6th March 2019, 06:ish PM

"Let's have a quick look at the 'Various stories' folder."
*looks*
"Hmm. Twenty-something subfolders and loose documents. Yeah, I need to cull these. But let's read that random NGE story first."

*two days later*

"Right, so how do I fix this broken-down clusterfuck of a cast as I can't feed Gendo nuke? TO THE TEAPOT!"
*starts writing ten minutes later*

That's a TL;DR version of how that went. I'm not going to post that three quarters of a page AN here though where I can't hide it with spoiler tags. So yeah, Darkness/Mindfuck induced audience apathy, desire to play with the universe and especially those characters anyway. The primary inspiration is JimmyWolk's 2nd Try which can be found on this very website, along with the follow on Webcomic that's still being updated. Check em out if you don't mind early onset tooth rot from all the WAFF.

Chapter Alfa-One

He wasn't surprised when there was no one there to pick him up at the train station, nor that he could see that the city was empty of people. When he had stepped off the Shinkansen from Tokyo 2 at the small station in the shadow of Mount Kano and in the middle of nowhere, he'd known that there was one, and only one reason why the MagLev line down towards Shimoda had been a priority for rebuilding and upgrades after the Impact war.

And now he stood in front of it. The entrance to the massive undersea tunnel was a fortress in and of itself, guarded as much by what he knew looked like blast-proof doors on the photos he'd seen online as it was by the tanks and soldiers on the outside of the complex that overlooked the town that had grown up around it. Before boarding his flight to Japan, he had done his research, and hew knew that for the most part the town served those that worked at his ultimate destination. There might be far more UN and JSSDF uniforms than was usual for the rest of the country and just about anywhere else in the world, but beyond that it looked like most Japanese towns, if somewhat more western influenced.

In the same letter that had summoned him here, he had been given a number to call, but his phone was still using an American SIM card. He checked it, and of course, no carrier. A glance at his father's old wristwatch told him that he was early, but he hated being at loose ends.

"Well, time to find a phone booth." he said to himself, and picked up the old dufflebag that held most of his material possessions. With the bag hanging over one of his slumped shoulders, he put on his headphones, put his phone's music player app on shuffle and went off to search for a technological relic. In spite of having spent the last four years with his uncle in Neo-Frisco, his Japanese hadn't really rusted, and he scanned over the Kanji characters on the various signs instead of using the English signage right next to them. Best get used to it again.

He wasn't surprised to find none of the six payphones that the station still had were occupied. He picked the one that seemed to be the least dingy and fished through his pockets for any Japanese change. Most of what he came up with was a few quarters and such he hadn't gotten rid off in the duty-free shop before getting on the plane, but he found a few five yen coins, should be enough to make a quick call. He was about to put the first coin into the slot but hesitated about halfway there. He had no idea who was on the other end, and the last thing he wanted to do right now was talk to his mother. Her disapproval of him had been the one constant in his life after his father had died, to the point where he had felt secretly relieved when she had had enough and sent him to live with his uncle in America. Yet another failure, yet another desperate attempt to make up for his mistakes? No, he didn't want that just yet. He knew that it had been his mother that had called him here, for all the letter had been signed by some random UNAD official. What she was doing at the facility, he had no idea, and normally he wouldn't have been all that eager to find out, but he knew better than considering disobeying a motherly command. The coin went into the slot. As much as he wanted to, he couldn't run away from this forever.

The number he dialled looked generic to him, and it took him longer to punch it in because he wasn't used to a physical keypad outside of his laptop. He waited for the person on the other end to pick up, fully aware that he was standing out horribly, not only because of the clothes he wore, but also because he was actually using one of these things.

Thankfully he didn't have to wait for very long, only four or five rings.

"Katsuragi residence, if this is UNAD, I'm hanging up!"

He was taken aback. "I… I'm sorry, but… I… I was told to call this number..." he trailed off, hating that he still kept stammering like this when things got awkward. "My name is Sinji, I-"

"Oh damn! You weren't supposed to be here until twelve!"

Oh great, he'd done it again. "I'm sorry..." he mumbled.

"Don't be, kiddo. You just caught me by surprise. You're still at the train station?"

"Uhm.. yeah, all the letter said that I was supposed to call that number..."

"Oh, okay then. Wait somewhere where I can find you."

"I… think I'll be out front."

"I'll be there in ten minutes, see ya there, Shinji!"

With that, she hung up ans Sinji was staring at a beeping telephone for a few seconds before slowly hanging up. He grinned while he did so, glad that this hadn't been his mother's private line or something. Headphones came back on, and as he walked out towards the exit, he heard the oh so familiar opening bars of one of his favourites. He quietly hummed at first, but by the time he had walked through the doors into the warm summer day, he was quietly singing to himself.

