Shinji Ikari One Shot
N.E.R.V. of Iron
This has been taken up by 100flyking to be written as a full story.
(Note: if you want the full experience, cue up shoot to thrill by AC/DC and hit play when you see "Okay Toji, mark". Not going to put the lyrics in the text for the whole song.)
The year was 2009, and Shinji Ikari's parents had sat him down at the kitchen table to talk to him. Usually this meant he was in trouble, but they assured him he was not.
"Mommy and Daddy's boss from work, Mr. Stark, is going to come visit. He is coming to see you Shinji." Said Yui Ikari.
"Come on dear, he isn't a baby, you don't have to talk to him that way. Shinji, Mr. Stark wants to talk to you about coming to work with N.E.R.V." Said his father, Gendo.
"W-with you guys?" Shinji asked.
"No not exactly son, but we would see you and you would get to see what your mom makes." Gendo said then sighed and pulled off his glasses. "Son, we want to talk to you about this, because it would mean you might have to go away on long trips. And you've always been…"
"Attached, that's all." Yui interjected before her husband called their son clingy or a momma's boy. "Do you think you'll be alright with that?"
"Y-yeah, I think so. I'm not a little kid anymore, I can do it." Shinji said.
Gendo smiled and slapped his son on the shoulder. "I know you'll make us proud, Shinji. Not that I'm not proud of you, I always have been."
"Dear, its okay, just stop talking now…" Yui said. All three turned towards the door of their apartment when the bell rang. Gendo was the one to open the door, and all three Ikari's bowed when a man entered followed by a red haired woman. Both were in business suits. Shinji had met Ms. Potts at a Stark Industries family picnic. He knew N.E.R.V. was all but a subsidiary of Stark, so their relatively small staff and their families were invited to all Stark functions.
Shinji recognized the man from TV and pretty much everywhere else, they even taught about him in school. Tony Stark, the man who, with a third of humanity dead and most of earth's heroes among them, brought earth back from the brink. His technology had saved billions from starvation and as the invincible Iron Man he had single handedly ended wars around the world and stopped even more from ever happening.
Shinji had a poster of the man in his bedroom. It was autographed.
He was wearing a silver business suit with a metallic pink and gold tie and somehow, he pulled it off.
"Yui, Gendo, lovely to see you both aaaaaaand by process of elimination…" Mr. Stark said then crouched down to be at eye level with Shinji. "You must be Shinji Ikari."
"Y-yes Mr. Stark."
"Call me Tony. Tell you what, lets cut the crap. Cause I know I don't have time and if you are half as smart as your parents…" Mr, Stark pushed one finger into Shinji's chest. "You don't either. You know the greatest geniuses throughout history did their best work before their fifteenth birthday? You only got six years, you got to get going. You know what I do, right Shinji? Not the running the multinational company, the other thing."
"You're a h-hero, you're Iron Man."
"That's right, I am a hero. Shinji, I need a very special young man to be a hero and fight a battle even I can't win. Now I won't tell you to do it, but I guarantee if you come with me, it will at least be a whole lotta fun. So whaddya say?"
…
Five years later…
"Alright kiddo, big debut, you ready for this?" Came the digitized voice of his mentor in his ear.
"Yeah, I'm ready, I got this."
"That's what I like to hear. Your mom and dad say hi by the way, they are down here in the box with me."
"Mom and dad are here?! Why didn't you tell me?"
"Would you do anything different?"
"I guess not."
"See you on the ground kiddo."
Shinji ended the call with a twitch of his eye. The headset integrated bone speakers, throat microphones, an interactive optic array. It was fun on its own as a wearable computer, but it really shined once he put on the plug suit. Both were Shinji's own creation.
Shinji tapped the wrist control and the ultrathin suit cinched to his body. While the original test type had been blue and white, this suit, brand new and rush manufactured to be here tonight was black up to his abs and purple across his chest and arms.
