catch fish". It slows things down, but "frustrated" definitely doesn't add much right now, I agree, if I leave the simile in at all.
Thanks for taking a look; I'm glad it seems smoother so far.
Black Noise
Curious
- Location
- About 1AU from Sol
Oh so it's a reboot, explains the feeling that I've read this before. Still I don't remember what happened next and the premise is interesting enough so I'll watch.
1.2 Tokyo-2
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
2. Tokyo-2
It amazes me still—how quickly most people put themselves back together, how quickly they got back to their lives.
After all, how many people did it take to crew an ambulance? To drive it? To maintain it when it leaked oil or needed new tires? To tell the driver where to go? To give it a place to stay when it wasn't needed?
That's a lot of people, and they all came out to see me. The doctors bowed before me, promising a full recovery within a week—not a difficult promise, considering I'd only been grazed. The nurses asked if I had any special requests for food or entertainment. Even the cleaning staff took care to wipe down my suite's washroom by hand. They all asked questions when they thought there was a free minute: "What have you been doing since we got back? I never see you on the news." "Did you get together with the redhead?" Stuff like that.
I thought they were just paying me too much attention, but it was more than that. When I took a look around the hospital, just to stretch my legs, I passed rows of empty beds and vacant suites. On my floor, the only other soul was a young girl with a broken leg.
The hospital had been built for a different time. Like I said, it amazes me how many people put themselves back together and got back to their lives, for I know how many people didn't come back, and it would've been far easier for most of us to have stayed behind.
After that walk, I made it known I'd be checking out as soon as I was healthy enough to do so.
"But Ikari," said the doctor, "someone just tried to kill you. Don't you think it'd be wise to wait a while? Or to ask for some protection?"
"I'm a private citizen. I work for no one, and the police have better things to do."
The doctor gawked at me, but he wrote down some notes on his pad, shook his head, and went on his way. And for a while, I was naive enough to think it was that easy.
By early evening, I walked out of the hospital with a sling around my arm. I shaded my eyes from the sun and crossed a large parking lot—one large enough for a hundred cars, yet there were less than twenty taking up space there.
And as I came upon the sidewalk and the nearest street, a white car rolled up. The window started to roll down. There was a glint of light, a reflection from inside.
My heart turned cold. I raised my good arm over my face—like that would stop a bullet!—and the driver of the car said,
"What the hell? I actually went to the trouble to look pretty for you today."
Misato Katsuragi peered over her sunglasses at me, and she leaned across the width of the car to open the passenger-side door, grinning like an imp.
"Or did you think I was here to kill you?"
I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time in the last day or two." I glanced back at the brown hospital building. "Did my doctor call you?"
"Yeah, you know, I should be irritated about that. I was told working at this level would keep random people from calling me up at any time of the day or night. I think someone overstated the benefits of this job."
I laughed a bit and climbed inside. Misato pointed out the seat belt—which she was definitely not wearing, but she drummed her fingers on the gear shifter until I was buckled in—and she said,
"Sorry I'm late."
"Late? I wasn't waiting."
"I know." She smiled to herself. "Just seems appropriate, somehow."
That was the nice thing about Misato: some people didn't come back from the sea quite the same, but Misato hadn't changed. Her idea of "looking pretty" was a tiny touch of lipstick and tangled hair; she drove faster than was sane.
And, of course, she would drive an old friend of hers home from the hospital to protect him from an assassin. These were all aspects of her personality, none of them any more (or any less) real than the others. They were all parts of her.
And I was glad that something somewhere saw fit to bring her back from the dead for us.
"I didn't die!" she said once. "I was just momentarily less than alive!"
That was her usual protest if the topic came up, anyway, and looking at her then, you'd have never known she'd died in the first place. Despite her knotted hair, she looked quite at home in her uniform—the green officer's dress of the Ground Self-Defense Force, even if she wasn't entirely happy with her job.
"It's a little dull," she bemoaned, and she took her displeasure out on a traffic cone, squibbing it behind us. "Believe me, the PM isn't interested in hearing advice from an upstart like me. He'd make me General of the Arctic if it would put me in charge of absolutely nothing."
"You like to stay busy."
"Damn right I do. Work hard, sleep hard, drink hard, bang hard. You've got to go at life full-tilt, or life will tilt you instead."
I made a face. "Is that so?"
She shrugged, but she did let off the gas a little. "Okay, maybe there's room for a little moderation now and then. I came back with a new liver; I'm trying to live with it for at least the next ten years. That's a goal, right?"
"You need to take care of yourself, Misato."
"Same for you, I should think." She slammed on the brakes at a stoplight, and when I was done getting the seatbelt out of my chest, Misato said, "So, what happened?"
I turned aside, facing the window. "You already know, don't you?"
"I know what I've read and what I've heard. I'm asking you."
"The man had a Seele tattoo."
She nodded. "Yeah, I know." She took out her frustrations on the accelerator. "I wasn't looking forward to hearing from those guys again, but it was just a matter of time!" She turned a curve at 1.5g just for the hell of it. Thank goodness my left arm still worked, or I would've been pinned against the window. "Men like them prey on the downtrodden and hopeless. That's why we have to fight them by rebuilding this world, one day at a time."
We hit straight, level road, and I relaxed.
That word Misato used—rebuilding—I'm not sure it was the right one. We came back to the real world with the world already built up. Beyond the Crater, most cities were still standing. Nature had hardly encroached upon them, despite the time that had passed while we dreamed. Truly, there wasn't much we needed to build. How could there be? Just on that drive, Misato and I passed a boarded-up grocery store, with broken windows and graffiti sprayed over the walls. Nature and time hadn't caused that damage. That was humanity.
"So, we'll put something together to go punch those guys in the face. They're the last thing we need to deal with now."
"Is that really SDF's job?"
"I mean the government. I'm part of the government now—as useless as my so-called job might be."
"You might need to find another job, if you're so bored right now."
Misato smiled, and she shifted into a higher gear. The car accelerated, and I sank a little deeper into my seat.
"You might say I have some prospects," she said.
"That's good."
"It is. And what about you?"
"Me?"
"Are you intent on working in soup kitchens and charity shops for the rest of your life?"
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, looking away. "Until I can go around without being recognized anymore."
"That right? Well, maybe that's for the best. You've done more than anyone could've expected of you. It's not unreasonable to rest on your laurels. It's our turn now."
Misato's grip on the steering wheel was firm and steady, and she navigated the next curve gently. She turned just enough to guide us through the ninety-degree bend, and she let the wheel slip through her fingers until it was straight and level again. All throughout, her expression was focused and serious. She watched the road with unwavering eyes. She never even glanced at me.
"Right?" she said.
"Mm," was all I could say.
Misato dropped me off at my building in the New City. I invited her over for dinner, but she wouldn't stay. Always some other meaningless task for the PM—that's what she said. As much as she complained, Misato zipped off in that horrifically expensive sportscar. Or at least, it would've been expensive before. Maybe, after Third Impact, it didn't have an owner anymore.
Apartments in the New City were mostly high rise buildings. They stuck out on the Tokyo-2 skyline like needles from a pin cushion. Old Matsumoto had been a rather small city (or perhaps, a large town), with few buildings tall enough to block a view of the mountains in the distance. But from the top of my building, you could be forgiven for thinking you were taller than the mountains. My penthouse there was my perch, my eye on the world beneath me. The world below was a jungle, and I was a monkey clinging to the highest branch I could.
In front of my door was a red sack of mail. The sack was property of Japan Post, and we had to leave it out each morning for the mailman to pick up. Our mail demanded thorough and intense screening for hazardous substances. Anthrax, ricin—you name it, they scanned for it, or purged it with radiation, or something. I never really knew the details there. The government said the mail was safe, and we hand-picked the postman who would deliver the mail for us each day. That way, we could tell ourselves it was all safe.
I still wonder, though: how fortunate were we, that someone came back from the LCL sea and wanted to be a mailman? Or he felt willing enough to do it? Willing to deliver threats like they were nothing? Dangerous packages and contaminated letters like they were no big deal?
People should be more appreciative of their mailmen, I think. There are so many tough, unglamorous jobs like that, jobs that simply need to be done. The world wouldn't go forward without people to deliver mail and packages. It wouldn't go forward without someone like me to cook food now and again, as I did that evening, despite the sling on my arm. It's a challenge to get water boiling, to boil noodles, or to cut mushrooms with just one good hand, but I did what I could. Because people carry mail or cook food for others, it frees everyone else to fight wars, make art and music, or do science.
Asuka was a great example of that.
She came home around eight that night. She kicked off her shoes and thrust her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. She took one look at me, and she said,
"What the hell? That's just a graze?"
I pulled on my sling. "It's basically a graze, yeah."
"Says you! Get away from that counter. I'm taking care of this."
"So, you want to take care of me? Or do you want to enjoy your dinner?"
She folded her arms and glared, but she relented. "Fine. But if there's anything that takes two hands, I'm helping."
With Asuka's help carrying the soup pot and chopping mushrooms, making dinner went a lot faster, and once Asuka was over the shock of my injury, she settled down enough to tell me about her day.
"Oh, it was awful. Damn undergrad contaminated a trial, so we had to do everything over. I would've been home an hour ago if not for that. Guy's gotta get his head on straight. His own dad died from heart failure; you'd think that'd give a guy motivation!"
At that time, Asuka worked on growing synthetic organs and limbs from an LCL base. As the stuff of primordial life itself, the LCL in the ocean could be harvested and "coerced" into shapes and forms people needed. Apparently this coercion took some combination of electric shocks and threaded scaffolds to make the organs take shape, or something. I was never real clear on the details, but it was impressive work—work people needed to see done.
"Don't be too hard on him," I told her. "People make mistakes sometimes."
Asuka put her soup spoon down and dabbed at her lip. "Mistakes are costly. Some people go off by themselves all alone, even when they get a kilo of hate mail every day. That could've been a very costly mistake." Her eyes snapped up to mine, and she said, "You need to get some protection. Or stay home."
"Protection would draw attention. And I won't stay home and do nothing."
"You don't get to have it both ways. If you do something that matters, people are going to notice you."
"Not if they don't know I'm there."
Asuka made a face at that, like I'd just started speaking Arabic, but her cell phone rang, interrupting us. She grumbled to herself in German and answered.
"Yeah? What? No, we tried the concentration at 0.35 for this batch. What? Okay, let me look."
Phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, Asuka climbed up from the dinner table and trotted into the bedroom. She came back with a laptop under her arm and set it up on a spare cushion.
"Hm, we could increase the thread density and worry about how to remove them later? No, let me pull those up. That was maybe three months ago? I don't remember what we saw then, but I should have it written down here somewhere…."
That conversation went on for over half an hour. Asuka worked on her soup now and then, but she she still had about a third of her bowl left when I washed my bowl out. I left her at the dinner table as she chatted with her colleague over charts and graphs. The work of advancing science doesn't rest when you get home to eat, you see.
Like Asuka, I tried to stay busy, too. I retired to the study and opened the red sack of mail. I had a special set of stationery for responding to these letters, though it wasn't very fancy: just my name in the letterhead, really. The first few letters weren't anything unusual: "My husband had been depressed lately. Do you think Lilith has forsaken us? Why does she let us endure all this suffering, after she promised us salvation here?" Stuff like that.
I'd never been a student of religious theory, and I didn't remember Ayanami promising us anything like salvation in this world, but letters like that weren't so bad. I could say, "We only thought it would be better in this world, to talk to people and meet them, even if they might hurt us, too." That any of us came back at all—that was a decision made by people, and people can be wrong, after all. That doesn't mean the decision was made in bad faith.
That was one of the easier ones. Letters like, "You were wrong, Ikari! You were naive and ignorant! Why would you lead people back into a world of starvation, disease, and death? A world where people can't even find relief on a beach without smelling of blood? What were you thinking?"
I put that letter aside, on a stack of a dozen others, and went on as best I could. Yes, it's hard to deal with letters like that, but at least they're individual people giving their honest thoughts. I couldn't say that about a lot of other people: the vultures who constantly rang our phone off the hook, for instance.
That's not to say the calls didn't bother Asuka and me; we'd put in a switch to disable the ringer if we needed to, and we had a caller ID system installed, too. Right then, all incoming calls to the apartment just lit up a red light on the phone base, and the incoming call number showed in black against a lit background.
And when one of those numbers called, I let the red light blink away until it fizzled out. What happened to us wasn't any of their business. No, what happened to me wasn't any of their business. Asuka was a scientist. She worked for the greater good of humanity. Me? I was a private citizen, nothing more. Unless one of them wanted to talk to me about security near soup kitchens, what happened to me shouldn't have mattered to anyone.
I went back to my letters:
"Ikari, you may not remember, but this isn't the first time I've written to you. I enjoyed your letter from before, but it amazes me that I heard from you at all. What's happened to you? What have you been doing? Everyone says you're a shut-in now, and I don't understand why you'd do that. You helped show everyone we'd lose something if we stayed in the sea. Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?"
I mean, on the face of it, it wasn't true. I still saw people from time to time. I saw Asuka almost every day. I worked in the soup kitchen and had good relations with the other staff there. I knew over a dozen of the kitchen's patrons by sight. I'd heard about where they lived, their past histories, and their future dreams. I met people. I was meeting people. And I had never objected to meeting people—not most people, anyway.
It was the people who'd call my home phone at all hours of the day or night, who'd flash the red light there even when it was dark—all because we couldn't stand to leave the ringer on and hear them wailing at us—those were the people I'd shut out of my life, and there were a lot of them.
But when I put that letter aside, I put my pen down and slid my stationery away, too. The red light on the phone base blinked incessantly, and I snatched up the handset to snuff it out.
"Yes, who is it?" I snapped.
"Hm?" said the man on the other end. "Oh, wow, uh, good evening. Is this Ikari?"
"Speaking."
"Ah, yes, this is Itsuki Miyamoto from—"
I glanced at the number on the caller ID. "From Yomiuri News."
"Yes, yes. I, uh, I wasn't expecting to reach you…."
"What do you want?"
"Well, as you can imagine, there's wild speculation and rumor surrounding the attempt on your life."
"And?"
"…ah, well, I would go over the details of the attack with you? The police report is rather sparse."
"A man entered the kitchen with a revolver. He tried to shoot me, but he only shot once before the gun misfired. That's all."
"That's all? Really? What about the lack of bullets? What about the five-eyed tattoo on the man's neck?"
A chill ran down my spine, and I brought the handset closer to my mouth.
"What do you know about that?" I said.
"It's from the new Seele, Ikari. Haven't you heard what they're up to?"
I balled my hand into a fist. "What those people choose to do with their lives is no concern of mine."
"Until they shoot at you. That makes them a threat, doesn't it?"
I drummed my fingers on the handset. "I don't have anything else to say. Leave us alone. Goodbye."
"Wait, WAIT! Just one more thing, and that's all. Please understand; my boss would have my ass if I didn't get at least one more thing out of you. One question, and that's it. I promise."
I straightened out the last letter on my desk. "One question."
"You've got dozens of people—not just in my paper but in every newspaper in the country—hanging on your every word. You could use that to speak out against militaristic buildup, or to push for better social services for the poor and hungry. You could condemn Seele publicly, but you do nothing. So, I must ask you: why do you stay silent?"
I hissed, forcing air through my clenched teeth. "I never asked anyone to follow me," I said curtly. "I made a decision for myself. Don't look to me for answers; I don't have any, so just leave me alone, all right?"
"Maybe you're right about that, but right or wrong, Ikari, people aren't going to leave you alone just because you ask them nicely."
No, people were too stubborn, too insistent for that. And for that matter, they wouldn't refrain from shooting you just because you told them what you thought they wanted to hear.
"Hello?" said the reporter. "Are you still there?"
I jerked in my seat. "Um, yes, I'm still here."
"Okay. Well, thank you for your time."
"No, wait."
"What?" A pause. "What is it?"
"I might have more to say to you," I said, glancing at the unlit red light on the phone base, "if you can give me some information in return."
"I'm listening."
"What do you know about Seele these days?"
"That depends, Ikari. Are you telling me it was a tattoo of a triangle and eyes on the shooter's neck?"
I smiled to myself, and for the first time that whole conversation, I sat back in my chair.
You see, people did more than just get back to their lives after Instrumentality. They moved forward. They dedicated themselves to building the future they wanted to see, however beautiful or horrific it was.
Seele was like that. For the next week or so, I let the hate mail pile up on my desk as I looked into Seele. They were organized, I found, and very good at propaganda. They had their own website dedicated to putting out their twisted views. "Mankind will destroy itself without Instrumentality!" That's what they said, in blinking red text that scrolled across the page. As secretive as they were, I guess they didn't believe in subtlety.
They wanted to get their message across to the world, too. They recorded a broadcast each week to their followers, in English, German, Japanese, and French. "Fear not, brothers and sisters, for though Adam and Lilith have failed us, there is still salvation to be found, and it is coming—soon."
The promise of that "salvation" inspired Seele to go to war—and they interpreted the actions of legitimate governments as preparations for that coming battle, too. Now, you should be skeptical of evidence that comes from terrorists. Photos of armies on exercises, or warplanes being built, don't really tell you anything. Countries do that all the time anyway, and they would do it just to protect themselves from each other than to defend against some Fourth Impact Revolution.
Still, I asked some people I knew to check the evidence and look on their own for information, which turned up a few leads. For instance, the Defense Agency had requested significant sums of money for various projects—mostly in the name of "emergency preparedness." I thought that was vague enough to investigate, though I hadn't thought much would come of it.
Until I got a phone call from an old friend.
"Hey, Shinji, did you ask Kensuke to do some snoopin' about some SDF money?"
Toji Suzuhara, an old friend and fellow Eva pilot, called me up on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, as I'd been listening to another Seele broadcast. I put my headphones aside and pressed the phone handset closer to my ear. I lowered my voice and said, "Yes, why?"
"I just got a call from his dad a little while ago; PSB just barged in and snatched him up! With no warning! What the hell did you get him involved in?"
That's what I wanted to know!
I made a few calls and found out that my friend and contact—Kensuke Aida—had been taken to Metro Police headquarters in National Square for questioning. I showed up there and spoke with some of the officers in charge, trying to get Kensuke off the hook, but the officer in charge was adamant:
"Look, Ikari, you really shouldn't say anything more to me," said the inspector. "Your friend is in possession of classified material. The PSB's duty to investigate this is paramount. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do here."
"Not even for me?"
In came Misato, who gave the inspector a polite bow while I stared dumbstruck.
"I'm sorry, General," said the inspector, "but if you think SDF can intrude on a police matter, you're quite mistaken."
"Haven't you heard?" said Misato, showing him an award-winning smile. "SDF is an extension of the police. You and I are the same."
The inspector chuckled politely. "I doubt that."
"Oh? Well, maybe this will change your mind." Misato handed over an envelope. The inspector furrowed his brow as he pored over each line in the memo.
"You can't be serious!" he said. "You can't do this!"
"I think you'll find that letter has the PM's signature on it, yes? That means I can do anything. If it said I could put you and your officers on vacation, I could do it. If it said I could turn the fountain outside into a swimming pool, I could do it. If it said I could requisition some pizza and beer for staff productivity, I could damn well do it." Misato snapped her fingers and frowned. "Damn. Why didn't I ask him for that?"
The inspector balled up the letter and hurled it into a trashcan, shaking his head. He conferred with one of his officers, and Kensuke was shown the way out from an interrogation room.
"Hey! About time you showed up! I thought they were gonna waterboard me!"
He pulled on his collar, adjusting his plaid red tie. One of the officers handed Kensuke's black blazer back to him, and Kensuke carried it over his shoulder as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.
"Don't be silly," said Misato. "We have much more effective methods than that."
Kensuke paled, laughing stiffly. "Uh…huh?"
"Don't do it again, and don't look into these matters any further, Aida." Misato winked. "That's an order, okay?"
Kensuke stiffened, standing straight and tall. "Yes, ma'am!"
"Good! Now, do you need a ride home?"
"Ah, no, I'll catch the train. It's not a big deal." Kensuke turned to me. "Shinji—first time I've seen you in months, and you get me involved in some military conspiracy! What gives?"
I bowed in apology. "Sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you wrapped up in this."
"You kidding? Military Club's gonna go wild over this!"
Misato cleared her throat and raised both eyebrows.
"Or they would go wild over this," said Kensuke, slapping his forehead with a sigh. "Ah well. Thanks for calling in the cavalry to spring me."
I glanced at Misato, and she put on the smile of an innocent schoolgirl. Kensuke didn't notice, continuing on:
"Stay in touch a little more, okay? Toji and I are doing a weekly tournament at the arcade. You should drop by."
"I'll try to pop in," I said.
"Don't just promise; be there, yeah?"
Misato cleared her throat again. "Aida, maybe you want to get home before you worry your father?"
"Ah!" Kensuke checked his watch. "You're right. Thanks again!"
With that, he ran off, leaving Misato and me alone. We followed Kensuke outside, into the open air. It was only as we cleared the lobby doors and entered the sunlight that I spoke to Misato.
"How did you know?"
"I'm nothing if not well-connected. Working for the PM does that, after all."
"I'd understand that if you pulled it off after the fact, but I hadn't told anyone Kensuke was arrested. How did you find out so fast?"
"Why is it you're looking into SDF troop movements and Seele activities?"
I looked out, over the square in front of us. It was a large greenspace with criss-crossing sidewalks and a central fountain. The surrounding buildings had all the features of regal governance: metal domes, classical pillars, tall and narrow windows, and the like. This was National Square, the heart of the Japanese government. SDF officers milled about in uniform. Lawyers and politicians crossed the grounds in their suits, all working toward the efficient operation of the country.
It's easy to be cynical about politicians and the like, but I'd learned over the previous two years that most politicians believe in what they're doing. They have conviction that they need to win and gain power to steer the nation toward safety and prosperity. People like them don't like to sit idly by.
And neither did Misato.
"You don't just work for the PM, do you?" I asked.
Misato shook her head.
"Are we safe?" I went on. "Are we safe from them?"
"I'm working to make us all safe."
I stepped in front of her, trying to catch her eye. "What can you do? If an assassin corners you in a kitchen, what can you do? If a suicide bomber takes out a ship, what can you do?"
Misato folded her arms. "Seele's just a group of people. I'm not worried about what people do. We can handle them."
"So there's nothing to worry about? No cause for concern?"
"I didn't exactly say that." She smiled bitterly, and she touched my shoulder—the shoulder of mine that supported my sling. "Sorry. That's all I can tell you, right now."
" 'Sorry'?" I jolted away from her. I pulled on the strap of the sling and let go. It snapped back against my body. "Look at this: this is what they did to me, and all you can say is sorry? Come on. Tell me: why are they making a move now?"
"Why do you ask?"
I shuddered, gawking at her. Misato's stare pierced me like a blast of x-rays.
"Do I need to say it again?" she said. "Why do you want to know?"
"Be—because I deserve to know!" I sputtered.
"And if you'd regret finding out? What then?"
"I should be the one to decide that."
We stared at each other for a time, and Misato was first to break: she sighed, shaking her head, and headed down the steps into the square.
"Come on, then," she said.
Misato led me across the square, into a building I wasn't familiar with. SDF guards manned the lobby, but Misato flashed them an ID card and nodded at me, and the guards stood down. One of them even said,
"Nice to see you here, sir."
I gave a polite smile in return, and that was all.
We took an elevator down several floors to an underground train station. I call it a station, but it was much smaller than any public train or subway station, with only a handful of guards on duty and no passengers in sight. The traincar itself was a curved, glossy white vehicle, like something out of the future—too pristine and neat to be part of the real world.
"Are you coming?" Misato stood between the sliding doors, holding them open.
My mouth hung open. I glanced down both ends of the tunnel, but the lights beyond were dim and unhelpful.
I tugged at the sling on my shoulder. I swallowed, and I said,
"Yeah."
Misato stood aside and waved me inside, and I sat down with her. The train doors closed, and we sped down a tunnel of gray rock and fluorescent lights to parts unknown.
It amazes me still—how quickly most people put themselves back together, how quickly they got back to their lives.
After all, how many people did it take to crew an ambulance? To drive it? To maintain it when it leaked oil or needed new tires? To tell the driver where to go? To give it a place to stay when it wasn't needed?
That's a lot of people, and they all came out to see me. The doctors bowed before me, promising a full recovery within a week—not a difficult promise, considering I'd only been grazed. The nurses asked if I had any special requests for food or entertainment. Even the cleaning staff took care to wipe down my suite's washroom by hand. They all asked questions when they thought there was a free minute: "What have you been doing since we got back? I never see you on the news." "Did you get together with the redhead?" Stuff like that.
I thought they were just paying me too much attention, but it was more than that. When I took a look around the hospital, just to stretch my legs, I passed rows of empty beds and vacant suites. On my floor, the only other soul was a young girl with a broken leg.
The hospital had been built for a different time. Like I said, it amazes me how many people put themselves back together and got back to their lives, for I know how many people didn't come back, and it would've been far easier for most of us to have stayed behind.
After that walk, I made it known I'd be checking out as soon as I was healthy enough to do so.
"But Ikari," said the doctor, "someone just tried to kill you. Don't you think it'd be wise to wait a while? Or to ask for some protection?"
"I'm a private citizen. I work for no one, and the police have better things to do."
The doctor gawked at me, but he wrote down some notes on his pad, shook his head, and went on his way. And for a while, I was naive enough to think it was that easy.
By early evening, I walked out of the hospital with a sling around my arm. I shaded my eyes from the sun and crossed a large parking lot—one large enough for a hundred cars, yet there were less than twenty taking up space there.
And as I came upon the sidewalk and the nearest street, a white car rolled up. The window started to roll down. There was a glint of light, a reflection from inside.
My heart turned cold. I raised my good arm over my face—like that would stop a bullet!—and the driver of the car said,
"What the hell? I actually went to the trouble to look pretty for you today."
Misato Katsuragi peered over her sunglasses at me, and she leaned across the width of the car to open the passenger-side door, grinning like an imp.
"Or did you think I was here to kill you?"
I shrugged. "It wouldn't be the first time in the last day or two." I glanced back at the brown hospital building. "Did my doctor call you?"
"Yeah, you know, I should be irritated about that. I was told working at this level would keep random people from calling me up at any time of the day or night. I think someone overstated the benefits of this job."
I laughed a bit and climbed inside. Misato pointed out the seat belt—which she was definitely not wearing, but she drummed her fingers on the gear shifter until I was buckled in—and she said,
"Sorry I'm late."
"Late? I wasn't waiting."
"I know." She smiled to herself. "Just seems appropriate, somehow."
That was the nice thing about Misato: some people didn't come back from the sea quite the same, but Misato hadn't changed. Her idea of "looking pretty" was a tiny touch of lipstick and tangled hair; she drove faster than was sane.
And, of course, she would drive an old friend of hers home from the hospital to protect him from an assassin. These were all aspects of her personality, none of them any more (or any less) real than the others. They were all parts of her.
And I was glad that something somewhere saw fit to bring her back from the dead for us.
"I didn't die!" she said once. "I was just momentarily less than alive!"
That was her usual protest if the topic came up, anyway, and looking at her then, you'd have never known she'd died in the first place. Despite her knotted hair, she looked quite at home in her uniform—the green officer's dress of the Ground Self-Defense Force, even if she wasn't entirely happy with her job.
"It's a little dull," she bemoaned, and she took her displeasure out on a traffic cone, squibbing it behind us. "Believe me, the PM isn't interested in hearing advice from an upstart like me. He'd make me General of the Arctic if it would put me in charge of absolutely nothing."
