"I see, Priestess of Genbu. You appear to be just like me, wading in a pool of your own death."
- Temdan Rowun, Fushigi Yuugi
"This car is a part of me just as much as it's a part of you."
- Joe Astor, Viper
"How is he these days?"
"Peter? Well, he was borderline for a while. Then he crossed the border."
- Ghostbusters II
NERV's top secret Seattle base was a booming place to be on a Friday afternoon. Mari was almost ready to yawn as boot sequence color patterns rapidly flashed across her glasses from the Entry Plug screens. She moved in slow motion as she stretched her shoulders and wiggled life back into her fingers. Her braided brown hair floated in weightless ripples when she turned her head. She'd been stuck in a tank full of breathable apple cider for the past twenty minutes, and she felt like she might start going stale if she didn't see some action soon.
An operator who sounded just as enamored with their job as she was droned through the Entry Plug's speakers.
"Umbilical power supply in place. LCL amniotic environment stable. Pilot biosigns are all green."
Mari sighed and vacantly blew bubbles into her liquid oxygen supply.
She wasn't sure why her Plugsuit looked more it passed off better as a bathing suit than any kind of regulatory military equipment. She wasn't exactly planning on an ocean vacation in the middle of a training operation. While she wasn't personally friends with any of Japan's Eva pilots (and they weren't even aware she served alongside them in a separate NERV branch on the opposite side of the planet), she had been keeping tabs on them long enough to know everyone else got to wear proper jumpsuits when they were piloting. Mari must have been the odd one out, because her version of the regalia mécanique took a more piecemeal approach to uniform design. She was wearing metallic pink and blue boots that reached up to her knees, metallic pink and black gloves that reached a little past her elbows, metallic pink bikini bottoms that barely covered up the downtown district, and a metallic pink and black crop top molded with thin plastic shielding and with the designation "04" painted in black army stencils on the front and back.
Whatever the hell "optimizing the ratio of neuralmetric yield by maximizing surface area" was supposed to mean. One of the world's greatest mysteries to her was what Freudian theories and math calculations had to do with how much of her butt cheeks were showing. She just got to pick the color.
Then again, considering she was basically a glorified fetus in this whole "giant robot that isn't really a robot is my mom" setup, she was a little surprised to be wearing anything.
"We're ready to begin the Activation Test, Lt. Makinami," Boredom McMonotone buzzed over the Evangelion's radio.
"It's about time we got this show on the road." Mari rolled her eyes. A cluster of LCL bubbles swarmed out of her mouth as she sighed in aggravation.
She leaned forward in her cockpit seat and anxiously coiled her fingers around the control throttles. Mari had been little more than NERV's test hamster for the past year, always getting first dibs at playing with the new toys that came out the American and Russian bases and ironing out their bugs before they were shipped off to HQ. If today's operation was a success, she'd have her own Eva that wasn't cobbled together from spare parts and could finally be assigned to the frontlines in Tokyo-3. She'd spend the whole weekend partying with the Seattle crew, once she got the apple cider washed off.
"Unit 04 online. Synchronization grid is all green. Engaging S2 Engine now."
The Master of the Mundane finished everything they had to say and flipped the last switch to bring the system online. In hindsight, Mari really wished they hadn't.
The inside of EVA-04's Entry Plug changed to red. The cockpit quaked violently as the words SYNCH FLUX ERROR suddenly filled her screens. The operator finally had an opportunity to express their upper vocal range as they panicked.
"The psychometer is going off the grid! The Plug won't eject! She's going critical!"
Then Mari heard the screaming: Hundreds of tinny radio voices blasting through her ear as the entire base vanished in blocks from her radar map. After five seconds of terrifying wails of torment, the voices abruptly cut off and the only thing that came through Mari's radio was deafening static. Her radar map was blank except for a set of longitude-latitude coordinates that couldn't physically exist.