As he opened the door his private workshop, the noise cancelling effect ended and he heard all the sounds of the airframe, the roar of the engines. Even over all that he could hear the final preparation in the main hold.
"Kensuke, is Eva ready to go?" He called out as he entered the hold.
"Don't you worry boss, Little Girl is all set." Kensuke Aida, the only other man on the planet Shinji trusted his creation to, yelled from the top of the scaffolding structure that stretched to all sides of the hold. He was wearing orange coveralls tied at his waist with only a grey tank top on his upper body.
"We don't get another chance at this Ken, is she perfect?"
"All of last year's playmates put together aren't as perfect as this lady."
"That's what I like to hear." Shinji said as stepped into the sole empty spot at the very center of the frame. With another eye movement, he patched into the cockpit radio.
"Toji, everything ready on the ground?"
"Yes, sir. Sound and pyros are a go and Big Girl is all green. We are ten minutes to drop."
"Then lets get it on." Shinji said and moved his feet to the metal frames waiting on the floor. He stretched his arms straight out to the sides then activated the assembly frame. Tony's suits put themselves together, flying to meet him. His mentor had refused to share the tech until Shinji finished his first suit on his own. Shinji didn't even care anymore, short of actually flying the suit, nothing felt cooler than this.
Arms swung out and began to build him from the feet up. As the purple plates closed around his feet, they were sliding into place around his calves. As those hissed shut, his hips and thighs were coming together. The spinal control frame came next and he felt the little buzz as it met his plug suit's nerve interface. His arms were already covered as his chest and shoulders came together and just as the mantle settled in his head was engulfed by metal.
The horn and frill of his helmet settled into place and the two halves of his visor slid together over his face. He had insisted on the unique jutting jaw line after taking a particularly bad hit in a rough landing in practice in his prototype suit. He did not want to go through having his jaw wired shut again. That it looked like a huge set of teeth was cool too.
The main reactor over his chest spun up, and the yellow glow spread across his suit to the numerous secondary systems. The "eyes" of the helmet, which did not line up with his eyes and so were not ports like Tony's suits, glowed yellow and spread across lines coming from the edges.
"REI, system check."
The blue tinted HUD lit up inside the helmet and two red eyes within a blue circle bounced across his vision.
All systems are at 100%, Shinji replied the OS. Shinji had derived the basic program from the JARVIS system. He preferred the feminine voice, but a complete rebuild had left the personality a little static still. JARVIS had had years to develop, but starting from scratch, REI still sounded robotic. Not digital, just not quite human.
"Toji, on my mark."
Shinji got down in a runner's stance with one leg under him, one leg out, and his upper body held off the deck by his fingertips.
"Open rear cargo door. Ken, get strapped in."
"Done boss."
"Ready to go boss."
As the door dropped, Shinji could see the bright lights of Tokyo-3 below through the sparse clouds. Mostly clear, it would be a good show.
"Okay Toji, mark."
Shinji could hear the music start over the clanging of his feet across the deck. He leaped into the void and tucked his arms to his body as he began to fall. With his head tilted up to see ahead, the horn of his helmet was perfectly in line with the lines of the suit.
Inside his helmet, blue icons highlighted the fireworks rising from the ground to meet him. He brought the thrusters across his suit to full power and danced among the beautiful explosions as he accelerated towards the ground. With the faintest twitch of his wrist he put himself on course for the Oculus.
Growing from the excavation camps around the originally discovered entrance to the geofront, the ring of buildings formed the center of the Tokyo-3 skyline. Through the kilometer wide hole in the ground was NERV, the targets of what was to come. The enemy he had been raised, NO, born to fight. As he flew directly over the opening and banked upside down to twist straight down, he noticed just how much the light from below and above made it look like an arc reactor. A nice fat target that said "come and get it, we are ready."
His suit's thrusters flared as he set in his final course and accelerated. He pierced through the strange air currents of the Oculus and into the stillness of the geofront. The lights were down to match the world above and false stars twinkled across the dome of its ceiling.
