The things you don't care to read: Unless you're desperately bored—or a lawyer of some breed—I suggest you scroll down a few lines. That's right folks, this is the disclaimer—a tribute to our modern day society where only one thing is certain: nothing and no one is above or beyond the reach of a lawsuit. Yes, despite the fact that I—a guy barely staying in college on fee wavers and student loans—could not possibly own the rights to something as cool as NGE or FLCL, I could be sued for not saying that I don't own said rights…theoretically, anyway. So in order to both avoid lopping my financial future off at the balls and to hopefully drive a bastard sub-species of man (hereby referred to as the second party) to extinction by cutting off its food supply, I (hereafter referred to as the first party) shall hereto and forthwith cease and deny any and all claims of ownership to Neon Genesis Evangelion and Fooly Cooly (heretofore referred to as the third party/parties). For those of you who don't speak "lawyer" (also known as "ass"), allow me to translate: I don't own Eva or FLCL, but the wonderful people at Gainax do. I have $1.14 in the bank and my parents are under a bankruptcy, so go waste your time suing someone with a five-figure or greater income. Now, if I haven't completely turned you off or bored you out of your mind (you're still reading this—or skipped it like I warned you to—so I assume I haven't) allow me to present what started off as a random piece of crap and went downhill from there. Variable Reality: A Neon Genesis Evangelion/Fooly Cooly crossover, and one of the many numerous current works of what I like to call Last-Minute Productions.
A beach; deserted save for two souls: one, a timid boy who has had the weight of the world unwillingly thrust upon his shoulders and the other, a girl who once desperately wanted to prove that she and she alone could carry that weight. That weight has just been lifted from both their shoulders, but neither rejoices... no, if anything, they despair further.
Shinji Ikari, Third Child and Pilot of Evangelion Unit-01: destroyer and savior of humanity all in one breath.
Asuka Langley Sohryu, Second Child and Pilot of Evangelion Unit-02: co-savior of humanity and unwitting implement used for the destruction—Instrumentality—of humanity, also known as Third Impact.
Yet there is one other on this beach; one more soul, in turmoil over what has become of her children—her friends.
Rei Ayanami, First Child and Pilot of Evangelion Unit-00: destroyer, savior, mother of humanity—humanity itself in a way, Lilith.
"Perhaps," she whispers, as she watches the Third attempt to strangulate the Second, "perhaps if things had been different, then this could have been avoided..." She pauses as the Second reaches up to stroke the Third's face, which in turn, causes him to cease trying to end her life. "Perhaps they deserve one more chance at redemption. Perhaps we all do." She smiled as Shinji glanced up to look her way, that uncanny ability of his to seek her out wherever she may be showing itself once more. And then, she was gone. Perhaps if she had stayed, the Second's following words may have changed her mind... then again, when Rei sets her mind to a task, she completes it—no matter what. Gathering the last of her remaining power as Lilith, Mother of Humanity, Rei set about attempting to reverse the events leading up to the final hours of mankind, and to influence the decisions made along the line to alter the course of events... Perhaps if she could find a variable among humanity—something no one could have expected—then things would be different.
"As long as the Earth, the moon, and the sun...."
"Asuka, I need you..."
"I'd rather DIE than do it with you!"
"This Rei is the Rei..."
"ASUKA!"
"Where is that idiot Shinji when you need him?!"
"You are the one which deserves to live."
"If you do not open your mind to her, your Eva..."
"AYANAMI!"
"Is this my wish? To become one with Ikari?"
"Rei, get the Lance."
"It's raping my mind..."
"Give me back my Shinji!"
"Misato, now!"
"A.T. Field full power..."
"Activate the dummy plug."
"Is that what I'm piloting?"
"I'm not giving Ikari a free show!"
"You want us to catch it?!"
"EVAS CHARGE!"
"...Show off."
"Don't talk to me like that, you damn rookie!"
"It was a bit overpriced. Here, keep the change!"
"Why don't you just try smiling?"
"Don't just stand there, GET IN!"
"...I'll do it. I'll pilot it!"
"The beach... this is that dream again," Shinji Ikari thought to himself, semi-wakeful yet still asleep enough to have the same recurring dream he'd had since his father left him with his uncle. Dream-Shinji sat up, hugging his knees to his chest and staring out at the ocean—an ocean of blood, with a giant face half-submerged in the distance. He couldn't quite make out the face, and it gave him that annoying tip-of-the-tongue feeling one gets when he or she can't quite put a name to a face. He felt as though he should know the name attached to this face very well. And then...
Shinji turned his head to the side, looking up the beach at... "The girl, she's..." Even though he couldn't quite make out her face either, or recall her name, he could tell she was quite beautiful.
