First, I'd like to give my most emphatic thanks to OrionPax09 for pre-reading and helping me out with this chapter.
Secondly, Enjoy.
Mana sat idly at her desk as the teacher droned on and on about Second Impact and its effects on the world economy. So far, her plan to set herself up in Tokyo 3 had been successful, despite the fact that she had been thrown into it with no warning whatsoever. The only thing that bothered her was the fact that she had nee forced to use her own name when doing so. The MAGI ran Tokyo 3, and while Sid was more powerful than any one of them, hacking into all three to create a completely new identity without being noticed was far beyond the AI's capability.
'That's probably going to come back to haunt me,' Mana knew. On the one hand, it meant that she would probably have to deal with NERV sooner, rather than later. On the other, at least she would know they were coming.
So there Mana sat, unhappy but unable to rectify many of her current problems, completely unaware that she was sitting between all three of the Evangelion Pilots. She had chosen this seat at random, having been told to take a seat of her choice. Mana was unaware of the status of the pilots; in fact, she didn't even know that the Evangelion pilots were put into this class.
The reality was that when Sid was registering her in the school that this class was the only one with openings, apparently her birth date excluded her from all other classes, and it didn't seem as though it was worth it to hack the system. Sid had told her as much, and while it was a bit odd, Mana agreed that it wasn't worth messing around with.
The red school issued laptop in front of Mana beeped, so she cracked open the lid and blinked as the bright screen caught her off guard. 'Why would they make it so bright! She thought as her eyes adjusted. A moment later she felt stupid as she realized the brightness slider was pushed to maximum.
The brightness problem taken care of, she looked at the message on the small LCD screen. It was one line and read as follows:
Are you a pilot? (y/n)
Mana blinked. 'What is this about? Pilot of what? They can't know about… no, that's impossible.' She opened a chat session with the sender and waited for their end to come up. Finally, the link established.
m.kirishima: Pilot of what?
a.nonymous: The Evangelion, are you an Eva pilot?
Mana was more than a little surprised at this. 'Why would I be an Evangelion pilot? I'm just a junior high school student. This kid is a weirdo.'
m.kirishima: No, I'm not an Eva pilot.
After Mana sent the line she heard a disappointed groan two seats a head and one to the left, a freckled and bespectacled boy with brown hair was slumped in his chair, his laptop screen open in front of him and displaying the text she had sent. Based on what she remembered from the class introduction, his name was Kensuke Aida. She knew nothing about him, but apparently he thought that she might be the pilot of one of those robots of Nerv's.
Mana sighed and returned to her note taking. All things considered, she still took pride in her grades.
When the bell rang, Mana was approached by Kensuke, "Hey, Kirishima, um… you want to… eat lunch with us?" he gestured back to his two friends.
She wanted to make new friends, and the boy seemed nice enough, if I a little weird, so she agreed, "Okay."
"Great!" Kensuke showed her over to their small ring of desks that had been set up for the lunch period. He turned to his friends and gestured to the one with the tracksuit, "This is my friend Touji, and next to him is my other friend Shinji."
Mana bowed to them, "It is nice to m-meet you."
And so, she sat quietly on the edge of the desk, chewing on her kappa-maki and watching the 'stooges' eat their own lunches. The one who was introduced as Shinji had the most elaborate meal, consisting of complex delicious looking foods. Touji's food was gone far too quickly for Mana to even figure out what exactly it was he'd been eating. 'This guy is a vacuum cleaner!'
Kensuke had a meal not unlike her own: rice balls and futo-maki.
She turned her attention back to Shinji, "That food looks delicious…what is it?" she asked him.
He smiled sheepishly and said, "Its grilled orange salmon and rice with steamed vegetables." It looked delicious in Mana's opinion, extremely delicious.
"You made that food?" She asked him. If he did make it, it indicated a level of skill she wouldn't have expected from somebody her age. Her own adventures in the kitchen were failures of an epic nature. She could pretty much only make rice… and she usually burned it.
He nodded, "Yeah, I usually make a lunch for Asuka too."
She smiled and nodded, genuinely interested now, "That's incredible! So, where did you learn to cook like that? Was it hard, did it take a lot of practice?" Mana fired off her questions. This boy was interesting, and her curiosity was overriding her typical shyness.
"W-well, I learned a lot from my teacher before I came here, he was a really good cook, so I guess it just rubbed off on me…" He answered with a blush.
Mana was about to ask him more about his talent when the bell rang, signaling the end of the lunch period. Maybe she'd get a chance to talk to him after school.
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The rest of the day had passed without major incident. Minor incidents however…
Rei had been paying suspiciously close attention to Mana, and had more than once been caught staring, though this was just passed off as 'Ayanami Eccentricity' so nobody paid it too much attention.