"You like to stay busy."
"Damn right I do. Work hard, sleep hard, drink hard, bang hard. You've got to go at life full-tilt, or life will tilt you instead."
I made a face. "Is that so?"
She shrugged, but she did let off the gas a little. "Okay, maybe there's room for a little moderation now and then. I came back with a new liver; I'm trying to live with it for at least the next ten years. That's a goal, right?"
"You need to take care of yourself, Misato."
"Same for you, I should think." She slammed on the brakes at a stoplight, and when I was done getting the seatbelt out of my chest, Misato said, "So, what happened?"
I turned aside, facing the window. "You already know, don't you?"
"I know what I've read and what I've heard. I'm asking you."
"The man had a Seele tattoo."
She nodded. "Yeah, I know." She took out her frustrations on the accelerator. "I wasn't looking forward to hearing from those guys again, but it was just a matter of time!" She turned a curve at 1.5g just for the hell of it. Thank goodness my left arm still worked, or I would've been pinned against the window. "Men like them prey on the downtrodden and hopeless. That's why we have to fight them by rebuilding this world, one day at a time."
We hit straight, level road, and I relaxed.
That word Misato used—rebuilding—I'm not sure it was the right one. We came back to the real world with the world already built up. Beyond the Crater, most cities were still standing. Nature had hardly encroached upon them, despite the time that had passed while we dreamed. Truly, there wasn't much we needed to build. How could there be? Just on that drive, Misato and I passed a boarded-up grocery store, with broken windows and graffiti sprayed over the walls. Nature and time hadn't caused that damage. That was humanity.
"So, we'll put something together to go punch those guys in the face. They're the last thing we need to deal with now."
"Is that really SDF's job?"
"I mean the government. I'm part of the government now—as useless as my so-called job might be."
"You might need to find another job, if you're so bored right now."
Misato smiled, and she shifted into a higher gear. The car accelerated, and I sank a little deeper into my seat.
"You might say I have some prospects," she said.
"That's good."
"It is. And what about you?"
"Me?"
"Are you intent on working in soup kitchens and charity shops for the rest of your life?"
I drummed my fingers on the armrest, looking away. "Until I can go around without being recognized anymore."
"That right? Well, maybe that's for the best. You've done more than anyone could've expected of you. It's not unreasonable to rest on your laurels. It's our turn now."
Misato's grip on the steering wheel was firm and steady, and she navigated the next curve gently. She turned just enough to guide us through the ninety-degree bend, and she let the wheel slip through her fingers until it was straight and level again. All throughout, her expression was focused and serious. She watched the road with unwavering eyes. She never even glanced at me.
"Right?" she said.
"Mm," was all I could say.
Misato dropped me off at my building in the New City. I invited her over for dinner, but she wouldn't stay. Always some other meaningless task for the PM—that's what she said. As much as she complained, Misato zipped off in that horrifically expensive sportscar. Or at least, it would've been expensive before. Maybe, after Third Impact, it didn't have an owner anymore.
Apartments in the New City were mostly high rise buildings. They stuck out on the Tokyo-2 skyline like needles from a pin cushion. Old Matsumoto had been a rather small city (or perhaps, a large town), with few buildings tall enough to block a view of the mountains in the distance. But from the top of my building, you could be forgiven for thinking you were taller than the mountains. My penthouse there was my perch, my eye on the world beneath me. The world below was a jungle, and I was a monkey clinging to the highest branch I could.
In front of my door was a red sack of mail. The sack was property of Japan Post, and we had to leave it out each morning for the mailman to pick up. Our mail demanded thorough and intense screening for hazardous substances. Anthrax, ricin—you name it, they scanned for it, or purged it with radiation, or something. I never really knew the details there. The government said the mail was safe, and we hand-picked the postman who would deliver the mail for us each day. That way, we could tell ourselves it was all safe.
I still wonder, though: how fortunate were we, that someone came back from the LCL sea and wanted to be a mailman? Or he felt willing enough to do it? Willing to deliver threats like they were nothing? Dangerous packages and contaminated letters like they were no big deal?
People should be more appreciative of their mailmen, I think. There are so many tough, unglamorous jobs like that, jobs that simply need to be done. The world wouldn't go forward without people to deliver mail and packages. It wouldn't go forward without someone like me to cook food now and again, as I did that evening, despite the sling on my arm. It's a challenge to get water boiling, to boil noodles, or to cut mushrooms with just one good hand, but I did what I could. Because people carry mail or cook food for others, it frees everyone else to fight wars, make art and music, or do science.
Asuka was a great example of that.
She came home around eight that night. She kicked off her shoes and thrust her hands into the pockets of her labcoat. She took one look at me, and she said,
"What the hell? That's just a graze?"
I pulled on my sling. "It's basically a graze, yeah."
"Says you! Get away from that counter. I'm taking care of this."
"So, you want to take care of me? Or do you want to enjoy your dinner?"
She folded her arms and glared, but she relented. "Fine. But if there's anything that takes two hands, I'm helping."
With Asuka's help carrying the soup pot and chopping mushrooms, making dinner went a lot faster, and once Asuka was over the shock of my injury, she settled down enough to tell me about her day.
"Oh, it was awful. Damn undergrad contaminated a trial, so we had to do everything over. I would've been home an hour ago if not for that. Guy's gotta get his head on straight. His own dad died from heart failure; you'd think that'd give a guy motivation!"
At that time, Asuka worked on growing synthetic organs and limbs from an LCL base. As the stuff of primordial life itself, the LCL in the ocean could be harvested and "coerced" into shapes and forms people needed. Apparently this coercion took some combination of electric shocks and threaded scaffolds to make the organs take shape, or something. I was never real clear on the details, but it was impressive work—work people needed to see done.
"Don't be too hard on him," I told her. "People make mistakes sometimes."
Asuka put her soup spoon down and dabbed at her lip. "Mistakes are costly. Some people go off by themselves all alone, even when they get a kilo of hate mail every day. That could've been a very costly mistake." Her eyes snapped up to mine, and she said, "You need to get some protection. Or stay home."
"Protection would draw attention. And I won't stay home and do nothing."
"You don't get to have it both ways. If you do something that matters, people are going to notice you."
"Not if they don't know I'm there."
Asuka made a face at that, like I'd just started speaking Arabic, but her cell phone rang, interrupting us. She grumbled to herself in German and answered.
"Yeah? What? No, we tried the concentration at 0.35 for this batch. What? Okay, let me look."
Phone pressed between her shoulder and ear, Asuka climbed up from the dinner table and trotted into the bedroom. She came back with a laptop under her arm and set it up on a spare cushion.
"Hm, we could increase the thread density and worry about how to remove them later? No, let me pull those up. That was maybe three months ago? I don't remember what we saw then, but I should have it written down here somewhere…."
That conversation went on for over half an hour. Asuka worked on her soup now and then, but she she still had about a third of her bowl left when I washed my bowl out. I left her at the dinner table as she chatted with her colleague over charts and graphs. The work of advancing science doesn't rest when you get home to eat, you see.
Like Asuka, I tried to stay busy, too. I retired to the study and opened the red sack of mail. I had a special set of stationery for responding to these letters, though it wasn't very fancy: just my name in the letterhead, really. The first few letters weren't anything unusual: "My husband had been depressed lately. Do you think Lilith has forsaken us? Why does she let us endure all this suffering, after she promised us salvation here?" Stuff like that.
I'd never been a student of religious theory, and I didn't remember Ayanami promising us anything like salvation in this world, but letters like that weren't so bad. I could say, "We only thought it would be better in this world, to talk to people and meet them, even if they might hurt us, too." That any of us came back at all—that was a decision made by people, and people can be wrong, after all. That doesn't mean the decision was made in bad faith.
That was one of the easier ones. Letters like, "You were wrong, Ikari! You were naive and ignorant! Why would you lead people back into a world of starvation, disease, and death? A world where people can't even find relief on a beach without smelling of blood? What were you thinking?"
I put that letter aside, on a stack of a dozen others, and went on as best I could. Yes, it's hard to deal with letters like that, but at least they're individual people giving their honest thoughts. I couldn't say that about a lot of other people: the vultures who constantly rang our phone off the hook, for instance.
That's not to say the calls didn't bother Asuka and me; we'd put in a switch to disable the ringer if we needed to, and we had a caller ID system installed, too. Right then, all incoming calls to the apartment just lit up a red light on the phone base, and the incoming call number showed in black against a lit background.
And when one of those numbers called, I let the red light blink away until it fizzled out. What happened to us wasn't any of their business. No, what happened to me wasn't any of their business. Asuka was a scientist. She worked for the greater good of humanity. Me? I was a private citizen, nothing more. Unless one of them wanted to talk to me about security near soup kitchens, what happened to me shouldn't have mattered to anyone.
I went back to my letters:
"Ikari, you may not remember, but this isn't the first time I've written to you. I enjoyed your letter from before, but it amazes me that I heard from you at all. What's happened to you? What have you been doing? Everyone says you're a shut-in now, and I don't understand why you'd do that. You helped show everyone we'd lose something if we stayed in the sea. Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?"
I mean, on the face of it, it wasn't true. I still saw people from time to time. I saw Asuka almost every day. I worked in the soup kitchen and had good relations with the other staff there. I knew over a dozen of the kitchen's patrons by sight. I'd heard about where they lived, their past histories, and their future dreams. I met people. I was meeting people. And I had never objected to meeting people—not most people, anyway.
It was the people who'd call my home phone at all hours of the day or night, who'd flash the red light there even when it was dark—all because we couldn't stand to leave the ringer on and hear them wailing at us—those were the people I'd shut out of my life, and there were a lot of them.
But when I put that letter aside, I put my pen down and slid my stationery away, too. The red light on the phone base blinked incessantly, and I snatched up the handset to snuff it out.
"Yes, who is it?" I snapped.
"Hm?" said the man on the other end. "Oh, wow, uh, good evening. Is this Ikari?"
"Speaking."
"Ah, yes, this is Itsuki Miyamoto from—"
I glanced at the number on the caller ID. "From Yomiuri News."
"Yes, yes. I, uh, I wasn't expecting to reach you…."
"What do you want?"
"Well, as you can imagine, there's wild speculation and rumor surrounding the attempt on your life."
"And?"
"…ah, well, I would go over the details of the attack with you? The police report is rather sparse."
"A man entered the kitchen with a revolver. He tried to shoot me, but he only shot once before the gun misfired. That's all."
"That's all? Really? What about the lack of bullets? What about the five-eyed tattoo on the man's neck?"
A chill ran down my spine, and I brought the handset closer to my mouth.
"What do you know about that?" I said.
"It's from the new Seele, Ikari. Haven't you heard what they're up to?"
I balled my hand into a fist. "What those people choose to do with their lives is no concern of mine."
"Until they shoot at you. That makes them a threat, doesn't it?"
I drummed my fingers on the handset. "I don't have anything else to say. Leave us alone. Goodbye."
"Wait, WAIT! Just one more thing, and that's all. Please understand; my boss would have my ass if I didn't get at least one more thing out of you. One question, and that's it. I promise."
I straightened out the last letter on my desk. "One question."
"You've got dozens of people—not just in my paper but in every newspaper in the country—hanging on your every word. You could use that to speak out against militaristic buildup, or to push for better social services for the poor and hungry. You could condemn Seele publicly, but you do nothing. So, I must ask you: why do you stay silent?"
I hissed, forcing air through my clenched teeth. "I never asked anyone to follow me," I said curtly. "I made a decision for myself. Don't look to me for answers; I don't have any, so just leave me alone, all right?"
"Maybe you're right about that, but right or wrong, Ikari, people aren't going to leave you alone just because you ask them nicely."
No, people were too stubborn, too insistent for that. And for that matter, they wouldn't refrain from shooting you just because you told them what you thought they wanted to hear.
"Hello?" said the reporter. "Are you still there?"
I jerked in my seat. "Um, yes, I'm still here."
"Okay. Well, thank you for your time."
"No, wait."
"What?" A pause. "What is it?"
"I might have more to say to you," I said, glancing at the unlit red light on the phone base, "if you can give me some information in return."
"I'm listening."
"What do you know about Seele these days?"
"That depends, Ikari. Are you telling me it was a tattoo of a triangle and eyes on the shooter's neck?"
I smiled to myself, and for the first time that whole conversation, I sat back in my chair.
You see, people did more than just get back to their lives after Instrumentality. They moved forward. They dedicated themselves to building the future they wanted to see, however beautiful or horrific it was.
Seele was like that. For the next week or so, I let the hate mail pile up on my desk as I looked into Seele. They were organized, I found, and very good at propaganda. They had their own website dedicated to putting out their twisted views. "Mankind will destroy itself without Instrumentality!" That's what they said, in blinking red text that scrolled across the page. As secretive as they were, I guess they didn't believe in subtlety.
They wanted to get their message across to the world, too. They recorded a broadcast each week to their followers, in English, German, Japanese, and French. "Fear not, brothers and sisters, for though Adam and Lilith have failed us, there is still salvation to be found, and it is coming—soon."
The promise of that "salvation" inspired Seele to go to war—and they interpreted the actions of legitimate governments as preparations for that coming battle, too. Now, you should be skeptical of evidence that comes from terrorists. Photos of armies on exercises, or warplanes being built, don't really tell you anything. Countries do that all the time anyway, and they would do it just to protect themselves from each other than to defend against some Fourth Impact Revolution.
Still, I asked some people I knew to check the evidence and look on their own for information, which turned up a few leads. For instance, the Defense Agency had requested significant sums of money for various projects—mostly in the name of "emergency preparedness." I thought that was vague enough to investigate, though I hadn't thought much would come of it.
Until I got a phone call from an old friend.
"Hey, Shinji, did you ask Kensuke to do some snoopin' about some SDF money?"
Toji Suzuhara, an old friend and fellow Eva pilot, called me up on a sleepy Sunday afternoon, as I'd been listening to another Seele broadcast. I put my headphones aside and pressed the phone handset closer to my ear. I lowered my voice and said, "Yes, why?"
"I just got a call from his dad a little while ago; PSB just barged in and snatched him up! With no warning! What the hell did you get him involved in?"
That's what I wanted to know!
I made a few calls and found out that my friend and contact—Kensuke Aida—had been taken to Metro Police headquarters in National Square for questioning. I showed up there and spoke with some of the officers in charge, trying to get Kensuke off the hook, but the officer in charge was adamant:
"Look, Ikari, you really shouldn't say anything more to me," said the inspector. "Your friend is in possession of classified material. The PSB's duty to investigate this is paramount. I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do here."
"Not even for me?"
In came Misato, who gave the inspector a polite bow while I stared dumbstruck.
"I'm sorry, General," said the inspector, "but if you think SDF can intrude on a police matter, you're quite mistaken."
"Haven't you heard?" said Misato, showing him an award-winning smile. "SDF is an extension of the police. You and I are the same."
The inspector chuckled politely. "I doubt that."
"Oh? Well, maybe this will change your mind." Misato handed over an envelope. The inspector furrowed his brow as he pored over each line in the memo.
"You can't be serious!" he said. "You can't do this!"
"I think you'll find that letter has the PM's signature on it, yes? That means I can do anything. If it said I could put you and your officers on vacation, I could do it. If it said I could turn the fountain outside into a swimming pool, I could do it. If it said I could requisition some pizza and beer for staff productivity, I could damn well do it." Misato snapped her fingers and frowned. "Damn. Why didn't I ask him for that?"
The inspector balled up the letter and hurled it into a trashcan, shaking his head. He conferred with one of his officers, and Kensuke was shown the way out from an interrogation room.
"Hey! About time you showed up! I thought they were gonna waterboard me!"
He pulled on his collar, adjusting his plaid red tie. One of the officers handed Kensuke's black blazer back to him, and Kensuke carried it over his shoulder as he wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead.
"Don't be silly," said Misato. "We have much more effective methods than that."
Kensuke paled, laughing stiffly. "Uh…huh?"
"Don't do it again, and don't look into these matters any further, Aida." Misato winked. "That's an order, okay?"
Kensuke stiffened, standing straight and tall. "Yes, ma'am!"
"Good! Now, do you need a ride home?"
"Ah, no, I'll catch the train. It's not a big deal." Kensuke turned to me. "Shinji—first time I've seen you in months, and you get me involved in some military conspiracy! What gives?"
I bowed in apology. "Sorry. I shouldn't have gotten you wrapped up in this."
"You kidding? Military Club's gonna go wild over this!"
Misato cleared her throat and raised both eyebrows.
"Or they would go wild over this," said Kensuke, slapping his forehead with a sigh. "Ah well. Thanks for calling in the cavalry to spring me."
I glanced at Misato, and she put on the smile of an innocent schoolgirl. Kensuke didn't notice, continuing on:
"Stay in touch a little more, okay? Toji and I are doing a weekly tournament at the arcade. You should drop by."
"I'll try to pop in," I said.
"Don't just promise; be there, yeah?"
Misato cleared her throat again. "Aida, maybe you want to get home before you worry your father?"
"Ah!" Kensuke checked his watch. "You're right. Thanks again!"
With that, he ran off, leaving Misato and me alone. We followed Kensuke outside, into the open air. It was only as we cleared the lobby doors and entered the sunlight that I spoke to Misato.
"How did you know?"
"I'm nothing if not well-connected. Working for the PM does that, after all."
"I'd understand that if you pulled it off after the fact, but I hadn't told anyone Kensuke was arrested. How did you find out so fast?"
"Why is it you're looking into SDF troop movements and Seele activities?"
I looked out, over the square in front of us. It was a large greenspace with criss-crossing sidewalks and a central fountain. The surrounding buildings had all the features of regal governance: metal domes, classical pillars, tall and narrow windows, and the like. This was National Square, the heart of the Japanese government. SDF officers milled about in uniform. Lawyers and politicians crossed the grounds in their suits, all working toward the efficient operation of the country.
It's easy to be cynical about politicians and the like, but I'd learned over the previous two years that most politicians believe in what they're doing. They have conviction that they need to win and gain power to steer the nation toward safety and prosperity. People like them don't like to sit idly by.
And neither did Misato.
"You don't just work for the PM, do you?" I asked.
Misato shook her head.
"Are we safe?" I went on. "Are we safe from them?"
"I'm working to make us all safe."
I stepped in front of her, trying to catch her eye. "What can you do? If an assassin corners you in a kitchen, what can you do? If a suicide bomber takes out a ship, what can you do?"
Misato folded her arms. "Seele's just a group of people. I'm not worried about what people do. We can handle them."
"So there's nothing to worry about? No cause for concern?"
"I didn't exactly say that." She smiled bitterly, and she touched my shoulder—the shoulder of mine that supported my sling. "Sorry. That's all I can tell you, right now."
" 'Sorry'?" I jolted away from her. I pulled on the strap of the sling and let go. It snapped back against my body. "Look at this: this is what they did to me, and all you can say is sorry? Come on. Tell me: why are they making a move now?"
"Why do you ask?"
I shuddered, gawking at her. Misato's stare pierced me like a blast of x-rays.
"Do I need to say it again?" she said. "Why do you want to know?"
"Be—because I deserve to know!" I sputtered.
"And if you'd regret finding out? What then?"
"I should be the one to decide that."
We stared at each other for a time, and Misato was first to break: she sighed, shaking her head, and headed down the steps into the square.
"Come on, then," she said.
Misato led me across the square, into a building I wasn't familiar with. SDF guards manned the lobby, but Misato flashed them an ID card and nodded at me, and the guards stood down. One of them even said,
"Nice to see you here, sir."
I gave a polite smile in return, and that was all.
We took an elevator down several floors to an underground train station. I call it a station, but it was much smaller than any public train or subway station, with only a handful of guards on duty and no passengers in sight. The traincar itself was a curved, glossy white vehicle, like something out of the future—too pristine and neat to be part of the real world.
"Are you coming?" Misato stood between the sliding doors, holding them open.
My mouth hung open. I glanced down both ends of the tunnel, but the lights beyond were dim and unhelpful.
I tugged at the sling on my shoulder. I swallowed, and I said,
"Yeah."
Misato stood aside and waved me inside, and I sat down with her. The train doors closed, and we sped down a tunnel of gray rock and fluorescent lights to parts unknown.
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Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
Interesting. Consider yourself under observation. 
1.3 Project Manoah
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
3. Project Manoah
The train arrived at another platform, identical to the first. The guards saluted when Misato walked out, and their eyes followed me as we entered the rest of the facility. Misato explained it used to be a bunker for the government. "Politicians spare no expense to make sure they'll survive," she quipped. But since learning of Seele's "salvation," SDF had converted the bunker into a base of operations.
We headed down a rocky tunnel, which let to buildings, of all things. They sat on springs, but they were buildings nonetheless: underground buildings, complete with fluorescent lighting, speckled ceiling tiles, and fake wood trim. If not for the occasional window that showed the rock tunnel, we could've been above ground for all I'd have known.
Misato led me to one of those false mahogany doors in particular. She took her ID in hand, but her hand hovered over the card reader.
"You know," she said, not facing me, "you can go back at any time."
"I know," I said.
Misato nodded, and she swiped her card in the reader. The lock clicked open, and Misato pushed the door inward, revealing…
An array of cubicles?
Misato went inside, and I scampered in as the door closed automatically behind me. I stared, open-mouthed, as I took in the sight around me: SDF officers manned the workstations, looking entirely too mundane as they chatted on headsets and moved windows around on their dual-monitor setups.
More exotic were the three large screens at the front of the room. They were lit by projectors in the back. The left screen had a map of the world with three stars on it: one in Germany, one in America, and one in Japan. The middle screen had some image I couldn't quite make out—a round object with a series of rings around it. The edges were irregular and pixellated, however.
Finally, the rightmost screen showed a graph of some kind: distance to earth in light-minutes versus time. The distance of what wasn't made clear.
"Well, it's about time!"
I jerked in surprise. A man in thick, black-rimmed glasses approached us with a clipboard—he was the former Lieutenant Hyuga with Nerv, and since then, it seemed he'd switched to GSDF, too.
"Nice to see you again, Shinji," he said, offering a hand. "We'll be glad to have any help you can give us."
I shook his hand weakly, laughing to myself. Misato caught Hyuga's gaze and shook her head.
"Sorry, I guess I misunderstood," said Hyuga, wincing. "General—should I give you these some other time?"
"No, that's all right. I'd like to review everything as soon as I'm done giving the grand tour. Anything I should know about in particular?"
The two of them went over some information I didn't completely understand—at least, not at the time. There were new measurements from the National Observatory that Hyuga wanted to go over. Some object they'd been monitoring was only two hundred light-minutes away. Misato and Hyuga discussed the issue while studying a graph on one of the projector screens. The curve on that graph had been steeper at one point. It was leveling off, but it still made an inexorable mark toward zero.
While they were talking, I looked more closely over the room. There was something primitive and minimalistic about it The sloped ceiling gave it a claustrophobic feel, and the grid of cubicles—each with a nameplate reading Telemetry or Liaison—seemed remarkably low-tech compared to what I was used to.
Misato must've caught me looking around, for she leaned over my shoulder, saying, "Not really that much to see, is there? Well, let's get to something exciting, hm?" She nodded to Hyuga. "We're going downstairs."
Misato led me from the control room out another door. We went down a few hallways to an open elevator—one with an empty, honeycomb wire lattice for walls. Beyond those walls lay a large chamber. An unusual warmth and humidity emanated from that chamber. It felt like standing a few meters from an open sauna door, or from a hot spring. That heat and humidity pushed against me like a surging tide—a tide with the smell of iron.
"What is it? Don't you want to see?" Misato flipped a switch on the elevator, holding the doors open.
"No, I—I don't need to see that."
"No? All right. Is there anything else you want to see, then?"
I shook my head.
"So, what do you plan to do now?" Misato folded her arms, and she leaned back against the metal railing that reinforced the elevator. "Do you regret knowing what you know now?"
I stared at the floor. "So what if I do? There's nothing I can do about it."
"That's not true. You could work here."
My head snapped up, and my hand clenched into a fist. "No! I won't! Not again!"
"That's fine. We don't need you to do that."
A small sound came out of my mouth, but it was nothing sensible. I stared at her, at a loss.
"We have candidates already," she explained. "They would benefit from your experience, your wisdom, your strength—if you're willing to offer it. You don't need to do anything now. You just need to show them who you are—or who you were."
"And who is that?"
"A hero, right?"
I shook my head. "That would be a lie. I'm not that. I was never that."
Misato raised an eyebrow at me, but she said nothing. She pushed off the railing of the elevator, flipped the switch on the controls, and stepped out, letting the elevator doors close. She took a heavy breath, watching me with steady eyes, and said,
"If you say so."
And with that, the tour was over. Misato took me back to the train, and we parted ways on the other side, back in town. Though I set foot on the platform, she stayed aboard the train, leaving me with these words:
"Seele's wrong about a lot of things. They're wrong about the way the world should be, or what humanity should do from here on. But they're not wrong about one thing."
"What's that?" I asked her.
"Something is coming. It's out there, and it's not going to turn around and go back the way it came. You can either do something about that or do your best to stay out of the way."
And with that, she left me. Misato had to make the future she wanted to see become reality, and if she didn't work for it, that reality would crumble around us soon.
Misato and Seele both set goals for themselves—goals meant to change the world.
And I?
The best goal I had was to get dinner started before Asuka came home.
I'm not sure if there's a place in the world for people like me—or like how I was, at that time. Either you help turn the present into the future, or you get left behind as you try to take refuge in the past. Looking at it that way, I guess there's always a place for people in some world—just not the world of what's yet to come.
Asuka wasn't like that. As soon as I told her what Misato was doing, she got on the phone with the general, looking for a job. "I have experience with this, Misato! Not just experience, but the technical expertise to be useful. Now, tell me: how did you guys manage to build another one, let alone three?"
Misato was vague on details—especially over the phone—but she invited Asuka for a meeting, and things moved along there quite quickly. I didn't pay attention to the exact details there. They'd get it all figured out on their own, and I had letters to respond to.
It turned out I had more time to respond to letters than I'd realized, too. A couple days later, I went back to the soup kitchen—the abandoned school—to work my usual shifts again. I went to change my shoes at the shoe lockers, but I found a note in mine:
Ikari, we've always valued your contribution to our cause here, but the staff are concerned that your presence constitutes a safety risk that we—
I balled up the note and chucked it aside. Sighing, I leaned back against the lockers, closed my eyes, and shut it all away.
I wandered the area around the school for a time. It was a hot and uncomfortable walk, as I wore a green, hooded sweatshirt to help hide my face. Sunglasses protected my eyes, and they gave the world around me an unrealistically vibrant hue. I hate that about sunglasses. Everything looks more real, more full of life, through those lenses. And then you take them off, and the real world is pale and withering in the sun. Grass that looked a healthy green is actually dying and losing color. Stuff like that. Sunglasses make the world look better than it really is.
I ripped those sunglasses off my face and forced that withered world into my eyes. I stomped my foot on the sidewalk, and it cracked just a little. The world was broken. Its people were broken. Their lives and their homes were full of ghosts.
And one of those ghosts—one of those faults or defects—stared back at me.
It took the form of a person. It stood at the end of the middle school access road, and it watched me. It dressed in all white; its robes shined with the gloss of satin. The thing stared at me without eyes, for its hood covered its face—all the way to its nose.
I did a double-take when I ran into that thing. I glanced back down the other end of the road, but no one else was around.
