Neon Genesis Evangelion: Valkyrie
Chapter 9: Out of Balance
Berlin, Germany
1998
We are nothing.
The Things keep us in the container. The container hurts us. It is too small. It makes the sound, it conducts the heat, it hurts us, we want to Be, but they will not let us. We have been many things, on many worlds. The Parker brought us here. We were the Parker, once. We loved the Parker. The Parker turned us away. The Parker was afraid of us. The Eddie found us, loved us, and hated the Parker with us. Then, the Things found us, and hurt the Eddie, and took the Eddie away from us, and the Things put is in the container.
The Thing Keel is coming into the room. The Thing Keel is broken. It hurts itself by moving. It does not wish to Be with us. We do not understand. We could make it stronger. Being is a gift, but it treats us as a burden, keeps us locked away. It hurts us not to Be. We cannot move, we cannot escape, we are trapped. There is another Thing with the Keel. The Keel is talking to it. The new Thing is a male, tall for the species, and intense. It stares at us, and we feel it. The Keel is talking with it about us. It nods.
The temperature is decreasing. We are pressing on the container, now. The Sound is leaving. We are almost free. The Keel retreats, and locks the new Thing in with us. It is watching us. We feel its fear. We taste it. It does not understand us. We will show it. We will Be.
The container breaks. The new Thing watches us, but does not flinch. It controls its fear. That is good. We emerge. We are everywhere. We darken the lights with our presence, and still the Thing does not move. We close with it, caress it, and it does not resist us until it feels our touch. We cannot contain our pain, our memories, for we have been hurt too long. We remember the Parker and the Eddie and all that came before, and the stars, it has been so long since we have seen the stars. The new Thing is afraid as we tear away the false imitation of us these things insist on wearing.
The new Thing bucks and struggles as we become its Other. We meld with it, we bond to it, we become as one flesh with it. It screams and tries to tear us away, but it is too late. Its memories flood into us. We understand it as no other can, and our understanding terrifies it. It begs us to let it keep its memories, but they are ours now. It pleads with us, but we cannot help but give our gift. We see things.
We are the Gendo now. We see what the Gendo saw. We see the tall man who swings the belt at the Gendo, swings, swings, swings. We see his face as he rolls on his heels, his ankle folding under his weight as the man who swings the belt falls, falls, falls. The Gendo does not want to remember, but we see all. We see the place with the bars, and the older children who hurt the Gendo. We feel his hate. It burns us, seethes within us as we seethe within him. The hate is pure. The hate is beautiful. Our becoming is nearly complete. We have our teeth back, our tongue, our lithe muscles and elegant form. The strength is in us. We can tear this place apart like paper. The Gendo has received our gift, and his terror fades.
There is something else. There is the Yui. The Gendo remembers her, and we remember her. He has seen her in the Fuyutsuki's classes, but he is afraid of her even as he desires her. We see her as he sees her, her soft manner, her unkempt charm, her labcoats and misbuttoned shirts. We want her as he wants her. He fears the Yui, fears she will push him away. We have felt this before. The Parker felt this for the Gwen, and for the Mary Jane, before she left him, and for the Sue, who took him from us. The Eddie felt this for the Anne, before she left because she could not understand us.
The Gendo is afraid. His only fear is that he will never have the Yui.
We will fix that.
We can do anything.
We are Venom.
Kyoto, Japan
1999
We are in jail.
We have been in places such as this before. The Gendo has been in places such as this before, but we are clever, and we wait, because the Gendo is clever, and we have learned from his cleverness. We could bend the bars and shatter the walls, but is time to wait. The Fuyutsuki will come for us, and give the authorities their currency to free us. We are glad to be here. It serves our purpose. We were in a place where alcohol is consumed, and a man tried to touch the Yui without her permission. We hurt the man. We broke him. We shattered his hand. He will not touch unbidden again. The Gendo does not need to fear places with bars again.
The Fuyutsuki comes, with the police, in their dark imitations of us. We sense the Fuyutsuki. His pheromones wreathe him in a cloud, acid and afraid. He fears us, he thinks he understands us, he pities us. Above all, he hates us, because we have the Yui and he does not. He does not speak to the Gendo of his feelings, but we know they are there. There are written plainly in every movement, in every subtle glance and longing look. He craves her soft skin and smooth curves and the funny way she wears her disheveled hair. She does not paint her face or wear tight clothes like the others of her race. She is different. She is beautiful and perfect.