Shinji then proceeded to straddle the girl, whose face still remained hidden in fog, and strangle her. Then, the girl's eyes—or eye rather, as the other was bandaged—opened. Blue eyes; startlingly, hauntingly blue. "The kind of eyes that stay with a person for the rest of their life," he thought, again losing himself to the one part of her face that he could make out clearly. The dream incarnation of himself released the girl and for some unknown reason started to cry. And then, at the point where the dream had always stopped before, it continued. The girl's face came into crystal clarity for all of a second—but that was all it took for the image to burn itself into his mind. He watched as the girl's full, red lips mouthed something—he couldn't tell what exactly but he knew it was bad, very bad.
…
Shinji Ikari awoke with a headache and covered from head to toe in sweat. Judging by the glowing green display of his alarm clock, he was already an hour late for his meeting. "Shit!" he cursed, kicking off the sheet and rushing to the shower of his teacher's small apartment. After a quick shower and change of clothes, Shinji took off at a run for the nearest train station.
Several hours and even more miles later, the boy arrived in Tokyo-3. Oddly enough, he was the only passenger during the whole trip, and the train departed the way it had come as soon as he stepped off onto the platform. "Odd," he murmured. Shrugging his small backpack around on his shoulder and switching his instrument case to the other hand, he started off out of the terminal and down the street, exploring the city that he may soon come to call home.
"We're sorry, but all lines are down due to the special state of emergency. Please seek out the nearest shelter. Have a nice day."
Annoyed, Shinji hung up the pay phone and glanced back down at the photo held in his hand. "P.S. Check this out! -- " "She isn't coming. Great. What a waste of time. At least I won't have to deal with father again..." he sighed, pocketing the photograph, and turning from the phone booth... only to catch a glimpse of something down the road—or someone rather. A girl, dressed in a school uniform and bearing an unusual shade of blue hair, stood in the middle of a four-lane highway. She seemed to smile briefly but a sudden motion to his right caused Shinji to glance away. A flock of birds had just taken flight from a power line. "Something must have startled them," he thought, turning his gaze back to the girl...that wasn't there any more. "She's gone."
All of this was beginning to feel awfully familiar to Shinji when a sudden explosion from behind jolted him from his reverie. Turning around, he was shocked to find a giant foot in the middle of the street—a foot attached to a very large thing, which was currently being attacked by small (only by comparison) air-craft. The sound of screeching tires drew his attention to a blue Renault—and the woman from the photograph—parked inches from where he now stood. "Hi! Sorry I'm late. Get in!" she called, opening the door and waving frantically.
"Fuyutsuki."
"Yes sir?"
"Wake up Rei."
"But...can we use her?"
"She's not dead yet."
"...Understood."
click
SOUND ONLY
"Rei?"
"Yes?"
"Our spare is unusable. You will do it again."
"...Yes sir."
Shinji watched his father finish his conversation and turn around to smirk down at his son. "What is he up to? Something isn't right about this," Shinji thought, only to be distracted as the door on the other side of the EVA cage was kicked in and several nurses wheeled in... "The girl from the street?" The gurney seemed to pause just long enough for Shinji to get a good look at her bandaged face and then resumed its previous speed until it was on the other side of the platform. That's where things started to go wrong.
A blast from above shook the entire facility, knocking over the gurney and spilling its valuable contents onto the floor—perilously close to the edge and certain liquidy death. Shinji gave a startled outcry and ran for the injured girl. Above, several support beams broke loose and fell towards the platform. Again, time paused for a moment. Misato Katsuragi and Ritsuko Akagi watched from the door to the EVA cage as the large I-beams threatened to turn the younger Ikari into a bloody smear on the platform—when the impossible happened and Unit-01 self-activated, ripping its right arm free of its restraints and intercepting the debris.
Shinji never noticed any of this as he made his way across the platform, finally kneeling beside the girl and cradling her in his arms. Her whimpers of pain made him cringe, almost crying out himself. Looking down, he noticed that she was bleeding into his hand. "Rei," he whispered. "Father—you bastard." Glaring up at the booth, he saw that his father was still wearing that ever-present smirk. "I'll do it. I'll pilot it!"
"Eva Unit-01," Misato paused a second. "Can he really do this? If he doesn't, we're all dead. But I've got this feeling—this feeling that we'll come out of this all right; that he'll somehow pull off one more miracle today. He hasn't been here a full day, and already we've had two of those—what with Unit-01's self-activation and his current sync ratio... Oh, who the hell am I trying to kid? This is no time for doubts Katsuragi!" Taking a deep breath, she grinned suddenly. "LAUNCH!" "It's in his hands now. No use worrying. All we can really do from this point is hope."
Shinji relaxed slightly, as the g-forces from liftoff had subsided. "Here goes," he mumbled, grabbing the butterfly controls and starting towards the enemy.