And when I looked back at it, the hooded stranger was gone.
I stayed home for the rest of the week. I still had a backlog of letters to respond to, and it was a rule of mine that no letter should take more than a week to deal with—either to respond to, or to put aside.
Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?
I twirled a pen in my hand as I stared over that letter, but after a few minutes to think on it, I stood at my desk, twisted a bit funny to line up my sling over the paper, and wrote,
"No, I like being up here. I like seeing all the lights in the city as they come on at night. I like knowing that people are recovering, a little bit at a time. People are doing just fine now, but don't worry. If the time comes that I need to be there, that I need to say something, I'll be there. That's a promise."
I stared at that for a moment before crumpling up the stationery and pulling out a new sheet.
But just as I put pen to paper, a voice called to me from the main room.
"Hey! Do you see what's going on outside?"
I trotted from the bedroom to meet Asuka. She stood at the sliding glass door that opened to our balcony. It was nighttime, and there was a steady, rhythmic clatter on the balcony.
"It's raining," I said.
"Is it?"
I stepped out on the balcony. It was raining. There was no question of that.
It was raining red splotches of viscous goo.
You know, I lied before when I said there's not much I regret. I regret a lot.
I regret being the boy who drifted aimlessly for two years.
I regret stuffing myself in that penthouse to look down on the world, as though I weren't a part of it. There's no place in the world for people who act like that yet expect the world to not pass them by. Those who try to make their own futures won't always succeed, but they have more control than someone like me, than anyone like who I was at that time.
I won't say I was ready to start swimming against that inexorable current of the future others make.
But, as the bloody rain came down on Tokyo-2, I put on my green hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. I packed a backpack with crackers and bottles of water.
And I took with me a sheathed kitchen knife, to help steer the current in my favor.
The train arrived at another platform, identical to the first. The guards saluted when Misato walked out, and their eyes followed me as we entered the rest of the facility. Misato explained it used to be a bunker for the government. "Politicians spare no expense to make sure they'll survive," she quipped. But since learning of Seele's "salvation," SDF had converted the bunker into a base of operations.
We headed down a rocky tunnel, which let to buildings, of all things. They sat on springs, but they were buildings nonetheless: underground buildings, complete with fluorescent lighting, speckled ceiling tiles, and fake wood trim. If not for the occasional window that showed the rock tunnel, we could've been above ground for all I'd have known.
Misato led me to one of those false mahogany doors in particular. She took her ID in hand, but her hand hovered over the card reader.
"You know," she said, not facing me, "you can go back at any time."
"I know," I said.
Misato nodded, and she swiped her card in the reader. The lock clicked open, and Misato pushed the door inward, revealing…
An array of cubicles?
Misato went inside, and I scampered in as the door closed automatically behind me. I stared, open-mouthed, as I took in the sight around me: SDF officers manned the workstations, looking entirely too mundane as they chatted on headsets and moved windows around on their dual-monitor setups.
More exotic were the three large screens at the front of the room. They were lit by projectors in the back. The left screen had a map of the world with three stars on it: one in Germany, one in America, and one in Japan. The middle screen had some image I couldn't quite make out—a round object with a series of rings around it. The edges were irregular and pixellated, however.
Finally, the rightmost screen showed a graph of some kind: distance to earth in light-minutes versus time. The distance of what wasn't made clear.
"Well, it's about time!"
I jerked in surprise. A man in thick, black-rimmed glasses approached us with a clipboard—he was the former Lieutenant Hyuga with Nerv, and since then, it seemed he'd switched to GSDF, too.
"Nice to see you again, Shinji," he said, offering a hand. "We'll be glad to have any help you can give us."
I shook his hand weakly, laughing to myself. Misato caught Hyuga's gaze and shook her head.
"Sorry, I guess I misunderstood," said Hyuga, wincing. "General—should I give you these some other time?"
"No, that's all right. I'd like to review everything as soon as I'm done giving the grand tour. Anything I should know about in particular?"
The two of them went over some information I didn't completely understand—at least, not at the time. There were new measurements from the National Observatory that Hyuga wanted to go over. Some object they'd been monitoring was only two hundred light-minutes away. Misato and Hyuga discussed the issue while studying a graph on one of the projector screens. The curve on that graph had been steeper at one point. It was leveling off, but it still made an inexorable mark toward zero.
While they were talking, I looked more closely over the room. There was something primitive and minimalistic about it The sloped ceiling gave it a claustrophobic feel, and the grid of cubicles—each with a nameplate reading Telemetry or Liaison—seemed remarkably low-tech compared to what I was used to.
Misato must've caught me looking around, for she leaned over my shoulder, saying, "Not really that much to see, is there? Well, let's get to something exciting, hm?" She nodded to Hyuga. "We're going downstairs."
Misato led me from the control room out another door. We went down a few hallways to an open elevator—one with an empty, honeycomb wire lattice for walls. Beyond those walls lay a large chamber. An unusual warmth and humidity emanated from that chamber. It felt like standing a few meters from an open sauna door, or from a hot spring. That heat and humidity pushed against me like a surging tide—a tide with the smell of iron.
"What is it? Don't you want to see?" Misato flipped a switch on the elevator, holding the doors open.
"No, I—I don't need to see that."
"No? All right. Is there anything else you want to see, then?"
I shook my head.
"So, what do you plan to do now?" Misato folded her arms, and she leaned back against the metal railing that reinforced the elevator. "Do you regret knowing what you know now?"
I stared at the floor. "So what if I do? There's nothing I can do about it."
"That's not true. You could work here."
My head snapped up, and my hand clenched into a fist. "No! I won't! Not again!"
"That's fine. We don't need you to do that."
A small sound came out of my mouth, but it was nothing sensible. I stared at her, at a loss.
"We have candidates already," she explained. "They would benefit from your experience, your wisdom, your strength—if you're willing to offer it. You don't need to do anything now. You just need to show them who you are—or who you were."
"And who is that?"
"A hero, right?"
I shook my head. "That would be a lie. I'm not that. I was never that."
Misato raised an eyebrow at me, but she said nothing. She pushed off the railing of the elevator, flipped the switch on the controls, and stepped out, letting the elevator doors close. She took a heavy breath, watching me with steady eyes, and said,
"If you say so."
And with that, the tour was over. Misato took me back to the train, and we parted ways on the other side, back in town. Though I set foot on the platform, she stayed aboard the train, leaving me with these words:
"Seele's wrong about a lot of things. They're wrong about the way the world should be, or what humanity should do from here on. But they're not wrong about one thing."
"What's that?" I asked her.
"Something is coming. It's out there, and it's not going to turn around and go back the way it came. You can either do something about that or do your best to stay out of the way."
And with that, she left me. Misato had to make the future she wanted to see become reality, and if she didn't work for it, that reality would crumble around us soon.
Misato and Seele both set goals for themselves—goals meant to change the world.
And I?
The best goal I had was to get dinner started before Asuka came home.
I'm not sure if there's a place in the world for people like me—or like how I was, at that time. Either you help turn the present into the future, or you get left behind as you try to take refuge in the past. Looking at it that way, I guess there's always a place for people in some world—just not the world of what's yet to come.
Asuka wasn't like that. As soon as I told her what Misato was doing, she got on the phone with the general, looking for a job. "I have experience with this, Misato! Not just experience, but the technical expertise to be useful. Now, tell me: how did you guys manage to build another one, let alone three?"
Misato was vague on details—especially over the phone—but she invited Asuka for a meeting, and things moved along there quite quickly. I didn't pay attention to the exact details there. They'd get it all figured out on their own, and I had letters to respond to.
It turned out I had more time to respond to letters than I'd realized, too. A couple days later, I went back to the soup kitchen—the abandoned school—to work my usual shifts again. I went to change my shoes at the shoe lockers, but I found a note in mine:
Ikari, we've always valued your contribution to our cause here, but the staff are concerned that your presence constitutes a safety risk that we—
I balled up the note and chucked it aside. Sighing, I leaned back against the lockers, closed my eyes, and shut it all away.
I wandered the area around the school for a time. It was a hot and uncomfortable walk, as I wore a green, hooded sweatshirt to help hide my face. Sunglasses protected my eyes, and they gave the world around me an unrealistically vibrant hue. I hate that about sunglasses. Everything looks more real, more full of life, through those lenses. And then you take them off, and the real world is pale and withering in the sun. Grass that looked a healthy green is actually dying and losing color. Stuff like that. Sunglasses make the world look better than it really is.
I ripped those sunglasses off my face and forced that withered world into my eyes. I stomped my foot on the sidewalk, and it cracked just a little. The world was broken. Its people were broken. Their lives and their homes were full of ghosts.
And one of those ghosts—one of those faults or defects—stared back at me.
It took the form of a person. It stood at the end of the middle school access road, and it watched me. It dressed in all white; its robes shined with the gloss of satin. The thing stared at me without eyes, for its hood covered its face—all the way to its nose.
I did a double-take when I ran into that thing. I glanced back down the other end of the road, but no one else was around.
And when I looked back at it, the hooded stranger was gone.
I stayed home for the rest of the week. I still had a backlog of letters to respond to, and it was a rule of mine that no letter should take more than a week to deal with—either to respond to, or to put aside.
Aren't you losing something by staying isolated in that tower of yours?
I twirled a pen in my hand as I stared over that letter, but after a few minutes to think on it, I stood at my desk, twisted a bit funny to line up my sling over the paper, and wrote,
"No, I like being up here. I like seeing all the lights in the city as they come on at night. I like knowing that people are recovering, a little bit at a time. People are doing just fine now, but don't worry. If the time comes that I need to be there, that I need to say something, I'll be there. That's a promise."
I stared at that for a moment before crumpling up the stationery and pulling out a new sheet.
But just as I put pen to paper, a voice called to me from the main room.
"Hey! Do you see what's going on outside?"
I trotted from the bedroom to meet Asuka. She stood at the sliding glass door that opened to our balcony. It was nighttime, and there was a steady, rhythmic clatter on the balcony.
"It's raining," I said.
"Is it?"
I stepped out on the balcony. It was raining. There was no question of that.
It was raining red splotches of viscous goo.
You know, I lied before when I said there's not much I regret. I regret a lot.
I regret being the boy who drifted aimlessly for two years.
I regret stuffing myself in that penthouse to look down on the world, as though I weren't a part of it. There's no place in the world for people who act like that yet expect the world to not pass them by. Those who try to make their own futures won't always succeed, but they have more control than someone like me, than anyone like who I was at that time.
I won't say I was ready to start swimming against that inexorable current of the future others make.
But, as the bloody rain came down on Tokyo-2, I put on my green hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses. I packed a backpack with crackers and bottles of water.
And I took with me a sheathed kitchen knife, to help steer the current in my favor.
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- Location
- Florida
I like where this is going, can't wait to see more.
Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
Ah, there it is! Before now, I was not sure where this was going, but slowly and surely, a red thread materialises.
And a little suggestion: Maybe you should advertise your story in the general Advertising Thread for User Fiction to give it more of a push; you might also consider adding more tags, in the future. Makes it easier for tag surfers to find.
And a little suggestion: Maybe you should advertise your story in the general Advertising Thread for User Fiction to give it more of a push; you might also consider adding more tags, in the future. Makes it easier for tag surfers to find.
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
@Ranma-sensei Done and done. I'm a little at a loss for tags beyond the couple I added, admittedly, but I'm very interested if something else appropriate comes to mind. Thanks!
Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
I might have some for you:
Code:
giant robots
Code:
robots vs. monsters
Code:
traumatized teenagers piloting giant robots
Code:
animeMuphrid
Star of the Lancer
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Editing changelog:
1.1/Two Years Later: changed "frustrated bear" to "bear that couldn't catch fish"
1.2/Tokyo-2: now runs through Shinji getting on the train to the base. Some new narrative here to wind down that chapter, with Shinji hesitating before getting on the train.
1.3/Project Manoah: see above; now begins with the train arriving at the base.
1.1/Two Years Later: changed "frustrated bear" to "bear that couldn't catch fish"
1.2/Tokyo-2: now runs through Shinji getting on the train to the base. Some new narrative here to wind down that chapter, with Shinji hesitating before getting on the train.
1.3/Project Manoah: see above; now begins with the train arriving at the base.
1.4 Blood Rain
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
4. Blood Rain
Looking back, I realize now that Second and Third Impact left a great scar on us—on Japan, and on humanity as a whole. I don't mean just the people who died and left us—though that affected us, too. I mean how prepared we were for disasters, how we'd come to expect them to happen—maybe not in our minds, but in our hearts.
I saw it that night, as the bloody rain fell outside. Asuka and I headed down to the basement utility plant, and there, we found our neighbors taking refuge. Residents camped out under pipes or near water boilers. They filled every nook and cranny, sitting with backpacks or luggage full of the essentials—crackers, water bottles, and the like. A network of lanterns lit the maze-like room, casting the whole floor in an artificial white glow. One of the residents had set up a radio for updates and news, not that it was very helpful:
"Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates to this notice will be issued every quarter-hour. Repeat: this is a precautionary safety notice. Do not be alarmed; this is only a precaution. Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates will be issued every quarter-hour—"
You get the idea. The reactions to this message were about as you'd expect, too:
"Precautionary for what?" said a teenaged boy by the radio. "What's so dangerous that they can't even tell us what's happening?"
"I'm sure the government would tell us what's going on if it made sense to do so," said the boy's mother.
"The same government that lied to us about the Angel attacks?"
"No, no, it's a different government now."
We were prepared for disasters, but that didn't mean we accepted them. There's an undeniable weight to it, the resignation that your fate is out of your control and that the best you can do is cope. Some of the residents set up games to pass the time—I spotted a group of four at mahjong and another pair halfway through a game of go. Others read books or comics by the poor light of flashlights or lanterns. What else could we do?
Asuka and I settled into a damp spot under some leaking pipes—I'm sure that had nothing to do with why that spot was open—and sat down with the rest of our neighbors to watch, listen, and wait.
Or at least, that's what I did. Asuka had other ideas. She propped up a writing pad on her knees and wedged a flashlight between some pipes to keep light on the pad as she wrote. I peered over to look at one point, but all I could make out was a mix of German and mathematics—an incomprehensible combination if I'd ever seen one.
"It's simple," said Asuka. "If it rains about one centimeter of LCL in total, as measured by a rain gauge, then all you need to know is the total area being rained on to estimate the volume of the Angel, give or take an order of magnitude."
"And how big is that?" I asked.
"What?"
"How big is the Angel, then?"
Asuka frowned, and she twirled a pencil between her fingers. "Well, if you say Japan is 3000 kilometers by 1500 kilometers, we're talking about something maybe 5 kilometers in diameter?" Asuka pursed her lips, and she put an eraser to the piece of paper. "No, that can't be. Must be off by an order of magnitude somewhere…"
But at least she tried. Even in captivity like this, Asuka was trying to figure out something about our situation. The most I could do was watch and listen. I watched her jot down estimates of rain gauges and city areas. I listened to our neighbors talk about petty, meaningless things—like who had died recently in a daytime drama, or which of their neighbors set off the smoke alarm that week.
"It was the Tendo family for sure." One of the residents near us talked with her family in a low voice. "No sense of urgency with them. Have you seen seen them down here yet?"
Asuka took notice of that. She put her pencil down and got up, approaching the other family. Honestly, that was so impolite of her, and she was always like that. Maybe that's what people do in Germany, or in the West, but if you do stuff like that here, people are going to be annoyed with you.
Then again, Asuka was never one to care much about that. If there was something she wanted to know, she'd ask about it, and she did there. She went up to the other family next to us and said,
"Someone you know hasn't come down yet?"
Our neighbors took one look at her and exchanged a few glances. Even in the dim light, Asuka's bright red hair was hard to miss. Still, the mother said, "I'm sure they're on their way down soon. I'm sorry if we were too loud."
Asuka shrugged. "You weren't, really. What was the name? Tendo? And what room are they in?"
The mother stiffened.
"I'm not asking your names or anything."
The mother and her children exchanged some glances, and at last, she said, "They're in 446."
"Great, thanks!" Asuka tucked her notepad under her arm and set off with a flashlight.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Looking for some people named Tendo. It sounds like they might not have taken the air raid siren seriously. Maybe because they don't really know what it's about, you know?"
"But, but, what am I supposed to do?"
"You could stay here, if you want? Would be easier that way. Watch our stuff, yeah?"
I frowned at that, and I handed Asuka's knapsack over to her as I put on my own backpack. Asuka smiled slyly as she slung the knapsack onto her back.
"You know, I like it when you get surly like this."
"I'll be more than surly if the Angel attacks while we're walking around, or if some pipes or ductwork fall on top of us in the chaos."
"Come on; the odds of that have to be a hundred million to one."
"Give or take an order of magnitude?"
"Shut up," she said with a dour expression, but at the same time, she pulled me by the shoulder, helping me squeeze through a narrow part channel between some pipes. "You know," she muttered, "I'm just going to ask some questions. If people knew what was coming, they wouldn't wait to get down here, right?"
I nodded.
"Are you okay with that?"
I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "With the sirens going off like that, who would stay in their own apartment right now anyway? Why do we have to be the ones to take care of this?"
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
Asuka rubbed my back, and she pulled on the hood of my sweatshirt. "Put this up," she said, "and put on your sunglasses. Nobody has to know. I'll do all the talking."
I nodded, and I hid behind a veil of green fabric and dark lenses, looking upon the dim world through a filter that was all the dimmer.
True to her word, Asuka did all the talking. She made a round through the whole utility plant, asking about the Tendo family. Did people know them? Did they know what they looked like? All that sort of thing.
Of course, the residents knew Asuka. The glimmer of realization lit up their eyes when they saw her, and even as I hid in a hood and sunglasses, I bet they knew who I was, too. But Asuka shrugged off their stares. "Do you know the Tendo, or not?" she asked one woman. "This isn't the time for staring. Spit it out!"
But no one in the utility plant had seen that family. Asuka and I even stood at the stair back to ground level for a while, inspecting every newcomer to the basement, but after fifteen minutes with no one else arriving, Asuka grew restless. If the family wasn't in the utility plant, they could still be on the way, and if the Angel attacked in that time…
"Maybe we should go take a look," she said, glancing up the stairwell to the ground floor.
"And if we don't find them?" I asked. "Then what?"
"Then we did all we could."
"Friends of theirs might not see it that way."
Asuka climbed the first step of the stair, not even looking to see if I'd follow. "Then they'd be wrong," she said.
That was Asuka all right—very black and white, very certain about things. Even to this day, I'm not sure if she actually thinks that way or, if instead, she just puts on a show of it to justify what she thinks is best. Either way, not everyone can do that, I think. Some people let their doubts get to them in situations like these, or worse—they make snap decisions on instinct instead, with lives hanging in the balance.
In any case, Asuka hiked upstairs without even ten seconds of hesitation, and I followed after her, holding on to my sunglasses as we went. We swept the stairs with our flashlights to see the way. It wasn't much of a climb to the fourth floor anyhow.
With darkness around us, our flashlights made the walls seem unnaturally white. They glowed and reflected light, drowning out the rest of the hallway in glare—at least until we angled our lights further down, at any rate. I learned quickly to shine the light on the carpet instead. The carpet was dark, so the light coming off it was gentler.
And as we walked on that carpet, dark fluid seeped from Asuka's shoe impressions.
"Asuka," I said.
She glanced over her shoulder. "What?"
"Look."
I shined my flashlight at Asuka's feet. Her white shoes were practically bleeding the stuff.
"God!" Asuka kicked some of the LCL off, splattering it on the walls. "Somebody think it was clever to track all this in?" She waved for me to follow. "Come on, Shinji. I'm not getting much more of this goo on me. Let's go!"
She ran down the hallway, and I jogged after her, flashing my light on the door numbers. 434, 436, 438…at last, 446. Asuka stopped dead in her tracks there, shining her flashlight on the doorknob.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Asuka touched the doorknob with her pinky finger, and the door creaked open. She flicked her flashlight to the threshold, where a trail of LCL led from inside to the hallway carpet.
"We should go," I said. "There's nobody left inside. There can't be."
Asuka frowned, and the spot of her flashlight made small circles as she thought. "You sure about that?"
"Asuka…"
She crept inside, shining her flashlight at every corner or niche. I sighed, and I followed after her.
A wooden entryway led to the main room. Around the dinner table were three sets of plates and cushions. There were even some chopsticks and rice still left there. I shined my flashlight under the table, finding nothing but dust.
"Don't worry about that." Asuka waved her flashlight across the floor, casting light on a trail of amber droplets. They led through the main room, into the rear of the apartment. Asuka motioned to me to follow, and she took the lead. Each step she took was slow and careful—one foot in front of the other, from a three-quarters crouch.
We tracked the trail of LCL into a bedroom. A whipping wind poured in through a shattered window. It howled and roared, spitting drops of LCL onto the walls.
Despite the wind, the room felt damp and muggy. Humidity clung to my skin, and my nose went slick with sweat and oil.
Where was all that humidity coming from, you ask? The bed. It was dripping LCL onto the floor and soaked throughout. It was like someone had taken a two-liter bottle of the stuff and poured it all on the mattress. That's how sopping wet it was.
And sitting atop this dripping heap was a stuffed bear, with a white patch of fur tinted orange-yellow from the LCL.
Asuka trotted around the bed, checking beneath it. She slid the closet door open gently, flashing her light through a half-dozen plaid skirts and powder-blue blouses, but her search came up empty, save for a picture frame that she plucked from the dresser.
"Take a look," she said.
The frame was metallic, copper in color with engraved ridges. The subjects were a woman, a teenaged boy, and a younger girl, all posed with snow-capped mountains in the distance.
"It's pretty, isn't it?" said Asuka. "It'd be a shame if a family like that just disappeared, with no one ever knowing what happened to them."
I put the picture frame back on the dresser. "Let's hurry. It's drafty in here."
She put her hand up to her forehead in a faux salute. "Yes, Commander Ikari."
With a wink, Asuka headed back out to the hallway, following the trail of LCL to the washroom. Asuka's flashlight scanned over the sink and mirror, and the light reflected off a half-dozen hygienic tools that had been scattered over the floor: a nail file, a pair of nail clippers, a hair dryer, and so on. All of them shined with dried LCL splattered on top of them.
And further into the washroom, that LCL thickened into a quivering puddle. That puddle enveloped a pair of washroom slippers, a blue bathrobe, stained white socks…
"Shinji."
"What?"
Asuka shined her light on the door to the bath proper. It was a couple centimeters open, with trails of LCL running down its height.
"You want me to get it?" she asked.
I shook my head, and I drew the kitchen knife from my sweatshirt pocket. I shined my light on the gap, turning my body back and forth to move the flashlight in my sling-bound hand. I stuck the nail file into the gap, and with it, I forced the door open!
Revealing nothing but a half-full tub of water.
"Jesus Christ!" Asuka let out a heavy breath. "People should never leave their doors closed like that!"
"So people like us will know that there isn't a monster hiding behind it?"
"Yes, that! Exactly that!"
There was nothing else to find in that washroom, but I kept the knife out just in case.
We scoured the rest of the apartment over the next fifteen minutes, finding a pile of LCL-soaked clothes in the kitchen and another within the sheets of the sopping wet bed we'd seen earlier. Three piles of clothes—that accounted for everyone in the apartment. As for who or what had done this, Asuka had a few theories:
"Maybe it's not the Angel's work," she said as we were leaving. "Maybe those Seele wackos found a way to replicate what First did."
We entered the main stairwell again, and our voices echoed throughout the building.
"How would they do that?" I asked her.
"Beats me. But if there's an Angel here, and if Misato is able to build another Eva, it's not out of the realm of possibility."
I opened my mouth to speak, but a clunk-clunk-clunk sound reverberated through the stairwell from above.
Asuka turned her light upward. "Somebody's here," she whispered.
The heavy, almost metallic footseps remained steady. Asuka climbed up a flight, and her light scanned across something. She didn't catch it, but the glow cast the thing's shadow—a deformed, inhuman shadow.
"Asuka…"
The shadow's master jumped over a stairwell railing and dashed down the staircase above us.
I tugged on Asuka's sleeve. "Go?"
"Yeah, go!" she said, taking off. "Let's go!"
We raced down the stairs. Asuka slid on a railing but tumbled and slammed into a wall. Her flashlight clattered and blinked out, and we left it behind. The last I saw of it, the creature must've kicked it as it passed, for the light spun end over end as it fell down the stairwell shaft.
On the basement floor, Asuka slammed the stairwell door shut behind me.
"Hey, we need something to block the door!"
The residents looked back at us indifferently. No one even moved.
"I'm serious!" cried Asuka. "There's a thing coming; it—"
The doorknob turned; the creature reached the gap with its hand—a "hand" of long, needle-like fingers, arranged radially like a starfish. They gnashed together like an insect's jaws.
"Eugh!" Asuka threw her weight against the door, and I joined her, trying to shove the door shut. "We need some help here!" she yelled.
At last, some of our neighbors came to help. A man and a woman ran up and started pushing back on the door, too; we pinched the creature's arm inside the gap, and it gave off this incoherent shriek, too high in pitch for any of us to make sense of. The sound pierced us, and Asuka threw her shoulder against the door, so she could cover an ear with her hand. The door inched wider, and the creature's fingertips glowed with a rainbow light.
I turned the knife over in my left hand and stabbed!
"Go back where you came from!" I yelled, and I drove the knife into the fleshy part of the creature's arm. It shrieked, recoiling, and the arm retreated.
With that, a couple residents dragged a crate into place and sat on it, keeping the door closed.
For the moment, at least, for even as they sat there, the creature banged and pounded on the outside, and if you looked hard enough at the metal door, you might've seen a slight dent.
Looking back, I realize now that Second and Third Impact left a great scar on us—on Japan, and on humanity as a whole. I don't mean just the people who died and left us—though that affected us, too. I mean how prepared we were for disasters, how we'd come to expect them to happen—maybe not in our minds, but in our hearts.
I saw it that night, as the bloody rain fell outside. Asuka and I headed down to the basement utility plant, and there, we found our neighbors taking refuge. Residents camped out under pipes or near water boilers. They filled every nook and cranny, sitting with backpacks or luggage full of the essentials—crackers, water bottles, and the like. A network of lanterns lit the maze-like room, casting the whole floor in an artificial white glow. One of the residents had set up a radio for updates and news, not that it was very helpful:
"Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates to this notice will be issued every quarter-hour. Repeat: this is a precautionary safety notice. Do not be alarmed; this is only a precaution. Take shelter away from windows or exterior walls. Do not go outside until the all-clear notice is given. Updates will be issued every quarter-hour—"
You get the idea. The reactions to this message were about as you'd expect, too:
"Precautionary for what?" said a teenaged boy by the radio. "What's so dangerous that they can't even tell us what's happening?"
"I'm sure the government would tell us what's going on if it made sense to do so," said the boy's mother.
"The same government that lied to us about the Angel attacks?"
"No, no, it's a different government now."
We were prepared for disasters, but that didn't mean we accepted them. There's an undeniable weight to it, the resignation that your fate is out of your control and that the best you can do is cope. Some of the residents set up games to pass the time—I spotted a group of four at mahjong and another pair halfway through a game of go. Others read books or comics by the poor light of flashlights or lanterns. What else could we do?
Asuka and I settled into a damp spot under some leaking pipes—I'm sure that had nothing to do with why that spot was open—and sat down with the rest of our neighbors to watch, listen, and wait.