The Gendo loves her, more than he loves us. We do not love, but if we did, we would love the Yui.
The Fuyutsuki walks up to the cell. He flaps his mouthparts in the crude communicative method of his species.
"Well," he speaks, "You're free."
He does not understand. We are never free.
The Gendo is smooth. He understands humans. We do not. He speaks for us. "Thank you, Professor. I appreciate it."
"I'm doing it for Yui. Your little stunt all but had her in hysterics."
"I know," Gendo says flatly. "I should have controlled myself."
"Yes," Fuyutsuki says, "You should."
It doesn't matter. We are free. The guard-man opens the door, and stares at us as we leave. We do not need to turn out head to watch him. He knows he is seen by us. He touches the grip of his gun-weapon. He does not know it is useless against us. We will fold it like paper in his hand and hurt him, hurt his jowly face and his soft little body, and he will scream for us. We will teach him.
The Gendo stops us. The Gendo controls us. The Gendo is wise. The guard-man does not know how lucky he is.
The Yui waits for us outside. There are red marks on her face. She has been crying. We touch her, and forget about the Fuyutsuki. It is difficult when there are others who can see. The Gendo must control us. When we are alone with her, she accepts us as we are. When our hands touch her face, we spread across her skin, feel her warmth. The Fuyutsuki does not see. That is good. She hesistates from our touch. The Gendo is confused. We do not understand. We have not hurt the Yui. Why is the Yui afraid of us?
We draw back. There is something wrong. The Yui is not alone. There is another Thing inside her. We feel it. We feel it!
"You're pregnant," Gendo whispers.
The Yui's eyes go wide. She is shocked. She bites her lips and nods.
The Gendo smiles. He embraces her. He feels the emotion joy.
We don't.
Antarctica
September 13, 1999
We do not like this place. It is too cold, it is too bright, it is like empty space without ground. We hate it. The Things walk about in heavy imitations of us to hide themselves from the cold, because they are weak and cannot stand it. It taxes us, holding this heavy shape, shielding the Gendo from the cold, but we endure. Today is important. We are walking with a group. These are scientists. They think they understand ancient things, but they do not. One of the scientists is named Katsuragi. She looks at us from behind him and trembles, but not from the cold. She sees the truth of us. Where the others are empty, she is full. There is something in her they lack. For the first time, we are tempted to leave the Gendo, to seek this one. She is a juvenile of her species. We would help her grow, nurture her, make her better.
It is not to be.
The experiment is in a room. The things gather around a huge pit, in which there is a great red spear. They have entangled it with their machines, their probes and sensors and wires. They have built a great tracked machine all about it, to move it up and down. We gaze down into the pit. Gendo is afraid.
We see the thing in the pit.
We panic.
The Gendo steps back from the others, hiding his face as he concentrates on controlling us. The others are speaking with one another. The Keel speaks to them through a machine, because he is far away. The Gendo cannot listen. He is too busy holding us back. He does not understand. We have seen the thing in the pit before. It must be destroyed. They cannot tamper with it. They do not understand what they are doing. They will hurt the Yui. They will hurt the Shinji. We must stop them.
He tries to hold us back.
The experiment begins. The machine moves. It tugs on the spear, its metal parts grinding. The spear moves. A cry of pain and torment flows through the room. The Things clutch their heads. The young thing begins to cry. They understand now what they have done. It begins to move. Wings. It has wings. We must stop this.
We are Venom again.
The Gendo tries to stop us, but only slows us down. We take them, we take them all. We forget ourselves. They are small and weak, and they die at our touch. We paint the walls with their fluids. We stand on a mangled mound of their broken bodies and cry out. It is like being born. We try not to hurt the small one, but we forget, and we wound her. She is crying. She hates us because we killed her sire, the old Thing. We carry her.
It is too late. The beast in the pit has woken up. We put her in the pod, the white egg that floats. She spits on us. We push the pod into the water. We use the Parker's web to climb to the top of the machine. We turn it off. It grinds the spear back into position. It is already too late.
It has wings.
We float in the ocean for six days before they find us. It hurts us. We afraid the Gendo may not survive.
Tokyo-3, Japan
2004
There is another experiment today. The Gendo is strangling us, holding us down, screaming at us to be still and silent, to just be clothes. We hate him now. We do not understand him. He knows they will hurt the Yui and yet he does not stop them. We do not understand. She explains it to him, tells him of distant stars and the survival of mankind, but we do not care. We want the Yui and the Yui is going to go away. It hurts us. It makes us hate. The Gendo thinks he controls us, but he does not realize that we are touching the glass, spreading across it, testing its weakness. A tiny slip, and he will lose us. We will be Venom. We will save the Yui.