Mari felt the universe plummeting backwards. Her spatial awareness collapsed and suddenly she was in an infinite void of boiling blood-tinted LCL. She flailed her arm up toward her rapidly disappearing world, losing hold of her very existence as a frenzy of invisible quantum sharks dragged her down into the Dirac sea.
Three months later…
Writhing fungal appendages burst out of the ground behind EVA-03's feet. The unit's left ankle was caught in the foaming reeds before its pilot even noticed.
So far, this Angel was more of a nuisance than an actual challenge for the Evangelion team. It was viral in nature and seemed to be drawn toward any technology it could find. One minute it possessed an electric trolley and sent it hurtling toward the Evas, then it created an artificial lightning storm between some power lines. Nothing it did was enough to faze the Evangelions' armor, and none of the Eva team's physical attacks could harm it in return. In its current state, the Angel was nothing more than a cloud of energy that phased in and out of sight and left a trail of melting cordyceps wherever it passed. The Eva team had to wait until the Angel was done chilling out in subspace and decided to show up in its physical form.
The giant transuniversal sinkhole rapidly expanding behind EVA-03 seemed to be a sign it was finished playing hide and seek.
"Hikari! Watch out!" Asuka screamed over the radio.
EVA-02 tackled into EVA-03 and pushed it to safety across the street. EVA-02 hacked away at the squirming vines reaching through the wormhole with its combat axe, painting the surrounding buildings with bright red gore.
EVA-01 moved toward the left of 02 and 03 with its two-handed Countersword cautiously raised. EVA-00 was stationed two blocks away aiming its sniper rifle.
The void twisted off the ground, gradually imploded on itself, and began to turn solid. The first thing to form was its face: Two menacing blue eyes shielded behind a silver muzzle with four nostrils. The instant it had a mouth, it wrenched open its armored jaws and vomited a wave of corrosive spores toward the NERV team. EVA-03 quickly crouched in front of the rest of the team and protected them with its clear riot shield.
The Angel continued to materialize as the wormhole collapsed around it. It crouched to the ground like a wild animal ready to strike, roaring in madness from its hollow metal mouth. Fully formed, it was a surreal abomination with six arms, four legs (if mangled pillars of flesh, bone, and silver metal could be qualified as "legs"), and a grotesque torso engulfed almost completely by the bloated and tumorous S2 Engine erupting from its ribs. Its severe mutations made the scraps of shattered silver armor grafted to its body almost unrecognizable. The top of its first pair of arms were fitted with only the bent and broken off remnants of its old shoulder pauldrons. Along its back, a white capsule was screwed through the top of its spinal column, hidden deep underneath an overgrown fungus colony with number "04" almost completely worn away.
The Entry Plug was impossible to spot with the naked eye, and none of Eva pilots could detect it with their onboard systems. If they had been able to take a glimpse inside the festering atrocity staring them down, they would have come face to face with one shadowy and mysterious beach babe tangled in alien sea algae and in the mood for some chaos. The long-expired LCL surrounding her swirled with black clouds and obscured her in murkiness, but her revealing two-piece Plugsuit left little room to doubt her physiological state. Her veins were lit up like neon blue roadways traveling over every curve of her body, while her eyes glowed icy cobalt underneath the glare of her glasses. Her darkened female outline sat in the unpowered cockpit like the constellation of an hourglass glowing in the empty black cosmos to herald that humanity's time had run out. And of course, her lips were curled in a smug cat-like smirk.
NERV HQ was on high alert. The monstrosity of silver metal and inflamed red flesh was scanned through hundreds of automated sensors the instant it was visible on the command center cameras. The Magi System processed the data and returned with an analysis in a matter of seconds. Then the screen flashed with the giant words all of the workers on deck feared the most.
[BLOOD TYPE: BLUE]
The voices of Evangelion team relayed back from the field and boomed through the command center's intercom.
"What the hell is that thing?" Asuka shouted from her cockpit.