Or at least, that's what I did. Asuka had other ideas. She propped up a writing pad on her knees and wedged a flashlight between some pipes to keep light on the pad as she wrote. I peered over to look at one point, but all I could make out was a mix of German and mathematics—an incomprehensible combination if I'd ever seen one.
"It's simple," said Asuka. "If it rains about one centimeter of LCL in total, as measured by a rain gauge, then all you need to know is the total area being rained on to estimate the volume of the Angel, give or take an order of magnitude."
"And how big is that?" I asked.
"What?"
"How big is the Angel, then?"
Asuka frowned, and she twirled a pencil between her fingers. "Well, if you say Japan is 3000 kilometers by 1500 kilometers, we're talking about something maybe 5 kilometers in diameter?" Asuka pursed her lips, and she put an eraser to the piece of paper. "No, that can't be. Must be off by an order of magnitude somewhere…"
But at least she tried. Even in captivity like this, Asuka was trying to figure out something about our situation. The most I could do was watch and listen. I watched her jot down estimates of rain gauges and city areas. I listened to our neighbors talk about petty, meaningless things—like who had died recently in a daytime drama, or which of their neighbors set off the smoke alarm that week.
"It was the Tendo family for sure." One of the residents near us talked with her family in a low voice. "No sense of urgency with them. Have you seen seen them down here yet?"
Asuka took notice of that. She put her pencil down and got up, approaching the other family. Honestly, that was so impolite of her, and she was always like that. Maybe that's what people do in Germany, or in the West, but if you do stuff like that here, people are going to be annoyed with you.
Then again, Asuka was never one to care much about that. If there was something she wanted to know, she'd ask about it, and she did there. She went up to the other family next to us and said,
"Someone you know hasn't come down yet?"
Our neighbors took one look at her and exchanged a few glances. Even in the dim light, Asuka's bright red hair was hard to miss. Still, the mother said, "I'm sure they're on their way down soon. I'm sorry if we were too loud."
Asuka shrugged. "You weren't, really. What was the name? Tendo? And what room are they in?"
The mother stiffened.
"I'm not asking your names or anything."
The mother and her children exchanged some glances, and at last, she said, "They're in 446."
"Great, thanks!" Asuka tucked her notepad under her arm and set off with a flashlight.
"Where are you going?" I asked.
"Looking for some people named Tendo. It sounds like they might not have taken the air raid siren seriously. Maybe because they don't really know what it's about, you know?"
"But, but, what am I supposed to do?"
"You could stay here, if you want? Would be easier that way. Watch our stuff, yeah?"
I frowned at that, and I handed Asuka's knapsack over to her as I put on my own backpack. Asuka smiled slyly as she slung the knapsack onto her back.
"You know, I like it when you get surly like this."
"I'll be more than surly if the Angel attacks while we're walking around, or if some pipes or ductwork fall on top of us in the chaos."
"Come on; the odds of that have to be a hundred million to one."
"Give or take an order of magnitude?"
"Shut up," she said with a dour expression, but at the same time, she pulled me by the shoulder, helping me squeeze through a narrow part channel between some pipes. "You know," she muttered, "I'm just going to ask some questions. If people knew what was coming, they wouldn't wait to get down here, right?"
I nodded.
"Are you okay with that?"
I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "With the sirens going off like that, who would stay in their own apartment right now anyway? Why do we have to be the ones to take care of this?"
"That's not an answer."
"I know."
Asuka rubbed my back, and she pulled on the hood of my sweatshirt. "Put this up," she said, "and put on your sunglasses. Nobody has to know. I'll do all the talking."
I nodded, and I hid behind a veil of green fabric and dark lenses, looking upon the dim world through a filter that was all the dimmer.
True to her word, Asuka did all the talking. She made a round through the whole utility plant, asking about the Tendo family. Did people know them? Did they know what they looked like? All that sort of thing.
Of course, the residents knew Asuka. The glimmer of realization lit up their eyes when they saw her, and even as I hid in a hood and sunglasses, I bet they knew who I was, too. But Asuka shrugged off their stares. "Do you know the Tendo, or not?" she asked one woman. "This isn't the time for staring. Spit it out!"
But no one in the utility plant had seen that family. Asuka and I even stood at the stair back to ground level for a while, inspecting every newcomer to the basement, but after fifteen minutes with no one else arriving, Asuka grew restless. If the family wasn't in the utility plant, they could still be on the way, and if the Angel attacked in that time…
"Maybe we should go take a look," she said, glancing up the stairwell to the ground floor.
"And if we don't find them?" I asked. "Then what?"
"Then we did all we could."
"Friends of theirs might not see it that way."
Asuka climbed the first step of the stair, not even looking to see if I'd follow. "Then they'd be wrong," she said.
That was Asuka all right—very black and white, very certain about things. Even to this day, I'm not sure if she actually thinks that way or, if instead, she just puts on a show of it to justify what she thinks is best. Either way, not everyone can do that, I think. Some people let their doubts get to them in situations like these, or worse—they make snap decisions on instinct instead, with lives hanging in the balance.
In any case, Asuka hiked upstairs without even ten seconds of hesitation, and I followed after her, holding on to my sunglasses as we went. We swept the stairs with our flashlights to see the way. It wasn't much of a climb to the fourth floor anyhow.
With darkness around us, our flashlights made the walls seem unnaturally white. They glowed and reflected light, drowning out the rest of the hallway in glare—at least until we angled our lights further down, at any rate. I learned quickly to shine the light on the carpet instead. The carpet was dark, so the light coming off it was gentler.
And as we walked on that carpet, dark fluid seeped from Asuka's shoe impressions.
"Asuka," I said.
She glanced over her shoulder. "What?"
"Look."
I shined my flashlight at Asuka's feet. Her white shoes were practically bleeding the stuff.
"God!" Asuka kicked some of the LCL off, splattering it on the walls. "Somebody think it was clever to track all this in?" She waved for me to follow. "Come on, Shinji. I'm not getting much more of this goo on me. Let's go!"
She ran down the hallway, and I jogged after her, flashing my light on the door numbers. 434, 436, 438…at last, 446. Asuka stopped dead in her tracks there, shining her flashlight on the doorknob.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
Asuka touched the doorknob with her pinky finger, and the door creaked open. She flicked her flashlight to the threshold, where a trail of LCL led from inside to the hallway carpet.
"We should go," I said. "There's nobody left inside. There can't be."
Asuka frowned, and the spot of her flashlight made small circles as she thought. "You sure about that?"
"Asuka…"
She crept inside, shining her flashlight at every corner or niche. I sighed, and I followed after her.
A wooden entryway led to the main room. Around the dinner table were three sets of plates and cushions. There were even some chopsticks and rice still left there. I shined my flashlight under the table, finding nothing but dust.
"Don't worry about that." Asuka waved her flashlight across the floor, casting light on a trail of amber droplets. They led through the main room, into the rear of the apartment. Asuka motioned to me to follow, and she took the lead. Each step she took was slow and careful—one foot in front of the other, from a three-quarters crouch.
We tracked the trail of LCL into a bedroom. A whipping wind poured in through a shattered window. It howled and roared, spitting drops of LCL onto the walls.
Despite the wind, the room felt damp and muggy. Humidity clung to my skin, and my nose went slick with sweat and oil.
Where was all that humidity coming from, you ask? The bed. It was dripping LCL onto the floor and soaked throughout. It was like someone had taken a two-liter bottle of the stuff and poured it all on the mattress. That's how sopping wet it was.
And sitting atop this dripping heap was a stuffed bear, with a white patch of fur tinted orange-yellow from the LCL.
Asuka trotted around the bed, checking beneath it. She slid the closet door open gently, flashing her light through a half-dozen plaid skirts and powder-blue blouses, but her search came up empty, save for a picture frame that she plucked from the dresser.
"Take a look," she said.
The frame was metallic, copper in color with engraved ridges. The subjects were a woman, a teenaged boy, and a younger girl, all posed with snow-capped mountains in the distance.
"It's pretty, isn't it?" said Asuka. "It'd be a shame if a family like that just disappeared, with no one ever knowing what happened to them."
I put the picture frame back on the dresser. "Let's hurry. It's drafty in here."
She put her hand up to her forehead in a faux salute. "Yes, Commander Ikari."
With a wink, Asuka headed back out to the hallway, following the trail of LCL to the washroom. Asuka's flashlight scanned over the sink and mirror, and the light reflected off a half-dozen hygienic tools that had been scattered over the floor: a nail file, a pair of nail clippers, a hair dryer, and so on. All of them shined with dried LCL splattered on top of them.
And further into the washroom, that LCL thickened into a quivering puddle. That puddle enveloped a pair of washroom slippers, a blue bathrobe, stained white socks…
"Shinji."
"What?"
Asuka shined her light on the door to the bath proper. It was a couple centimeters open, with trails of LCL running down its height.
"You want me to get it?" she asked.
I shook my head, and I drew the kitchen knife from my sweatshirt pocket. I shined my light on the gap, turning my body back and forth to move the flashlight in my sling-bound hand. I stuck the nail file into the gap, and with it, I forced the door open!
Revealing nothing but a half-full tub of water.
"Jesus Christ!" Asuka let out a heavy breath. "People should never leave their doors closed like that!"
"So people like us will know that there isn't a monster hiding behind it?"
"Yes, that! Exactly that!"
There was nothing else to find in that washroom, but I kept the knife out just in case.
We scoured the rest of the apartment over the next fifteen minutes, finding a pile of LCL-soaked clothes in the kitchen and another within the sheets of the sopping wet bed we'd seen earlier. Three piles of clothes—that accounted for everyone in the apartment. As for who or what had done this, Asuka had a few theories:
"Maybe it's not the Angel's work," she said as we were leaving. "Maybe those Seele wackos found a way to replicate what First did."
We entered the main stairwell again, and our voices echoed throughout the building.
"How would they do that?" I asked her.
"Beats me. But if there's an Angel here, and if Misato is able to build another Eva, it's not out of the realm of possibility."
I opened my mouth to speak, but a clunk-clunk-clunk sound reverberated through the stairwell from above.
Asuka turned her light upward. "Somebody's here," she whispered.
The heavy, almost metallic footseps remained steady. Asuka climbed up a flight, and her light scanned across something. She didn't catch it, but the glow cast the thing's shadow—a deformed, inhuman shadow.
"Asuka…"
The shadow's master jumped over a stairwell railing and dashed down the staircase above us.
I tugged on Asuka's sleeve. "Go?"
"Yeah, go!" she said, taking off. "Let's go!"
We raced down the stairs. Asuka slid on a railing but tumbled and slammed into a wall. Her flashlight clattered and blinked out, and we left it behind. The last I saw of it, the creature must've kicked it as it passed, for the light spun end over end as it fell down the stairwell shaft.
On the basement floor, Asuka slammed the stairwell door shut behind me.
"Hey, we need something to block the door!"
The residents looked back at us indifferently. No one even moved.
"I'm serious!" cried Asuka. "There's a thing coming; it—"
The doorknob turned; the creature reached the gap with its hand—a "hand" of long, needle-like fingers, arranged radially like a starfish. They gnashed together like an insect's jaws.
"Eugh!" Asuka threw her weight against the door, and I joined her, trying to shove the door shut. "We need some help here!" she yelled.
At last, some of our neighbors came to help. A man and a woman ran up and started pushing back on the door, too; we pinched the creature's arm inside the gap, and it gave off this incoherent shriek, too high in pitch for any of us to make sense of. The sound pierced us, and Asuka threw her shoulder against the door, so she could cover an ear with her hand. The door inched wider, and the creature's fingertips glowed with a rainbow light.
I turned the knife over in my left hand and stabbed!
"Go back where you came from!" I yelled, and I drove the knife into the fleshy part of the creature's arm. It shrieked, recoiling, and the arm retreated.
With that, a couple residents dragged a crate into place and sat on it, keeping the door closed.
For the moment, at least, for even as they sat there, the creature banged and pounded on the outside, and if you looked hard enough at the metal door, you might've seen a slight dent.
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Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
The plot thickens.
What your story suffers a little from is talking heads - it tears you out of the immersion.
Secondly, you'll need someone with enough time on their hands to look your pieces over for (in your case minor) errors before you post.
What your story suffers a little from is talking heads - it tears you out of the immersion.
Secondly, you'll need someone with enough time on their hands to look your pieces over for (in your case minor) errors before you post.
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Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
@Ranma-sensei Yeah, reducing dialogue density is one of my revision goals. It's something I'll probably do over another editing pass. Thanks for letting me know it's something that stuck out.
Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
It's not the dialog density, but the talking without description I'm referring to. It makes it both hard to follow who is speaking when, and also impossible to always know what the characters are doing.
Talking heads should be kept down to only a few, and ideally only be used as literary vessels.
Talking heads should be kept down to only a few, and ideally only be used as literary vessels.
1.5 The Governance of Men
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
5. The Governance of Men
It's amazing what people can do when their lives are on the line. They'll throw their own bodies at maintenance closets to break the doors open. They'll rip apart wooden pallets with their bare hands, using the boards to barricade themselves.
They worked tirelessly—and so did the enemy. The creature gathered friends to help break our defenses. As we collaborated and discussed defensive strategies, the creatures exchanged shrieks and squeals. As we piled anything and everything in the basement to barricade the door, they used anything and everything in the building to break our defense. At one point, they banged on the door with metal and plaster. Sparks showered the base of the door, casting an irregular light through the gap there. The creatures wedged pieces of stairwell railing underneath, using them as levers. Some of our neighbors took apart a battery-powered lantern and rigged it to deliver a mild shock. A creature yelped in pain and dropped the railing piece straight away, but that didn't stop them for long. Eventually, they settled for just beating down the door with some kind of ram. The steady, unyielding rhythm of the ram became the ticking clock for our demise. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang.
Asuka knew the situation was untenable. She made an appeal to the residents: "Does anyone have a radio?" she called out. "Anything at all?"
"Here!" A man pushed his way to the front of the room, holding up a satellite phone. "There's just, you know, one problem."
He showed us the face of the phone. No signal.
Going higher up in the building was right out. There was another door to the rest of the building, sure, and once the first barricade had been finished, our neighbors had started building up another at that exit as well, but we wer uneasy about using it. No one wanted to risk running into one of those things in tight quarters. The stairwell offered too few options for retreat or defense.
That left outside. There was an exterior door that we worked to block off as well, but we hadn't heard any creatures outside trying to break it down, and overall, we felt better about the idea of trying to escape through the alley.
For that reason, Asuka asked the group for volunteers. "Is there anyone who'd be willing to go with this man? Anyone with combat experience who'd help protect him? For your families' sakes?"
"I would." A woman stepped forward, in short hair and with a silver necklace. "Whatever it takes to protect ourselves from those things out there."
"Good. Anyone else?"
The total lack of movement in the room said no, and Asuka scowled.
"Really? You can hear those things coming."
Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. The door budged slightly, and Asuka kicked at a box to press back against it.
"You see it?" she said, pointing at the pile of junk. "The enemy is at the gate, and we have nothing else to stop them. You can't just sit there!"
"If we go outside, we make ourselves targets," said a man in a business suit. "The best thing to do is make ourselves too difficult to attack. Let those creatures go after easier prey. We just have to stall until the police or SDF can get to us."
Asuka shook her head at that. "How are they even going to know we're here, that we need help, if we don't tell them?"
The man in the business suit ignored Asuka, taking apart a piece of metal pipe and placing it with the pile of boxes and other scrap.
"That's the most useful thing we can do right now," he said, "unless you think you can kill one of those things with a pipe. That's all we have: pipes and wrenches and screwdrivers."
Well, that wasn't true at all. We had hammers, too. If nothing else, the utility plant had a wide array of tools to use, once we'd broken into some of the maintenance closets. Asuka armed the woman volunteer with a firefighter's axe. Asuka herself took a bottle of hot water and a hammer.
"You're going, too?" I asked.
"Of course." She shrugged it off like she was going to the store. "Someone has to have the pull to get help over here fast. If they know it's me on the line, that should do something." Asuka squeezed the water bottle, spraying a trail of water and steam across the floor. "Or do you want to go instead?"
I shook my head at that. "You'd leave me alone? Here?"
She touched my shoulder and smiled. "There's no way I'm letting a bunch of aliens stop me from getting back here. Just hold the fort while I'm gone."
Hold the fort. That meant keeping everyone calm and steady as the creatures beat down our barricade. That meant trying to convince people of what to do when the boxes budged.
My eyes narrowed a bit, as I looked over the mass of people in the plant—the families who settled under ducts or crammed themselves between boilers and water treatment machines. "But why can't I go with you?" I asked.
Asuka eyed me from the side. "You want to go?"
"Yeah." I took my knapsack off and wrapped the straps around one arm, holding it as a shield. "I'm ready to go."
She poked her fingers at my sling-bound shoulder. I winced.
"You're not 100%," she said, rubbing the wound to soothe it. "Just relax; I'll be fine. Keep everyone's spirits high. We'll be back before you know it."
I gulped, and I nodded. "Okay. If you say so."
The residents broke down the barricade on the external door to the building's alleyway, and Asuka, the man, and the woman headed out, into the night.
While Asuka and the others searched to make contact with the outside world, the residents focused their efforts on bolstering our defenses. In Asuka's stead, much of that responsibility fell elsewhere. At first, there was some confusion about what to do and who would manage the situation, but after some time, a leader emerged.
"We'll need something stronger than this." A woman in a business suit pulled out a piece of plastic pipe from the main door barricade, and two levels of piled up junk shifted and collapsed. "Let's get some metal pipes here," she said, tossing the plastic one aside. "There's no time to waste."
The woman was a cabinet minister: the Minister of Consumer Affairs and Food Safety—or food unsafety as we had said in the soup kitchen sometimes. Though her qualifications to reinforce a defensive "bunker" like ours may have been suspect, she didn't hesitate to dole out responsibilities among the residents.
But were the residents listening? That was another story. Sure, there were a few that piled on crates, pipes, or ductwork for the barricade, but many others sat around and watched without interest or care.
"We're gonna die here no matter what you do," said one man, who preferred to read a book by flashlight than lift a finger to help with the barricade.
The cabinet minister took exception to that. Hands on her hips, she stormed up to the man with the book. "Help's on the way," she said. "We could use someone else working to keep us alive long enough for that help to get here."
The man eyed the cabinet minister, and he very deliberately turned a page in his book, continuing to read.
Many others in the room were the same way. A mother declined to help, wanting to stay with her children and keep them from panicking. Others still put in only a token effort: work on the exterior door barricade stalled as two residents argued over the use of some paint cans. The two men bickered incessantly for the better part of fifteen minutes while the other residents around merely sat down and looked away.
To her credit, the cabinet minister recognized the problem. She did her best to intervene in the dispute, but her efforts were in vain: she was an administrator, not a diplomat. When the two men refused to back down, the cabinet minister tried to pick up the slack herself, but she couldn't keep that up for long. She wasn't a young woman: stacking up a bunch of paint cans didn't agree with her back. Organizing and leading were the things she could do.
But persuading people to follow her—to heed her call? That was difficult, too.
The minister pulled me aside at one point to talk about just that. We ducked between a pair of boilers, and she said,
"You know, I think we could use your help."
I offered her my lame arm. "I could try, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be."
The minister laughed. "That's not what I mean." She gestured to the rest of the room—mostly of our fellow residents camping out under lantern light. "Look, people are scared right now. Scared people don't work well and don't think clearly. We need all hands on deck."
"You're absolutely right, but…" I shrugged again. "What am I supposed to do about that?"
The minister looked over her glasses at me. "I'm not asking you to get up and lead the troops into battle yourself. Just talk to people. Tell them this is important. Tell them they can make a difference, like you did."
My mouth hung open at that, but the minister wasn't about to listen to an argument. She slapped me on my shoulder—my bad shoulder, and I winced when she did—and she went on her way, seeing to the construction of some traps, should the enemy breach the barricades.
I pulled on my collar and rolled my neck. I let out a breath, and I approached one of the families near the boiler: a man, a woman, and two children. The woman was reading a story about a stuffed rabbit to the children, but I caught the man's eye and crouched down beside him.
"Hello," I whispered. "Uh, are you all doing well?"
"Yes, thank you," said the man. He had a thermos in hand, and he swung it in small circles, letting the liquid slosh inside. "The children are a little frightened, but their mother is keeping them calm, I think." He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled and nodded in turn, all without missing a line in the story. "What can we do for you?" asked the man.
"We need volunteers to work on the defenses." I pointed out the entrances to the floor. "Barricades, traps—we need every able-bodied person not otherwise occupied."
The man frowned, looking at me from the side. "These are my children, Ikari. This is my family!"
"I know, I know," I said, showing him both hands to calm him. "But you can do something to protect them."
"Can I?" The man huffed. "I don't know anything about building things. I don't know anything about traps." He felt the grit on the utility plant floor and rubbed it between his fingers. "Here we are, reduced to grime and dirt and under siege from who-knows-what. What am I going to be able to do, really?"
"I—I—" I bowed my head. "I don't know."
The man nodded at that and raised both eyebrows, punctuating his point. I got up, and I let him be.
It's true he wasn't strictly needed. No one person—no particular person—was needed. And with that attitude, that fatalism, he might not have been that useful anyway.
I went back to our stuff—my spot with Asuka's and my bags. I camped out there on a beach blanket under the leaky pipe. I sat with my arms over my knees, taking up as little space as possible, and I waited.
I didn't talk to anyone else.
Until there was a banging on the alleyway door.
"Hey, it's us! Let us in!" came the muffled call.
A gaggle of residents, led by the cabinet minister, gathered at the barricade. The cabinet minister herself put an ear to the wall. "What's all that noise out there?"
"It's Soryu!" said the muffled voice. "We made contact with SDF, but the creatures are after us! Open the door!"
The cabinet minister started pulling paint cans from the stack, but she was alone: the other residents were like an army of garden gnomes.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Let's go; we've got neighbors out there!"
I joined the minister, pulling paint cans off the stack one at a time, but no one else stepped up to help.
"Please!" I said to them, putting two cans down to the side of the door. "This is my girlfriend; these are our friends and neighbors! They have the satphone! Please!"
One woman broke ranks with the rest of our neighbors, taking down some wood planks from the other side of the barricade, but for a long time—too long—it was just the three of us trying to take down the blockage. The cabinet minister had us work from the side, trying to cut a way through as soon as possible, but moving all that material took effort, and time.
"Hurry up!" yelled Asuka. "They're coming!"
We shifted one large barrel of industrial soap, and that cleared the way for the door to swing open—not a lot, but enough for a person to squeeze through.
"There, it's open!" the minister shouted back. "Come in, come in!"
The man with the satphone came first. It was a tight fit for him; the door's latch ripped his shirt, but the minister and the woman bystander took him by the arm and yanked him through.
The woman who'd gone outside came next. She slipped through more easily.
Asuka was last. She popped in without any trouble at all.
But something came after her. It darted halfway through the door, and though the woman who'd gone outside tried to close the way, the door slammed against the creature's body and bounced off.
That was my first good look at the thing: a white, pasty imitation of a man. It stood a head taller than anyone else there; its hulking body was pure muscle. It looked like it could rip a man in two with its bare hands.
And it had no mouth or nose—just a bony purple mask with five eyes.
The necklace woman tried to push again on the door, hoping to pin the beast there, but it had a hand free.
"Urk." A needle-like finger went through the woman's head.
Most of the residents ran or screamed, but the minister, the satphone man, Asuka, and I came to the woman's aid. Strangely, the wound didn't bleed; the "finger" was so narrow and sharp that the stab was like nothing at all. The woman's eyes still moved.
And she shrieked. "Ah…AHH!"
POP!
She burst like a water balloon. She burst into reddish goo, and her firefighter's axe clattered on the floor.
Then there was nothing and no one holding the door.
Asuka raised a hammer high in the air; she yelled and hollered and charged at the creature. The beast swiped at her, and its needle-like claws caught a tuft of Asuka's hair. Asuka stumbled; she hammered on the creature's arm and threw her body against the beast, pinning its wrist against the wall.
Others joined in the fray, too: the satphone man took up the dropped firefighter's axe and gashed the creature's shoulder.
Howling in agony, the creature presed a hand to its wound, and it melted. It dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL, splashing my shoes and Asuka's alike with droplets of reddish-orange goo.
The group relaxed. The satphone man turned his axe over on its head and leaned on it like it was a walking stick. Asuka dropped her hammer and let out a heavy breath. She went to shut the alleyway door.
But the puddle of LCL was moving. It frothed and bubbled. The creature grew back out of it fully formed—and whole.
Asuka tried to shove the thing back out. "Don't you know how to die?" she cried.
She didn't have leverage, though; she struggled to push it back through the doorway.
So I ran in there. I barreled into the thing and drove it outside. In the alley, the moon and the building's shadow casting us in alternating light and black, I wrestled with the creature. "Shut the door!" I yelled, pinning the creature on its back. "Don't let it back in!"
"Don't be stupid!" cried Asuka. "We're not leaving you with that thing!"
"Asuka, don't argue! Just—urk."
I shuddered.
Something hurt me.
Something hurt in my head.
It was one of those needle fingers. It went through my forehead, just above and between my eyes.
The creature's gaze betrayed nothing. Its eyes expressed no emotion; it didn't even have a mouth to smile with.
But in that moment, I was connected with it. The thing injected terror, loss, and pain into my mind: visions of death on lonely battlefields, sounds of babies crying without parents to care for them.
The sight of my father, staring at me and not bothering to fake a smile.
I shut my eyes and groaned, but then, I heard something else.
"Ikari."
The voice of a ghost. The voice of Rei Ayanami.
Ayanami stood before me, in her green and white middle school uniform, in black socks halfway to her knees and white shoes. It was a ridiculous image. It didn't belong there, but there she was.
And unlike the times I'd seen her before, this vision of Ayanami was different.
She offered a hand to me.
Her expression was no different—blank, like an unflinching observer studying traffic patterns or insect migrations. But still, her hand was there, and I accepted it. I reached out for her ghostly, glowing hand. Our fingertips met.
Squish!
My arm burst into fluid, and the rest of me followed soon after. The world went black.
The world went black, but I still heard something:
A humming sound.
It was the rhythmic, mechanical hum of a movie projector.
The world had gone black, but it was lighter than true darkness: it was the black that you only see on a movie screen that is still being lit up, even though there's nothing on the film.
I was sitting. The seats were velvety and dark magenta in color. The cup holders were black plastic, with a rough, bumpy texture on the outside.
I started; I pushed up to leave, but a hand caught me. A hand squeezed my own.
It was a pale hand, paler than any person's should be.
"It's all right." That was Ayanami; she sat next to me. "You're all right. You're safe."
I stammered. "But—but—what's going on? What is this place?"
She smiled. "You're here with me now."
"Ayanami…"
I trailed off, staring at her, but the thing that looked like Rei Ayanami paid me no mind. She waved a hand, and the movie screen came to life. It showed a moonlight alleyway with a puddle of LCL near a door. A green hooded sweatshirt, a sling, and a knife lay in the puddle. A white creature stalked about a nearby stairwell, looking for prey.
"Don't be afraid," she said, watching the scene. "You don't have to go back there anymore."
It's amazing what people can do when their lives are on the line. They'll throw their own bodies at maintenance closets to break the doors open. They'll rip apart wooden pallets with their bare hands, using the boards to barricade themselves.