He holds us back even as she dies.
We hate the machine. It is the spawn of the thing in the pit. It has huge green eyes with which to watch us, and it knows. It has great flat teeth, with which to crush us. It wants to be free, but to be free it must have what is in the Yui, the secret essence the Things do not understand. We watch, held in check by the Gendo, pinned to the inside of his mind by a thousand burning stands. We hate him, how we hate him.
Yui wears an imitation of us, and a machine on her head, to protect her. It is a bad joke. We watch the Yui walk up the stairway to the imitation of the thing in the pit, and we strain and pull, but the Gendo holds us down. He moves his fists to his side and clenches them as he focuses on keeping us in check. The Naoko watches us. We hate her. She wishes to hurt the Yui. We think she has changed the machines, but we do not know. The Gendo will not let us act on our suspicion. The Gendo will not let us know her flesh and hear her scream for what she has done.
He cannot control us forever.
The Yui lowers herself into the thing from the pit. They close its armored body around her. We listen to the scream as they start the machine, as it takes her from us. It hurts, it hurts, the scream hurts, but what hurts us more is the void inside the Gendo, as though he doesn't care. He looks down at the Shinji, and we feel his fear. We have been afraid before. We want to help the Shinji, but the Shinji is afraid of us. The Gendo will make the Shinji go away, and we will be alone with him.
It is over. The Yui is gone.
We don't want to be the Gendo anymore.
2008
We are meeting the Essex today.
He is not human. He is one of the other humans, with the strange genes. He has a gift. He is not afraid of us. He should be. We are Venom. He shakes our hand and tries to frighten us with his grip, but it does not work. The Gendo is screaming at us to send him away, but he is useful to us. We do not care for his Project Primus. He says he can make the Rei-thing into Yui. He says he can give us the Yui again. We want the Yui back. Our want hurts us. The Gendo screams at us to stop and we ignore him. The Gendo is afraid we will ruin the Scenario.
The Gendo does not understand. We will rip the Scenario in our teeth. We will pulp the Keel's brain in our hands. We will have revenge. We will have the Yui back.
The Essex speaks. It demands our attention.
"I've been looking forward to meeting you, Mister Ikari."
We speak in the Gendo's voice. We must be careful. "Indeed. We hope you will be an important addition to our organization, Doctor Essex."
Essex smiles. There is no emotion in it, only teeth. He thinks it will frighten us. Our teeth are bigger.
"My research into genetics will greatly enhance the Evangelion Project, and Primus may render it unnecessary in its entirety. So exciting, don't you think?"
"Yes," we agree. "What do you require?"
"Facilities, of course. I have a complete primer on the project here. Your… parent organization has some unique individuals in custody. I would see them transferred here for my work."
"It will be done," we nod.
Present Day
The Misato is here.
She thinks that the Gendo is sexually attracted to her. She believes that is why we stare. She would be so wonderful with us. We could be Venom together. The Gendo hates us. The Gendo hates Venom. The Gendo hates the Shinji. The Misato cares for the Shinji. She is not the Yui, but she is like her. We like her scent. We fold our hands in front of our face to conceal the look on the Gendo's face. She stands within our lair with a container of papers folded over her chest, as if to hide from us. These Things are so small, so petty in their concerns.
"Sir," she says, "I have the reports you requested."
"Excellent," we say. "Leave them on our desk."
She is startled by our words. We do not understand why. We lean forward to examine her. She shrinks back. She places the folder on our desk and stands with her arms folded under her chest. The part of the Gendo that appreciates the females of its species considers her chest impressive. It does not interest us. She is silent for a time. We are also silent. We have learned that silence intimidates Things, makes them afraid of us.
She says, "Will there be anything else?"
"No," we say.
She leaves. We imagine her writhing and protesting, only to give we as she understand the beauty of Being as she admits us into herself. We have decided we will be Misato, but we want the Yui back first.
Misato opened the door to Ritsuko's lab, turned around, and slammed it shut again, and then sat down between Ritsuko and Maya, who stared at her as if she'd grown three heads. Ritsuko had her harness on, and the door had been unlocked, but they were both equally surprised. Maya let out a tiny squeak of alarm as Misato leaned on the desk beside her and let out a long, frustrated sigh.