"But life still goes on
I can't get used to living without living without
Living without you by my side
I don't want to live alone hey
God knows got to make it on my own
So baby can't you see
I've got to break free..."

Yeah, he really missed that one thing he'd left behind in America.

And so he slipped away from a world that didn't want him to somewhere that he actually understood on a base level. As was usual when that happened, he almost jumped out of his skin when someone tapped him on his shoulder. Headphones were slipped down to his neck and he [I]did[/I] jump to his feet. In front of him stood a woman, hair dark purple and wearing the blue-black-and white camouflaged battledress of a Major in the UNAD forces, UN flag on one shoulder and the Japanese one on the other. The only things breaking the ensemble were the cross pendant hanging from her neck, as well as a warm, infectious smile.

His eyes darted downwards to her nametag for the briefest of moments.

"Shinji Ikuri?" she asked, and he nodded. "Major Misato Katsuragi. Your mother sent me to pick you up."

He had learned long ago not to show the turmoil he felt every time his mother was brought up without prior warning, but it seemed to have worked. They exchanged formal greetings.

"Is this everything you have?"

"I'm.. uh yeah, pretty much." he said apologetically, but Katsuragi waved that away.

"Eh, we'll go shopping if you need something. Come on, my car's over there."

Which turned out to be a small, somewhat sported out pre-Impact War Japanese hatchback from the mid 1980s, if Shinji's limited knowledge of vintage cars was anything to go by. He was disconcerted by the blatantly illegal way in which it was parked, half-way up the curb and the wrong direction down a one-way street. Even with the UNAD tags, this was something else. Once inside after his bag was stowed away in the trunk, Major Katsuragi turned the key and the engine came alive. After only a very curt "Seatbelts!", she rammed the car into reverse, and with squealing tires, the most terrifying ten minutes of Shinji's life so far began, and by the end of it, he wondered if the Major was even aware that such things like a speed limit existed.

"You look a lot like your picture, Shinji!" Katsuragi exclaimed as they left the city itself and headed towards the perimeter of the facility. The one she had spoken to was far too busy hanging on for dear life as the car went around a corner at a speed that was way too high and at an angle that the gods had not meant man to drive at.

"Y… yeah?" he managed eventually as the road became straight again.

"Your mother just described you as a scrawny, brown-haired kid likely wearing some snarky American T-Shirt. Wasn't much, so she gave me a picture from your file."

Sinji was too busy holding onto the Jesus handle over his head to feel more than sad acceptance that his mother hadn't really changed and didn't wonder why there was a file about him at… whatever place his mother worked at. The one maxim of his life at any point past pre-school had been that you did not ask what Gendo and Yui Ikari were doing for a living. When asked at school, Shinji had always said that they worked as administrators for the JSSDF and the UN, just as instructed, as much as he had wondered. The last time he'd wondered enough to ask out loud had been a few days after his father had died, and that had… not gone well. He had no desire for another tounge-lashing like that. A few months after that, she had decided that she'd had enough of him and had sent her ten year old son to live with his uncle in America.

At this point the Major slowed down as they began to approach the first checkpoint and traffic got dense enough to restrict her movement.

"She's going to be happy to see you, Shinji."

He doubted that, but made the noises and words that were expected of him, so he was fairly sure that Katsuragi didn't notice his doubting glance out the window.

"There's the first checkpoint. Keep your ID handy, Shinji."

All he had was his Japanese passport and his now entirely useless driver's licence, having received it a mere three weeks ago.

The first checkpoint was behind a bend, and the moment he handed over his passport and looked up, he forgot all about it. Behind the small gatehouse, he could see the flagpoles of maybe a dozen nations that participated in that particular UNAD branch lining the road as it lead towards… the biggest damn metal gates he'd ever seen, set into the side of an artificial hill. They had been impressive in the few press releases that came out of this place, but seeing something big enough for two of the old jumbo-jets to fit in comfortably with room to spare that at the same time was supposedly rated to withstand a nuclear weapon going off within less than a kilometre. At the moment the doors were open, each painted with half the UN flag and writing above that denoted it as UNAD Command NERV-1 in Japanese and English. The tunnel that gaped from within was half and half, both a four-lane highway and a double-track maglev train, fed from the immense multi-storey car park he knew to be mostly underground, alongside a special maglev rail that only UNAD members had access to. Right now, it wasn't exceptionally busy, but as he slowly pulled himself back together, he saw that there still was at least some traffic, but mostly deliveries of some kind.

It was then that he heard what the Major was talking about.

"- her son."

Great.