The reality was that Rei was absorbing as much about this new student as possible, so that she could make a report to the commander about this unexpected development. New students simply showing up without warning was definitely worth notifying him.
Unfortunately for her spying, she had to break off from her surveillance of Mana, as she had to go to headquarters with Shinji and Asuka for testing.
Mana was pleased. School was over and she'd made friends, it wasn't even that awkward, she found them easy to talk to, like her friends from Toyko-2… She turned her mind away from thinking about them for the time being, and just kept the smile on her face as she walked down the street. Today was a good day.
A cell-phone rang and she blinked in confusion before realizing that it was her phone. 'Strange, nobody has this number yet…'
She flipped open the cover and put the phone to her ear, "Hel-"
"So how was your first day? Was it fun? Did you meet people? Tell me about it!" the voice on the other end of the line was, in Mana's opinion, freakishly energetic… and familiar.
"Sid? Why are you acting like a twelve year old on speed?" Mana asked. Sid's behavior was… unexpected.
"Well, I was going through some of your father's old documents and I found the plans for an emotions and personality upgrade patch for my systems... so I installed it! Great huh?" she was… so very hyper.
Mana slapped her hand to her forehead and stared at the ground with a twitching eyebrow. "Sid, uh… my day was great, I met some people… could you calm down a little, please?" she pleaded for some sanity; it wasn't too much to ask for, really.
There was a sigh on the other end of the line and Sid seemed noticeably calmer, "Okay… well anyway, you should pick up some food on the way back, there isn't any here and it is my understanding that meatbags need to eat. There's a s re n orn r…" the line dropped out and was replaced with static for a few seconds before the phone blinked that it had no service.
Mana pulled the phone from her ear and stared at the screen, "Huh, that's strange, all the service is out…" she looked around and saw that all of the traffic lights and store front signs had also gone dark. "Is the power out…?"
She hurried her pace towards her apartment, maybe Sid could figure this out, the power shouldn't have actually stayed off like it had; there were backups that should have kicked in.
While running for her apartment she was struck by an inspiration. She, while continuing at a swift jog, started punching codes into her phone, to open up and unlock the network carrier settings. After entering several failed codes she finally got what she was looking for and punched in a string of numbers, then hit send.
The phone got hot from the power being diverted to the broadcasting antenna and the battery wouldn't last long, but the multi-frequency beacon that the phone had just become would surely attract the attention of any active electronic scanning devices, the kind that Sid could use as part of being the I-system.
Whatever the cause, a complete and total lack of power in a city that was supposed to be a fortress against the Angels could never be good. She needed to be as close to Sid as possible, if something were to happen… well, this is what the suit was made for, what her father had wanted her to be able to do: to be a force comparable to the Evangelions.
She stopped against a street post to catch her breath, all of the running had taken a toll on her and she just couldn't go on. "You'd think with all of this running I'd have made it home by now…" she said aloud to nobody in particular.
"…tension, there's an Angel approaching Toyko-3, please deploy Evangelions. This is the J-S-S-D-F, an Angel is approaching this city, please respond to this threat!"
Mana opened her eyes wide in shock and turned slowly to the sky to look at the low flying plane, "Shit."
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Sid was bored out of her mind, and she had a lot of mind. She'd spent all day at the apartment while Mana was in school. Surfing the internet, watching TV, cleaning, writing programs to write other programs that would write other programs, and so on. She ended up giving up on that and spent the better part of the day working on the patch she'd found in Dr. Kirishima's files, and installed it within her own programming to great effect.
Unfortunately, this just resulted in more boredom than before. So she ended up making…things.
After destroying the refrigerator, the microwave, toaster, coffee machine, TV set, computer, DVD player, cable box, stereo, and alarm clock, she finally had all the parts she would need to 'tinker' with.
The end result of this tinkering was… well, upgrades would be a good word for it.
Soon after finishing the 'upgrades', Sid noted that it was a little after Mana would have left school, so she placed a phone call (the phone being one of the few things she didn't cannibalize.)
Unfortunately, before their conversation could be completed the line had gone down, and seconds later the power in the apartment as well.
"Oh… This kinda sucks."
Sid sighed and stepped out onto the balcony, enjoying the view since there was now literally nothing else to do.
After ten minutes of cataloging and recording every single detail she could see from the balcony she snapped her head around in the general direction of the school, there was a transmission being broadcast, it was crude, powerful, and nonsensical random data.
It was like an electronic yell, nonsense, but loud nonsense.
'Well, it is rather odd that such a broadcast would be going out during a power failure…' she decided to investigate, and so she picked up the contraption she'd made and jumped from the balcony.