Shinji found his target just as REI highlighted the small platform for him. He tucked his arms and legs to reorient and with a great blast of his thrusters that blew across the crowd like a storm, he slammed into a perfect three-point landing. With the rear of the stage behind him and the lake of the geofront behind that.
REI helpfully informed that in fact it was not perfect, and he was two inches from the rehearsed position. He corrected with a small side step as he stood up and raised his fists to the sky. A small power spike caused the golden lights across his armored body to flash and the crowd roared. The huge screen behind him came to life and alternated between the UN, Japanese, the black and red flag of NERV, and a STARK industries banner.
Silently, a testament to the skill of the engineers operating the lifts, the head and shoulders of the identical giant rose from the water behind him. The crowd gasped and aww'd.
Yeah it was shamelessly taken from Tony's entrance at the Stark Expo, but Shinji thought the dancing girls would have been a bit much for the Japanese audience. Yellow arms rose from the platform and carefully disassembled the suit that had been assembled around him only a minute before. He stood in the barest concealment of the plug suit for only a moment before garments were hoisted and, in a maneuver he had practiced for months, he managed to step and move at just the right time to gracefully step into a hakama and haori, purple and black of course. His headset folded down to rest against the collar of his plug suit.
He ran one gloved hand through his hair and smiled for the crowd as his mentor stepped onstage with him.
"Shinji Ikari ladies and gentleman! Earth's newest, mightiest hero!" Tony Stark, dressed in a tuxedo, said and the screen changed to the Avenger's A symbol on a flapping banner momentarily. Not that there was much of the team left, but Tony insisted it remain as a symbol, especially for what was to come. The crowd went nuts for it.
It was another ten minutes of waving and shaking hands before he got up to the private box where his parents were. Mom looked gorgeous in a blue and white kimono and as she loved to point out, not nearly old enough to have a fourteen year old. Dad was all smiles and shook Shinji's hand and slapped him on the back when he told him how proud he was. A touch of grey had entered his beard, but he had always looked old next to mom. After saying hello to the Stark board members present and a few NERV big wigs he didn't see on a daily basis, Shinji found the person he really wanted to see.
She was wearing a scarlet dress that went all the way to her ankles with a slit that came just far enough above her knee to draw the eye, but still low enough to not raise brows on a fourteen year old. She had worn her golden red hair down and her bangs swept across the thin straps of the dress on her shoulders. In her strappy red heels, she was just even with Shinji. A thin red bangle on her left wrist was the only jewelry she wore. She held a small golden colored clutch in her fingers.
"Well good evening, Miss Langely."
"And good evening to you, Mr. Ikari." She replied with that million watt smile and held her hand out for him. He gingerly gripped her fingers and raised it to his lips to kiss it.
"So Asuka, what do you think of Eva?"
"I think its okay."
"Okay?"
"Well I know you are saving the really amazing stuff for when you finish my mark two." She said and poked him in the shoulder. It had been an ongoing thing between them. When they first met a year ago he had asked her out and she had turned him down. It took a month of cajoling before he had said he would do anything for her if she would let him have just one date. She had made him promise to construct her personal hardsuit, as the pilot armors were called, with his own hands as a masterpiece.
They had had a lot of dates since, but he was still working on the suit. The exterior plating had actually been the easy part, it was the interior frame and the machine muscles that took a long time. Not to mention that she had demanded an even more overcharged thruster system than his mark 1. Mark 2 stood unfinished next to the yellow painted prototype mark 0.
"When are you going to finish that by the way, Shinji?"
He grinned sheepishly and scratched the back of his head. "I'm workin' on it."
Their eyes met and they smiled at each other.
"I'm glad you're back to stay, Asuka." He said. She had been in Germany for a month for the final calibrations of Unit Two and she had just arrived together the day before. Her evangelion would be another week at sea. Shinji had not had time to see her since she arrived.