He wordlessly accepted his passport back and took great care to glance out of the window away from the friendly officer as she glanced at him with a worried frown. The small red car slowly moved through the parking lot, and Shinji sighed. She was worried about how he had reacted, but he was in no mood to face her judgement for his relationship with his mother. For how he had been happier living in the obscurity of the largest city in California than he had ever been during the annual visits, how he had considered running away when the letter had arrived, for how he had cried himself to sleep for days because he hadn't wanted to face her again?

Kautsuragi seemed to understand enough, and didn't really say anything, while Shinji, ever the polite child looked back at her.

"I'm sorry, Major, I…."

She grinned, infectious enough that he couldn't help smiling back at her, a little at least. "Families, eh?"

Shinji nodded, shy, but thankful that she had accepted him at least that much. His uncle and aunt, for all the love and acceptance they had given him, had never really understood, wanted to understand why he was so stiff with his mother, always wanting him to explain, while the Major seemed to be content with not knowing, for now at least. Not that it was his place to tell her anything, but he appreciated the gesture.

And then…. And then he was once again too busy staring out the window to worry about his issues or the absolutely insane speed at which Major Katsuragi was barrelling through the tunnel. All he could see were concrete walls, but it never seemed to end. The press releases had told him how long this tunnel was, hailed it as one of the great accomplishments of engineering in a post-Impact War world, but even if there were longer tunnels in Japan and elsewhere, the sheer scale of it beggared belief, and was something Shinji knew he had been unable to understand until seeing it himself. There was even a small, typically Japanese gas station halfway through, on the dot at kilometre fifteen.

It didn't stop at the other end when they finally emerged onto NERV-One itself, and once again, pictures didn't really tell the whole story or did the place any real justice. What had once been the Yokosuka peninsula thus named was covered in military installations. In it's middle stood the massive pyramid that dominated the entire landscape, with the rest of the gigantic base consisting of buildings, hangars and what not in the area around the pyramid, leaving maybe a two kilometre green belt between the buildings ancoast

"Wow, a real Geofront..."

Katsuragi grinned at his amazement. "Different from the old proposals, eh?"

Shinji couldn't do more but nod and stare at the beehive of activity around him, recalling the far smaller, purely residential proposals that had cropped up after the Impact War. UNAD kept a very tight lid on what they were doing at their various sites all over the world, but he knew that NERV-1 was the very centre of it all, and that his mother worked here.

Eventually though, he saw and heard something that would be burnt into his mind for the rest of his days.

The sound was an inhuman yell, conveying the sort of rage that Shinji had often heard described. He glanced over to Major Katsuragi, but decided against asking when he saw the very worried and also angry look on her face. The car bolted around the corner of some generic warehouse before she slammed on the brakes and the car came to a screeching halt.

Shinji didn't notice. In fact, he didn't notice anything but the gigantic, pale blue and vaguely humanoid machine that towered over the buildings around it. The only things breaking up the colour were the white accents on the shoulder pylons and arms, the grey facemask and the one piercing red eye. An eye that incidentally turned and looked directly at him. There was no way to tell with that sort of height difference, but somehow Shinji knew that this… thing was looking straight at him. He was too petrified to do anything but stand there and look back as the thing. Beside him, Katsuragi seemed to be furious too, but not with him. She reached over and pulled a small, digital walkie-talkie from the glove box. With sharp movements that betrayed her anger she set it to some frequency before yelling loude enough to make Shinji's ears ring.

"WHAT THE HELL, REI! STOP SCARING THE NEW GUY AND GET THE HELL BACK UNDER COVER!"

After a minute and another yelling a small, almost emotionless voice that a less scared Shinji would have almost described timid came from the small radio.

"It was not my intent to scare him."

"Well you did a damn good job at it anyway. Now get moving."

"Hai, Major."

Katsuragi turned to her young charge. "I have to apologize for that, Shinji."

"It's… fine..."

He didn't really know what he was saying at the moment, nor did he realise that he had been called 'the new guy'. He was too busy watching that massive beast retreat towards what had to be a giant lift of some sort, as two doors scraped aside and some sort of platform retracted with the beast on it.

"Yeah," the Major said, "normally we introduce people to what we do in a much more controlled way, but since [I]someone[/I] felt the need for unscheduled training… Shinji Ikari, meet Evangelion Unit 00 and it's pilot, whom I will personally have a bit of a talk with before we introduce you to her proper. Though I do have to wonder. Doing this without clearing it with me first is not the way she usually does things."

Shinji was still staring at the spot where the machine had disappeared.

"Yeah. It's not my job to explain all of this to you. That would be your mother's job."

The mention of her pulled him from his blurred state of mind. "Really?"

"Yeah, she's..." Katsuragi paused and tilted hear head towards him, looking curious. "Wait, you don't know?"