They worked tirelessly—and so did the enemy. The creature gathered friends to help break our defenses. As we collaborated and discussed defensive strategies, the creatures exchanged shrieks and squeals. As we piled anything and everything in the basement to barricade the door, they used anything and everything in the building to break our defense. At one point, they banged on the door with metal and plaster. Sparks showered the base of the door, casting an irregular light through the gap there. The creatures wedged pieces of stairwell railing underneath, using them as levers. Some of our neighbors took apart a battery-powered lantern and rigged it to deliver a mild shock. A creature yelped in pain and dropped the railing piece straight away, but that didn't stop them for long. Eventually, they settled for just beating down the door with some kind of ram. The steady, unyielding rhythm of the ram became the ticking clock for our demise. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. Beat, beat. Bang.
Asuka knew the situation was untenable. She made an appeal to the residents: "Does anyone have a radio?" she called out. "Anything at all?"
"Here!" A man pushed his way to the front of the room, holding up a satellite phone. "There's just, you know, one problem."
He showed us the face of the phone. No signal.
Going higher up in the building was right out. There was another door to the rest of the building, sure, and once the first barricade had been finished, our neighbors had started building up another at that exit as well, but we wer uneasy about using it. No one wanted to risk running into one of those things in tight quarters. The stairwell offered too few options for retreat or defense.
That left outside. There was an exterior door that we worked to block off as well, but we hadn't heard any creatures outside trying to break it down, and overall, we felt better about the idea of trying to escape through the alley.
For that reason, Asuka asked the group for volunteers. "Is there anyone who'd be willing to go with this man? Anyone with combat experience who'd help protect him? For your families' sakes?"
"I would." A woman stepped forward, in short hair and with a silver necklace. "Whatever it takes to protect ourselves from those things out there."
"Good. Anyone else?"
The total lack of movement in the room said no, and Asuka scowled.
"Really? You can hear those things coming."
Bang. Beat, beat. Bang. The door budged slightly, and Asuka kicked at a box to press back against it.
"You see it?" she said, pointing at the pile of junk. "The enemy is at the gate, and we have nothing else to stop them. You can't just sit there!"
"If we go outside, we make ourselves targets," said a man in a business suit. "The best thing to do is make ourselves too difficult to attack. Let those creatures go after easier prey. We just have to stall until the police or SDF can get to us."
Asuka shook her head at that. "How are they even going to know we're here, that we need help, if we don't tell them?"
The man in the business suit ignored Asuka, taking apart a piece of metal pipe and placing it with the pile of boxes and other scrap.
"That's the most useful thing we can do right now," he said, "unless you think you can kill one of those things with a pipe. That's all we have: pipes and wrenches and screwdrivers."
Well, that wasn't true at all. We had hammers, too. If nothing else, the utility plant had a wide array of tools to use, once we'd broken into some of the maintenance closets. Asuka armed the woman volunteer with a firefighter's axe. Asuka herself took a bottle of hot water and a hammer.
"You're going, too?" I asked.
"Of course." She shrugged it off like she was going to the store. "Someone has to have the pull to get help over here fast. If they know it's me on the line, that should do something." Asuka squeezed the water bottle, spraying a trail of water and steam across the floor. "Or do you want to go instead?"
I shook my head at that. "You'd leave me alone? Here?"
She touched my shoulder and smiled. "There's no way I'm letting a bunch of aliens stop me from getting back here. Just hold the fort while I'm gone."
Hold the fort. That meant keeping everyone calm and steady as the creatures beat down our barricade. That meant trying to convince people of what to do when the boxes budged.
My eyes narrowed a bit, as I looked over the mass of people in the plant—the families who settled under ducts or crammed themselves between boilers and water treatment machines. "But why can't I go with you?" I asked.
Asuka eyed me from the side. "You want to go?"
"Yeah." I took my knapsack off and wrapped the straps around one arm, holding it as a shield. "I'm ready to go."
She poked her fingers at my sling-bound shoulder. I winced.
"You're not 100%," she said, rubbing the wound to soothe it. "Just relax; I'll be fine. Keep everyone's spirits high. We'll be back before you know it."
I gulped, and I nodded. "Okay. If you say so."
The residents broke down the barricade on the external door to the building's alleyway, and Asuka, the man, and the woman headed out, into the night.
While Asuka and the others searched to make contact with the outside world, the residents focused their efforts on bolstering our defenses. In Asuka's stead, much of that responsibility fell elsewhere. At first, there was some confusion about what to do and who would manage the situation, but after some time, a leader emerged.
"We'll need something stronger than this." A woman in a business suit pulled out a piece of plastic pipe from the main door barricade, and two levels of piled up junk shifted and collapsed. "Let's get some metal pipes here," she said, tossing the plastic one aside. "There's no time to waste."
The woman was a cabinet minister: the Minister of Consumer Affairs and Food Safety—or food unsafety as we had said in the soup kitchen sometimes. Though her qualifications to reinforce a defensive "bunker" like ours may have been suspect, she didn't hesitate to dole out responsibilities among the residents.
But were the residents listening? That was another story. Sure, there were a few that piled on crates, pipes, or ductwork for the barricade, but many others sat around and watched without interest or care.
"We're gonna die here no matter what you do," said one man, who preferred to read a book by flashlight than lift a finger to help with the barricade.
The cabinet minister took exception to that. Hands on her hips, she stormed up to the man with the book. "Help's on the way," she said. "We could use someone else working to keep us alive long enough for that help to get here."
The man eyed the cabinet minister, and he very deliberately turned a page in his book, continuing to read.
Many others in the room were the same way. A mother declined to help, wanting to stay with her children and keep them from panicking. Others still put in only a token effort: work on the exterior door barricade stalled as two residents argued over the use of some paint cans. The two men bickered incessantly for the better part of fifteen minutes while the other residents around merely sat down and looked away.
To her credit, the cabinet minister recognized the problem. She did her best to intervene in the dispute, but her efforts were in vain: she was an administrator, not a diplomat. When the two men refused to back down, the cabinet minister tried to pick up the slack herself, but she couldn't keep that up for long. She wasn't a young woman: stacking up a bunch of paint cans didn't agree with her back. Organizing and leading were the things she could do.
But persuading people to follow her—to heed her call? That was difficult, too.
The minister pulled me aside at one point to talk about just that. We ducked between a pair of boilers, and she said,
"You know, I think we could use your help."
I offered her my lame arm. "I could try, but I'm not sure how useful I'd be."
The minister laughed. "That's not what I mean." She gestured to the rest of the room—mostly of our fellow residents camping out under lantern light. "Look, people are scared right now. Scared people don't work well and don't think clearly. We need all hands on deck."
"You're absolutely right, but…" I shrugged again. "What am I supposed to do about that?"
The minister looked over her glasses at me. "I'm not asking you to get up and lead the troops into battle yourself. Just talk to people. Tell them this is important. Tell them they can make a difference, like you did."
My mouth hung open at that, but the minister wasn't about to listen to an argument. She slapped me on my shoulder—my bad shoulder, and I winced when she did—and she went on her way, seeing to the construction of some traps, should the enemy breach the barricades.
I pulled on my collar and rolled my neck. I let out a breath, and I approached one of the families near the boiler: a man, a woman, and two children. The woman was reading a story about a stuffed rabbit to the children, but I caught the man's eye and crouched down beside him.
"Hello," I whispered. "Uh, are you all doing well?"
"Yes, thank you," said the man. He had a thermos in hand, and he swung it in small circles, letting the liquid slosh inside. "The children are a little frightened, but their mother is keeping them calm, I think." He smiled at the woman, and the woman smiled and nodded in turn, all without missing a line in the story. "What can we do for you?" asked the man.
"We need volunteers to work on the defenses." I pointed out the entrances to the floor. "Barricades, traps—we need every able-bodied person not otherwise occupied."
The man frowned, looking at me from the side. "These are my children, Ikari. This is my family!"
"I know, I know," I said, showing him both hands to calm him. "But you can do something to protect them."
"Can I?" The man huffed. "I don't know anything about building things. I don't know anything about traps." He felt the grit on the utility plant floor and rubbed it between his fingers. "Here we are, reduced to grime and dirt and under siege from who-knows-what. What am I going to be able to do, really?"
"I—I—" I bowed my head. "I don't know."
The man nodded at that and raised both eyebrows, punctuating his point. I got up, and I let him be.
It's true he wasn't strictly needed. No one person—no particular person—was needed. And with that attitude, that fatalism, he might not have been that useful anyway.
I went back to our stuff—my spot with Asuka's and my bags. I camped out there on a beach blanket under the leaky pipe. I sat with my arms over my knees, taking up as little space as possible, and I waited.
I didn't talk to anyone else.
Until there was a banging on the alleyway door.
"Hey, it's us! Let us in!" came the muffled call.
A gaggle of residents, led by the cabinet minister, gathered at the barricade. The cabinet minister herself put an ear to the wall. "What's all that noise out there?"
"It's Soryu!" said the muffled voice. "We made contact with SDF, but the creatures are after us! Open the door!"
The cabinet minister started pulling paint cans from the stack, but she was alone: the other residents were like an army of garden gnomes.
"Hey!" she yelled. "Let's go; we've got neighbors out there!"
I joined the minister, pulling paint cans off the stack one at a time, but no one else stepped up to help.
"Please!" I said to them, putting two cans down to the side of the door. "This is my girlfriend; these are our friends and neighbors! They have the satphone! Please!"
One woman broke ranks with the rest of our neighbors, taking down some wood planks from the other side of the barricade, but for a long time—too long—it was just the three of us trying to take down the blockage. The cabinet minister had us work from the side, trying to cut a way through as soon as possible, but moving all that material took effort, and time.
"Hurry up!" yelled Asuka. "They're coming!"
We shifted one large barrel of industrial soap, and that cleared the way for the door to swing open—not a lot, but enough for a person to squeeze through.
"There, it's open!" the minister shouted back. "Come in, come in!"
The man with the satphone came first. It was a tight fit for him; the door's latch ripped his shirt, but the minister and the woman bystander took him by the arm and yanked him through.
The woman who'd gone outside came next. She slipped through more easily.
Asuka was last. She popped in without any trouble at all.
But something came after her. It darted halfway through the door, and though the woman who'd gone outside tried to close the way, the door slammed against the creature's body and bounced off.
That was my first good look at the thing: a white, pasty imitation of a man. It stood a head taller than anyone else there; its hulking body was pure muscle. It looked like it could rip a man in two with its bare hands.
And it had no mouth or nose—just a bony purple mask with five eyes.
The necklace woman tried to push again on the door, hoping to pin the beast there, but it had a hand free.
"Urk." A needle-like finger went through the woman's head.
Most of the residents ran or screamed, but the minister, the satphone man, Asuka, and I came to the woman's aid. Strangely, the wound didn't bleed; the "finger" was so narrow and sharp that the stab was like nothing at all. The woman's eyes still moved.
And she shrieked. "Ah…AHH!"
POP!
She burst like a water balloon. She burst into reddish goo, and her firefighter's axe clattered on the floor.
Then there was nothing and no one holding the door.
Asuka raised a hammer high in the air; she yelled and hollered and charged at the creature. The beast swiped at her, and its needle-like claws caught a tuft of Asuka's hair. Asuka stumbled; she hammered on the creature's arm and threw her body against the beast, pinning its wrist against the wall.
Others joined in the fray, too: the satphone man took up the dropped firefighter's axe and gashed the creature's shoulder.
Howling in agony, the creature presed a hand to its wound, and it melted. It dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL, splashing my shoes and Asuka's alike with droplets of reddish-orange goo.
The group relaxed. The satphone man turned his axe over on its head and leaned on it like it was a walking stick. Asuka dropped her hammer and let out a heavy breath. She went to shut the alleyway door.
But the puddle of LCL was moving. It frothed and bubbled. The creature grew back out of it fully formed—and whole.
Asuka tried to shove the thing back out. "Don't you know how to die?" she cried.
She didn't have leverage, though; she struggled to push it back through the doorway.
So I ran in there. I barreled into the thing and drove it outside. In the alley, the moon and the building's shadow casting us in alternating light and black, I wrestled with the creature. "Shut the door!" I yelled, pinning the creature on its back. "Don't let it back in!"
"Don't be stupid!" cried Asuka. "We're not leaving you with that thing!"
"Asuka, don't argue! Just—urk."
I shuddered.
Something hurt me.
Something hurt in my head.
It was one of those needle fingers. It went through my forehead, just above and between my eyes.
The creature's gaze betrayed nothing. Its eyes expressed no emotion; it didn't even have a mouth to smile with.
But in that moment, I was connected with it. The thing injected terror, loss, and pain into my mind: visions of death on lonely battlefields, sounds of babies crying without parents to care for them.
The sight of my father, staring at me and not bothering to fake a smile.
I shut my eyes and groaned, but then, I heard something else.
"Ikari."
The voice of a ghost. The voice of Rei Ayanami.
Ayanami stood before me, in her green and white middle school uniform, in black socks halfway to her knees and white shoes. It was a ridiculous image. It didn't belong there, but there she was.
And unlike the times I'd seen her before, this vision of Ayanami was different.
She offered a hand to me.
Her expression was no different—blank, like an unflinching observer studying traffic patterns or insect migrations. But still, her hand was there, and I accepted it. I reached out for her ghostly, glowing hand. Our fingertips met.
Squish!
My arm burst into fluid, and the rest of me followed soon after. The world went black.
The world went black, but I still heard something:
A humming sound.
It was the rhythmic, mechanical hum of a movie projector.
The world had gone black, but it was lighter than true darkness: it was the black that you only see on a movie screen that is still being lit up, even though there's nothing on the film.
I was sitting. The seats were velvety and dark magenta in color. The cup holders were black plastic, with a rough, bumpy texture on the outside.
I started; I pushed up to leave, but a hand caught me. A hand squeezed my own.
It was a pale hand, paler than any person's should be.
"It's all right." That was Ayanami; she sat next to me. "You're all right. You're safe."
I stammered. "But—but—what's going on? What is this place?"
She smiled. "You're here with me now."
"Ayanami…"
I trailed off, staring at her, but the thing that looked like Rei Ayanami paid me no mind. She waved a hand, and the movie screen came to life. It showed a moonlight alleyway with a puddle of LCL near a door. A green hooded sweatshirt, a sling, and a knife lay in the puddle. A white creature stalked about a nearby stairwell, looking for prey.
"Don't be afraid," she said, watching the scene. "You don't have to go back there anymore."
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1.6 Vision
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
6. Vision
When you've been involved with Eva at some point, something about it stays with you—even when you try to rest, even when you try to sleep. There's something infectious about it that stays in your mind. It takes form in your dreams, and once grown this way, the idea of Eva—and all that comes with it—never truly leaves you.
To me, being involved with Eva used to be very claustrophobic and confining. It's little wonder that, in my dreams, those feelings took the form of a train. Trapped within an empty traincar, with blinding sunlight streaming in across from me, that traincar was my cage. I spoke with an Angel there. I spoke with friends there. During my time as an Eva pilot, that traincar never let me go.
So used to the traincar was I that, well, I was a little surprised not to be there again.
The theater wasn't unusual in any way. Granted, a mechanical projector struck me as a little old-fashioned, but the seats were typical—even a bit uncomfortable. The seat only went about halfway up my back, for instance.
If I even had a back that could feel uncomfortable.
No, whatever that place was, the sensations there were real. The roughness of the cup holders irritated my fingertips, for instance.
And the pale hand that held mine was hot to the touch.
"Excuse me," I offered weakly, and I pulled my hand away.
Ayanami turned slightly, looking at me with one eye. "Good morning."
I raised an eyebrow. "Is it morning?"
Her eyes fell off me; she went back to watching the screen.
I looked her up and down. From her red eyes and blue hair, she was without a doubt the image of someone I'd known once—whatever that meant in this world.
"So," I said, fumbling for words, "you're alive?"
"No," she said, with a slight shake of the head.
"You're not?" I raised an eyebrow.
"I am everywhere and nowhere," she said, staring at the screen. "Past and future are the same to me."
Try as I might, I couldn't catch Ayanami's gaze. She studied the movie screen with analytic intent.
I followed her eyes. The camera looked from overhead at the building's alley. One of those creatures beat mercilessly on the alleyway door, but the door held firm: inside, the barricades were back in place. Our neighbors were safe.
Asuka was safe.
"I guess I should thank you," I said.
Ayanami looked at me with one eye again, saying nothing.
"For saving me," I explained.
She broke her gaze once more, staring ahead. "You are a friend."
The scene shifted—to another block, another city?—as uniformed SDF members took the battle to the creatures. In silence, they fired their guns, tossed grenades, and marked hordes of creatures with lasers for distant bombardment, but it was largely for nothing. Mobs of the manlike aliens overran humvees and armored vehicles, ripping metal apart with their bare hands.
Just as one of those creatures pried open a tank hatch, I turned aside.
"What's going on here?" I muttered. "Why is this happening?"
Ayanami bowed her head. "I'm sorry. You can watch something else if you like."
"No, it's fine, really," I said, pulling on my collar and gulping. "I just wanted to know, I guess, for when I go back."
Ayanami's mouth hung open a little. "You want to go back?"
I scratched the back of my head. "Of course. Asuka's there. Misato is there. I can't leave them."
She shook her head, and she stared at the screen again. "I can't protect you indefinitely. Everything I do has a cost."
"A cost?" I said.
Ayanami waved her hand, and the scene before us shifted and blurred. An image formed of some SDF members holding a bridge against the creatures. A spray of bullets rang out; SDF members fired in bursts, but the creatures advanced anyway. One creature cleaved through an SDF member's rifle, reducing the man to firing with his pistol. From point-blank range, he fired into the creature's chest:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
And nothing happened. The creature didn't even flinch. The SDF member turned his pistol aside and fled, but the creature stabbed him in the head with its needle-like fingers, and with a cry and shriek of terror, the SDF member dissolved.
The sounds of battle faded out, rendering the remaining fight in a slideshow of light and color, nothing more.
"Do you see now?" asked Ayanami, still watching the scene.
I gulped and nodded, averting my gaze.
"If you go back," she said, "there may be others I can't save."
"So I'm supposed to stay here?" I beat my fist on the armrest. "I'm supposed to stay and wait in safety, to watch while everyone else goes to fight? No way. I know how to fight."
"Like you did just now?"
I nodded—once, twice, several times. "If that's what it takes."
At that, Ayanami hung her head, and she gripped her armrest a little tighter. "You aren't a fighter anymore. You don't have Eva to protect you. You have courage, but you don't have the means to fight."
I sighed, pressing my hands against my head. "Then what am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I don't know." She stared ahead with narrowed eyes. "I can protect you, even if you can do nothing. I can protect you, even at the cost of others. Is that what you want?"
I scoffed, looking over the scene before us. The pale creatures stalked innocent people in their homes, dissolving them at will. Creatures roamed the streets in gangs. They cast long shadows of the moon on the roads, and when those shadows passed, everything human fell apart behind them.
And Ayanami watched this unfold, unfazed and unmoved.
"This is impossible!" I said, turning away. "How can you look at that? Why even watch?"
"These are my children," she said, "and I watch over them."
I shied away from her, scooting aside in my chair. "Ayanami?"
She closed her eyes. "No."
"No?" I shuddered. "Then you are—"
Her eyes snapped to me, and my throat closed up.
"I am not the person you knew." Her tense expression melted; she broke into a smile. "But I am me. I am myself, and I am still your friend. That is my promise to you."
I looked into her eyes for a time and nodded. Ayanami hesitated for a moment before turning back to the view. In that silence, I cleared my throat, saying,
"So you watch over us, as a mother would."
She nodded.
"Then how can you stand this?" I gestured at the screen. "How can you bear to watch as people are fleeing and hiding in panic? How can you sit there as they're reduced to liquid?"
Ayanami pressed her lips together for a moment. "I'm trying to stop it."
"That's good for you, then," I said, running my fingers through my hair and staring at the ceiling. "I'm glad someone can do something about this."
"So can you." She watched me with one eye, but as soon as that red iris settled on me, I shook my head.
"No, no, absolutely not. I'm not that kind of person."
She cocked her head. "Then why do you read their letters?"
"Because they're desperate!" I slammed my fist on the armrest, and it bounced off its hinge. "They're desperate and unhappy, and why? Because I put them there!" I slapped my chest. "I put them there, and I don't have the answers to get them out." I sighed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I'm just a kid. I'm just a kid, all right? I don't have what you have; I can't do what you can do. I'm just a kid. I didn't try to make a decision for everyone else; I just wanted to do what was right for me."
"So it's not right for them?" Ayanami leaned closer, over the armrest. "They would be better off in the sea?"
I turned away. I dug my hands in my pockets and kicked at the floor, hoping there'd be some popcorn I could shuffle around, but there wasn't.
Ayanami sat back in her chair, but she was still looking at me. "I didn't ask people to look to me for guidance," she said, "but they do."
My head rose. "What are you saying?"
"People will write letters to you, whether you want them or not."
I shook my head. "The people who write to me—they don't really want letters in response."
Ayanami raised an eyebrow.
"I can't give them what they want." I threw my hands at my thighs and ran my fingers down to my knees and back again. "They want to know it's going to be all right. I can't give them that."
Ayanami turned an eye to me. "But you'd fight anyway?"
"Of course!" I said, nodding.
"Then tell them what you feel," she said, facing forward again, "and that you'd fight anyway."
I frowned. "Even though I have doubts?"
"That's the first thing you should say. They have doubts, too."
"Really?"
She nodded. "And so do I."
I sighed, and I looked up, to the dark, formless ceiling—then to the light of the projector at the back of the room. They say light gives hope, right? Perhaps that was true in the real world, but here, the projector's light left me wanting more. There was a great neutrality in it. It was whatever you wanted to make of it. It was hope and warmth if you wanted it to be. It was cold and emotionless if you feared it would be.
Maybe that was true of a lot of things. You had to make of them what you wanted to make, or else they'd turn to everything you dreaded instead.
My eyes turned forward again, to the screen—to the faded image of a city under siege, with gunfire punctuating the night.
"Ayanami," I said, "I can't stay here."
She nodded. "I know."
"Will I see you again?"
"Yes." She smiled, ever-so-slightly. "That's a promise, too."
I smiled too, but it wasn't my place to stay. Ayanami had her work to do, and so did I. I admit, though, I thought Ayanami had it easier than I did. She had power. She had the ability to see, the prescience to know what was in people's hearts. I had no such luxury.
I took one last look around the theater—the peculiar place I hoped never to visit again—and I saw something I'd missed on my first glance:
A figure in a satin hood.
It sat at the end of the row, far from us. It watched the film as well. It didn't move a muscle. It didn't say a word.
"Ayanami," I whispered, leaning closer to her, "who is that?"
"Me," she said.
I spun around, but again, Ayanami wasn't even looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.
"Pardon?" I said, incredulous.
"Someone like me," she said.
And she gripped the armrest a little tighter.
When I came to, water dripped off me. I shivered, gasping for breath. I rolled over, climbed to my feet, and beat my fist on the door.
"Hey!" I whispered, trying not to make too much noise. "Anybody in there?"
"Shinji?" That was Asuka. "You got popped, didn't you? How…?"
I shivered again. My skin was sticky; my clothes were drenched. "It's a long story," I said. "Can I come in?"
It took a little while, but our neighbors disassembled the barricade and let me sneak inside. Asuka draped me in a towel, which helped immensely. A hug on top of that wasn't unwelcome, either.
"Welcome home," she said softly, and she planted a kiss on me for good measure.
Then she made a face.
"What?" I said.
"You taste a little like blood."
"Oh, so no more kisses for me?" I complained.
She scoffed. "Please. I didn't say that."
Only Asuka could manage to kiss me, pin me against a wall, and rub my hair clean of LCL all at the same time. She was a wonder all right.
Unfortunately, she couldn't hold that kiss forever. "Okay, that'll have to do," she said when she pulled away. "We've got work to do."
I blinked. "We do?"
Asuka's eyes flickered aside, to the door on the other end of the floor. Three men were putting all their body weight against the barricade, but the pile was still sliding back in fits and spurts . We'd have to make a stand there, in the utility plant, until help arrived.
Asuka and the consumer affairs minister took the lead again, coordinating the residents in an organized defense plan—no longer would we just try to hold the creatures at bay. They were coming in, and we'd have to fight them on our turf.
That was our advantage, Asuka pointed out. We could prepare the battlefield for them.
We set up a kill zone around both the interior door (leading to the rest of the building) and the exterior door (leading to the alley outside). The bulk of the residents relocated outside the kill zone, huddling in corners or under pipes. We extinguished our lamps there, leaving only the kill zone lanterns lit: our enemies would be visible for all to see, while we lurked in the shadows.
And we armed ourselves with tools: wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and the like. I'd left my knife outside, and no one was about to open the door to let me get it. Asuka handed me a metal-encased flashlight, instead. "Use it to surprise them," she said, "or use it as a club."
"As a club?" I said, and I swung feebly with my left arm. It wasn't a coordinated motion by any means.
"Something wrong with your other arm?" She squeezed my right shoulder, and I flinched—I flinched without pain. I opened my hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at them.
"Your arm looks good to me," said Asuka. "I guess reverting to LCL every now and then can be good for your health."
I rolled my shoulder around a bit. I switched the flashlight to my right hand and felt the weight of it. For the moment, that flashlight was nothing but a cold, useless shell of metal. There was nothing to be done with it while we sat and waited for the enemy to come.
And they did come.
They broke the door off its hinges and burst through the pile of junk. They stood strong and tall. There was something bizzarely beautiful about them. Great, hulking muscles gave them an athletic look. They were perfect physical specimens that way, and as they walked, their spongy toe-pads gave them springy, fluid steps, as though they were always in total balance.
Three creatures pushed through the barricade, and they fanned out through the kill zone. In the darkness, a group of us lay in wait as one of the creatures came our way. It tip-toed down a passage between water treatment machines, looking back and forth as it went along. Its eyes scanned back and forth—a surreal sight against the three false eyes on its facial mask. Those eyes never moved.
Not even when the creature fell flat on its face.
The creature writhed and shrieked, sloshing about on the ground. It tried vainly to scramble to its feet, but each time it tried, its toe pads slipped, kicking up dark fluid.
Ah, the wonders of machine oil, right?
The creature's two comrades raced to its aid, but they hesitated at the edge of the passageway, just outside the slick of oil. That was all the time we needed, for two of our residents lined up on the opposite end with a heavy metal bucket. Wearing thick rubber gloves, they splashed liquid down the whole passageway, and the creature fizzled and burned, and the two residents admired their work.
"Hey!" cried the cabinet minister, watching from behind. "Don't stand there and watch. Reload the drain cleaner!"
That was our work: with only a couple buckets capable of holding such corrosive chemicals, we had to be cautious. Each pair of bucket operators had a third resident to sort through drain cleaners, bleach solutions, and other industrial chemicals we had access to. These creatures were still flesh and blood, after all. They could burn and writhe just as well as we did.
But with the creature's two companions standing over their fallen comrade, the cabinet minister thrust her arm out, stopping the bucket carriers.
"Wait!" she said. "Watch what they do."
The creatures—each one indistinguishable from the others—never even made a move as their comrade shrieked and screamed in pain. Its high-pitched warbles rang through the room like a tinny piano.
The creature dissolved itself, but its LCL still bubbled as acid intermixed with it. That tinny shriek? It lingered in the room, even once the creature had gone.
And the other creatures ignored their comrade's plight. They chattered with one another in their unintelligible tongue, and they left, for a moment.
"What are they doing?" said one of the residents. "Going back outside?"