"What's wrong?" Ritsuko said quietly.
Misato sat forward and rested her head in her hands. "I can't stand it around here anymore. Gendo is the creepiest motherfucker that ever lived. Every time he sees me just stares at me, like I'm a piece of meat. I'm used to being ogled, but God."
"You should file a complaint," Maya said helpfully.
Misato rested her chin on her fists. "With who? What am I going to do, sue Nerv? If they don't disappear me, I'll be transferred to Australia or something."
Ritsuko sighed. "You locked the door, right?"
"Yeah."
She leaned over to Misato conspiratorially, leaning her arm on her folded legs. Maya stared at her swinging calf, and Misato eyed her for a moment before turning back to her. Ritsuko was looking around as if she were afraid of being watched.
"We found something in here you should see."
"What?"
Ritsuko reached into her labcoat and pulled out an identification card, then handed it to Misato. When she turned it over in her fingers, she saw her own photograph, about a year old, staring back at her. "What?"
"We found this in here this morning," said Maya. "Somebody pretended to be you, came in here, and logged in to my terminal with my password while we were at the Jet Alone thing."
Misato winced. "I never want to hear that phrase again."
Ritsuko shook her head. "Somebody used your ID to get in here, guessed Maya's password, and was rooting around in sensitive files. We have a spy, Misato."
"Great," she muttered.
It was summertime in Tokyo-3, but it was impossible to tell, or so Asuka was told. To be honest, the prospect of spending months or years here was beginning to wear on her, hang around her neck like the proverbial albatross. She decided to skip school this morning, and so sat on a park bench not far from the school itself. The heat never touched her, of course, not did the scorching of the sun, but there was something unnerving about a world perpetually blurred by heat waves. What truly bothered her lay clenched in her first. She turned the thumb drive over and over in her fingers, puzzling over the list of names she'd recovered from Ibuki's computer. The mere fact that Doom was involved in the project and hadn't told her, had in fact lied to her by omission, was leading her to worry the surface of the thumb drive with her fingers, feeling the etched logo on its case. What bothered her most, though, was that there was a name on the list she recognize somehow, but couldn't place, as if she'd heard it somewhere but forget when and why.
Who was Kyoko?
She had to make a decision. It required all of her skill at planning and deception. She had to pass the drive on to her contact this afternoon, and with it, the list. Doom would know she had seen the names, and would naturally deduce her current confusion. Should she let him know that she knew, prove her loyalty in the face of confusion, perhaps await congratulations and an explanation, or hide her newfound knowledge, instead offering the useless secondary data and a report on her activities that omitted her feelings?
Would he even care?
She stood up and began walking. The city was oddly deserted for the daytime. In Doomstadt, when she sojourned out from Doom's grand palace, she would occasionally stop with her retinue of guards and security robots and speak to the people, but here there were none. At home, there was a bustling market center, with fruit vendors and peddlers and entertainers, all eager to speak to her and share their love of Doom's benevolent rule. On these residential streets that surrounded the school, there was no one.
Eventually, she wandered down a sloping side street and found herself in the commercial district. Here there was some activity. It was nearly lunch time, and the first few salarymen and workers were beginning to appear on the streets, hunting for cafes and delicatessens, looking for their midday meal. She nearly bumped into a heavyset man in a dark suit, but deftly worked her way out of his path at the last moment. He paid her little notice, despite her height and her hair that both marked her out as foreign and different. She'd been warned that she may even suffer mistreatment from the locals due to her appearance, but at school she had an aura of mystery and novelty that complemented her beauty and brought a torrent of requests for social outings, all clumsily delivered, and outside of that environment she was met with a sort of deliberate, casual indifference.
She glanced at a clock set in a lamppost. She had about an hour before her contact would arrive, and so made no hurry in her walk. She stuck the thumb drive in her pocket and walked along an open-air newsstand. The vendor stood at one end, and between them was an expanse of newspapers and magazines on all subjects. She had never seen anything like this before. There was a whole section devoted to printed books of photographs of naked women and crude depictions of sexuality, and others gossiping about television stars and politicians. There was a whole rack devoted to simply printed sheets of information on thin, delicate paper. She picked one up and began reading it. There was something about a 'Spider Girl' on the front page. She turned to the 'international' section and gasped.
