CODENAME: XJ-9 Chapter 2

Wrote this one in some kind of marathon, it's hard to get the beginning of the story out of the way so i can get to the meat of it, but hopefully this chapter doesn't suck.

"Nobody could have survived that kind of impact…" she said softly to herself after she watched the scene unfold before her, watched the armored figure crash through the Angel at speeds that would have put her own suit to shame.

To say nothing of her tremendous shock when the figure, no, girl as it seemed now that she had a clearer look 'Weird as it may be that somebody would actually put a skirt on their armor' she thought, stood up and then started flying.

She didn't have a hard time believing the armor would have survived such an impact, her own could have done marginally as well, but anybody inside such a suit should have been turned into a thin watery paste after a hit like that.

Even if they survived, they shouldn't have been moving around so easily, so smoothly. She didn't even look hurt aside the scuffs on her armor, nothing a good buffing wouldn't fix. And surely, she noted, they wouldn't have taken off like a rocket out of Tokyo-3 airspace as she had just done in front of her.

Something didn't add up, she'd decided, "Sid, can you analyze the scans we took of her before she flew off? Something about this is bothering me, whoever is in there is either very, very small or that armor plating is skin tight, to say nothing about the fact that an impact like that would have killed me."

"I've got nothing, the scans couldn't penetrate the outer layer of armor, and we should get going, Nerv goons incoming." The AI known as Sid said from within the armor's helmet.

'Who was that?' the girl wondered as she too jetted away.

X

The metal girl soared through the sky over the western United States, the rising sun reflecting off her armor plating.

"It doesn't make any sense," she said aloud to herself, "I should at least be able to get mom on the communicator but she's not answering, and I'm not damaged enough that I shouldn't be able to tap into enhanced GPS…"

Her monologue was interrupted by a sudden feeling of being watched, followed immediately by her sensors screaming at her that somebody had a radar lock on her. "What the…" she got out before a dense stream of high caliber tracers sprayed past her.

Two things about that really bothered her, she decided. The first thing was that the weapons shooting at her were human weapons, so the second thing that bothered her was that humans were shooting at her and they should have known who she was.

She rolled onto her back and flew backwards; looking back the direction the shots came from and was troubled by what she saw; a pair of fixed wing strike fighters, her internal database told her they were F-16C multirole fighters. 'Which haven't been built in fifty years, but those look brand new!' she thought to herself as another stream of tracers arced towards her.

Evading them was trivial and she couldn't help but wonder if they were trying to shoot her down or to test her abilities and she didn't intend to stick around to find out. With a thought she pushed her engines to full throttle and went hypersonic in seconds, blasting over Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania in a matter of minutes before she slowed rapidly over New Jersey.

Or at least that was the plan, as she hovered over what was supposed to be Tremorton she found herself staring at nothing but ocean, a double-check of her internal geography database combined with information from the GPS satellites that she could contact confirmed her location, and yet below her was nothing but the atlantic.

"No, this isn't right…" she pleaded to nobody. She ran diagnostic after diagnostic on her systems, trying to find some fault that could account for her inability to find her home, anything to prove she was just off course.

She found nothing that could account for the discrepancy and so with mounting panic she flew straight up into the sky at full burn, clawing towards orbit. Everything about this world seemed wrong, she had to know.

X

Iron Maiden cruised through the skies of Tokyo-3 on her nightly patrol, searching for people in distress whom she would save from their imminent peril. At least that had been the plan; it was a fairly calm night as apparently the recent Angel attack had people staying inside of their houses more than they would have otherwise and so crime was down.

"Not that I'm complaining" Mana said softly to herself, though her armor's AI, Sid, could still hear her.

"Oh, thinking about how quiet it's been tonight?" Sid asked as she processed sensor data and managed flight system cooling with her spare cycles.

"Picked anything up about that girl from last night?" She asked her AI companion as she set down on one of Tokyo-3's taller high-rise structures. She looked around and didn't see anybody up there, which was good; she didn't need somebody sneaking up on her while she was distracted.

