Through the Eyes of Unit 01

by drew6406

AU. A transfer student named Arika comes into Shinji's life and saves him from committing suicide two years before the angel war. As quickly as she came she is kidnapped and wakes up in Nerv's lab. Little did she know she would become the berserker he would ride into battle. And then become the enemy humanity swore to fight along with him. This is their story of becoming a legend.

1. Prologue: The Sinister Plot

Evangelion belongs to Ginimax. I own nothing but the story and my own characters.

All right here's the first chapter to my third story. Now I know I haven't updated the other two, but right now thoes stories I have writers block. Until then this will be the active story. Anyway, let the story begin.

It's been many years now since the day my lover's life could've ended. Many of my friends, and those I considered family, are now all but gone. Old enemies of the past are dead, but not forgotten. Speaking of which, I should tell the story of how we became 'them.' We didn't ask to be immortal… to a certain point, but that's how it is. Every so many thousands of years finding a planet to spread new life. Then moving on to the next. Anyway I'm getting ahead of myself here.

It all started with a group called Selee, a group of arrogant bastards who wanted to be gods among men. Force instrumentality on humanity to reach a divine status. With what they called The Dead Sea Scrolls, the instructions to Second and Third Impact, they would carry out their scenario. The awakening and disintegration of Adam, the first angel of the seventeen supposed messengers of god, went according to plan. Second Impact, September 13, 2000: half of the human population of the world was laid to waste. Cities were submerged, and coastlines changed by the rising sea levels of Antarctica's vaporization. A true dead sea formed at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere. Perpetual summer covered the rest of the world due to the earth's axis shifting. The rest of Selee's plan was to control Third Impact, by eliminating the rest of the angels, except for Lilith, the second angel. The scrolls predicted that the fifteen other messengers would come to Japan in the year 2015. There was a problem. Selee needed to destroy the angels when the time came, but how? They needed to form a scientific military organization (Gerin at the time, later NERV) tasked with building constructs for war using cloned DNA from the first two angels. These biological weapons would come to be known as Evangelion. Towering, armored, humanoid giants, piloted by tiny human beings.

Creating them however was a whole other challenge. NERV performed thousands upon thousands of tests, many of them seen as 'breakthroughs.' But the final product always ended in failure. Each failed Eva was brought to Terminal Dogma and stripped of its flesh, leaving nothing but its bones, cybernetics, and armor. With so many robotic skeletons reminding NERV of their failures, it was no wonder they called it the Eva graveyard. The scientists would come so close to perfection, but get the same problem. They couldn't control their creations. They would have to shut it down, or it would damage the test chamber and fall apart from going berserk.

More months went by without any positive results, until one day, one of the scientists got an idea. Why not base a control system on having a human soul absorbed into the core. And so the contact experiment was born. No one knows who the candidate was, because the commander picked the subject and loaded them into the entry plug before the test was ready. NERV went through with it anyway, and got mixed results. Upon completion of the test, the unit preceded to go on a rampage. It broke free of its restraints and bashed the viewing window, destroying the glass. It then shut down and began to deteriorate, but more slowly than the previous attempts. The brighter side was that pilots could be identified by how much they synchronized with the core soul and how similar their DNA was. The Eva would mark the place as the first true prototype to the future units. Thus the Eva got its name: Unit 00.

Unit 00 still had the drawbacks the others had. If not treated properly, the Eva would fall apart, like the other failed Evas, in a year's time. The new commander, Gendo Ikari, would not have this. So he ordered project E to come up with a plan B for constructing the Evas, a method for making them last longer and cost less to build. It was not until May 16th, 2003 that they found a solution, one even more sinister than forcing a soul to be absorbed into the core. Scientists figured if they could upscale an already stable humanoid being then it would be able to fit the role of an Eva. The scientists wanted beings who were still growing physically and mentally, so they chose adolescent humans. That's right! Teenagers! They would conduct a test to see if they're fit on all levels. Then inject them with angel DNA to bring about the physical change to Eva status. Lock them in armor and restraints, add cybernetics and the entry plug, and do the contact experiment. Voila! An Evangelion.

The first test of the ECP, Evangelion Conversion Project, didn't start until late October in NERV Berlin. The test went on for 96 hours without a hitch. The end result was a new red and orange eva (later known as Unit 02), an out of their mind scientist, and one psychologically scarred redhead girl. The final result may have been a success, but NERV paid a heavy price for the accomplishment. Most of the staff from every NERV branch resigned after hearing that a child had been turned into a biological weapon. Because of this, the true plan of the program became top secret and the ex-staff members 'disappeared' and were replaced. The commander then launched a examination program to all high schools within proximity of Nerv facilities. If a student passed the test with more than 90%, they would be slated for the ECP.

One evening in 2004, Yui Ikari, the commander's wife, was driving home from Nerv. In the backseat young Shinji, age 4, slept peacefully. The drive was going smoothly until a drunk driver swerved and collided with the driver's side of the car. Shinji was nearly unscathed, but his mother was rushed to Nerv's hospital. Gendo heard the news and rushed there immediately. As soon as he arrived, a doctor informed him that Yui was dying from severe blood loss. As a final attempt to save her, he had her taken to the lab, and forcefully absorbed into a waiting core made from Lilith's DNA. Shinji watched in terror as alarms went off and they failed to retrieve her. If things weren't bad enough, the next day he was abandoned at a train station to wait for his teacher. Gendo may have left his son, but he spent the next 11 years devising a plan to use Third Impact to get Yui back. All he needed to do was get ahold of both angels, defeat the rest, make ayanami clones, make his son the third child, and create a Lilith DNA Evangelion for him to pilot. As the years passed, he was able to check off the steps of his scenario. By 2013, the only thing left was the candidate for Unit 01. But he would find his chosen subject once the year's examination test finished in Tokyo 3 high school.

I'm sorry not having any real dialogue in this chapter, but the next will have some.

P.O.V. Will also switch in places. Next chapter: The only True Friend