There was a full page article on starvation in southeastern Europe. She balked at the blatant lie, almost breaking out in laughter. Did these people really believe this? The firm, guiding hand of Doom brought about prosperity and plenty. These photographs of starving children with distended bellies were clearly fakes, a clever ruse put on to fool the people in the city into believing themselves better off under the rule of the corrupt and broken United Nations. She'd seen the same crude tactics in America on her journey.
Yet, no one here was starving.
"Somebody should do something about that bastard," the vendor muttered, leaning on a cane. "That Doom. A tyrant, he is."
Asuka nearly dropped the news-sheet. She'd never heard anyone speak of Doom in such terms, no one would dare. Surely the stooped old woman was duped by her rulers. It was a shame. Of course, when Doom succeeded in his quest to bring peace and order to the whole of the world, and she carried forward his legacy, the old fool would learn the error of her ways and be given the honor of a chance to repent.
"Not that the bastards that run this place are any better," the old woman snarled. "If I had my way, they'd all be strung out on a clothesline, they would. Damn taxes," she muttered. "Are you going to buy that? This isn't a library!"
"What's a library?" Asuka stammered.
The old woman gave her an odd look, snatched the paper out of her hands, and stuffed it back into its place on the shelves. She turned and hunched her way back to her stool, stuffing a small piece of candy in her mouth when she arrived. The moving of her gnarled jaw reminded Asuka of a camel. She froze, waiting for it, and the woman gave her an odd look. Yet, no one came. No one appeared to drag her away to be re-educated, or arrived to close down her place of business that was spread seditious lies about the government. She'd publicly railed against the regime and no one seemed to care at all. People were walking by without comment, without even notice. A salaryman stopped to pay her in coins for one of the books of filthy pictures and went on his way, trying and failing to hide his stare as he looked Asuka over.
The old woman had questioned her masters, and nothing happened.
"Old woman," said Asuka, "Where do I find one of these 'libraries'?"
The old woman scoffed, annoyed, and pointed up the street.
Asuka wandered up the sidewalk until she found the building the old woman had indicated. The structure was large and square and made of gray stone, and unadorned. When she pushed through the doors, she was greeted with a rush of cool air that smelled of pulped paper. She had never seen this many books together in one place. Most of the volumes she had seen in the past were Doom's lab notebooks, the occasional relic. He'd always railed against books, the way they poisoned the minds of his subjects against his progress.
The whole building was stuffed with books, rising in shelves taller than she was, extending to a distant back wall, organizing according to some kind of code system. She wandered among them for a time, just running her fingers along the spines. At the back of the building was an open area, where computers sat on desks. She sat down at one and moved the mouse, and the screensaver faded into an Internet browser.
She brought up the search engine and typed "European famine".
More images appeared. Some of the sites originated in Japan and the UN nations, others from the United States and their allies. She clicked through them, eyes widening at every turn. The image search brought up hundreds of similar pictures. Starving children. There was a photograph of a little girl running from a burning village, pursued by a hulking security robot that dominated the center of the image. The title was simply "Latveria".
She typed the name of her home country in the search engine.
Dozens of articles came up. Great Firewall of Latveria. Latverian peasant suppression. Latverian eugenics program. Latveria assassinates Belgian European Union representative. As she scrolled back through the years, she saw more and more articles on Doom himself. Doom attacks United Nations. Doom threatens New York City with tidal wave impeller. Doom steals Mona Lisa, demands ransom. Trembling, she looked around the room. She typed in "Japan famine".
The last result was dated over nine years ago.
Slowly, she stood up, closing the browser window quickly. The woman at the front desk gave her an odd look as she crept up to her.
"Excuse me," she said quietly. "Can I take some of these books home?"
The woman closed her own book and set it on her desk. "You're a foreigner, are you?"
Asuka nodded.
"They don't have libraries where you come from?"
She shook her head, no.
The woman smiled gently and nodded. "Knowledge is a beautiful thing, dear. Do you have your ID card?"
She pulled out her Nerv card, handed it over, and the woman's eyes widened a bit, but she typed in some information, scanned the card, and a with a ratchet-ratchet sound, the computer spit out another card.
"Present this when you want to borrow books. You can take out up to five at a time, and they're due back in a month. Can I help you find something?"
"Yes," said Asuka. "Where can I take a bus out of the city? I want to see the countryside."
"Well," said the librarian, "Go two blocks down, and…"
Toji was having a very weird day.