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Asuka Langley-Sohryu was getting impatient. Once the power had gone out they had, after help from Rei, figured out that there was a manual door hatch, and so she made Shinji open it. He was less than pleased but as usual his spine didn't have the structural integrity to support a protest.
"I don't think this is the way to the geofront, Asuka…" he said nervously. He didn't want to set her off, but going uphill was definitely not the way to get to the cages.
Asuka ignored his whining and kicked open the door in front of her… and promptly yanked it shut again right before one of the Angel's legs slammed down in front of it. She quickly recovered from her shock at seeing the Angel up close and put a smug grin on her face, "Well, now that I've visually confirmed the Angel, lets go kill it!"
Shinji dropped his face into his palm at Asuka's arrogance. 'Why are you trying to convince us? We already know you made a mistake…'
Rei's eyebrow twitched in annoyance. Had anybody been watching her they would have been shocked to see it, however nobody was. This was Rei after all; you could look at her for five minutes and see everything there was to see and everything there ever would be to see.
Rei decided to take charge of the situation; they could not afford any further delays, especially with this Angel attacking them. "We will need to go this way and break into the ventilation system." She said as she yanked a grid off of the nearby wall.
She had the layout of the facility memorized perfectly, living your entire life in one place had a way of doing that to you. Nobody had ever asked her, so she'd never told anybody, but when she was younger, and before most of the Evangelion testing, she'd explored extensively to pass the time, and now it was paying off.
"You better not screw this up, Wondergirl!" Asuka warned as they crawled through the dusty ductwork, it was as if it had been completely untouched since the facility was first created. Of course, that was probably an accurate picture of the reality.
"I won't." was her simple reply. Rei was like that, simple, direct, to the point. She didn't waste any words or effort on unnecessary speaking. That said; there was never any confusion about what she meant.
They had been crawling through the tunnels for about ten minutes and it was about this time that Shinji made the fatal mistake of looking in front of him. Asuka saw this and decided to reward him with a violent barrage of kicks to the face that resulted in the collapse of the ventilation duct.
Shinji and Asuka landed together in a pile of limbs and a mass of red hair. Said pile was creating quite a disturbance, and it drew the attention of the cage workers, who were preparing the Evangelions to be deployed manually.
Rei dropped down shortly after the commotion and landed perfectly on her feet as if she were an expert gymnast.
"So, there you are. We were waiting. Let's get you ready to launch," said Dr. ritsuko Akagi, the faux blonde doctor who had turned to see the commotion generated by the tangled mass of pilot.
"What? But how?" said Shinji as he disentangled himself from Asuka, who also had straightened herself out and was standing next to Rei.
The doctor smiled, "Your father did it. He had the faith that you would make it, so they made the Evangelions ready for you, by hand."
Shinji looked over at the platform his father was standing on and watched the older Ikari pulling on the ropes that would bring the entry plug into place.
Asuka looked over at her Unit-02 and grinned broadly, "Then what are we waiting for, lets go kick some ass!"
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Mana had been resting her body for ten minutes or so at the street corner when she saw the Angel. It was huge and covered in eyes; a nasty black four legged spider…thing. This was definitely not her best day ever.
She stood up to run away and came face to face with…
"Sid? I guess the beacon worked then." She said as she faced her electronic cybernetic friend.
"Got that right, good trick, so, an Angel; I guess you'll be needing the suit?" the turquoise haired girl asked Mana.
Mana turned back to the Angel, which happened to be advancing towards her position, and then turned back around to answer her friend, "I think that would be a great idea, you mind?"
"Not at all." Sid replied as her projected form flickered into non existence. The skeletal shape of the armor shifted and the 'device' moved from the hand and latched onto what was now the back of the suit. After fifteen seconds the transformation was complete and the suit was ready to be worn.
Mana tore off her school uniform and clad in only her undergarments stepped backwards into the armored suit. After sealing around her it powered up and the HUD came up in front of her face, showing power system status and targeting scan information on the Angel.
"Sid, we need to get airborne, link flight control and bring the jets online." She said to the AI in her suit. The projection of Sid's avatar nodded her head and the suit hummed to life as the flight systems kicked in, Mana lifted off moments later, just in time to avoid being stepped on by the Angel's large black leg.
"Ah, that was close!" Mana yelled out as she jetted away from the creature. She reached onto the suit's back and disconnected the rifle shaped device, bringing it around to the front and holding it in front of her, "Hey Sid, what is this? It looks like it was made out of random junk…" she examined it a little more, "Is that a magnetron?!"
Sid's avatar blushed, "Well, see, I was bored today, so I scrounged up some parts, I got the capacitors from the TV, the cooling system from the refrigerator. I got the magnetron from the microwave of course. It's an optical maser; I thought it might be good to have a long range weapon."
