"I'm not a car battery. I don't need rechargin'."
- Michael Rooker, Days of Thunder
The Evangelion Racing team was about to learn there's more than one way to clean out a few valves in a fuel injection system. The three cars sped in a circle around their enormous opponent, surrounding it in a continuous blur of orange, red, and pink. A line of slower but more rugged vehicles driven by Angels formed a second ring on the outside, circling the track like vultures waiting for the kill.
The Angels never stood a chance against three feisty race vixens with unmatched Synchronization ratings behind the wheel. Until now.
Most weeks, the Angels would try to run their human opponents down with little more than go-karts armed with antimatter generators and pitchforks. For today's event, however, the Angels had seemingly outclassed the Eva team in every category besides raw RPMs, taking to the track with a towering motorized nightmare designed to obliterate any smaller vehicles caught in its treads and deliver the death knell for the Eva Racers. A Robosaurus for the apocalyptic age.
The automotive terror let out a metallic roar, belching exhaust fumes over the field. Racer 00's pilot broke from the rest of her team and swerved in front of the bipedal machine, tricking it to lose its balance. The Angel contraption revved back and threw its automated claws toward the track, smashing through Racer 00's hood like a trash compactor and slaughtering the car in mid-drift.
The crumpled orange speedster screamed and shuddered in agony as the nimble driver in its cockpit struggled with the starter. The car shook for a second as its wounded engine almost started to turn, but then the horrifying Bardielzilla-looking creation slammed its claws through the canopy, wrenching the car completely in half in a gory showcase of battery cables and hydraulic oil, decisively ending any glimmer of hope that it would ever move on its own power again. The Angels celebrated with a barbaric wave of applause.
Mari swallowed her sympathy for Rei and threw Racer 05 into top gear. She steered through the Angel's legs, weaved through its claws as they impaled the asphalt around her, and accelerated toward freedom. She was almost out of danger when she heard the sound of screeching rubber and clashing metal somewhere in the dense black clouds ahead of her. The Angel beast rose through the smoke with something sleek and red in its steel jaws. It violently shook its head pistons like a dog rattling the life out of its prey and tossed the object aside as if it were a Frisbee.
Mari drove out of the collision zone and into the clear blue horizon. So clear that she could see the mangled frame of Racer 02 twirling out of control through the air and heading straight for her windshield at 200 miles per hour.
Mari seemed incredibly bored for a girl who had been captured by ruthless interdimensional invaders and was about to become the subject of a living autopsy.
She was sitting on the edge of a structure that looked every bit like an operating table as it did a giant Xerox machine. Indescribable Angelic forms were clustered around her, meticulously poking every inch of bare skin on her legs, shoulders, and waist, prodding every crease in her glittering pink Plugsuit, and pinching dangerously close to the zipper seam that rode her underarm. A small flick from an elongated alien finger is all it would have taken to put her in a state of undress.
She looked more annoyed at her predicament than afraid.
The walls to Mari's left and right showed a panorama of devastation. The Evangelion Racers were left abandoned in the field as molten lumps of brightly-colored metal. Scorching oil from the crumpled engine blocks was still spewing across the road, mixing with LCL seeping from the cockpits that had been carved open in the likeness of three vicious Cesarean sections. Mari had only been half-awake when they pried her out of the wreck and took her to… whatever this place was. A space ship? A parallel universe? The sponsors' lounge?
In front of Mari, separated into individual cells like lab mice undergoing isolated experiments, she could see the other two members of her vanquished race team. Asuka had been collected along with entire interior roll cage of her Eva Racer. At first glance, she was nothing but a curled up ball of red sequins sinking deeper and deeper into a matching leather seat as a single beaming spotlight glared down on her. Her fingers frantically clawed at her temples while her long hair covered most of her face. Her knees were pulled up until they squeezed against her trembling, tear-soaked chin. Trapped in her own personal Hell, she wailed in shrieks of agony, groans of terror, and incomprehensible sentence fragments that mostly pertained to her mother. It was as if she was trying to wrestle something out of her head, and the thing was too invested in her most intimate thoughts to let go.