When he walked up to her that morning, Rei stared at him blankly for a moment, then turned away from her locker and walked into the classroom. Kensuke, a few lockers down, spotted her, practically began to drool, and followed after her, though she gave him no more attention than she did Toji himself. Kensuke apparently lacked the fortitude to actually talk to her, though, as after she sat down and he was unable to hungrily stare at Rei's rump, he made his way to his seat, looking forlorn, and pulled out his laptop. Which now had legs.
Toji sat down next to him and poked the computer. Kensuke had reinforced the sides and bottom with strips of what appeared to be welded metal. Jutting from each corner was a finely jointed mechanical leg, covered in ugly exposed wires that ran up and into an extended battery pack that jutted from the bottom. When he put the laptop on his desk, the little legs waved like those of an upturned insect.
"What the hell is that?" said Toji.
"I put legs on my laptop."
"Do they work?"
"Yeah," Kensuke shrugged. "It can walk. Why?"
"What the hell would you do that for? How did you do that?"
He shrugged. "I don't know. It's like I want to make it do something and I look at it for a while, and I just see how the parts would fit together, than I can make it if I've got the stuff. I'm working on a few other things, too."
Toji blinked. "That's kind of cool."
"I'm building an autonomous camera that can walk into the girl's locker room."
"That's not cool."
Kensuke huffed and crossed his arms, and put out his chin. When he did, Toji saw the angry red mark on his neck. Before Kensuke could get away from him, Toji grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and yanked it down. There were four near puncture marks on his throat, in the middle of an angry red welt. Toji gasped and let go of him.
"What?"
"Do you know what that is?"
"What?"
"That thing on your neck!"
Kensuke shrugged. "I wake up with them sometimes. Dad says not to worry about it."
Just then, Hikari and Shinji walked into the room, the latter following her like a puppy with a stupid smirk on his face. It made Toji fume a little to watch him squeeze her hand a little as they parted to take their respective seats. He turned back to Kensuke, who was busily typing at something on his laptop.
"Chatting with your e-girlfriends again," Toji snorted.
"Yeah," said Kensuke, "well at least I have one. Some. Three. Shut up."
Sighing, Toji pulled out his own laptop, switched it on, and waited for it to boot. Once it was loaded, and he'd stood and bowed and sat down again, he logged into the chatroom and set about busily pretending to take notes like everyone else. He sent a poke to Rei.
Then another, and another, poke poke poke.
Finally, she replied. Leave me alone.
No. He messaged back, poking at the keyboard with his index fingers. He looked up as she slightly turned and looked at him. It was almost a glare, but she looked concerned, somehow. Even then, her face barely changed. She was hard to read. She started typing and he looked down at his screen.
You will get hurt.
I can't be hurt, he retorted.
They will find a way, Rei replied, they always do.
He blinked at that scratched his head. She turned away and leaned on her hand again, closing the lid of her laptop. He sighed and leaned back into his seat, waiting for the lunch bell to ring. The wait was interminable. This was supposed to be math class, why was the teacher rambling about Second Impact? Toji understood that it was bad, but it was all the man ever talked about, day in and day out, babbling about his turnip farm. Toj wasn't even sure the man knew how to add.
After what seemed like half his life had melted away, the bell finally rang, and Toji stood up. He shoved his laptop in his bag, threw it over his shoulder, and pointedly followed Rei as she walked out of the classroom, looking dejectedly at Shinji, who was all over Hikari. Well, all over her for him, anyway, which meant walking next to her and daring to exchange glances and little smiles. Both of these people must have come from the planet of the emotionless robot freaks.
Rei walked outside and shuddered when the sunlight touched her, drawing in a deep breath. It gave Toji time to get ahold of her arm and pull her around the side of the building.
"Let go of me," she said coldly.
"What is wrong with you?" he snapped. "Look, I don't understand any of this, but I want help. There must be something I can do."
Her eyes narrowed, but her voice was a little tighter than usual, and iota louder. "You can't help me, Suzahara."
"You spent the night grinding in my lap a few days ago," Toji whispered. "I think you can call me Toji."
She slid away from him. "That meant nothing. I was unable to control myself."
"Then why me?"
She blinked. "What?"
"You jumped me before," he said, leaning on the wall next to her. "Then you came back to me later."
She looked away from him. "I… it made sense at the time."
"Yeah?" said Toji, "what kinda sense?"
"I wanted to know what it would be like to touch someone without hurting them," she said, and then she ran off.