Asuka shook her head. "Don't think they're the type to say, 'Fuck it, we're outta here,' " she quipped, and she went back for another bucket.
And she was right. The creatures came back with a full wooden crate. They shoved it into the oil slick, displacing black goo from the floor. Then, they went back to the barricade for another crate.
Asuka tapped one of the chemical handlers on the shoulder and passed the bucket ahead. "When they come back with that box, hit them again."
The chemical handler nodded, and the pair took another loaded bucket, swinging it back and forth to gain momentum for the toss.
The creatures hurled another create down the passageway, and one of them leapt from dry floor to one box, to another, and across to our safe side of the passage, towering over the bucket handlers.
The rest of the residents fled, and Asuka, the cabinet minister, and I brought up the rear. "Hit it!" cried the minister. "Hit it now!"
The bucket handlers splashed the creature at point-blank range. Acid splattered everywhere, even…
Well, there's just no avoiding some of a bucket full of acid when you're splashing something right beside you. Even with rubber gloves, there's no way.
For that, I'm thankful the creature—even as the acid burned through its skin—took the time to dissolve both the bucket handlers before it melted in turn.
That's the only thing that saved us from our neighbors' screams.
After that, our carefully plotted defense effort crumbled. We fled down the passageway to another chokepoint, where the cabinet minister had set up a second oil slick. We overturned the oil and left the way behind us impassable—for a while, at least, but there was still one creature lurking. I shined my flashlight on it, and we all saw: it crossed the first slick easily, but without more boxes or other tools to get after us, it darted down another hallway, searching for a way around.
"Everybody behind the second level!" Asuka called out. "Fall back and regroup!"
"Regroup for what?" asked one of our neighbors, the man who preferred to read rather than help build the barricade. "That thing will just find another way to get at us."
"We still have plenty of drain cleaner," said the cabinet minister, her brow furrowed as she thought. "We can put together another defensive stand."
A man in our group didn't see it that way. He stopped walking.
"This is pointless," he said. "I'm tired; I'm not running anymore."
"Come on!" cried Asuka. "It's not much further!"
But the man stood firm. "I don't have to listen to you! You're not a leader, Soryu!" He glared at her, then at the cabinet minister. "And what do you know?" he demanded. "You're a politician; you deal with nutrition requirements and workplace safety rules! If we're going to be dissolved again, I'm going to meet that on my terms!"
The cabinet minister narrowed her eyes, but Asuka got a word in first.
"If you think they're going to win and give up fighting them, then they've already won!" Asuka called down the hallway. "You chose to come back, didn't you? Stand up and fight for it!"
The man snarled. "Fight for it? The way your boyfriend has? All he can do—all any of us can do—is throw ourselves at those things until they take us all out." The man met my gaze. "You know it, don't you?"
Asuka pulled on her own hair and scowled. Some others in the group started to follow the man, and they had every reason to.
"Forget about them," said the minister, turning her back on the rest. "We have to take care of ourselves now."
A pit in my throat choked me, leaving me open-mouthed and staring dumbly. I looked both ways down the hallway. I had a sense of something—of Ayanami? Was she there? Was she watching us, even then? No, there was no sign of her, but I felt Ayanami must've been there anyway. I could imagine her watching over us the way she had on that fantastic tower, the tower that didn't connect to the ground, that lay beneath a pure white sky. Her stare never wavered.
"Stop!" I shouted.
That word fell from my lips, and with it, all our neighbors stopped to look at me. The cabinet minister gaped in surprise. Even the angry man glanced at me from afar.
"Stop!" I said again. "So what if the only thing we can do is throw ourselves at those things? That doesn't make it wrong to try."
"There is no point in trying something that's futile," said the man, shaking his head and he headed further down the hall. "We can't beat them!"
"I'm not asking you to beat it," I said, storming after him. "Asuka isn't asking you to beat it. The minister isn't asking you to beat it. We're asking you to show you still believe in standing here!" I stomped my foot on the floor. "Stand here!" I said, "with your own two legs!" I clasped my hands together, begging. "As long as you believe that, then what they're doing doesn't matter. We can come back from it."
"You believe that?" asked the concerned father, scoffing. "Or are you just saying it?"
"I don't know this is better, but…" I scanned the hallway. One of the residents had left a sledgehammer behind, but it was still intact, still a good weapon. I picked up the sledgehammer and thrust it into the angry man's hands. "Take the opportunity to find out," I told him.
Asuka trotted after me. Without a word, she put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, but the other residents' reactions were mixed. Some of them shook their heads and moved on. Others, like the angry sledgehammer man, hesitated a bit.
They wouldn't have long to think about it.
"EEYAH!" A scream echoed through the halls. "They're coming through the middle passage!"
Asuka grimaced, and she drew her ball-peen hammer, raising it overhead. "All of you—come with us or go. It's up to you and what you can live with. Come on, Shinji!"
She ducked down a side passageway, hopping over a pair of ducts that ran across the path, and I went after her. We ran to the intersection of the middle passageway with this path, where the cabinet minister had another group of residents together. In the faint light of a lantern, they cowered and ran from the creature—which moved freely through the halls like a panther scouring the jungle for prey.
"Watch out!" cried one of our neighbors. "Spilled acid down there!"
Acid had eaten through one of the floor ducts, leaving an oval-shaped gap, as though a giant had bitten down and chewed on part of the tubing. Asuka sized up the gap and leapt gingerly over it, and I did the same.
Just in time to face the last creature.
"Get down!" cried Asuka.
I ducked, and the creature's needle-like fingers sank into the wall. Asuka swung her hammer head at the creature, but the beast yanked its hand free and scampered back, only to be cut off by another group of residents wielding mops and brooms. That kept the creature at some distance, but with one swipe of its claws, it shattered two broom handles, spraying us with a shower of splinters.
Even those shattered handles—they made my flashlight look pathetic by comparison. The short metal casing hardly had any reach! I looked down to the flashlight in my hand, and I laughed to myself. I laughed, and I turned the flashlight around. I fingered the rubber switch and pressed down.
That's how a human being—a thinking, rational creature—uses a tool.
A spot of light blanketed the creature, and it shied away from the beam with its arm covering its eyes.
"Everyone!" I called out. "Get some flashlights; get some light on it! Don't let it look any direction without some glare!"
At once, the dark hallways of the utility plant came to life, with beams of light criss-crossing the array of pipes, ducts, and metal walkways. From each direction, we slathered the creature in blinding, focused light, and as it cowered and shielded its eyes, our neighbors beat and stabbed the creature. It bled sticky LCL that oozed from each wound, but I kept my light on it, despite the stomach-churning image in front of me.
That was, at least, until the creature swung blindly at me, knocking my flashlight to the floor. The metal case clattered on the floor, and the light reflected harmlessly off a steel pipe. And with the light from my end pointed away, the creature lowered its arm, blinked, and saw Asuka and me clearly.
I turned to run, but I stumbled over the damaged duct on the floor. I scrambled for footing, but the creature lurched after me, its needle-like fingers shining in the others' lights.
WHAM!
A sledgehammer head bashed the creature aside, hurling it against some machinery.
"Sorry I'm late," said the angry man, resting the sledgehammer on his shoulder. "Did I miss much?"
The creature, wounded beyond saving, dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL. That didn't mean it gave up; it tried to grow back even from that state, but we threw some lye on the remains for good measure. That, we discovered, was a good way to make one of those thing stay dead.
SDF arrived not much later, bearing food, water, and canisters of sand to keep to make sure the creatures, once "killed," would never return. The SDF members swept the rest of the building for threats and stayed on the city block for the rest of the night, maintaining security and safety against the threat.
As for what that threat was, I didn't find out until morning. The power had yet to come back, but the SDF members were kind enough to give Asuka and me access to a radio once the area had been cleared. We crouched within an SDF armored vehicle and shared a headset, and that was the first time that night we heard from a friend.
"I'm sorry you've had such an eventful night," said Misato, her voice crinkling with static. "Are you both okay?"
"Shinji's better than he was before," said Asuka, poking at my shoulder. "But Misato—what about that Angel?"
"The Angel's still on the loose, spreading as many of those creatures as it can across the earth. Now that Tokyo-2 is secure, for the moment, we're getting ready to launch an operation to take that Angel down. Hopefully it won't lead to more adventures for you two."
Asuka rapped her knuckle on the radio casing. "Hopefully it does! No way we're lying down while Angels invade again! Get these people of yours to take us over there. We're helping with this. Even if I have to scrub a goddamn toilet in your base, we're helping with this."
"Is that true?" asked Misato. "Shinji, do you feel that way, too?"
A silence. Asuka looked to me, but she looked aside just as quickly. I sat back, staring through the front windows of the vehicle as the sun rose over Tokyo-2, and I frowned.
I said before that Third Impact left a scar on us. Scars don't heal completely, and I think that was true then, too. The damage we suffered from that time—from having everything inside us laid bare—could never be undone. Because of that, we'd come to expect disasters and unhappiness.
Maybe we'd become too comfortable with it—too adjusted, too well-adapted.
Maybe what we needed was the courage to make sure the next disaster never came. Either that, or the hope that we could affect the wide and inhospitable world, in spite of everything.
"Yes, Misato," I said. "Whatever I can do, I want to be a part of this."
I couldn't see Misato's face through the radio, of course, but she responded with the kind of unbridled warmth and optimism that I hadn't even realized I'd missed.
"In that case," said Misato, "let's go save the world."
The Boy Who Became a Legend
The Second Coming Part One End
When you've been involved with Eva at some point, something about it stays with you—even when you try to rest, even when you try to sleep. There's something infectious about it that stays in your mind. It takes form in your dreams, and once grown this way, the idea of Eva—and all that comes with it—never truly leaves you.
To me, being involved with Eva used to be very claustrophobic and confining. It's little wonder that, in my dreams, those feelings took the form of a train. Trapped within an empty traincar, with blinding sunlight streaming in across from me, that traincar was my cage. I spoke with an Angel there. I spoke with friends there. During my time as an Eva pilot, that traincar never let me go.
So used to the traincar was I that, well, I was a little surprised not to be there again.
The theater wasn't unusual in any way. Granted, a mechanical projector struck me as a little old-fashioned, but the seats were typical—even a bit uncomfortable. The seat only went about halfway up my back, for instance.
If I even had a back that could feel uncomfortable.
No, whatever that place was, the sensations there were real. The roughness of the cup holders irritated my fingertips, for instance.
And the pale hand that held mine was hot to the touch.
"Excuse me," I offered weakly, and I pulled my hand away.
Ayanami turned slightly, looking at me with one eye. "Good morning."
I raised an eyebrow. "Is it morning?"
Her eyes fell off me; she went back to watching the screen.
I looked her up and down. From her red eyes and blue hair, she was without a doubt the image of someone I'd known once—whatever that meant in this world.
"So," I said, fumbling for words, "you're alive?"
"No," she said, with a slight shake of the head.
"You're not?" I raised an eyebrow.
"I am everywhere and nowhere," she said, staring at the screen. "Past and future are the same to me."
Try as I might, I couldn't catch Ayanami's gaze. She studied the movie screen with analytic intent.
I followed her eyes. The camera looked from overhead at the building's alley. One of those creatures beat mercilessly on the alleyway door, but the door held firm: inside, the barricades were back in place. Our neighbors were safe.
Asuka was safe.
"I guess I should thank you," I said.
Ayanami looked at me with one eye again, saying nothing.
"For saving me," I explained.
She broke her gaze once more, staring ahead. "You are a friend."
The scene shifted—to another block, another city?—as uniformed SDF members took the battle to the creatures. In silence, they fired their guns, tossed grenades, and marked hordes of creatures with lasers for distant bombardment, but it was largely for nothing. Mobs of the manlike aliens overran humvees and armored vehicles, ripping metal apart with their bare hands.
Just as one of those creatures pried open a tank hatch, I turned aside.
"What's going on here?" I muttered. "Why is this happening?"
Ayanami bowed her head. "I'm sorry. You can watch something else if you like."
"No, it's fine, really," I said, pulling on my collar and gulping. "I just wanted to know, I guess, for when I go back."
Ayanami's mouth hung open a little. "You want to go back?"
I scratched the back of my head. "Of course. Asuka's there. Misato is there. I can't leave them."
She shook her head, and she stared at the screen again. "I can't protect you indefinitely. Everything I do has a cost."
"A cost?" I said.
Ayanami waved her hand, and the scene before us shifted and blurred. An image formed of some SDF members holding a bridge against the creatures. A spray of bullets rang out; SDF members fired in bursts, but the creatures advanced anyway. One creature cleaved through an SDF member's rifle, reducing the man to firing with his pistol. From point-blank range, he fired into the creature's chest:
BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!
And nothing happened. The creature didn't even flinch. The SDF member turned his pistol aside and fled, but the creature stabbed him in the head with its needle-like fingers, and with a cry and shriek of terror, the SDF member dissolved.
The sounds of battle faded out, rendering the remaining fight in a slideshow of light and color, nothing more.
"Do you see now?" asked Ayanami, still watching the scene.
I gulped and nodded, averting my gaze.
"If you go back," she said, "there may be others I can't save."
"So I'm supposed to stay here?" I beat my fist on the armrest. "I'm supposed to stay and wait in safety, to watch while everyone else goes to fight? No way. I know how to fight."
"Like you did just now?"
I nodded—once, twice, several times. "If that's what it takes."
At that, Ayanami hung her head, and she gripped her armrest a little tighter. "You aren't a fighter anymore. You don't have Eva to protect you. You have courage, but you don't have the means to fight."
I sighed, pressing my hands against my head. "Then what am I supposed to do?" I said.
"I don't know." She stared ahead with narrowed eyes. "I can protect you, even if you can do nothing. I can protect you, even at the cost of others. Is that what you want?"
I scoffed, looking over the scene before us. The pale creatures stalked innocent people in their homes, dissolving them at will. Creatures roamed the streets in gangs. They cast long shadows of the moon on the roads, and when those shadows passed, everything human fell apart behind them.
And Ayanami watched this unfold, unfazed and unmoved.
"This is impossible!" I said, turning away. "How can you look at that? Why even watch?"
"These are my children," she said, "and I watch over them."
I shied away from her, scooting aside in my chair. "Ayanami?"
She closed her eyes. "No."
"No?" I shuddered. "Then you are—"
Her eyes snapped to me, and my throat closed up.
"I am not the person you knew." Her tense expression melted; she broke into a smile. "But I am me. I am myself, and I am still your friend. That is my promise to you."
I looked into her eyes for a time and nodded. Ayanami hesitated for a moment before turning back to the view. In that silence, I cleared my throat, saying,
"So you watch over us, as a mother would."
She nodded.
"Then how can you stand this?" I gestured at the screen. "How can you bear to watch as people are fleeing and hiding in panic? How can you sit there as they're reduced to liquid?"
Ayanami pressed her lips together for a moment. "I'm trying to stop it."
"That's good for you, then," I said, running my fingers through my hair and staring at the ceiling. "I'm glad someone can do something about this."
"So can you." She watched me with one eye, but as soon as that red iris settled on me, I shook my head.
"No, no, absolutely not. I'm not that kind of person."
She cocked her head. "Then why do you read their letters?"
"Because they're desperate!" I slammed my fist on the armrest, and it bounced off its hinge. "They're desperate and unhappy, and why? Because I put them there!" I slapped my chest. "I put them there, and I don't have the answers to get them out." I sighed, and I buried my face in my hands. "I'm just a kid. I'm just a kid, all right? I don't have what you have; I can't do what you can do. I'm just a kid. I didn't try to make a decision for everyone else; I just wanted to do what was right for me."
"So it's not right for them?" Ayanami leaned closer, over the armrest. "They would be better off in the sea?"
I turned away. I dug my hands in my pockets and kicked at the floor, hoping there'd be some popcorn I could shuffle around, but there wasn't.
Ayanami sat back in her chair, but she was still looking at me. "I didn't ask people to look to me for guidance," she said, "but they do."
My head rose. "What are you saying?"
"People will write letters to you, whether you want them or not."
I shook my head. "The people who write to me—they don't really want letters in response."
Ayanami raised an eyebrow.
"I can't give them what they want." I threw my hands at my thighs and ran my fingers down to my knees and back again. "They want to know it's going to be all right. I can't give them that."
Ayanami turned an eye to me. "But you'd fight anyway?"
"Of course!" I said, nodding.
"Then tell them what you feel," she said, facing forward again, "and that you'd fight anyway."
I frowned. "Even though I have doubts?"
"That's the first thing you should say. They have doubts, too."
"Really?"
She nodded. "And so do I."
I sighed, and I looked up, to the dark, formless ceiling—then to the light of the projector at the back of the room. They say light gives hope, right? Perhaps that was true in the real world, but here, the projector's light left me wanting more. There was a great neutrality in it. It was whatever you wanted to make of it. It was hope and warmth if you wanted it to be. It was cold and emotionless if you feared it would be.
Maybe that was true of a lot of things. You had to make of them what you wanted to make, or else they'd turn to everything you dreaded instead.
My eyes turned forward again, to the screen—to the faded image of a city under siege, with gunfire punctuating the night.
"Ayanami," I said, "I can't stay here."
She nodded. "I know."
"Will I see you again?"
"Yes." She smiled, ever-so-slightly. "That's a promise, too."
I smiled too, but it wasn't my place to stay. Ayanami had her work to do, and so did I. I admit, though, I thought Ayanami had it easier than I did. She had power. She had the ability to see, the prescience to know what was in people's hearts. I had no such luxury.
I took one last look around the theater—the peculiar place I hoped never to visit again—and I saw something I'd missed on my first glance:
A figure in a satin hood.
It sat at the end of the row, far from us. It watched the film as well. It didn't move a muscle. It didn't say a word.
"Ayanami," I whispered, leaning closer to her, "who is that?"
"Me," she said.
I spun around, but again, Ayanami wasn't even looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on the screen.
"Pardon?" I said, incredulous.
"Someone like me," she said.
And she gripped the armrest a little tighter.
When I came to, water dripped off me. I shivered, gasping for breath. I rolled over, climbed to my feet, and beat my fist on the door.
"Hey!" I whispered, trying not to make too much noise. "Anybody in there?"
"Shinji?" That was Asuka. "You got popped, didn't you? How…?"
I shivered again. My skin was sticky; my clothes were drenched. "It's a long story," I said. "Can I come in?"
It took a little while, but our neighbors disassembled the barricade and let me sneak inside. Asuka draped me in a towel, which helped immensely. A hug on top of that wasn't unwelcome, either.
"Welcome home," she said softly, and she planted a kiss on me for good measure.
Then she made a face.
"What?" I said.
"You taste a little like blood."
"Oh, so no more kisses for me?" I complained.
She scoffed. "Please. I didn't say that."
Only Asuka could manage to kiss me, pin me against a wall, and rub my hair clean of LCL all at the same time. She was a wonder all right.
Unfortunately, she couldn't hold that kiss forever. "Okay, that'll have to do," she said when she pulled away. "We've got work to do."
I blinked. "We do?"
Asuka's eyes flickered aside, to the door on the other end of the floor. Three men were putting all their body weight against the barricade, but the pile was still sliding back in fits and spurts . We'd have to make a stand there, in the utility plant, until help arrived.
Asuka and the consumer affairs minister took the lead again, coordinating the residents in an organized defense plan—no longer would we just try to hold the creatures at bay. They were coming in, and we'd have to fight them on our turf.
That was our advantage, Asuka pointed out. We could prepare the battlefield for them.
We set up a kill zone around both the interior door (leading to the rest of the building) and the exterior door (leading to the alley outside). The bulk of the residents relocated outside the kill zone, huddling in corners or under pipes. We extinguished our lamps there, leaving only the kill zone lanterns lit: our enemies would be visible for all to see, while we lurked in the shadows.
And we armed ourselves with tools: wrenches, hammers, screwdrivers, and the like. I'd left my knife outside, and no one was about to open the door to let me get it. Asuka handed me a metal-encased flashlight, instead. "Use it to surprise them," she said, "or use it as a club."
"As a club?" I said, and I swung feebly with my left arm. It wasn't a coordinated motion by any means.
"Something wrong with your other arm?" She squeezed my right shoulder, and I flinched—I flinched without pain. I opened my hand and wiggled my fingers, staring at them.
"Your arm looks good to me," said Asuka. "I guess reverting to LCL every now and then can be good for your health."
I rolled my shoulder around a bit. I switched the flashlight to my right hand and felt the weight of it. For the moment, that flashlight was nothing but a cold, useless shell of metal. There was nothing to be done with it while we sat and waited for the enemy to come.
And they did come.
They broke the door off its hinges and burst through the pile of junk. They stood strong and tall. There was something bizzarely beautiful about them. Great, hulking muscles gave them an athletic look. They were perfect physical specimens that way, and as they walked, their spongy toe-pads gave them springy, fluid steps, as though they were always in total balance.
Three creatures pushed through the barricade, and they fanned out through the kill zone. In the darkness, a group of us lay in wait as one of the creatures came our way. It tip-toed down a passage between water treatment machines, looking back and forth as it went along. Its eyes scanned back and forth—a surreal sight against the three false eyes on its facial mask. Those eyes never moved.
Not even when the creature fell flat on its face.
The creature writhed and shrieked, sloshing about on the ground. It tried vainly to scramble to its feet, but each time it tried, its toe pads slipped, kicking up dark fluid.
Ah, the wonders of machine oil, right?
The creature's two comrades raced to its aid, but they hesitated at the edge of the passageway, just outside the slick of oil. That was all the time we needed, for two of our residents lined up on the opposite end with a heavy metal bucket. Wearing thick rubber gloves, they splashed liquid down the whole passageway, and the creature fizzled and burned, and the two residents admired their work.
"Hey!" cried the cabinet minister, watching from behind. "Don't stand there and watch. Reload the drain cleaner!"
That was our work: with only a couple buckets capable of holding such corrosive chemicals, we had to be cautious. Each pair of bucket operators had a third resident to sort through drain cleaners, bleach solutions, and other industrial chemicals we had access to. These creatures were still flesh and blood, after all. They could burn and writhe just as well as we did.
But with the creature's two companions standing over their fallen comrade, the cabinet minister thrust her arm out, stopping the bucket carriers.
"Wait!" she said. "Watch what they do."
The creatures—each one indistinguishable from the others—never even made a move as their comrade shrieked and screamed in pain. Its high-pitched warbles rang through the room like a tinny piano.
The creature dissolved itself, but its LCL still bubbled as acid intermixed with it. That tinny shriek? It lingered in the room, even once the creature had gone.
And the other creatures ignored their comrade's plight. They chattered with one another in their unintelligible tongue, and they left, for a moment.
"What are they doing?" said one of the residents. "Going back outside?"
Asuka shook her head. "Don't think they're the type to say, 'Fuck it, we're outta here,' " she quipped, and she went back for another bucket.
And she was right. The creatures came back with a full wooden crate. They shoved it into the oil slick, displacing black goo from the floor. Then, they went back to the barricade for another crate.
Asuka tapped one of the chemical handlers on the shoulder and passed the bucket ahead. "When they come back with that box, hit them again."
The chemical handler nodded, and the pair took another loaded bucket, swinging it back and forth to gain momentum for the toss.
The creatures hurled another create down the passageway, and one of them leapt from dry floor to one box, to another, and across to our safe side of the passage, towering over the bucket handlers.
The rest of the residents fled, and Asuka, the cabinet minister, and I brought up the rear. "Hit it!" cried the minister. "Hit it now!"
The bucket handlers splashed the creature at point-blank range. Acid splattered everywhere, even…
Well, there's just no avoiding some of a bucket full of acid when you're splashing something right beside you. Even with rubber gloves, there's no way.
For that, I'm thankful the creature—even as the acid burned through its skin—took the time to dissolve both the bucket handlers before it melted in turn.
That's the only thing that saved us from our neighbors' screams.
After that, our carefully plotted defense effort crumbled. We fled down the passageway to another chokepoint, where the cabinet minister had set up a second oil slick. We overturned the oil and left the way behind us impassable—for a while, at least, but there was still one creature lurking. I shined my flashlight on it, and we all saw: it crossed the first slick easily, but without more boxes or other tools to get after us, it darted down another hallway, searching for a way around.
"Everybody behind the second level!" Asuka called out. "Fall back and regroup!"
"Regroup for what?" asked one of our neighbors, the man who preferred to read rather than help build the barricade. "That thing will just find another way to get at us."
"We still have plenty of drain cleaner," said the cabinet minister, her brow furrowed as she thought. "We can put together another defensive stand."
A man in our group didn't see it that way. He stopped walking.
"This is pointless," he said. "I'm tired; I'm not running anymore."
"Come on!" cried Asuka. "It's not much further!"
But the man stood firm. "I don't have to listen to you! You're not a leader, Soryu!" He glared at her, then at the cabinet minister. "And what do you know?" he demanded. "You're a politician; you deal with nutrition requirements and workplace safety rules! If we're going to be dissolved again, I'm going to meet that on my terms!"
The cabinet minister narrowed her eyes, but Asuka got a word in first.
"If you think they're going to win and give up fighting them, then they've already won!" Asuka called down the hallway. "You chose to come back, didn't you? Stand up and fight for it!"
The man snarled. "Fight for it? The way your boyfriend has? All he can do—all any of us can do—is throw ourselves at those things until they take us all out." The man met my gaze. "You know it, don't you?"
Asuka pulled on her own hair and scowled. Some others in the group started to follow the man, and they had every reason to.
"Forget about them," said the minister, turning her back on the rest. "We have to take care of ourselves now."
A pit in my throat choked me, leaving me open-mouthed and staring dumbly. I looked both ways down the hallway. I had a sense of something—of Ayanami? Was she there? Was she watching us, even then? No, there was no sign of her, but I felt Ayanami must've been there anyway. I could imagine her watching over us the way she had on that fantastic tower, the tower that didn't connect to the ground, that lay beneath a pure white sky. Her stare never wavered.
"Stop!" I shouted.
That word fell from my lips, and with it, all our neighbors stopped to look at me. The cabinet minister gaped in surprise. Even the angry man glanced at me from afar.
"Stop!" I said again. "So what if the only thing we can do is throw ourselves at those things? That doesn't make it wrong to try."
"There is no point in trying something that's futile," said the man, shaking his head and he headed further down the hall. "We can't beat them!"
"I'm not asking you to beat it," I said, storming after him. "Asuka isn't asking you to beat it. The minister isn't asking you to beat it. We're asking you to show you still believe in standing here!" I stomped my foot on the floor. "Stand here!" I said, "with your own two legs!" I clasped my hands together, begging. "As long as you believe that, then what they're doing doesn't matter. We can come back from it."
"You believe that?" asked the concerned father, scoffing. "Or are you just saying it?"
"I don't know this is better, but…" I scanned the hallway. One of the residents had left a sledgehammer behind, but it was still intact, still a good weapon. I picked up the sledgehammer and thrust it into the angry man's hands. "Take the opportunity to find out," I told him.
Asuka trotted after me. Without a word, she put a hand on my shoulder and smiled, but the other residents' reactions were mixed. Some of them shook their heads and moved on. Others, like the angry sledgehammer man, hesitated a bit.
They wouldn't have long to think about it.
"EEYAH!" A scream echoed through the halls. "They're coming through the middle passage!"
Asuka grimaced, and she drew her ball-peen hammer, raising it overhead. "All of you—come with us or go. It's up to you and what you can live with. Come on, Shinji!"