For reasons even she herself couldn't explain, Mari imagined the Clockwork Orange soundtrack playing in the background.
"Take it easy on the little sprocket, will ya guys?" Mari said to the Angels with a look of remorse. "She might have a few screws loose in the gearshaft, but she ain't a carburetor on an Oldsmobile."
The leader of the Angels was looming close enough to Mari that her bare knees almost met the unspeakable mass of exoskeleton that roughly defined his torso. His appearance defied the laws of physics and biology, senselessly combining the qualities of an alien creature, a mad scientist, and a junk heap of winding clockwork all into one. He was the only being sinister enough to throw a monkey wrench into the great plan that was humanity. The Master of Macabre Machinations: Turbinel.
"Oh, but this is only her first lap around the track," the Angel sneered. "We're still only trying to understand the way your kind behaves. We haven't even begun to contaminate her brain."
One of the Angels crowded behind Turbinel appended a short "Mwuahahaha" to the end of his statement.
Rei was kept in a neon containment field across from Asuka. She was floating motionlessly in a tall glass tube, preserved in an unidentifiable synthetic that was slowly decrypting the mysteries of her genes and preparing her cells for mass replication. Her eyelids twitched as her sweet liquid dreams briefly turned sour. She remained perfectly silent in her chemically-induced sleep aside from an occasional "glubble." Her two-piece pearl white Plugsuit never looked more like a luxury bathing suit before now.
Mari's stall was the most crowded of the three. She was surrounded by the metallic clatter of surgical knives, the electric whir of bone saws, and the high-pitched squeal of a hydraulic impact wrench.
"I guess I'm in for more than a little tune-up, eh?" Mari asked as she eyed her captors from side to side, a hint of trepidation in her breath. Tucked behind her glossy pink skirt, her gloved fingers nervously clutched the edge of the counter.
"You've got that right, motor muffin," Turbinel boastfully replied. "We're going to take out all your stock parts and load you up with custom mods."
"There's a slight chance your soul will survive the encounter," a more scholarly Angel added.
"You three have been leaving us in the dust for long enough," said Turbinel. "Now that your worthless human toys are destroyed, all that's left for you is to become our Angel Racers. You'll be the beautiful harbingers that drive humanity to its final Instrumentality."
"We'd love to keep all three of you on the team, but we really only need one of you alive," said another Angel.
"Mwuahahaha," added the same devious Angel as before.
Turbinel pointed his plier-shaped limb toward Asuka's screaming, shivering helplessness.
"She'll be an Angel in mind."
He pointed toward Rei's buoyant, bubbling sleepiness.
"She'll be an Angel in body."
"And what a body it is!" one of the other Angels rudely exclaimed.
"As for you, my tantalizing timing belt, you'll be the fusion of both of our species." Turbinel's compound sensors leaned closer to Mari's spectacled eyes. "Assuming your body doesn't reject the S2 Engine, of course."
"And if you die during surgery, we still get to salvage you for parts," said an Angel looming over Mari's side.
"Mwuahahaha."
"Well, I guess I was up for inspection sooner or later." Mari sighed partially in disinterest, and partially in defeat.
Guided by overwhelming magnetic forces—or maybe because she simply didn't see the point in testing her chances going unarmed against an army of highly advanced alien butchers—Mari shifted herself in reverse so her legs fit on the operating table and she could lie with her back against the cold luminescent surface.
A flying saucer of surgical lights glared off of her glasses as she stared toward the ceiling. The Angel's medical and mechanical instruments grew louder, closer to her delicate flesh. For a moment, her mind saw Asuka's Racer spiraling down toward her again. Then she realized it was the shadow of the oxygen mask descending over her mouth.
Author's note: Nothing in this story is supposed to make sense, so don't bother asking what it's supposed to be based on. I basically just took the circa-2012 Eva Racing designs for the girls and came up with an alternate (but vaguely similar) canon for them completely in my head.