Chapter 1: Shinji
The foreign kid was talking again. I'll admit that he wasn't as talkative as most Europeans are supposed to be, but it was still above my normal comfort level. (Then again, so are most things beyond complete silence). He'd ooh'ed and ah'ed at half the things he saw on our trip...though strangely, he'd treated the Geofront as just another in a series of wonders. The golden light shimmering on the glass of upside-down skyscrapers had been incredible--enough to shake even me out of my usual torpor. He seemed more concerned with the buildings aboveground, and watched them as if he expected them to fall over.
"I think we'll get along quite well, Ikari. I say, d'ye want to play singlestick sometime?"
"What's singlestick?"
"Don't ask," Misato called back. She was sitting at the prow of the boat, talking with with Dr. Akagi as we plowed through an underground sea of pink liquid. Every so often, I thought I could see the gloomy shadows of monstrous limbs in the distance.
The boy explained anyway. "Ah. I suppose you wouldn't know about it here, would you? It's just something we used to play in the Vale of the White Horse. You use wooden cudgels. Trains you for saber fencing."
I sighed with relief, my excuse all ready.
"Sorry, I don't have any Kendo armor. It's pretty expensive."
He gave a sharp, barking laugh.
"Armor? How do you expect to judge the winner if both fellows are wearing armor?"
"Umm...how do you expect to pick the winner?"
"Here it comes," Misato muttered.
"Well, you try to cut the other fellow's cheek or forehead until it's bleeding. Technically, you don't win unless it's a full inch of blood, but I don't suppose it would matter much in a friendly match. It's the cut that's the main thing....I say, what's wrong?"
"Isn't that a little dangerous?" I ventured.
"Why, don't be silly. It's the safest thing in the world! Well, unless both contestants start bashing at each other's elbows to deaden the arm. I remember when Willum Smith lost all feeling in his right hand after a bout with the shepherd a year back. .."
He must have caught my expression, since he threw his hands out in what he must have thought was a reassuring gesture. I nearly jumped.
"Don't worry, though. You could wear a heavy coat in the first couple of matches. Not that they ever do that in London, but it's good enough for a match in Japan..."
I was discovering that my normal habit of nodding and going along could quickly get me killed.
"Is that how you got that scar on your forehead?" I asked. I'd heard that the indirect approach didn't work as well with foreigners, but I thought that mentioning the potential of scarring would be obvious enough.
"What, you mean in singlestick? Oh, no. This came from my fight with Flashman. Well, Scud helped too. Flashy was much bigger, you see. Diggs refereed to make sure it was all according to London Rules."
He added the last part as if he expected me to protest a two-on-one fight. Clearly, he didn't know me very well.
"I told you not to ask," Misato said. The foreign boy had managed to rub her the wrong way back in the car, when he'd been horrified that the military allowed women in. I tried to change the subject.
"What's your home and family like?"
He gave me a puzzled look, as if nobody had ever asked him that before. Then he started talking very quickly and excitedly. I spent most of that time praying that he wouldn't remember his earlier offer to hit me with a wooden stick, so I only caught half of it--something about a giant chalk horse, a stone that whistled if you blew into it just right, and something called a "veast" that sounded a little bit like a Japanese festival. I guess it would have been interesting if I'd paid more attention.
"...and we're quite close to the place where William the Conqueror beat the Saxons--"
"Tom, he meant your home in the Angevin Union, not your ancestral home," Misato cut in.
"Actually, growing up in the third world country he just described would explain a lot," Ritsuko said.
"Shut up, Rits."
Misato's rebuke didn't carry much conviction, though.
"What do you mean, the Angevin Union?" Tom asked.
Misato sighed.
"I mean your home in France."
"France?!"
The boy spoke the word as if he was ready to gag. Misato suddenly whipped around and glared at him, eyes narrowed. Her happy-go-lucky mask dropped instantly.
"We're not stupid, Tom. We all know that most of England got submerged in Second Impact, so you can stop pretending. And don't ever -- ever -- joke about Second Impact in my presence again. Do you understand me?"
Tom looked back at her in stunned silence. The steel in her voice had been intimidating enough, but there was something else as well that I couldn't put my finger on.
"Y...yes ma'm," he said weakly. After she turned back around, he leaned against the boat's side and looked at a giant hand jutting out of the pink sea as the waves from our boat's wake lapped against it.
"Submerged..." he whispered.
"We're here," Ritsuko suddenly announced. We piled out of the boat and walked through a pair of metal doors. As soon as we were inside, the doors closed behind us and everything went black.
When the lights are off a mile underground, they're off. I turned in place--I didn't want to risk blundering off the catwalk--until I thought I was facing the direction my escorts had been standing.
"Who turned off the lights?" I shouted. In the darkness, I heard my voice bounce and echo around the room. It sounded a few octaves higher than I'd always thought it was. On the other hand, it wasn't half as squeaky as the scream I let out when the lights turned on again and I found myself standing face to face with a giant robot.
"Synthetic lifeform," Ritsuko corrected. "Mankind's ultimate weapon against the Angels."
"Begging your pardon, ma'am, but they're not angels," Tom said.
The doctor deflated a little and shot a what the hell? look at Misato.
"Fundamentalist," Misato whispered.