"Yeah, nothing like an interplanetary war to bring a girl back, eh?"
Shinji stepped closer and lifted her hands in his. The light of the Oculus lit the lake like a full moon beside them. Asuka took a half step closer and now their hands were out to their sides and their torso's pressed together. She closed her eyes and leaned in…
HEY LISTEN! buzzed Shinji's headset as it unfolded and wrapped itself around his head. He groaned and leaned back from Asuka.
"What is it REI?"
"A possible blue pattern has been detected approximately 50.537 Kilometers off the East coast of Japan. Confirmation in progress… please wait… confirmation complete, blue pattern is confirmed as an angel, I repeat, blue pattern confirmed."
"Oh shit…" Shinji looked up at Asuka and remembered that what he heard had only been in his ear. "The the… the angel is coming, I gotta… you know…"
"You gotta go, yeah…" She said and they stood their frozen looking into eachothers eyes for a moment before she grabbed him by the shoulders and kissed him. "Go!"
Shinji shook off the delerium and dashed away, stripping off the kimono on the run.
Asuka's bracelet rung twice and four green dots arranged in a square appeared in hologram when she looked down at it.
"Achtung! Engel Entdeckt! Engel Entdeckt!"
"Little behind the 8 ball there Zwei. Begin recording all major news feeds as well as Stark and NERV channels, I want to go over this later. Devote majority of processes to learning mode observation of Unit one and the Mark 1's telemetries."
"Jawohl!"
Shinji was at a dead run, doing his best to dodge around the evening-ware clad crowd but knocking over more than a few on the way.
"Sorry, Angel attacking!... REI, start-up status?"
"Main reactor online, all autonomous systems active. Full motion controls and thrust controls require plug suit integration."
Damn, going to have to bypass that in 1.1 he thought as he kicked off a table to get around some apparently deaf old fat woman.
"Bridge, Captain Katsuragi, can you hear me?"
"Loud and clear Shinji." Came the slightly distorted voice over the radio.
"What is the status of unit one?" Shinji said as he leapt to the stage where his suit was on display. He tapped a button on his wrist and the suit made a beep beep as its lights blinked before panels began to move for him to step in.
"We are getting ready to withdraw it from the lake, but it will take a while to get it resituated on the main railway for removal to launch site. Just finished the arc reactor install last week, so batteries won't be an issue anymore."
Thank god thought Shinji. Tony had been furious with the initial design calling for batteries, what a stupid idea.
Shinji climbed into his armor and the panels began to rearrange around him. Without an assembly rig this took a little longer, but not as long as waiting for the rig to take the whole suit apart before it put it back on him.
"Roger that cap, I am going to go see our new friend, see what we are dealing with until we can get recon onsite and Unit One ready to go. Lets take this thing out in the water if we can."
To fight in Tokyo-3 was a last resort. Too many battles in metro areas to count had shown the foolishness of it. If they could evacuate fine, they could rebuild, but Tony was adamant: Stark money can't buy lives lost.
As the visor slid shut, REI's two red dots icon came up again.
"All systems go, combat systems released, all limiters and safeties removed. The mark one is now fully active. Connection established to main MAGI cluster…"
Far below, in the bowels of the geofront, the mighty processors of the MAGI were waking from the half dream in which they could manage the day to days of the city. Entire levels of the giant facility came to life as memory was accessed and coolant pumps started up.
"Connection established. Initiating connection to Evangelion Unit One… handshakes complete. Auxillary power source connection active, arc reactor cluster as sleep idle."
In an explosion of noise and light, Shinji launched into the false sky and shot through the Oculus. He waited until he was above ground before bringing the thrusters to power and the boom and white shockwave shook the windows of the city once he turned to the East. They had learned from Tony's mistake: Breaking the sound barrier inside the geofront, or worse while transiting the Oculus, was a bad idea.
"Get big girl woken up before they are ready to launch."