"Nothing so fa- hold on, there are reports coming in to NERV, I'm intercepting them… oh wow. Two F-16s tried to shoot down an 'unidentified object' but it went hypersonic before they could hit it, about a half hour later NASA started screaming about an unauthorized space launch over the atlantic…" Sid rattled off as she intercepted the datastreams, "Oh, you're gonna love this part, they think it's us."

"What, like 'us' as in Japan?" Mana asked as she reviewed the data Sid was projecting into her heads up display. 'Huh, she accelerated that fast, I can't even do that!'

"No, us as in you and I, they think Iron Maiden was who they were shooting at." Sid replied as she continued to sift through the reports.

"Wait, what? How? Why? She's turquoise for crying out loud! and my armor does not have pigtails!" Mana ranted, incensed.

"True, but you're wearing the most advanced power armor on the planet… at least you were before last night." Sid commented as she collected sensor data. "By the way, according to the sensor data I've pulled from NERV's satellite network, she is up in space and if her re-entry course is any indication she's not pleased."

Mana instinctively looked at the sky, even knowing she wouldn't see what she was looking for. "What do you mean? How can you tell?"

"Well, this steep of an entry angle is more likely to kill you than bring you back down; it's not something a sapient with a healthy emotional state would try to pull off… and it looks like she's going to come down over Japan unless something changes." Sid amended as she pulled in more data.

"Sid, bring reactor output levels to 90%, we're going up to greet our new friend." Mana stated after brief consideration, "I don't know who she is or why she's here, but if she means violence I'll repay it in kind." She stepped off the edge of the roof and kicked in her jets, rocketing towards space.

X

The metallic teen flew forcefully back towards the earth below her. The only thing she'd found from orbit was more confusion, the earth below her was not the earth she remembered, Antarctica was gone and the coastal areas of all major continents were largely underwater.

She was scared, confused, not the least she was angry. 'What I would give to turn off my emotions right now…' she thought to herself. The only thing she had left to her was to find out who ruined her home; who likely killed everyone she'd ever known.

She would pay back their destruction and violence in spades. She'd been given emotion, she'd been giving free will, and she was likely going to go against the very core tenets of her programming, and she simply couldn't make herself care.

She woke up in Japan, she'd start her search for those responsible in Japan, she decided as she rocketed down from orbit. It was not long after that she picked up the metallic signature headed in her direction, she subtly changed course but the signature kept tracking her.

"On an intercept course… metallic… it's got to be cluster!" she snarled with venom she wouldn't have imagined herself capable of. It made sense in her mind only the cluster would have the kind of power to make something like this happen.

Abruptly she fell into cooler air and altered her speed and course to intercept the signature that was closing on her, the cluster would answer for its crimes.

She could see the figure in the distance, the red and gold color scheme was not one she would typically associate with the cluster but the full metal construction cemented in her mind that she was looking at a robot, if the look on its face was any indication, an angry one.

'That makes two angry robots up here today.' She thought with a sense of dark humor. She cut thrust as her foe closed the distance, in moments they were standing a dozen yards from each other, twenty thousand feet above the ground.

"So, you just couldn't give up could you?" she spat. "I said no, I said I didn't want to join the cluster… and you don't even have the courage to attack me directly! No, you kill millions of people and destroy half of my planet! Everybody I've ever known is probably dead, so what you think now that I'm alone I'll come along with you?" she continued with mounting rage.

She tried to deploy her blaster pistols but found that her transformation systems were offline. 'No matter' she thought 'I still have my palm blasters and my fists, that is all I need!'

Iron Maiden, secretly Mana Kirishima stared in complete confusion at the girl before her, now seeing her in incredible close-up, had more questions than ever, most of which would have to wait while Sid translated the angry English rant that had just been shouted at her.

"Sid… I don't think that's power armor" she noted as she watched the mouth on the front of the 'helmet' move along with the words. "I do believe that she's some kind of robot or android…" she started before a blast of superheated plasma shot forth from the palm of the turquoise and white robot girl before her.