"Yeck," Hikari shuddered. "Asuka saves me from getting turned into mushroom soup and now we have to fight this weirdo?"
"Why does it look like an Eva?" Shinji gasped.
"Why does it have to look like mine?" Hikari added.
"Target locked. Awaiting orders," Rei said stoically.
Gendou was sitting at his desk at the highest tier of the base. His mouth was hidden behind his folded hands, while his eyes were hidden behind the white glow of his glasses. Misato stood near his right shoulder staring out at the screen. Ritsuko was watching closely from his left.
"My God. That's-…" Misato started to gasp, recognizing the disfigured remnants of the creature's original body in an instant.
"An Angel," Ritsuko forcefully completed her sentence, stopping her before she had a chance to say "EVA-04."
The doctor lowered her voice toward Gendou.
"Commander, I highly advise we eradicate all traces of the Thirteenth Angel before the infection spreads."
"Wait! Shouldn't we tell them about Mar-…" Misato objected.
"She doesn't exist. EVA-04 is an unmanned vehicle," Ritsuko sternly asserted.
"You know that's bullshit!" Misato shouted back in anger. "Look at the signals coming in. She's still synchronized with that thing!"
"She's been submerged below the threshold of reality for too long. Whatever came back is no longer human," Ritsuko said with haunting absolute certainty.
"We don't know that for sure!" Misato objected. "We can still try to get her ou-…"
"The Angel is the only thing that's been sustaining her for the past three months. She's become a Whore of Babylon."
Ritsuko turned her head to look Misato straight in the eye and coldly added, "She's gone."
Asuka got sick of waiting for something tubular to happen and decided to hang ten on her own. EVA-02 hurled its axe toward the Angel, where it lobbed halfway through the Angel's shoulder and got stuck in place as the severed muscles twisted and healed around it. EVA-02 used its assault rifle, EVA-03 used its submachine gun, and EVA-00 used its sniper rifle to pummel the monster in a hail of firepower. EVA-01 remained awkwardly frozen in shock.
The Angel hissed and shrieked as the bullets bounced off its armor and tore through its flesh, only to grow back even more mutated when the Evas stopped to reload. EVA-00 pulled a canister grenade out of its right pauldron and tossed it under the Angel's body. The resulting explosion blew off two and a quarter of the Angel's legs, but they instantly grew back in the form of squirming blister-covered cartilage.
The Angel stretched its head forward and screamed again in defiance. It used all four of its legs to instantly launch into the sky and blot out the sun. EVA-02 and EVA-03 looked up from their shade and saw the Angel come crashing back down toward them like a raging ocean wave.
Author's note: Ritsuko's "She's beyond all hope. Kill it" mentality is kinda how I feel about Rebuild in general.
Author's note 2: Well boys it looks like we turned this megane-ko into a real mega-neko.
Author's note 3: Alternate titles I was considering for this story: "Anything But Tangerines," "New Junk City," "Black Sheep" (the boss theme from Alien Soldier, not the Chris Farley movie), "The Last Soul," and "Aquarius."
Author's note 4: My brain is bouncing back and forth between saying this version of the EVA-04 disaster is a pure accident caused by the Angels being an uncontrollable evil so it plays into the "follies of Man trying to play God" theme, or saying the whole thing is just SEELE being assholes again and they secretly manipulated everything to play out this way while rigging it to look like an accident because their plan was to use Mari as a hyper-modernized sci-fi version of a sacrificial virgin against her will so they could spawn an Angel they can control to some degree to hasten the end of the world and/or set an example to the other NERV insiders. Not sure which one should be canon in this AU.
Author note 5: If you're confused on how Bad Mari can be shadowy and glowy at the same time, uh… let me think of a comparison. You know that scene in Sailor Moon R when they start fighting Wise Man and for a split second you see this outline of a dude that looks sorta like a more smoky version of Rubeus? It's a lot like that.