Inside Central Dogma, Ritsuko stood hunched over Maya's control screen, reading over her shoulder. Pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose and taking another drag of her cigarette, Ritsuko smirked. "Amazing."
Maya glanced over her shoulder, giving her superior a curious look. "What is sempai?" she asked, quickly turning back to her screen.
Leaning in closer, Ritsuko pointed to a peculiar cluster of values. "This. Look, he hasn't been in the Eva two minutes and already he's piloting like a natural. It's as if he's been piloting the Eva his whole life. And his sync scores are well above what we expected for his first activation."
Maya shook her head. "I don't get it sempai. Forty-three percent isn't that great a score. The Second Child's records indicate she regularly gets between ninety and one hundred percent on activation tests, and she has been doing it her whole life. Wouldn't it have been wiser just to send for her than to throw a kid with no piloting experience whatsoever into the most unreliable Evangelion we have and expect him to pull through for us?"
"You would think so," Ritsuko allowed. "But we weren't expecting an attack so soon—you know that. And besides that, the first AN-411 hasn't been completed yet. There's really no fast and reliable way of transporting an Eva from Germany, except by boat. Besides, she doesn't have any combat experience anyway; in that aspect, all three children are alike. We stand just as much a chance of survival with the Third as we would with the Second or First."
Back on the surface, Shinji was becoming quite familiar with one of the quirks in the Eva's neural control system: pain. The enemy had wasted no time in attacking as it fired off one of the massive energy beams that it had been using earlier to hammer headquarters, then used its advantage while he was distracted to grab the head of his Eva—and was now currently attempting to remodel the Evangelion's forehead. Of course, for Shinji, it felt like someone was trying to pound a new hole into his head the hard way.
Letting out a scream, the young Ikari began to violently shove on the controls, to no avail. His arm "No, the Eva's!"—which had been broken sometime earlier—throbbed painfully in time with the pounding in his head. Then, it happened. The energy lance the Angel had been using to pound his Evangelion's face in finally broke through its armor—straight through the eye socket and out the back of its skull. Pain like he'd never felt before in his life poured itself through his very being, and he screamed.
As he stood there leaning against a skyscraper and gushing blood, Shinji felt something press at the back of his mind. Two sensations, both alien and familiar, invaded his being. The first was a protective warmth that wrapped itself around his aching body, offering comfort as only a mother can. The second was similar to the first, only this one seemed to be guiding him, both asking and showing him what to do.
As one, Shinji's eyes snapped open and Evangelion Unit-01's head came up. They'd had enough; it was time to finish this. Bringing its arm up, they focused on it for a moment before the limb regenerated. Glancing up, they felt more than saw shock register in their enemy. "So much the better." Reaching out, they grabbed the thing's arm, snapping it easily. Its eyes glowing a violent shade of pink, the Angel fired off its beam weapon again, striking the Evangelion and continuing on through the city. Flames erupted on all sides of blast, and the Angel thought for a moment that it had won—only to have its hopes dashed as something within the flames moved. There, in the writhing mass of heat and light stood the demonic visage—made even more so by the flames surrounding it—of Evangelion-01. It moved forward out of the flames, its pace slow and deliberate—stalking its prey. Then, with a roar, the Eva launched itself into the air only to come spinning around and slam into the Angel's midsection.
Furious, they pounded the Angel as it had done them earlier. They cared nothing for a quick ending—only that this thing suffered before they wiped it from the face of the Earth. As the two behemoths fell to the ground, the Eva continued its assault on the Angel's core, doubling its fists together and bringing them down repeatedly before grabbing the protective bones surrounding it—like a rib cage—and pulling them apart. Ripping one of the 'ribs' free; it slammed the sharp bone against the core.
Realizing its demise was imminent the Angel gave a great shove, sending both itself and its attacker back upright, before wrapping itself around the great purple beast, shoving its dying core up against the Eva's head. For a second, it paused. At this close proximity, it could tell something was amiss. "So, the Mother has decided to set her children free of the pain caused by our war. Even so, we must persevere and reunite with the Father. I am sorry Mother, good-bye." And Sachiel was no more.
As the blast cleared around him, Shinji Ikari came to his senses. No longer was he the giant beast itself, but simply its pilot. "What happened," he thought, idly glancing around. Suddenly, the entire right side of the helmet covering the Eva's head came off, brown and slagged from the heat of the explosion. It hit the street below with a resounding crash, but Shinji ignored it. His attention was on the building to his right. It was one of those newer office buildings that reflect everything around them, like giant mirrors. In this mirror, he watched as the flesh of his face—no, his Eva's face—writhed and split, revealing an eyelid, and a giant green eyeball. The four pupils contracted as one. Shinji had one last thought before losing consciousness… "What the hell is this thing?!"