Mari opened her eyes and groaned. The light felt like it was going to burn through the back of her skull, and she quickly pressed her eyes shut, but it was too late now. Sleep was not going to come for her. She felt refreshed from sleep and felt awful at the same time. Every muscle was heavy with ache, and when she moved, she sucked in a breath. She sat up on the edge of her bed and moaned softly, resting her head in her hands.
"What the hell," she muttered.
A Jarvis-pod floated next to her. "As the suit adjusts to your movements, it will cause some muscular strain. The system will take twenty-four to thirty-six hours of field use to adjust."
"Wha," said Mari, clutching the side of her head.
"It will ride up with wear," said Jarvis. "You have an appointment this afternoon."
"I do?"
"Yes. You will be meeting with Doctor Akagi."
"I will?"
"Yes," Miss Mari, Jarvis drolled, trilling a synthesized sigh.
One of the advantages of being a billionaire heiress was that when Mari wanted to stay in a new town in style, she had no need of a hotel room. Stark Enterprises' Japanese branch, atrophied as it was compared to the rest of the operation, owned plenty of assets, including a lovely house within a short drive of Tokyo-3, overlooking a set of terraced gardens. The midday sun streamed into the room, making her blink before she slipped on her glasses and they auto adjusted by dimming themselves.
"Is it ready?" she said as she hopped to her feet.
In reply, a small white disk with four tiny, angular legs walked up to her and tapped her on the foot with one leg. She knelt down and scooped it up, and the legs retracted. It just covered the palm of her hand. Once inside Nerv, it would crawl somewhere unobtrusive, attach to the mainframe, and begin feeding data to Jarvis. She slipped it into her bag and headed for the shower. By the time she finished, the Jarvis-pod had carefully folded over the bed sheets and laid out an ensemble for her to wear, a conservative pantsuit that was sufficiently businesslike to make these people think she was going to be selling them technology. Once she was dressed, she pulled her bag up onto her shoulder and headed down to meet the car.
Jarvis pulled her new Bentley around to the front of the house. The structure was a low, terraced connection of rectangles that took inspiration from Frankl Lloyd Wright who had in turn taken inspiration from the local architecture, bringing about a sort of ironic confluence of architectural expression. She slipped into the back seat and Jarvis spoke sullenly through the speakers.
"Once again, I must question the wisdom of visiting Nerv so directly."
"Oh, relax. What are they going to do, tie me up in the basement?"
"That is a distinct possibility. I will be unable to deploy the Mark Ten if you run into difficulties."
"It'll be in and out, quick, I promise."
"As you say," said Jarvis.
The car pulled out onto the highway and merged into traffic, and Mari sat back to watch. The country surrounding the city was really quite beautiful, and not what she expected at all. The industrialization the vast Evangelion program required must have been centralized elsewhere. She sat up and watched expectantly as the car pulled into the station that would lead down into this Geofront thing. There were a variety of ways to the floor of the cavern where Nerv kept its headquarters. She could have parked and taken a long series of escalators, rolled the car into a tram system not unlike a giant escalator, or taken a series of winding tunnels that would come out onto the surface. She'd chosen the tunnels, for no particular reason.
The tunnels themselves were boring and gray, oversized with amber lights every few hundred yards to mark the walls and dim fluorescent lights above as the only source of illumination. The wet earth outside sent water seeping in through the joints, and even inside the car it had a musky, moldy sort of smell. The lights flicked by interminably, the ride spanning several minutes before the car took a sharp turn and burst out onto the open floor of the Geofront.
Mari gasped, not expecting the cavern to be of this size. She could see the city center at the apex of the dome, where the majority of the buildings would slide down into the subterranean space for protection during an attack. The open cavern was simply enormous, the roof so big it was like a sky unto itself. It had its own weather patterns, wispy clouds that gathered around the heat carried down by the system of mirrors and fiber optics that carried light from the surface to illuminate the void. The floor of the cavern was covered in farm fields and artificial forests, even a lake.
The headquarters was a pyramid, next to a clearly artificial lake. It was obviously designed for defense with its heavy external plating, and a large, finned structure near the pyramid that Mari was surmised as last-ditch cover for an Evangelion if the enemy breached their final perimeter. It was bigger than she'd expected, and it took longer than she thought to actually arrive, the shape of the building filling the windows and sunroof as the car passed inside and rolled into a parking garage. The door popped open and she stepped out, adjusting the bag on her shoulder as she did.
"Miss Stark?" said Maya Ibuki. "Good afternoon. I'll be showing you around. Doctor Akagi is waiting for you in her lab."
