Author's note: This is a continuation of the first scene in Chapter 1 before the time skip.
Mari's shining pink heels sank into the silt on the ocean floor. Gravity on this plane of existence was simultaneously intense and non-existent. The water filling the infinite expanse around her was easy to breathe. It was like being submerged in LCL that had been synthesized with a few extra spices in the formula.
The sea floor moved under her feet. The silt turned into dozens of writhing living figures, an army of underwater beings forming out of a single giant entity. As the sea creatures separated, they took the form of glowing fungal matter crudely imitating the contours and musculature of human male bodies. They vaguely looked like they were wearing swim trunks made of protective mushroom latex to keep up with Mari's skimpy oceanic motif. Their heads were giant overgrown mushroom caps, giving them a surreal and alien appearance.
Mari gnashed her fangs and punched one of the sub-dimensional nautical menaces. It didn't go very well. Her fist sank straight through the being's primitive flesh as if it were a punching bag made of melting taffy. She pulled her arm back and tried to kick another one of the creatures away as it rose out of the sentient mass under her feet. All she managed to do was polish her pink boot with a fresh coat of flaky slime.
She started to sink into the fungal colony like it was made of quicksand. The arms of several human-imitation creatures flailed from the sea floor and reached up her legs. They roughly grabbed at the pink and black band around her waist and yanked her Plug-kini bottoms down to her thighs.
"Okay, fine," Mari mumbled in acceptance. She begrudgingly moved her legs to help the creatures pull the pink Unit 4 skivvies over her ankles and off of her feet.
The tiny swimwear hovered weightlessly through the water beside her. Between her boots and her crop top, she was wearing her birthday suit instead of her Plugsuit.
The legion of writhing sea floor beings stared up from underneath Mari like she was a human biology exhibit standing on stage. She couldn't read what they were thinking due to them having large spotted fungus caps in place of faces, but she was pretty sure they had something shady planned for her. Unless the baring of vaginas just happened to be the customary Mushroom Boy way of saying "Hello."
The swim trunks started to slide down as the sea creatures lowered their AT Fields. The junction of Mari's lower body was marked by a small patch of dark brown hair. The junctions of the lower bodies of the semi-human Dirac abominations were marked with complex vibrant swirl patterns. In between their fungus-stalks-trying-to-be-legs, each one sported a pair of swirl-covered bulbs growing underneath a veiny shaft-like formation. Mari had a few guesses where that was supposed to go.
She was stuck up to her knees in fungus growth. Her arms were getting tangled around the constantly shifting bodies of the creatures. As she sank deeper into the living seabed and got closer to the bulb arrangement growing below the waist of one of the beings (specifically, when it was almost in her face), she realized the swirling patterns naturally formed the shape of the letter "S". There was one "S" for each bulb, and two bulbs lining each rigid vented shaft.
S+S = S2.
"You've got to be kidding." Mari rolled her eyes behind her glasses.
Another fungal being formed out of the floor directly behind Mari. Its hands pushed against the large plastic "4" on her backpack and made her bend forward. Its gelatinous waist lined up with the top of her firm hips while she fought off another being stretching its elastic arms around her shoulders and trying to pull her top half headfirst into the sentient quicksand.
"Do what you've gotta do back there," she calmly grumbled over her shoulder. "Just take it easy on the lymph nodes."
The Angel lurched forward and inched its S2 Organ closer toward her hedgehog's dilemma.
"What the hell is that thing?" Asuka's voice screamed in a distorted reverberating pitch over the Angel's infested comms receiver.
Mari was an alluring and sinster siren lying in wait in the murk of EVA-04's contaminated Entry Plug. Her center of gravity was welded to the cockpit seat with thriving fungus growths as strong as the giant mass blocking her Plug ejection rockets. Densely pulsing fibers of bacteria hugged around her bare hips and came to a junction between her legs, forming a rough construct of mucousy organic bikini bottoms to replace her old synthetic ones.
"Yeck. Asuka saves me from getting turned into mushroom soup and now we have to fight this weirdo?" Hikari's voice broadcasted in sounding like she had a severe case of laryngitis.
Underneath the indestructible fungal netting that protected the Angel's delicate organic structure and Mari's modesty, there were two secret bundles of shapeshifting reeds working as living interface adapters. They were permanently locked inside the two soft cavities along Mari's underside, assuming management of their human biological functions and altering her internal physiology so those vestigial functions were phased out completely. Now the reeds were purely for keeping Angelic energy flowing in and absorbing converted human energy back out. Mari's and the Angel's individual biologies had combined into a single inseparable system.
It wasn't all that bad. Mari found the seating arrangement to be mildly uncomfortable after the Angel's soul had first merged with her consciousness, but she quickly adapted to this new mode of life. And it felt great any time the cockpit was getting rocked around. The webbing acting as her bikini strings would react and grow more resilient if a jolt made her shift out of her seat's biological power couplings too far, but she always had a couple inches of suspension to comfortably shift around. In the lowest of Lilian terms, it wasn't unlike having two malleable vibrating friends paying a permanent visit. If she had been a boy, she would have had to contend with something more in line with a catheter and a colonoscopy tube.
"Why does it look like an Eva?" Shinji's garbled watery voice echoed in Mari's right ear.
"Why does it have to look like mine?" Hikari whined on the left.
The Angel and Mari coexisted in layers. The outside part of their body were the fungal formations trapping EVA-04's entry hatch and grotesquely mutating its cells. Mari sat inside the Evangelion's cockpit connected to what was left of its piloting systems, and the bacteria around her lap created a connection inside of her. Together they formed a matryoshka doll of infection and assimilation.
"Target locked. Awaiting orders," Rei's distorted chipmunk voice echoed directly behind Mari's head.
Mari calmly breathed the flecks of contaminated mold floating in the LCL around her. The aquatic bacteria sweeping from her lungs reacted with the alien energy coursing up from her lap when they both reached her heart, making her icy blood burn blue and making her veins light up like runes on her skin. Her discarded pink Plug bottoms still hovered idly in the water around her with the number "04" printed on their left rear side, serving as a reminder half of her was skinny dipping and there was an abomination happening below her waistline.
Mari leaned forward in her seat and grinned through the cloudy waters with her fangs. The Angel encasing her sprang into its attack.
Author's note 2: Sure beats having your face ripped off while Kaworu's disembodied voice talks to you, I guess.