"Aren't most Angevin citizens supposed to be secular these days?" Ritsuko asked.
"Not this one, evidently."
"Good thing you warned me before I mentioned my Angelic evolution theory."
Misato nodded. I took a few seconds to survey the room. Its dimensions were enormous--like a green metal cathedral dome, crisscrossed with walkways and railings.
"Evolution?" Tom said. "You mean like that Empedocles fellow, with his arms and legs and organs running around until they put themselves together?"
Ritsuko started to roll her eyes, stopped, and decided to stare instead.
"Wherever he came from, they're big on the Classics," Misato said.
"Ah."
A cold voice rang out from the platform above us. Ever since I was a child, I'd only been permitted to hear it distorted through the phone lines. It was so sharp and clear now that I almost didn't recognize it.
"It's been a while," my father said.
I hung my head and said nothing. This was all wrong. This wasn't how I'd fantasized seeing my father. Then again, even my fantasies hadn't been very hopeful. At least I didn't have to see his look of scorn when I stared at the floor.
"Prepare Unit 01. We have a pilot now," he said.
For a moment, I thought he meant Tom. Suddenly, all of his idiosyncrasies made sense. The violent sports...the fights...his regret that there weren't any Irish laborers on the roadside to attack with a peashooter...
Still, I felt a little sorry for the boy. He didn't know my father like I did. Father used people, then spat them out again. Unfortunately, I hadn't been useful at four years old, so I'd been discarded early in the game.
...Which brought me to another issue.
"Why did you send for me?" I asked.
"Because you're the pilot of Unit 01, obviously," my father said. It was incredible how much scorn he managed to compress into those eight words.
"What?! Wait...Why me? Why now?" I shouted.
"There's nobody else."
"What about Tom? That's why you brought him here, isn't it? He plays Rugby football, for crying out loud. Let him kill the Angel!"
"You think I'd choose you if Tom's synch ratio was remotely close to functional?" he snapped. There it was. I hadn't thought it was possible to feel any smaller, but my father had found a way to do it. Stupidly, I wanted to scowl at the golden-haired little foreigner who'd just received praise at my expense. From my father. My father.
I couldn't even work up the motivation to do that.
"How can you do this to me now, father?" It sounded pathetic, probably because it was.
He stood impassively behind the reflections in his bulletproof glass cage. I don't think he so much as twitched.
"The choice is simple," he said. "Get into the EVA or leave."
"This is insane, father! I can't do this! I have no idea how to pilot this thing!"
"You'll be instructed."
"That's not enough!"
"Then get out of my sight," he said. He hit an intercom button. "Medical team: I want Pilot Ayanami in here now."
"Get in the EVA, Shinji," Misato growled.
"I can't!"
"Ikari?" Tom said.
"What?!"
"Look here; it's a rum thing to ask you to do something I can't do myself, but that can't be helped. These creatures--"
"Angels," Ritsuko amended.
"--creatures want to kill us all. There are women here, for heaven's sake!"
Misato bristled behind him. I can only assume she let it go because she expected Tom's pleas to have any effect...which just goes to show how little she knew about me at that point.
"Can't you just try, Ikari?"
I imagined Tom dying in unpleasant ways. It didn't help, much.
"I'm not getting into that EVA," I said.
He gave me a hard look, then turned away and said nothing for the next few minutes.
Rei's entrance was a masterclass in emotional blackmail. Imagine, if you will, a hauntingly beautiful girl dressed in a skin-tight suit gasping in pain as she's wheeled in. Tom's eyes suddenly went wide, and he took a few paces back. Before he could say anything, a crash from the ceiling sent debris hurtling toward us. I screamed and uselessly covered my head, waiting for the blow to fall. It never did.
When I looked up again, I saw a huge pair of purple arms curled over me like a shield. A scream interrupted my thoughts before I could consider the implications of that fact. A few feet away, the girl had fallen from her stretcher and was pouring blood onto the floor.
Tom had finally found his voice again.
"Ikari, this is abominable! You can't intend to let this girl go in your place, surely? If you--"
"I'll do it!" I yelled.
Years later, someone asked me why I didn't see through the obvious manipulation and press my father for concessions while the iron was hot. I can only reply with this: Picture yourself as a scared, sexually frustrated fourteen year old boy, and then tell me what you would have done differently.
Asuka once told me that the entry plug is like a womb, with all of the comfort that this implies. I agree with her, except for one thing: I've never been comfortable with LCL. It's nasty, oily stuff that makes your skin feel like it's suffocating. As for getting it out of your system, imagine spending ten minutes coughing something up that tastes like blood.
"I feel sick," I grumbled.
"You're a boy, so act like one," Misato replied.
The entry plug erupted in light: first a rainbow, then bright red, then black-and-white rings. As soon as the plug returned to normal, I could feel the EVA's body moving along a conveyer belt. Then I realized that the EVA's body had become my own.
"Synchronization at 43%."
Someone--I think it was Ritsuko--shouted "Amazing!" in the background. For the first time, I wondered if I might make it out of this alive after all.
"Removing secondary lock bolts."
No problem. No problem at all. Just keep focused on their commands...
"Removing primary restraints."
No problem...No problem...
"Removing secondary restraints."
No prob--
"EVA launch!"
"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!"