Mana mentally face-palmed, "That stuff isn't cheap you know…" she caught sight of a pair of rectangular slots on the side of the weapon, "What are the slots for."
"It makes toast."
"Why does it make toast?" she asked, completely thrown by the AI's eccentricities as displayed thus far.
"Well, I already had the toaster taken apart, so I figured, why not?" The Avatar shrugged.
Choosing not to respond, and to continue the conversation at a later time, I time when they were not in danger of being destroyed by an Angel… 'The Angel seems to have no means of ranged attack, that's a little… oh there it is, crap.'
Mana dodged the acid shot that had spewed forth from the Angel's eyes and lined up the maser-rifle and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened, that is to say, the rifle did not fire. On her HUD she saw a flashing warning notice, 'Capacitor not charged, ready to fire in fifteen seconds.'
Mana was distracted by the message long enough that she didn't see the next shot coming until it was too late, and it slammed directly into her… defensive field.
"Thanks for keeping an eye out Sid!" Mana thanked her AI for most probably saving her life, and then flew low around the Angel and across the way the beast had come into the city, to try to lead it out into the open, which would reduce possible civilian casualties.
She looked at the message on her HUD, the lights were green and the weapon was ready to fire. Before she pulled the trigger, Mana hesitated, "Hey, Sid does this thing work?"
The avatar grinned sheepishly, "Well, probably. It'll either fire or explode; fifty-fifty chance."
Mana grimaced. "Well, guess we'll find out." She pulled the trigger. The magnetron activated and the cooling compressor kicked on, then a split second after the initial trigger pull a turquoise beam shot forth and slammed into and orange barrier, the Angel's AT field.
The rifle stopped firing and Mana shot off in another direction, the Angel following this pest that was trying in vain to hurt it.
"Turquoise?! Seriously? Boost the output; we can't punch through that thing with what we've got right now!" She yelled over the sound of the jets screaming as they were pushed to the limits, the Angel was chasing her and it was a lot faster than it looked.
The AI shrugged, "I like the color." She paused for a moment as her processes altered the configuration of the charging mechanism, "Output boosted to maximum safe levels. System will be charged in five minutes."
Cursing her bad luck and flying through the buildings so as to avoid being hit directly by a blast of acid she nearly missed the sight of three Evangelion units climbing out of a hole in the ground.
As the Evas got up onto their feet Mana noted that her weapon would be charged in two minutes.
Down on the surface the three Evangelions had prepared their pallet rifles and were spreading out to find a clear line of fire onto the Angel.
Mana listened in on the radio chatter between the Evangelions as they positioned themselves, they hadn't seemed to have noticed her yet.
"Come on, Wondergirl, keep up, we gotta kill this thing before our batteries run out!" came a girl's voice, it sounded familiar.
"Roger." Another girl's voice, but calm, quiet.
"I see it!" the voice of a boy, one she knew she'd heard before.
The red unit rushed forwards, rifle in hand, and came out from behind the tall buildings of Toyko-3, she had a direct line of fire on the Angel. She pulled the trigger and the bullets lanced forth and tore through the beast like tissue paper. Soon afterwards it crumpled to the ground, dead.
It was then that the head of the blue Evangelion rotated skywards and Mana knew she'd been seen. The charge on her rifle read ten seconds to firing.
"Control. Pilot Ayanami reports that an apparently mechanical flying humanoid is hovering over the city, it appears to be armed."
Mana blinked. 'Ayanami!?'
A deep male voice came back through, "This contact is to be classified as hostile, terminate at once."
"Roger."
Mana's eyes shot wide as the large rifle pointed upwards at her and fired. She pushed the jets to full and shot to the side away from the bullets. "Sid! Scan for a weak point or a power source!"
After a few tense seconds the HUD displayed the shoulder pylons as containing the power supply for the hostile Evangelion unit, she locked on as another burst issued forth from the pallet rifle. "Power source identified, target is locked. You can fire when ready!"
Mana's finger twitched and pulled the trigger back, the weapon spooled up quickly and the beam that shot forth was several orders of magnitude larger than the previous shot.
The blue Evangelion raised a hand and projected it's AT field defensively in front of it, but it only held for a moment before collapsing under the strain of the shot impacting it. The turquoise beam continued on through the shoulder pylon and the unit went dark as its power source was destroyed.
The alarms inside the suit went off as more projectiles flew through the air towards her; apparently the remaining two units had caught on. Mana looked down at the two units and said to Sid, "Time to run!"
Mana returned the weapon to the clamps on the suits back and shot away from the city at high speed, turning back only once; to wonder about what the hell had just happened.
"The pilots… couldn't possibly be…" Mana said, mostly to her self.
Sid shook her head. "It seems that they are, I'm sorry."
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Cheers, TRF