"Yes Shinji."
Moving amongst the labyrinthine transport railway, Unit One's mind and nervous system began to wake. Rather than the thin, flexible armor the design had originally called for, Tony Stark had taken a different approach. The evangelion was, at its most basic, a biological life form not unlike a human. So Tony had armored it like a human.
The Arc reactor cluster that replaced the unpredictable core within its chest was made up of six individual industrial units. Each could power a city the size of New York on its own. Together they could not only move the beast, it could fly with only slightly less agility than its pilot's suit. The repulsors on its hands could each swallow the bow of a battleship.
They hadn't gotten around to testing the uni-beam output fired directly from the reactor cluster. The predictions measured in gigatons and were truly frightening.
Overall it was nearly twice as heavy as the original design and its bulk showed it. It was a point of humor among the engineers that it had come out looking not unlike a competing, but ultimately rejected concept, the Jaeger.
"Shinji, this is Tony, you copy?"
"Yes sir."
"Ops tells me by the time you intercept this thing, big girl is still going to be 10 minutes from getting off the ground. Back-up is on the way till she arrived."
"Awesome, whose coming?"
Shinji hastily corrected as a massive bow wave knocked him momentarily off course. The streak of Red and gold blew past him on a column of blue light.
"Who else? Try and keep up."
Shinji opened up the throttle and chased after his mentor.
Hell yeah, we are the human race. We may not have claws and fangs, we may not be a thousand feet tall, and most of us can't use magic. But we have the single scariest weapon in the universe and we are not afraid to use it. We are a race of maniacs in the galaxy. We are old enough to know what is right and young enough not to choose it. There are a hundred thousand races out there that had reached their zenith thousands of years ago and stayed there. In only 30 millennia, man had gone from little more than an animal to playing god. To us it seems slow, to the galaxy at large we are frightening. Just who the hell do you think we are?
As Shinji Ikari flew beside his mentor, he pondered this and more. As they banked to dive towards the angel, he thought he had an answer.
"We are humanity! This is our planet! We have earned it in blood and fire from those who would kill and enslave us!" He said as he saw the enormous green beast rise from the water on spindly legs.
He came to a hover beside his mentor in front of the things birdlike face.
"Alright, so here is the deal, oh visitor from another world…" Said Tony Stark with his arms crossed across his chest. "What you got going on here? You aren't the first one to try and wipe us out. I've taken down things bigger and uglier than you on a off day. You might notice too that we are still here, so your chances aren't good. So tell you what, you want to turn around and leave, no harm no foul. Deal?"
The face turned one way, then the other, then the angel Sachiel raised its gangly arms from the water and swung them towards the insects in its path.
Blue light lanced out from the insects and the beast staggered back, its hands on fire with pain.
"No deal then."
The insects stung, it hurt. Sachiel dried to swat them but they moved like lightening. When it dove back under the water to escape them, they followed. When it shot holy fire at them, they were never where they were when it aimed. It caught one, the one colored like fire, between its huge claws once. The pain had been unbearable.
It took a step back. Insects were making the messenger of the Lord retreat. At this rate it would not find the other, the one the Lord sought. It could now allow these insects to survive and hinder its brothers. Sachiel roared to the sky and its core began to glow. Its gangly limbs swelled with muscle as the water around it began to boil. The bony plates of its shoulders separated and gills the size of trains began to breath the thin air of earth.
After it swung and nearly caught the dark colored one, the insects retreated out of reach. Their stings met the fiery light of Sachiel's soul.
"REI, status on Big Girl?"
"Evangelion Unit One will be ready to launch in 30 seconds. Control systems to facilitate rendezvous are already synced with my systems. I have already brought the unit to combat state."
"Good. Hey Tony, my date is ready to make an appearance, I need to go pick her up!"
Iron Man dodged a surging purple beam that arced pink lightening into the ruins of Tokyo below.
"Nothing for me to do here, I'm getting clear."
