Superwomen of Evangelion - CODENAME: XJ9

There is a lot to be said for looking before you leap, for learning to crawl before you walk, to walk before you run. Indeed, there is a lot to be said for doing your research before engaging in any high risk venture.

But on the other hand, you don't always have that luxury, either of time, resources, or information. At the dawn of the twenty-first century mankind was struck by the largest calamity in its short existence, second impact; an event which set in motion an extinction level event not seen since the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago.

In an instant the continent of Antarctica was vaporized and in the following weeks and months hundreds of thousands of species of plant and animal disappeared from the face of the earth along with fully half of the human population of the planet.

It was of course all caused by a case of both not doing the research and pulling the trigger too soon, had the men and women running the experiment at the south pole on that fateful day known what they needed to have known, had they been aware of exactly what it was they were doing, everything could have turned out differently.

History, as it is wont do to, often repeats itself, and in the case of one dark evening in Tokyo-3, another such case of pulling the trigger without doing the research was underway.

x

Shinji sat in his entry plug, sweat rolling off his brow and dissolving into the LCL as quickly as it formed. He reloaded the fuse in the positron rifle and waited as it cooled and recharged. As he waited for the firing solution to finish computing for his second and hopefully final shot, he was completely unaware that the next three minutes would prove to be some of the most important of his life.

"Come on…" he said quietly to himself, urging the computer to process faster, knowing it wouldn't do any good at the same time. The seconds clicked by, the gun was still cooling, computer still calculating. His view screen flashed and then quickly polarized, before him an orange Evangelion was holding a shield, blocking the deadly beam of light, protecting him at the expense of itself.

'Ayanami!' a single thought in his head. His targeting reticule turned green and he pulled the switch. In an instant there was silence, and but a moment later a lance of light and sound issued forth as if Susanoo himself saw fit to lend his strength to the boy.

The beam struck a hexagonal force field for almost a tenth of a second before tearing through it in a magnificent flash like it was so much tissue paper. The beast on the receiving end of the attack shrieked for a moment before it was silenced forever, it's still floating corpse slowly tilting and falling towards the earth.

Before the dust could settle, and in fact before the kill had even been confirmed, Shinji was mobile and within moments was extracting his fellow pilot from her damaged Evangelion, the intense heat coming from it burning even the hands of his own Eva.

It was as he grabbed onto the butterfly handles sealing the escape hatch on his fellow pilot's plug that the more lasting consequences of his final attack on their mutual foe were set in motion. What he didn't know, what he couldn't have known, was that the forces involved in the miracle he'd just performed had consequences far beyond the simple destruction of the Angel. Consequences soon to make themselves known, even if not to him.

x

As a flash like a bolt of lightning temporarily turned night to day a teal and white object streaked through the sky at an alarming speed, easily breaking the sound barrier. Had this happened on any other night it's likely many citizens of Tokyo-3 would have heard, if not seen, the figure as it crashed into and through the still warm remains of what was once the fifth Angel.

It was perhaps this very fact that was her saving grace, the corpse of the monster was certainly more forgiving than the dozens of meters of steel and concrete forming the upper plating of the geofront below, if only marginally.

Metallic eyelids opened, their surface covered in dust and scratches, the rest of her body was in a similar state. A groan escaped her blue lips, "Uh… Did anybody get the license plate on that truck?" she asked aloud to nobody in particular, part of her wishing that she hadn't had her recent nerve upgrade.

Her answer was an abrupt deluge of blood pouring down from the hole she'd just bored through the corpse above her. 'That settles it; I've definitely had better days' she thought to herself as she stood back up, letting the viscous red fluid flow off of her, or more accurately, lifted herself out of the pool of blood that had formed over her.

"What is this stuff?" she wondered as she held an arm in front of her, red droplets forming and falling into the larger pool of red she was nearly knee deep in. With but a thought the tip of her left index finger folded back and a sensor probe extended, after dipping it into the pool around her she knew what she was standing in.

Surely she would have vomited at that moment, were she capable of such a thing, as it was she shuddered involuntarily and jumped out of the pool, her metallic pigtails quickly reconfiguring themselves to their flight configuration.

Hovering over the pool she finally took the opportunity to look around, finally gathering her senses she scanned the area, noticing first and foremost the partially destroyed octahedron that somehow was alive, or had been. She'd never seen anything like it, and she'd seen quite a number of strange things in her time as a defender of earth.

The second thing she noticed was that her short term memory was missing; she couldn't remember how she'd gotten there, or, according to her internal clock, anything from the last twelve hours. "Something must have erased my short term memory buffer…" she observed with some alarm while continuing to run her scans of the area. The idea that something could have wiped her memory like that worried her, but at the moment she had more important things to consider.

'Like how I got to Japan…' she thought as her internal systems finally linked up with the GPS satellites in orbit. They were using a protocol that hadn't been used extensively since the early twenty-first century, the more advanced satellites were not responding to her signals, she chalked that up to damage she sustained either on impact or by whatever had wiped her memory.

At the same time she couldn't seem to raise anybody on her internal communicator, something that should have continued working even under extreme personal damage.

"Maybe mom can clear this up for me." She said as she flew away from the intensely creepy corpse dominating the greater part of six city blocks below her. In her mildly damaged state she didn't dare accelerate to the speeds she normally would have, and so it would be another twelve hours before she learned that the home she was trying to return to wouldn't be there when she arrived.

X

A photograph, low resolution but not out of focus, black and white. That was what Commander Ikari Gendo of Nerv held in his hands. It was sobering to think that such a cosmically insignificant thing such as a slip of paper with a printout on it could mean so much, and yet there it was.

"Where did it come from?" he asked his Sub Commander, one Fuyutski Kozo as he handed the picture back to the graying old man who'd given it to him in the first place.

"We don't know, at least not yet. Everything was a mess after the battle; it's as if she appeared out of thin air as far as we can tell. The single eyewitness account we have has her speaking English right before she left, headed east." The older man reported, essentially regurgitating what he himself had been told by the Section Two agent not fifteen minutes prior.

"So, the Americans have sent a one of those armors to keep tabs on us?" Gendo mused as he leaned back in his chair, "It's not as if we don't have enough costumed heroes making things difficult for us."

"Possible I suppose, but it doesn't really seem their style." The Sub Commander replied as he stared at the photo, "The design doesn't look military at all, least of all her state of dress." He noted with a hint of something that bordered between amusement and mild disgust. Who'd ever heard of a power armor wearing a skirt? Or for that matter an armor of such obviously advanced technology, the aforementioned costumed heroes currently plaguing them were good, granted, but not that good. "If anything, it looks like…" he trailed off, dismissing his thought outright due to the pure absurdity of it.

"Fuyutski?" The younger dark haired man prompted.

"Well, if I didn't know any better, I'd say she looks like a teenager."

I had to do it, and you know you love it.

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