'Damn, I wasn't paying attention.' She chastised herself mentally as she dodged the shot with a burst of her jets. It was to no avail, within moments a fist caught her on the side of the helmet and she tumbled backwards through the sky, rapid bursts of her hand and foot thrusters countering her tumble and putting her back on her 'feet' in the sky.

For her part the robot did her best to dodge the return pulse blast that the Iron Maiden loosed at her, but she was a good shot and it splashed across her armor, scorching the paint but doing no real damage, to the confusion of both combatants. "Is that really all you've got! I've got to admit it did sting a little but I thought the cluster had more than that!" taunted the metal girl as she charged in, fist ready to deliver the haymaker of the century.

"Sid shields now!" Mana screamed as she threw up her arms to block the strike, which slammed into and then abruptly through the now overloaded shields. She grunted in pain as the strike crashed into her armor, the shock causing micro fractures in the plating that were already being repaired.

Sparks shot from her palms as the repulsors shorted out and failed. 'that limits my offensive options…' Mana thought with great frustration. Her stability compromised, she didn't have the agility to dodge when her foe grabbed her head and shoulders in a robotic bear hug and drove them both towards the ground.

As the robot increased the pressure on Iron Maiden's head and torso Mana's breathing became labored. Panic set in when her HUD began to crack. "Armor integrity is compromised, we've got at most fifteen seconds before the helmet caves in!" warned Sid as the altimeter clicked down below eight thousand feet.

"Argh!" Mana grunted as she struggled in the grip of her foe. She had one chance, slim as it might be. "Sid… divert all power… to the chest…piece…and fire" she forced out through gritted teeth as her helmet started to throw sparks.

In an instant a massive detonation of arc energy separated the two combatants and sent them tumbling apart, each of them only having moments to correct their uncontrolled descent and land before they became part of the terrain.

Iron Maiden struck the ground on her feet with a burst of thruster fire and a loud metallic clank before falling to a knee. She took stock of her situation, her HUD showed that her left gauntlet had completely shattered, though the fact that she could feel the warm afternoon sun on her bare skin could have told her that just as well.

"Sid, I'm offloading you out of the armor, I don't think it's going to hold together much longer. The helmet is about to completely fail and I don't think I can win this fight." She informed her AI companion as she typed commands onto her right forearm with her now bare left hand and had sent her away before she could even protest.

She picked up an inbound sensor contact right as her hud failed completely. 'Figures' she thought to herself as she pulled the useless helmet off and threw it to the ground. "I didn't see my last stand being quite like this…" she said to herself as she extended her only remaining functional weapon, the progressive blade embedded in her right forearm armor.

The robotic girl charged in towards her damaged opponent, not to say she was undamaged herself, but she had enough fight left to finish the fight. As she closed the distance she readied her killing blow… and then stopped short.

Her processors refused to believe it, surely her optics were faulty, a momentary diagnostic confirmed that she wasn't hallucinating and she was stunned, her opponent was not a cluster robot as she had initially assumed in her fractured emotional state, her opponent was human, the very thing she was created to protect.

So stunned was she that she didn't react when the charging armored human she'd been fighting tackled her to the ground and prepared a killing blow of her own. Blue eyes met turquoise; a strand of auburn hair fell onto the robot's face.

Mana hesitated, the robot had stopped mid attack; something had changed. Even as pumped and not less than a great deal enraged, she wouldn't just kill somebody, robot or not. She retracted her blade back into her armor and collapsed from exhaustion onto the robot. "Why." She asked softly, "Why attack?"

She couldn't answer, because she didn't know, she was never this reckless before, she never attacked without provocation before… and yet here she was. Laying on busted pavement under a human in some kind of armor that she'd nearly killed.

She sat up, ignoring the tingles of pain coursing over her titanium skin, and picked up the nearly unconscious girl who had stopped just short of delivering a killing blow. "Where do you live? I'll take you home." She asked as the only thing that popped into her head. Maybe this girl had answers, but even if not, she figured she owed her at least that much.

If it sucked, let me know, i'll stop writing forever.

(just kidding)

[but no, really.]