Shinji sighed, trying to decide how much he should and could tell this person he barely knew without causing offence on his first day here. "I spent the last six years with my uncle in America. I've been back to Japan what, four times?"

For a moment he was about to add that twice his mother had been too busy to come even see him, though he had to admit that she had called regularly, but eventually...

"I… see…" she said slowly. "Well, let's better get to it, don't we, Shinji."

Even though it was obvious that she wanted to break up the awkward tension suddenly hanging in the air between them, he mumbled a quiet apology and said nothing more for the rest of their drive through the base. He stared out of the window, resting his chin on his right arm, and only speaking when they went through yet another layer of security. Eventually, they pulled into a large parking lot in front of the pyramid and the Major led Shinji through the forest of parked vehicles and up a set of black marble steps towards the main entrance, a row of sliding doors at the base of the pyramid. He followed her without complaint, but as he looked around, he noted quickly that there just about as many scientists and technicians as there were soldiers, and that she let him straight past reception and towards the lifts. She selected one that had a numeric keypad next to the doors. After typing in a six digit code, the doors slid open. She walked in without a word, and Shinji followed. His eyes bulged a bit when he noticed that there were almost twice as many levels below them as there were above. The level she took them to was about halfway down, and was, as he dared to take a glance, labelled as 'Project E - Research and Development'.

Which up front turned out to look like 'Generic research facility #26' but that changed when as they walked deeper and deeper into the maze of individual labs, testing rooms, assembly shops and semi-automated component manufactures, as Shinji started to get a sense of the sheer scale of this place. He could not help but be impressed, even though he noticed fairly quickly that Major Katsuragi would gave gotten hopelessly lost without the guidance system of coloured stripes on the walls and floors, along with plenty of people to ask for directions.

Eventually she seemed satisfied that they had reached where they were going. "In here."

Which turned out to be a cavernous space, with four cradles, each designed to hold one of the massive machines, going by how three of them were occupied. The… Evangelions in them looked like something out of a Christian crucifixion scene.

He could see that they were connected to the building by a set of what he guessed were power cables or something, and technicians were climbing all over them with the same sense of urgency he'd noticed before, especially the third one, which was still missing parts of it's outer shell and both legs. At this distance he couldn't see the insides clearly, but it was obviously still being worked on.

Of the other cradles, one was holding the massive, pale-blue machine he'd seen earlier, the second one held another, of a slightly different design but just as disturbingly humanoid. It was coloured white, with black accents. Beyond that, the biggest difference he could see was some sort of horn sticking out it's forehead.

Katsuragi led him through a whole other maze of people, and Shinji followed her more or less on autopilot.

At least until he saw her respectfully greeting and then talking to a tall, brown-haired woman wearing a labcoat. Shinji froze in mid-stride and his insides twisted themselves into a knot tight enough that he felt physical pain and a primal urge to turn and run all the way back to his room overlooking the bay area. He knew the woman would be furious, but there was that small 'shoulder devil' that always told him to stand his ground. This time he chose to listen.

The woman turned around and looked at him, and it was all he could do not to shrink under her gaze.

"He… hello, Mother."

tbc

1)It's a sign of the times that I have no idea what the average payphone call costs these days, since it's been six+ years since I last made one. And that's in Germany, never mind Japan. At the same time, writing in a verse where I can give the middle finger to certain aspects of physics, technology and High School level economics should be fun. :)

2) And yes, he just so happens to be a fellow follower of the same band I love. In case anyone wonders about the pattern the UNAD uses for uniforms and vehicles, here's a sample. Sue me, I'm a bit of a cold war nut and I like that pattern.

3) As for the Major's car, I decided to give her a ride appropriate for the way she drives. This picture is pretty much it, but of course with right-hand drive and souped up to near season 4 levels of performance. I like the combo between that colour and the rest of it.

4) Yes, the EVAs are getting an off-canon colour scheme, but it's always going to be something that's recognisable, related to the pilot, hence Rei's being pale blue instead of the darker shade from canon, Eva 01 having that white and black scheme from Shinji's canon plugsuit and so on. Along those lines. As for Eva 00's appearance, I simply never liked the look it had pre-refit. Too Metroid Prime for my taste.

5) Generally I've tried not to make changes for the sake of doing them but to only change things that either really bugged me, such as the kids being two years older than canon, or those that were simply logical extrapolations of other changes made. Shinji's mother being around is one thing I changed for a good reason that should become apparent in the next chapter, if you can't guess it already. To be honest, I'd pretty much forgotten what she looked like, so in my head I pictured her as a blonde for some reason before just going back and checking.

6) This chapter is as long as it is because I couldn't think of a good way to end it anywhere. I don't know exactly how many chapters this is going to have, since I usually end up adding/removing/moving stuff from my pre-outlined plot.