With that both suits streaked away from the angel, and the beast resumed its terrible advance wreathed in steam as it boiled the water around it.
"Evangelion Unit One has launched from electric railway… Thrusters have ignited… all systems at 100%... Laying in boarding course."
A series of waypoints appeared on Shinji's hud and spinning blue triangles. He would make a long curve to get on the same heading as the eva before it passed him. If done correctly, he would be at the perfect point to board.
As he banked into his turn, he could see the building size mecha closing in on a column of blue light. Coming out of his turn he flared the throttle and brought himself around on the same heading and same speed, right above the purple giant's back. Lasers flashed and his suit lined itself up as a hatch between the two main ventral thrusters opened. Shinji felt the heat and buffeting from their wash as he descended before he was engulfed by the spinal mounted cockpit.
Lights came on with system readouts before transitioning to view screens of the outside world. Great arms came around Shinji's armored body and clamped onto his arms and legs. His suits power was rerouted into the body of the machine. This was both to help with the overall power load and to ensure no weapons were accidentally discharged inside the cockpit.
"Alright, Evangelion Unit One, Mark One, release controls, combat status, go!"
Thrusters cut out and the eva turned itself in the to hit the angel with bent knees and arms spread. Its knees caught the angel in the abdomen, sending its massive body to the ocean floor while its arms were pinned down by the eva's.
Repulsor shots from each palm shredded the arms at the wrists. The great fists rose and came down on the bird like face, one after the other, again and again. Blood and bone splinter drifted in the water. As the angel's arms regenerated and rose to grab its attacker, Shinji slammed the eva's palms down into the monster's shoulders and fired again.
Stepping off the beast, the evangelion hoisted the ruined body up by the bony plates arcing like claws out of its chest and into the air.
"Alright, time to finally give this thing a test fire. Release reactor safeties, prepare to fire uni-beam."
"Warning: This system has not been properly tested. Release of safeties is unadvised."
"Override, release safeties."
"Safeties released."
As its shoulder knitted themselves back together, the angel began to struggle in Unit One's grip tearing at the arms that held it.
"Fire!"
There was a flash and the fire of the gods burst forth from Unit One's breastplate. The angel offered resistance for a fraction of a second before the beam burst through. The cameras on the Stark orbital station were blinded. The personnel all the way on the Steve Roger's Memorial Moonbase saw the beam shooting out from planet Earth into the black and just as quickly cut out.
Unit one dropped the cinder like pieces of angels left, and they turned to ash before they even hit the water. Inside, Shinji had his arms out othe control systems and typing furiously on haptic holographic displays.
"Come on come on, don't do this to me baby, ssssh, come on you know I love you…"
The cascade of warnings and system failure notifications spoke of his machine's disbelief. As Unit One stood in thigh high waters of the pacific, the glow of its reactors dimmed and the lights went out.
"Well fuck." Shinji said as the last screen shut down and left him in the cockpit lit only by his suit's lights.
"Message from Mr. Stark for you, Shinji. Marked priority open."
He sighed. "Go ahead and open it REI."
A video loaded on his HUD. Along with annoying MIDI tune, it showed a super deformed red and yellow suited Tony Stark dancing around with his fingers pointing up towards a neon sign reading I TOLD YOU SO. Shinji tried closing it but it just reopened and he was joined by a red haired woman Shinji supposed was Ms. Potts and a blue haired girl with red eyes he recognized as an avatar he had once made for REI.
"REI, did you put yourself in this?"
"Perhaps."
"Why?"
"Because I did warn you more durable capacitors were needed if you planned to route the uni-beam projector through the main power system. So I did in fact tell you so."
Great, she sounded natural, but now she was snarky. Well, it was progress.
To clarify if my descriptions sucked, Shinji's suit looks pretty much like Unit One correctly proportioned and Unit One literally looks like someone built an iron man suit over the canon evangelion, helmet and all.