She ducked down a side passageway, hopping over a pair of ducts that ran across the path, and I went after her. We ran to the intersection of the middle passageway with this path, where the cabinet minister had another group of residents together. In the faint light of a lantern, they cowered and ran from the creature—which moved freely through the halls like a panther scouring the jungle for prey.
"Watch out!" cried one of our neighbors. "Spilled acid down there!"
Acid had eaten through one of the floor ducts, leaving an oval-shaped gap, as though a giant had bitten down and chewed on part of the tubing. Asuka sized up the gap and leapt gingerly over it, and I did the same.
Just in time to face the last creature.
"Get down!" cried Asuka.
I ducked, and the creature's needle-like fingers sank into the wall. Asuka swung her hammer head at the creature, but the beast yanked its hand free and scampered back, only to be cut off by another group of residents wielding mops and brooms. That kept the creature at some distance, but with one swipe of its claws, it shattered two broom handles, spraying us with a shower of splinters.
Even those shattered handles—they made my flashlight look pathetic by comparison. The short metal casing hardly had any reach! I looked down to the flashlight in my hand, and I laughed to myself. I laughed, and I turned the flashlight around. I fingered the rubber switch and pressed down.
That's how a human being—a thinking, rational creature—uses a tool.
A spot of light blanketed the creature, and it shied away from the beam with its arm covering its eyes.
"Everyone!" I called out. "Get some flashlights; get some light on it! Don't let it look any direction without some glare!"
At once, the dark hallways of the utility plant came to life, with beams of light criss-crossing the array of pipes, ducts, and metal walkways. From each direction, we slathered the creature in blinding, focused light, and as it cowered and shielded its eyes, our neighbors beat and stabbed the creature. It bled sticky LCL that oozed from each wound, but I kept my light on it, despite the stomach-churning image in front of me.
That was, at least, until the creature swung blindly at me, knocking my flashlight to the floor. The metal case clattered on the floor, and the light reflected harmlessly off a steel pipe. And with the light from my end pointed away, the creature lowered its arm, blinked, and saw Asuka and me clearly.
I turned to run, but I stumbled over the damaged duct on the floor. I scrambled for footing, but the creature lurched after me, its needle-like fingers shining in the others' lights.
WHAM!
A sledgehammer head bashed the creature aside, hurling it against some machinery.
"Sorry I'm late," said the angry man, resting the sledgehammer on his shoulder. "Did I miss much?"
The creature, wounded beyond saving, dissolved on its own into a puddle of LCL. That didn't mean it gave up; it tried to grow back even from that state, but we threw some lye on the remains for good measure. That, we discovered, was a good way to make one of those thing stay dead.
SDF arrived not much later, bearing food, water, and canisters of sand to keep to make sure the creatures, once "killed," would never return. The SDF members swept the rest of the building for threats and stayed on the city block for the rest of the night, maintaining security and safety against the threat.
As for what that threat was, I didn't find out until morning. The power had yet to come back, but the SDF members were kind enough to give Asuka and me access to a radio once the area had been cleared. We crouched within an SDF armored vehicle and shared a headset, and that was the first time that night we heard from a friend.
"I'm sorry you've had such an eventful night," said Misato, her voice crinkling with static. "Are you both okay?"
"Shinji's better than he was before," said Asuka, poking at my shoulder. "But Misato—what about that Angel?"
"The Angel's still on the loose, spreading as many of those creatures as it can across the earth. Now that Tokyo-2 is secure, for the moment, we're getting ready to launch an operation to take that Angel down. Hopefully it won't lead to more adventures for you two."
Asuka rapped her knuckle on the radio casing. "Hopefully it does! No way we're lying down while Angels invade again! Get these people of yours to take us over there. We're helping with this. Even if I have to scrub a goddamn toilet in your base, we're helping with this."
"Is that true?" asked Misato. "Shinji, do you feel that way, too?"
A silence. Asuka looked to me, but she looked aside just as quickly. I sat back, staring through the front windows of the vehicle as the sun rose over Tokyo-2, and I frowned.
I said before that Third Impact left a scar on us. Scars don't heal completely, and I think that was true then, too. The damage we suffered from that time—from having everything inside us laid bare—could never be undone. Because of that, we'd come to expect disasters and unhappiness.
Maybe we'd become too comfortable with it—too adjusted, too well-adapted.
Maybe what we needed was the courage to make sure the next disaster never came. Either that, or the hope that we could affect the wide and inhospitable world, in spite of everything.
"Yes, Misato," I said. "Whatever I can do, I want to be a part of this."
I couldn't see Misato's face through the radio, of course, but she responded with the kind of unbridled warmth and optimism that I hadn't even realized I'd missed.
"In that case," said Misato, "let's go save the world."
The Boy Who Became a Legend
The Second Coming Part One End
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Ranma-sensei
Sorcerer
- Location
- Citrix Receiver
- Pronouns
- Weatherdependent
Argh, you guys on this board are killing me!
"Have a nice weekend?" - "Sure, but now I got 10k words to read up on - and that's only the comments on the story post!"
Addendum:
What I forgot to say, Muphrid; Asuka's reaction to her boyfriend coming back to her after being popped like a balloon is a little - flat, for lack of a better term. I was a the very least expecting tear-tracks on her cheeks, possibly a passionate kiss, Japanese courtesy be damned (like she'd care, anyway).
All in all, maybe add a scene in later where Shinji catches her thanking 'Wondergirl'.
"Have a nice weekend?" - "Sure, but now I got 10k words to read up on - and that's only the comments on the story post!
"Addendum:
What I forgot to say, Muphrid; Asuka's reaction to her boyfriend coming back to her after being popped like a balloon is a little - flat, for lack of a better term. I was a the very least expecting tear-tracks on her cheeks, possibly a passionate kiss, Japanese courtesy be damned (like she'd care, anyway).
All in all, maybe add a scene in later where Shinji catches her thanking 'Wondergirl'.
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Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
@Ranma-sensei: Yes, I agree. I had to do some significant ironing around this part and neglected to smooth that well enough.
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Some proposed changes: substantially new text in red
#1: introducing the creatures' ability to regenerate earlier
#2: Asuka's reaction to Shinji's return
#1: introducing the creatures' ability to regenerate earlier
#2: Asuka's reaction to Shinji's return
2.1 Angel Attack
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Part Two: The Sixth Child
7. Angel Attack
You know, Nerv had to be out of their minds to trust mankind's fate to middle-schoolers like us.
We were young, damaged, sexually confused teenagers. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea who we really were or what we wanted out of life. And yet, Nerv trusted us to take care of humanity. I have to wonder: were they that desperate? Or were they looking for soldiers who still had a chance to win yet were young enough and immature enough to be controlled, or broken, when the time for Third Impact came?
Knowing my father, I can only think it was the latter, but he didn't have full control over our fates, either. Still, if you didn't live in that time, it must be unfathomable to think that we ever put humanity's future in the hands of children.
It must be even more unfathomable to think that we did it twice!
You have to realize something about children, though: I'm not sure children really understand bravery. They know the concept, and they know it's something good, but piloting Eva—it's not a snap decision. It's not something you can decide to do with courage in your heart and then be done with it. Bravery is a rush of emotion that ebbs away with time. Piloting Eva is a grind. It's not something a child can be brave for.
It's something a child convinces herself to do.
For my part, I was just floored that we still had to use children at all, but the truth of the matter sunk in as we were on the way to the bunker. Misato explained what she could over the radio, and when she told me there was another pilot—someone else like Asuka and me—I couldn't believe it. Why, after all we'd gone through, did she subject someone else to that, too?
"What would you rather do?" Misato argued, her voice tinged with static. "Would you trust all our lives to some mindless clone? I wouldn't. I admit it's difficult and painful, but I will do everything I can to shield a pilot from hardship. I do that because I'd rather put my faith in people."
People. Despite the bloody rain that had fallen on the capital, people were everywhere. Our motorcade took us past armed checkpoints with dozens of SDF members standing by. It took us by tents where thirsty civilians sought water and safety. Teams of men and women patrolled the streets, filling in puddles of LCL with sand. Survival was a cooperative effort, and all mankind was involved in it.
That was the case at our destination, as well: National Square. SDF manned several tents there for coordination and logistics, and at least three convoys of infantry and refugees arrived just while we made our way through. For the moment, our place wasn't with the refugees and aid workers. I could not help pass out water or meal packets. I was needed elsewhere.
Our escort took us to the Defense Agency building, and from there, we headed downstairs to the secret train station. The place was as inhospitable and bleak as ever. The lights in the train tunnel were as white and harsh. The SDF members who rode with us weren't very chatty, either.
"We're just here to escort you to the general, sir," said the leader.
And so we rode on, in uncomfortable silence, to the bunker with no name.
Unlike the first time Misato showed me around, that day the base was bustling. Armed guards stood watch at every stairwell entrance. Fireteams in full armor and combat gear stormed through the halls, as though they had appointments with the aliens and were running late. I can't remember the soldiers' faces, though. Like those featureless cream-colored walls, they all blended together after a while.
The busy atmosphere had taken hold in the control room, too. People shuffled in and out with binders and notebooks. Misato had a group of four staffers hanging on her every word, scribbling down orders, and flipping through pages upon pages of reports and communiques. Only when Hyuga waved for her attention did she notice we were here.
"Oh thank goodness," she said, pushing through the crowd of staffers. "Now I can do some actual work for a change. Shinji, Asuka, good to have you both helping us. Ready to stave off the end of the world?"
"Whatever it takes," said Asuka. "Where do you want us?"
"Here." That was Maya Ibuki, who offered Asuka a seat at one of the cubicles on the right side. "We'd really appreciate your help giving a pilot's insight into the technical side of things. That combination of experience is a luxury here."
Asuka took her seat and looked over the readouts. "There are only two experienced Eva pilots left in this world, so of course I'm a rare commodity. Isn't that obvious?"
Maya chuckled nervously, looking to Misato for help. Misato nodded.
"I see someone's confidence hasn't diminished," said Misato. "Hold on to that and make yourself useful. You work for me now. Understand?"
Asuka did a quick salute, even as she moved windows around on the touch-screen panels. Really, she seemed to fit rightin, while I—I was still standing up. I caught Misato's eye, and she winced.
"Sorry, Shinji. We have something in mind for you, too."
Misato handed me a headset and motioned to the back of the room, where there was an elevated platform and station. Misato sat down at that station with an array of four monitors in front of her. Hyuga and I took seats in the row just in front of her. Hyuga logged me into the system with a few keystrokes, and I plugged my headset into the front panel of the computer case. At that moment, though, the default feeds on the monitors were completely blank, save for one panel with an array of different listings: Master, Operations, Neural, and Plugcom. Each loop managed a different set of controllers and systems. Hyuga explained that I would have access only to the Operations and Plugcom loops.
"Where does Plugcom go?" I asked.
Hyuga laughed, but when he saw I was serious, he explained it simply:
"To the pilot, Shinji."
My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, but Hyuga put his own headset on and took his seat. That's when Misato spoke up.
"Good morning, everyone," she said, just one seat behind me. "Shall we get started?"
Her voice came through the headset just a fraction of a second after I heard her behind me. Surely there had to be some way to fix that? I fumbled through the controls looking for some setting as Misato went through numerous safety checks and status reports before launch. Everything from armor integrity to temperature regulation—the works.
Midway through the checklist, I finally heard the person on the other end of the radio loop. Misato finished checking in with the Telemetry controllers, and she looked to Hyuga and me.
"Plugcom?" she asked.
Hyuga tapped his monitor and depressed a switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, Control."
A girl's voice answered him—a steady, even bored voice. "Hi there. Oh, what was it I'm supposed to say? Hi Control? Something like that?"
Laughing, Hyuga sat back in his chair. "Something like that, yes. How are you doing?"
"I'm breathing warm liquid that smells like blood, so I think I've had better days. Can we go?"
Hyuga looked back to Misato, both of them chuckling.
"Honestly, that girl," said Misato, shaking her head, but when she flipped the switch on her headset line, she was all business, with only a hint of levity in her voice. "Plugcom is go," she said. "Give me aerial on screen one, cage on two, and launch site on three, please."
The three main screens at the front of the room flickered to life. On the far left was a plot of green lines that I couldn't quite understand, but the middle screen was a video feed of some mountainside, with a large, cleared area—a square concrete pad with a seam running down the middle. "Danger - Elevator," it read, with the words stenciled in red, but the platform opened up, revealing a shaft beneath.
And lastly, there was the Evangelion on the launch catapult.
Unit-14—a dark behemoth. Where the Eva I had known had been lithe to a fault—too tall by proportion to be truly human—Unit-14 was a shorter, burly creature. The spikes on its helmet were almost as tall as its head and neck. If my Eva and Asuka's had been like lean predators—like birds of prey, or hunting cats—Unit-14 was like an entirely different beast:
It was like a bear.
A bear in shiny, forest green armor, with only hints of black accents near its joints. Its six eyes—in two rows of three—were the only bright things about it. They glowed with a pure, searing white, a shade of white that was murderous for its penetrating power.
And the time had come for Unit-14 to kill.
"Start the clock," said Misato.
On Misato's command, one of the master clocks at the front of the room reset to thirty seconds and counted down. The controllers went through their final checks during the launch process—checking that the launcher motors had warmed up correctly and such. The digits on the clock ticked down, and when they hit zero—
SHING! The Eva vanished up the launch chute, and when the cage elevator reached the surface, it lurched slightly against the restraints, which released with explosive blasts. The Eva stumbled off the launch platform, like a child coming off an exciting ride. Well, if that child was a hulking beast looming over a mountainside, anyway.
"All right," said the pilot. "Where am I going?"
"We're getting you navigation data right now, Fourteen, standby," said Hyuga, who glanced back to Misato.
"Give her some waypoints," Misato said on the master loop. "Put navigation on one and give me target visual on two."
The first screen flickered to a topographical map with a route through the mountains back to town. The second screen changed to an airborne camera, which captured within a pair of crosshairs the Eva's target:
A massive, gyroscopic Angel.
It spun incessantly. Its outermost ring tumbled forward slowly, and then second ring turned perpendicular to it. Each ring further in spun faster than the last, to the point that the innermost rings were just blurs to human eyes, or even seemed to spin the wrong way—at least according to the camera. The Angel floated over roads and forest, with its spinning rings kicking up a breeze as it passed.
The Angel's target was an artillery battalion. Capital Perimeter Defense had started fighting back a horde of creatures along the Nagano Expressway, and the Angel flew to intercept this battle. The controllers guided the pilot to do the same.
"Defend the battalion from the Angel's attacks," said Hyuga, "and let's all go home safe."
"You're making it sound easy, Control," said the pilot.
Hyuga bowed his head and fought back a smile. "Would you like it better if we sounded more desperate down here?"
"Maybe."
The Eva lumbered toward its target at a steady pace—thump, thump, thump. It crossed rivers and valleys in deliberate, measured leaps, never seeming to exert itself, never seeming to be in a great hurry. With that deathly stare on its face, you couldn't mistake this for laziness or indifference. No, the Eva's arrival was inevitable, and as it had barreled across the countryside effortlessly, it would push through the Angel just the same.
But confident though the pilot may have been, Angels have a way of surprising you.
When the Angel approached the artillery batteries, the artillery commanders didn't even seem fazed. They kept firing off their shells, laying waste to hills and the advancing throng of creatures, of "walkers," that advanced on their position. Plane-mounted cameras showed us the creatures suffering from the bombardment. The explosions ripped their bodies apart, and when they tried to reform, another cluster of impacts would tear them back down again.
But the Angel inserted itself between the artillery and their targets. Though shells passed through gaps in its rings harmlessly, the Angel whirled and spun. It spun so fast that all its rings blurred.
To the camera's eye, even the images of clouds and mountains behind the Angel twisted and bent.
Artillery shells warped through the Angel and came back around, blasting the ground far short of their targets. And the Angel? The Angel advanced on the artillery battalion, kicking up dirt and trees in an earthen wake. The battalion retreated, turning their barrels around and breaking down the highway on their tank-like tracks.
But a fast getaway for those self-propelled howitzers was something like forty kilometers per hour. They strained and lurched for speed on the empty highway, but the Angel ground up pavement and cement bridges behind them, ripping asphalt from the ground without even touching it. One of the artillery pieces spun out, tumbling, and—
A flash!
A white, saturating flash blinded the camera, leaving only a few misplaced crosshairs behind. Static and low-frequency warblings burst through the radio, and readouts of the Eva's telemetry went blank.
"Fourteen?" cried Hyuga, pressing his headset to his ear. "Fourteen, do you read?"
The light faded, leaving a barrier of concentric octagons between the Angel's outer ring and the hand that held that ring in place:
The Eva's hand.
"I'm a little busy here, Control!" the pilot said. "Is there something you wanted to say?"
Hyuga stared at the image on the middle screen, and he shook his head. "No, Fourteen. Carry on."
The Eva punched at the AT field, but the Angel twisted and spun, wrenching itself free. Its AT field came back together whole, and it zoomed backward. Ripples of air and light coursed through the environment, and even the airborne camera wobbled as they passed by.
But as the Angel gave ground, the Eva took advantage of all the space it ceded. Unit-14 charged and leapt after the Angel with all the grace and dexterity of a circus acrobat or a ballet dancer—a strange image given the Eva's lumbering shape. As the Angel fled down the highway, the Eva gave chase, bounding over road signs and across highway dividers. It was a coordinated, deliberate pursuit.
"She's good," I said to myself.
"She'd better be," said Misato. "It'd be a shame if all that simulation time didn't translate to the real thing."
Whether in simulation or reality, the pilot knew how to fight an Angel. Hyuga sat back, scrutinizing the displays in front of him, but he said nothing. The pilot had no need of his advice or guidance. She knew the stakes, and she knew how to fight, and for the moment, Hyuga was redundant. The most he could do was sit back, watch, and hope he would be needed again, if at all.
That didn't look like it would happen soon, though. The Eva grasped at the Angel, catching the outer layer of the Angel's AT field. The pilot pushed the Eva's fingertips through the barrier, like pencils punching holes in a piece of paper, and she clawed to catch the spinning ring.
"Careful," said Hyuga. "It might have something up its sleeve this time."
But the pilot pulled the Angel in for a punch anyway, and this time, the Angel shot itself at her like a shell out of a canon.
Crack! The Angel's outer ring smashed the Eva's right forearm.
"Fracture detected!" cried one of the controllers. "Right radius, transverse open fracture."
"Right forearm armor plating displaced."
Misato rose. "How is she doing?"
Hyuga got up as well, and the two of them studied the forward projector screens together. "Fourteen, Control," said Hyuga. "Your right arm is broken. How does it feel?"
"It's not—too bad," the pilot offered through gritted teeth. "Maybe a little smashing into an easel."
"Let's take her plug depth down; ease her off the pain," said Misato.
"Let's lower the synch rate to 35%," said Maya, overseeing a group of technicians on the right side of the room. "We can then ease her back up to her normal levels over the next few minutes."
"And raise it back?" Misato shook her head. "That's not standard procedure."
"But it would help." Asuka rose from her position a few rows down. "Fighting at a low sync rate is like walking through mud. She's going to notice it, and she's not going to be as effective while that's in place, but we can reintroduce full synch and she'll hardly notice the pain. She'll be too busy to notice."
Misato frowned, so Asuka added,
"It's what I wish you guys had done when I was a pilot."
Holding on to her headset cord, Misato only looked to Maya and made her wishes known with a slight nod. "Go ahead, and let's get her on VOX. If she's straining too hard, we're aborting."
Hyuga hit the switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, we're going to have you on VOX."
The Eva chased after the Angel, making a one-handed swipe, but the Angel propelled itself free and zoomed down the road, making for the retreating artillery pieces. The Eva ran after the Angel, and the pilot grunted with each step.
"Oh, so that means I can't gripe about you guys when you're not on the line?"
"I'm afraid not," said Hyuga, who paced next to his station as he watched. "You feel all right with that arm? Well enough to continue?"
The Eva opened and closed its fist gingerly. "I guess it'll have to do," said the pilot.
Hyuga smiled. "Time for round two, then. See if you can chase it down and hold on to the AT field with both hands. I know your arm is weak, but you might be able to kick through the AT field and get some damage on that ring. All right?"
"It'll be a lot harder to get after that thing on a broken leg if this doesn't work," said the pilot.
Hyuga looked back to Misato, who only nodded. "That's a risk we'll have to take," he said.
So the Eva gave chase again, but this time, its strides weren't quite as graceful. The Eva's feet sank into the pavement in places, and it stumbled over cracks in the road. It carried on like a bull, charging toward its target with reckless abandon.
It grabbed the Angel's AT field again, but the Angel whirled and spun. Dragging space itself around it, the Angel ripped up the highway, bombarding the Eva with strips of asphalt.
"I don't think I'm holding on to this thing!" cried the pilot.
"You can," said Hyuga. "You don't need to penetrate it with your hands; just don't let it go. Kick through it."
With only one hand to hold on, the Eva raised its right leg and kicked upward, but the leg just bounced off the Angel's AT field.
And worse than that, both the Eva's legs rose from the ground as debris around the Eva rocketed upwards.
"Fourteen, let go!" Hyuga rose from his seat. "Let go, let go!"
The Angel shot for the sky with unreal speed, and though the Eva broke free, the warp of space dragged it into the clouds with the Angel. The Eva tumbled. The pilot grunted and groaned. And when the Angel spat the Eva out like a flavorless wad of gum, the Eva splatted on the side of the road, lying flat on its face.
Warning lights flashed. Alarms rang out. The controllers bombarded the master audio loop with reports.
"Multiple ribcage fractures. Upper body strength strongly compromised."
"Three armor plates displaced."
"LCL temperature up to 30C."
Misato rose from her chair. "All right, all right," she said, leaning over the table as she addressed the room. "Let's settle down, everyone. Liaison, relay to the regulars that Eva-14 is partially damaged and may not continue operations today. Systems, what can we do in the next minute or two to repair those displaced plates?"
Misato's staff worked feverishly to come up with solutions, but amid all this commotion, the pilot's labored, pained breaths came over the radio. The Eva stood up, staggering to its feet, and it set its sights on the Angel.
"Fourteen, Control. Stand by while we assess the damage."
"Damage?" the pilot said, despite her haggard breaths. "I feel fine."
"That's adrenaline. You won't feel fine in a while, and the last thing we need is for you to black out from the pain mid-battle. Stand by."
But the Eva took a tentative step, and then another. It trotted along the side of the road, building up to a sprint. In the distance, its target floated over the highway, bending the light of the setting sun into a warped ring, but the Eva gave chase.
"Fourteen! Do you read me?"
One of the controllers a few rows down looked back to Misato. "We still have her telemetry. Comms should be functional."
Misato huffed. "This isn't about the comms not working. Plugcom, give her to me, please."
Hyuga tapped one of the controls on his monitor and slid back from his station. Misato tightened her radio headset and flipped the switch to transmit.
"Fourteen, this is the General. You are ordered to stand down until further notice. Do you understand me?"
"Why? Is it that bad?"
Misato and Hyuga exchanged a glance like they'd just seen a unicorn fly through the room. "That's what we're trying to figure out!" cried Misato.
But did we have the time for that? Not really. On the far right main screen, the Angel ripped one of the artillery pieces off the highway and flung it aside like a toddler throwing away a toy. We all saw it. So did the pilot, who said,
"You guys figure it out. I feel fine."
Misato narrowed her eyes. "You operate only with this installation's consent. If you take that Eva on an unauthorized action, we will shut you down. Am I clear?"
"Do whatever you have to do."
"So be it," Misato said to herself. "All right, people, listen up! I want the tow on station in ten minutes. Commence emergency shutdown procedures and hold at S2 shutdown. Let's go!"
And so, in a flash, the pilot and her commanders lost faith in one another. The room went abuzz with controllers going over their shutdown checklists. Some of them, having little else to do, sat away from their stations. Asuka was one of those. She met my eyes from a distance and shook her head, baffled. I could only shrug.
The remaining controllers watched the battle unfold, as the pilot confronted the Angel without support. She bashed and swatted at the Angel's AT field, letting out grueling shouts and cries each time her fists failed to break through.
I turned aside, to Hyuga, and said, "She's not going to do anything that way."
Hyuga covered his microphone. "She needs to do what we were doing to begin with: hold on to it and try to break it, one AT field layer at a time."
I scoffed in frustration. "Shouldn't we tell her that, then?"
Behind me, Misato put down her headset. "You think she's going to listen?"
I spun in my chair, facing her. "I think we should try, yeah."
"Why?" Misato folded her arms. "What makes you think you can reach her now, where all other efforts have failed?"
I glanced at the middle front screen, where the Eva and Angel did battle. I closed my eyes, listening to each blow. I felt those punches as though they came from my own hands.
"Because I've been there," I said. "I know what it's like to sit in that chair."
Misato came around her table to my station. "Are you prepared to tell her that?" Misato's eyes were steady and sure; they locked me in place, and I could only look away.
"I…I guess so?" I said, retreating back in my chair.
"Show me, then." Misato clicked the Plugcom button on the transmission panel, and when the system complained, she entered her password to override it. She held up the transmission switch on my headset cord. "Ready?"
I nodded weakly, and Misato threw the switch. There was a slight hiss, and all I could get out was, "Um, hello? Pilot—Pilot, can you hear me? This is, uh, this is…"
Laughter. She was laughing at me. "I know who you are." The Eva backed off, watching the Angel but otherwise unmoving. "How long have you been there?"
"The whole time," I said.
"Really? You got some advice for me there? Here to tell me to shut up and listen or something?"
"No, I, uh—" I gulped, and I took a breath. "I just wanted to say, you're a lot braver than I was."
"You're kidding," said the pilot.
"I'm not." I scooted forward in my chair, and I leaned on the desk as I spoke to her. "I never had the courage to fight through pain. I just got too tired to take it anymore."
A brief silence. "I'm not being brave either," said the pilot. "It hurts, yeah, but so what? You guys asked me to do this job. I'm trying to do it."
"You don't have to try so hard. Really. You don't have to put it all on your shoulders." I ran my fingers through my hair, and I watched the camera views of the Eva on the front projectors—as if I could catch the pilot's eye by looking at it. "I know that trying to protect so many people is hard. I've been there. I know. Let the people here do their jobs and help you. Please."
The Eva kept its guard up, but as the Angel drifted off to chase the artillery pieces again, the Eva held fast.
"I still feel fine," said the pilot, "but what do you have for me?"
Misato sighed, and she got Hyuga's attention. "Get her on track, and we can salvage this thing."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, adjusting his headset. "All right, Fourteen. We have some procedures for you. We need you to snap your right wrist armor plates back into place. Can you do that?"
The Eva pushed the armor plates flat, and the pilot let out a noticeable hiss each time. "Okay," she answered. "Now what?"
"We're going to throttle up your sync rate to give you full functionality with that arm—as much as we can given the break. Ready?"
"Yeah, go for it."
Hyuga nodded to Asuka, and the pilot grunted.
"Okay, maybe not quite as fine!" She wiggled the Eva's fingers. "But that's a lot more responsive, sure. What do you want me to do, Control?"
"Hold that AT field with both hands and break through with whatever you have," said Hyuga, pumping his fist toward the floor.
The Eva charged down the road. As the Angel gobbled up another artillery piece and flung it around to crash, the Eva caught up and latched on to the Angel's AT field. The Eva dug its fingers into the orange barrier. The Angel lurched and threw itself against the Eva, but the pilot spun the Angel around like a matador turning away a bull.
And with a mighty yell, the Eva ripped the AT field open! It charged head-first into the exposed space!
Ka-WHONG!
The Angel's outer ring broke on the Eva's AT field; the ring shattered, showering the expressway and countryside in chunks of alien, blue-white material. The Angel flew back in a wandering, irregular path. It headed for the sky, where the Eva could not reach, and it retreated behind the clouds.
Though the technicians in the control room clapped and sat back in relief, Misato kept them all on point: "Don't celebrate yet, people. Let's keep eyes on that Angel. But Fourteen, nice work." Misato covered her microphone. "And nice work from our assistant Plugcom, as well, hm?"
It's nice to be able to celebrate a win, no matter how mild or temporary that victory may be. For the moment, the Angel fled, and since it was far out of reach of the Eva's grasp, Misato ultimately recalled Eva-14 to base. The controllers closed out their consoles.
And I? I went to visit with the pilot. That was Misato's idea, too, really. "You're going to be working together a lot, I think. Make sure some of your experience rubs off on her."
We waited outside the cage elevator—Asuka and I, that is. Asuka had a full clipboard of information from Ritsuko about working on an Eva, manning one of the technical stations, and so on.
I took one look at that stack of papers, and I offered Asuka a sympathetic smile. "You have a lot on your plate."
"Hm?" She looked up absently. "Oh, I guess I do. I can't really think about it right now, though."
I put an arm around her shoulder. "Why's that?"
Asuka looked away and sighed. "Because of the pilot, you know."
"What about her?" I asked, frowning.
Clang. The cage elevator reached our floor, and out walked the pilot. Her plugsuit was mostly white, with just a few hints of green and black around her shoulders and feet. Her hair was dark and kept in a ponytail, which extended just to her shoulders. She was somewhat short but lithe in step.
Her gray eyes flickered to Asuka. "They have you here, too?"
Asuka nodded. "Yeah. You okay?"
The pilot shrugged, and her eyes went to me. "Guess we should shake hands or something? What you said out there helped, I think. Thanks."
She offered a hand, and I took it, though my eyes went back and forth between her and Asuka.
"What am I missing here?" I said.
Asuka rubbed her temple, looking away. "Shinji, this is—"
"Nozomi." A girl in a red tie and brown vest turned the corner. Her uniform was foreign to me, but her short pigtails and freckles were unmistakable.
Her name was Hikari Horaki.
"How was it?" asked Horaki, still standing at the corner of the hallway. "Everything went well?"
"Yeah, fine," said the pilot, Nozomi, who shrugged again. "It's all fine."
Asuka let out an irritated sigh, saying,
"Shinji, this is Nozomi Horaki, Hikari's little sister."
7. Angel Attack
You know, Nerv had to be out of their minds to trust mankind's fate to middle-schoolers like us.
We were young, damaged, sexually confused teenagers. We had no idea what we were doing. We had no idea who we really were or what we wanted out of life. And yet, Nerv trusted us to take care of humanity. I have to wonder: were they that desperate? Or were they looking for soldiers who still had a chance to win yet were young enough and immature enough to be controlled, or broken, when the time for Third Impact came?
Knowing my father, I can only think it was the latter, but he didn't have full control over our fates, either. Still, if you didn't live in that time, it must be unfathomable to think that we ever put humanity's future in the hands of children.
It must be even more unfathomable to think that we did it twice!
You have to realize something about children, though: I'm not sure children really understand bravery. They know the concept, and they know it's something good, but piloting Eva—it's not a snap decision. It's not something you can decide to do with courage in your heart and then be done with it. Bravery is a rush of emotion that ebbs away with time. Piloting Eva is a grind. It's not something a child can be brave for.
It's something a child convinces herself to do.
For my part, I was just floored that we still had to use children at all, but the truth of the matter sunk in as we were on the way to the bunker. Misato explained what she could over the radio, and when she told me there was another pilot—someone else like Asuka and me—I couldn't believe it. Why, after all we'd gone through, did she subject someone else to that, too?
"What would you rather do?" Misato argued, her voice tinged with static. "Would you trust all our lives to some mindless clone? I wouldn't. I admit it's difficult and painful, but I will do everything I can to shield a pilot from hardship. I do that because I'd rather put my faith in people."
People. Despite the bloody rain that had fallen on the capital, people were everywhere. Our motorcade took us past armed checkpoints with dozens of SDF members standing by. It took us by tents where thirsty civilians sought water and safety. Teams of men and women patrolled the streets, filling in puddles of LCL with sand. Survival was a cooperative effort, and all mankind was involved in it.
That was the case at our destination, as well: National Square. SDF manned several tents there for coordination and logistics, and at least three convoys of infantry and refugees arrived just while we made our way through. For the moment, our place wasn't with the refugees and aid workers. I could not help pass out water or meal packets. I was needed elsewhere.
Our escort took us to the Defense Agency building, and from there, we headed downstairs to the secret train station. The place was as inhospitable and bleak as ever. The lights in the train tunnel were as white and harsh. The SDF members who rode with us weren't very chatty, either.
"We're just here to escort you to the general, sir," said the leader.
And so we rode on, in uncomfortable silence, to the bunker with no name.
Unlike the first time Misato showed me around, that day the base was bustling. Armed guards stood watch at every stairwell entrance. Fireteams in full armor and combat gear stormed through the halls, as though they had appointments with the aliens and were running late. I can't remember the soldiers' faces, though. Like those featureless cream-colored walls, they all blended together after a while.
The busy atmosphere had taken hold in the control room, too. People shuffled in and out with binders and notebooks. Misato had a group of four staffers hanging on her every word, scribbling down orders, and flipping through pages upon pages of reports and communiques. Only when Hyuga waved for her attention did she notice we were here.
"Oh thank goodness," she said, pushing through the crowd of staffers. "Now I can do some actual work for a change. Shinji, Asuka, good to have you both helping us. Ready to stave off the end of the world?"
"Whatever it takes," said Asuka. "Where do you want us?"
"Here." That was Maya Ibuki, who offered Asuka a seat at one of the cubicles on the right side. "We'd really appreciate your help giving a pilot's insight into the technical side of things. That combination of experience is a luxury here."
Asuka took her seat and looked over the readouts. "There are only two experienced Eva pilots left in this world, so of course I'm a rare commodity. Isn't that obvious?"
Maya chuckled nervously, looking to Misato for help. Misato nodded.
"I see someone's confidence hasn't diminished," said Misato. "Hold on to that and make yourself useful. You work for me now. Understand?"
Asuka did a quick salute, even as she moved windows around on the touch-screen panels. Really, she seemed to fit rightin, while I—I was still standing up. I caught Misato's eye, and she winced.
"Sorry, Shinji. We have something in mind for you, too."
Misato handed me a headset and motioned to the back of the room, where there was an elevated platform and station. Misato sat down at that station with an array of four monitors in front of her. Hyuga and I took seats in the row just in front of her. Hyuga logged me into the system with a few keystrokes, and I plugged my headset into the front panel of the computer case. At that moment, though, the default feeds on the monitors were completely blank, save for one panel with an array of different listings: Master, Operations, Neural, and Plugcom. Each loop managed a different set of controllers and systems. Hyuga explained that I would have access only to the Operations and Plugcom loops.
"Where does Plugcom go?" I asked.
Hyuga laughed, but when he saw I was serious, he explained it simply:
"To the pilot, Shinji."
My eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets, but Hyuga put his own headset on and took his seat. That's when Misato spoke up.
"Good morning, everyone," she said, just one seat behind me. "Shall we get started?"
Her voice came through the headset just a fraction of a second after I heard her behind me. Surely there had to be some way to fix that? I fumbled through the controls looking for some setting as Misato went through numerous safety checks and status reports before launch. Everything from armor integrity to temperature regulation—the works.
Midway through the checklist, I finally heard the person on the other end of the radio loop. Misato finished checking in with the Telemetry controllers, and she looked to Hyuga and me.
"Plugcom?" she asked.
Hyuga tapped his monitor and depressed a switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, Control."
A girl's voice answered him—a steady, even bored voice. "Hi there. Oh, what was it I'm supposed to say? Hi Control? Something like that?"
Laughing, Hyuga sat back in his chair. "Something like that, yes. How are you doing?"
"I'm breathing warm liquid that smells like blood, so I think I've had better days. Can we go?"
Hyuga looked back to Misato, both of them chuckling.
"Honestly, that girl," said Misato, shaking her head, but when she flipped the switch on her headset line, she was all business, with only a hint of levity in her voice. "Plugcom is go," she said. "Give me aerial on screen one, cage on two, and launch site on three, please."
The three main screens at the front of the room flickered to life. On the far left was a plot of green lines that I couldn't quite understand, but the middle screen was a video feed of some mountainside, with a large, cleared area—a square concrete pad with a seam running down the middle. "Danger - Elevator," it read, with the words stenciled in red, but the platform opened up, revealing a shaft beneath.
And lastly, there was the Evangelion on the launch catapult.
Unit-14—a dark behemoth. Where the Eva I had known had been lithe to a fault—too tall by proportion to be truly human—Unit-14 was a shorter, burly creature. The spikes on its helmet were almost as tall as its head and neck. If my Eva and Asuka's had been like lean predators—like birds of prey, or hunting cats—Unit-14 was like an entirely different beast:
It was like a bear.
A bear in shiny, forest green armor, with only hints of black accents near its joints. Its six eyes—in two rows of three—were the only bright things about it. They glowed with a pure, searing white, a shade of white that was murderous for its penetrating power.
And the time had come for Unit-14 to kill.
"Start the clock," said Misato.
On Misato's command, one of the master clocks at the front of the room reset to thirty seconds and counted down. The controllers went through their final checks during the launch process—checking that the launcher motors had warmed up correctly and such. The digits on the clock ticked down, and when they hit zero—
SHING! The Eva vanished up the launch chute, and when the cage elevator reached the surface, it lurched slightly against the restraints, which released with explosive blasts. The Eva stumbled off the launch platform, like a child coming off an exciting ride. Well, if that child was a hulking beast looming over a mountainside, anyway.
"All right," said the pilot. "Where am I going?"
"We're getting you navigation data right now, Fourteen, standby," said Hyuga, who glanced back to Misato.
"Give her some waypoints," Misato said on the master loop. "Put navigation on one and give me target visual on two."
The first screen flickered to a topographical map with a route through the mountains back to town. The second screen changed to an airborne camera, which captured within a pair of crosshairs the Eva's target:
A massive, gyroscopic Angel.
It spun incessantly. Its outermost ring tumbled forward slowly, and then second ring turned perpendicular to it. Each ring further in spun faster than the last, to the point that the innermost rings were just blurs to human eyes, or even seemed to spin the wrong way—at least according to the camera. The Angel floated over roads and forest, with its spinning rings kicking up a breeze as it passed.
The Angel's target was an artillery battalion. Capital Perimeter Defense had started fighting back a horde of creatures along the Nagano Expressway, and the Angel flew to intercept this battle. The controllers guided the pilot to do the same.
"Defend the battalion from the Angel's attacks," said Hyuga, "and let's all go home safe."
"You're making it sound easy, Control," said the pilot.
Hyuga bowed his head and fought back a smile. "Would you like it better if we sounded more desperate down here?"
"Maybe."
The Eva lumbered toward its target at a steady pace—thump, thump, thump. It crossed rivers and valleys in deliberate, measured leaps, never seeming to exert itself, never seeming to be in a great hurry. With that deathly stare on its face, you couldn't mistake this for laziness or indifference. No, the Eva's arrival was inevitable, and as it had barreled across the countryside effortlessly, it would push through the Angel just the same.
But confident though the pilot may have been, Angels have a way of surprising you.
When the Angel approached the artillery batteries, the artillery commanders didn't even seem fazed. They kept firing off their shells, laying waste to hills and the advancing throng of creatures, of "walkers," that advanced on their position. Plane-mounted cameras showed us the creatures suffering from the bombardment. The explosions ripped their bodies apart, and when they tried to reform, another cluster of impacts would tear them back down again.
But the Angel inserted itself between the artillery and their targets. Though shells passed through gaps in its rings harmlessly, the Angel whirled and spun. It spun so fast that all its rings blurred.
To the camera's eye, even the images of clouds and mountains behind the Angel twisted and bent.
Artillery shells warped through the Angel and came back around, blasting the ground far short of their targets. And the Angel? The Angel advanced on the artillery battalion, kicking up dirt and trees in an earthen wake. The battalion retreated, turning their barrels around and breaking down the highway on their tank-like tracks.
But a fast getaway for those self-propelled howitzers was something like forty kilometers per hour. They strained and lurched for speed on the empty highway, but the Angel ground up pavement and cement bridges behind them, ripping asphalt from the ground without even touching it. One of the artillery pieces spun out, tumbling, and—
A flash!
A white, saturating flash blinded the camera, leaving only a few misplaced crosshairs behind. Static and low-frequency warblings burst through the radio, and readouts of the Eva's telemetry went blank.
"Fourteen?" cried Hyuga, pressing his headset to his ear. "Fourteen, do you read?"
The light faded, leaving a barrier of concentric octagons between the Angel's outer ring and the hand that held that ring in place:
The Eva's hand.
"I'm a little busy here, Control!" the pilot said. "Is there something you wanted to say?"
Hyuga stared at the image on the middle screen, and he shook his head. "No, Fourteen. Carry on."
The Eva punched at the AT field, but the Angel twisted and spun, wrenching itself free. Its AT field came back together whole, and it zoomed backward. Ripples of air and light coursed through the environment, and even the airborne camera wobbled as they passed by.
But as the Angel gave ground, the Eva took advantage of all the space it ceded. Unit-14 charged and leapt after the Angel with all the grace and dexterity of a circus acrobat or a ballet dancer—a strange image given the Eva's lumbering shape. As the Angel fled down the highway, the Eva gave chase, bounding over road signs and across highway dividers. It was a coordinated, deliberate pursuit.
"She's good," I said to myself.
"She'd better be," said Misato. "It'd be a shame if all that simulation time didn't translate to the real thing."
Whether in simulation or reality, the pilot knew how to fight an Angel. Hyuga sat back, scrutinizing the displays in front of him, but he said nothing. The pilot had no need of his advice or guidance. She knew the stakes, and she knew how to fight, and for the moment, Hyuga was redundant. The most he could do was sit back, watch, and hope he would be needed again, if at all.
That didn't look like it would happen soon, though. The Eva grasped at the Angel, catching the outer layer of the Angel's AT field. The pilot pushed the Eva's fingertips through the barrier, like pencils punching holes in a piece of paper, and she clawed to catch the spinning ring.
"Careful," said Hyuga. "It might have something up its sleeve this time."
But the pilot pulled the Angel in for a punch anyway, and this time, the Angel shot itself at her like a shell out of a canon.
Crack! The Angel's outer ring smashed the Eva's right forearm.
"Fracture detected!" cried one of the controllers. "Right radius, transverse open fracture."
"Right forearm armor plating displaced."
Misato rose. "How is she doing?"
Hyuga got up as well, and the two of them studied the forward projector screens together. "Fourteen, Control," said Hyuga. "Your right arm is broken. How does it feel?"
"It's not—too bad," the pilot offered through gritted teeth. "Maybe a little smashing into an easel."
"Let's take her plug depth down; ease her off the pain," said Misato.
"Let's lower the synch rate to 35%," said Maya, overseeing a group of technicians on the right side of the room. "We can then ease her back up to her normal levels over the next few minutes."
"And raise it back?" Misato shook her head. "That's not standard procedure."
"But it would help." Asuka rose from her position a few rows down. "Fighting at a low sync rate is like walking through mud. She's going to notice it, and she's not going to be as effective while that's in place, but we can reintroduce full synch and she'll hardly notice the pain. She'll be too busy to notice."
Misato frowned, so Asuka added,
"It's what I wish you guys had done when I was a pilot."
Holding on to her headset cord, Misato only looked to Maya and made her wishes known with a slight nod. "Go ahead, and let's get her on VOX. If she's straining too hard, we're aborting."
Hyuga hit the switch on his headset line. "Fourteen, we're going to have you on VOX."
The Eva chased after the Angel, making a one-handed swipe, but the Angel propelled itself free and zoomed down the road, making for the retreating artillery pieces. The Eva ran after the Angel, and the pilot grunted with each step.
"Oh, so that means I can't gripe about you guys when you're not on the line?"
"I'm afraid not," said Hyuga, who paced next to his station as he watched. "You feel all right with that arm? Well enough to continue?"
The Eva opened and closed its fist gingerly. "I guess it'll have to do," said the pilot.
Hyuga smiled. "Time for round two, then. See if you can chase it down and hold on to the AT field with both hands. I know your arm is weak, but you might be able to kick through the AT field and get some damage on that ring. All right?"
"It'll be a lot harder to get after that thing on a broken leg if this doesn't work," said the pilot.
Hyuga looked back to Misato, who only nodded. "That's a risk we'll have to take," he said.
So the Eva gave chase again, but this time, its strides weren't quite as graceful. The Eva's feet sank into the pavement in places, and it stumbled over cracks in the road. It carried on like a bull, charging toward its target with reckless abandon.
It grabbed the Angel's AT field again, but the Angel whirled and spun. Dragging space itself around it, the Angel ripped up the highway, bombarding the Eva with strips of asphalt.
"I don't think I'm holding on to this thing!" cried the pilot.
"You can," said Hyuga. "You don't need to penetrate it with your hands; just don't let it go. Kick through it."
With only one hand to hold on, the Eva raised its right leg and kicked upward, but the leg just bounced off the Angel's AT field.
And worse than that, both the Eva's legs rose from the ground as debris around the Eva rocketed upwards.
"Fourteen, let go!" Hyuga rose from his seat. "Let go, let go!"
The Angel shot for the sky with unreal speed, and though the Eva broke free, the warp of space dragged it into the clouds with the Angel. The Eva tumbled. The pilot grunted and groaned. And when the Angel spat the Eva out like a flavorless wad of gum, the Eva splatted on the side of the road, lying flat on its face.
Warning lights flashed. Alarms rang out. The controllers bombarded the master audio loop with reports.
"Multiple ribcage fractures. Upper body strength strongly compromised."
"Three armor plates displaced."
"LCL temperature up to 30C."
Misato rose from her chair. "All right, all right," she said, leaning over the table as she addressed the room. "Let's settle down, everyone. Liaison, relay to the regulars that Eva-14 is partially damaged and may not continue operations today. Systems, what can we do in the next minute or two to repair those displaced plates?"
Misato's staff worked feverishly to come up with solutions, but amid all this commotion, the pilot's labored, pained breaths came over the radio. The Eva stood up, staggering to its feet, and it set its sights on the Angel.
"Fourteen, Control. Stand by while we assess the damage."
"Damage?" the pilot said, despite her haggard breaths. "I feel fine."
"That's adrenaline. You won't feel fine in a while, and the last thing we need is for you to black out from the pain mid-battle. Stand by."
But the Eva took a tentative step, and then another. It trotted along the side of the road, building up to a sprint. In the distance, its target floated over the highway, bending the light of the setting sun into a warped ring, but the Eva gave chase.
"Fourteen! Do you read me?"
One of the controllers a few rows down looked back to Misato. "We still have her telemetry. Comms should be functional."
Misato huffed. "This isn't about the comms not working. Plugcom, give her to me, please."
Hyuga tapped one of the controls on his monitor and slid back from his station. Misato tightened her radio headset and flipped the switch to transmit.
"Fourteen, this is the General. You are ordered to stand down until further notice. Do you understand me?"
"Why? Is it that bad?"
Misato and Hyuga exchanged a glance like they'd just seen a unicorn fly through the room. "That's what we're trying to figure out!" cried Misato.
But did we have the time for that? Not really. On the far right main screen, the Angel ripped one of the artillery pieces off the highway and flung it aside like a toddler throwing away a toy. We all saw it. So did the pilot, who said,
"You guys figure it out. I feel fine."
Misato narrowed her eyes. "You operate only with this installation's consent. If you take that Eva on an unauthorized action, we will shut you down. Am I clear?"
"Do whatever you have to do."
"So be it," Misato said to herself. "All right, people, listen up! I want the tow on station in ten minutes. Commence emergency shutdown procedures and hold at S2 shutdown. Let's go!"
And so, in a flash, the pilot and her commanders lost faith in one another. The room went abuzz with controllers going over their shutdown checklists. Some of them, having little else to do, sat away from their stations. Asuka was one of those. She met my eyes from a distance and shook her head, baffled. I could only shrug.
The remaining controllers watched the battle unfold, as the pilot confronted the Angel without support. She bashed and swatted at the Angel's AT field, letting out grueling shouts and cries each time her fists failed to break through.
I turned aside, to Hyuga, and said, "She's not going to do anything that way."
Hyuga covered his microphone. "She needs to do what we were doing to begin with: hold on to it and try to break it, one AT field layer at a time."
I scoffed in frustration. "Shouldn't we tell her that, then?"
Behind me, Misato put down her headset. "You think she's going to listen?"
I spun in my chair, facing her. "I think we should try, yeah."
"Why?" Misato folded her arms. "What makes you think you can reach her now, where all other efforts have failed?"
I glanced at the middle front screen, where the Eva and Angel did battle. I closed my eyes, listening to each blow. I felt those punches as though they came from my own hands.
"Because I've been there," I said. "I know what it's like to sit in that chair."
Misato came around her table to my station. "Are you prepared to tell her that?" Misato's eyes were steady and sure; they locked me in place, and I could only look away.
"I…I guess so?" I said, retreating back in my chair.
"Show me, then." Misato clicked the Plugcom button on the transmission panel, and when the system complained, she entered her password to override it. She held up the transmission switch on my headset cord. "Ready?"
I nodded weakly, and Misato threw the switch. There was a slight hiss, and all I could get out was, "Um, hello? Pilot—Pilot, can you hear me? This is, uh, this is…"
Laughter. She was laughing at me. "I know who you are." The Eva backed off, watching the Angel but otherwise unmoving. "How long have you been there?"
"The whole time," I said.
"Really? You got some advice for me there? Here to tell me to shut up and listen or something?"
"No, I, uh—" I gulped, and I took a breath. "I just wanted to say, you're a lot braver than I was."
"You're kidding," said the pilot.
"I'm not." I scooted forward in my chair, and I leaned on the desk as I spoke to her. "I never had the courage to fight through pain. I just got too tired to take it anymore."
A brief silence. "I'm not being brave either," said the pilot. "It hurts, yeah, but so what? You guys asked me to do this job. I'm trying to do it."
"You don't have to try so hard. Really. You don't have to put it all on your shoulders." I ran my fingers through my hair, and I watched the camera views of the Eva on the front projectors—as if I could catch the pilot's eye by looking at it. "I know that trying to protect so many people is hard. I've been there. I know. Let the people here do their jobs and help you. Please."
The Eva kept its guard up, but as the Angel drifted off to chase the artillery pieces again, the Eva held fast.
"I still feel fine," said the pilot, "but what do you have for me?"
Misato sighed, and she got Hyuga's attention. "Get her on track, and we can salvage this thing."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, adjusting his headset. "All right, Fourteen. We have some procedures for you. We need you to snap your right wrist armor plates back into place. Can you do that?"
The Eva pushed the armor plates flat, and the pilot let out a noticeable hiss each time. "Okay," she answered. "Now what?"
"We're going to throttle up your sync rate to give you full functionality with that arm—as much as we can given the break. Ready?"
"Yeah, go for it."
Hyuga nodded to Asuka, and the pilot grunted.
"Okay, maybe not quite as fine!" She wiggled the Eva's fingers. "But that's a lot more responsive, sure. What do you want me to do, Control?"
"Hold that AT field with both hands and break through with whatever you have," said Hyuga, pumping his fist toward the floor.
The Eva charged down the road. As the Angel gobbled up another artillery piece and flung it around to crash, the Eva caught up and latched on to the Angel's AT field. The Eva dug its fingers into the orange barrier. The Angel lurched and threw itself against the Eva, but the pilot spun the Angel around like a matador turning away a bull.
And with a mighty yell, the Eva ripped the AT field open! It charged head-first into the exposed space!
Ka-WHONG!
The Angel's outer ring broke on the Eva's AT field; the ring shattered, showering the expressway and countryside in chunks of alien, blue-white material. The Angel flew back in a wandering, irregular path. It headed for the sky, where the Eva could not reach, and it retreated behind the clouds.
Though the technicians in the control room clapped and sat back in relief, Misato kept them all on point: "Don't celebrate yet, people. Let's keep eyes on that Angel. But Fourteen, nice work." Misato covered her microphone. "And nice work from our assistant Plugcom, as well, hm?"
It's nice to be able to celebrate a win, no matter how mild or temporary that victory may be. For the moment, the Angel fled, and since it was far out of reach of the Eva's grasp, Misato ultimately recalled Eva-14 to base. The controllers closed out their consoles.
And I? I went to visit with the pilot. That was Misato's idea, too, really. "You're going to be working together a lot, I think. Make sure some of your experience rubs off on her."
We waited outside the cage elevator—Asuka and I, that is. Asuka had a full clipboard of information from Ritsuko about working on an Eva, manning one of the technical stations, and so on.
I took one look at that stack of papers, and I offered Asuka a sympathetic smile. "You have a lot on your plate."
"Hm?" She looked up absently. "Oh, I guess I do. I can't really think about it right now, though."
I put an arm around her shoulder. "Why's that?"
Asuka looked away and sighed. "Because of the pilot, you know."
"What about her?" I asked, frowning.
Clang. The cage elevator reached our floor, and out walked the pilot. Her plugsuit was mostly white, with just a few hints of green and black around her shoulders and feet. Her hair was dark and kept in a ponytail, which extended just to her shoulders. She was somewhat short but lithe in step.
Her gray eyes flickered to Asuka. "They have you here, too?"
Asuka nodded. "Yeah. You okay?"
The pilot shrugged, and her eyes went to me. "Guess we should shake hands or something? What you said out there helped, I think. Thanks."
She offered a hand, and I took it, though my eyes went back and forth between her and Asuka.
"What am I missing here?" I said.
Asuka rubbed her temple, looking away. "Shinji, this is—"
"Nozomi." A girl in a red tie and brown vest turned the corner. Her uniform was foreign to me, but her short pigtails and freckles were unmistakable.
Her name was Hikari Horaki.
"How was it?" asked Horaki, still standing at the corner of the hallway. "Everything went well?"
"Yeah, fine," said the pilot, Nozomi, who shrugged again. "It's all fine."
Asuka let out an irritated sigh, saying,
"Shinji, this is Nozomi Horaki, Hikari's little sister."
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- Location
- Spain
That was fast, even by Eva standards.
Ranma has already mentioned this and I saw that you amended one of the scenes already, but I'll chip in on the talking heads matter as well. It can make some of the reading a bit confusing.
I think that some of the action during the early parts of the angel-spawn invasion could have also used a little bit more build-up. I wasn't expecting little angels at all when Asuka and Shinji were finding LCL pools everywhere (kinda surprised that they didn't bat much of an eye at that, too), and I think it came a little out of nowhere.
The suddenness of it all might have been what you were going for, but I think that some foreshadowing might have worked well in that scene. Maybe a sound here, or a moving shadow there. That kind of thing.
Then again, this is coming from a guy with a chronic tendency towards too much wordiness, so take with a pinch of salt.
Muphrid
Star of the Lancer
Interesting. I'd like to hear if others felt the same way. Thanks for pointing this out.