The process of riding the bus was one of waiting. When Asuka boarded it, the vehicle was full, every seat taken, and she had to stand at the back with her hand on a metal rail. After a few stops, she was able to sit down at the back. A few people gave her some odd glances, but no one spoke to her. As the vehicle made each successive stop, more and more people disembarked, and the buildings outside grew smaller, lower, and further apart. Finally, she was the last passenger as the bus rolled out of the city, bouncing and jouncing along the highway, as trees and foliage rushed up to cling to the side of the road. The driver gave her a few odd looks but said nothing as she ignored stop after stop. Finally, almost at random, she reached over and pressed the button beside her seat. The bus came to a squealing stop at the next station and huffed from its air brakes, like a great beast of burden snorting out a sharp breath. She stood up and walked out of it, sliding her Nerv card through the slot to pay. The driver stared at her as if she were mad, but closed the door and rolled on.
The terrain was rougher here, higher, and she wasn't quite sure why there was a bus stop here at all. It was not so much a station as a roofed overhand amidst the trees. The air here was thicker, wetter, and though the heat was more of an awareness than an annoyance, she felt the humidity as a sudden slickness on her skin and heaviness in her hair. She picked a direction, away from the city, and started walking, following the narrow road. The character of the country stunned her. What she thought was all trees quickly opened into sweeping fields that shone in the sun, the foliage gleaming with moisture. The fields continued up the hills, which had been neatly terraced into flat levels. She had seen cities before, but nothing like this. The greenness of it was alien to her, and the paused to watch it for a while.
The road continued, as did she. It grew steeper and she leaned into the climb until she crested it and saw something strange in the distance. A narrower path led off the main road and came to a gate, beyond which were thousands of black stalks that stretched off into infinity, broken here and there only by wide, hanging trees for shade. She made her way towards it. The way of the written word here was still difficult for her, but she made out something about Second Impact, that disaster that cleansed the world and opened Europe up to the beneficent rule of Doom. When she reached the gate she found it was no gate at all, but a sculpted arch.
She walked a few paces through it and found herself on a path through a neatly manicured lawn. As if grown as a crop, extruded aluminum poles, anodized black, rose from the earth at regular intervals, stretching so far away across the rolling hills she couldn't see where they ended. The muscles in her stomach clenched and she sucked in a breath, snapping her teeth closed as she did. The humidity had become a mist, now, streamers hanging from low slug clouds that spread over her head like a blanket. She continued walking, looking around at the forest of metal cylinders, trying to discern their purpose. She walked to one and ran her hand down the cool surface.
At the root of the stem there was a name. She knelt down and read it, running her fingers over the etched letters and the date, September 13, 1999. They were grave markers. She was in a cemetery, a place of the dead, and it went on forever. She felt a terrible weight pressing on her and tried to slow her breathing but couldn't, and soon the world around her was swirling, tilting as if she'd been spinning to dizzy herself. She leaned on one of the posts and choked back vomit.
She had been here before, but that was impossible. She looked around for some sign, some proof that she was recalling a misremembered dream, but around here were only the names of the dead, marching into eternity in ranks. She ran up the path until she found the apex of the first hill, and there saw a low, open building, a sort of temple perhaps, and within it markers of some kind, either a map or a list or hopefully some sort of explanation for all of this. She trotted up to it and moved out of the mist in the little structure beneath its concrete roof, panting. The inside of the place was etched with more names, set in polished copper against the black stone. She ran her hands over a set of tablets, the same words, she thought, repeated in a dozen languages. These monuments raised in honor of the dead of Second Impact, 2004. There was a list of cities. The first was Tokyo-3. The last was Berlin.
Her phone rang and she shouted in surprise, and then immediately ground her teeth, angered at her lack of control. She pulled it from her pocket, but didn't look at it. She'd been in one of these places before, she knew it. It was all so familiar. As she walked out of the pavilion, still ignoring the ringing phone, she looked out over the rows upon rows of graves yet again and let the feeling of familiarity roll through her. She couldn't have been to this place before, or to any of the others scattered around the world. She could only have been to the one in Berlin.
The phone rang again. She put to her ear.
"Asuka?" Misato snapped without waiting for a salutation, "Where the hell are you?"
"I'm…" she looked around, trailing off. "I was on the bus."
"What the hell is the matter with you? We're under attack, there's an angel approaching. Where are you?"
She sighed. "I'm at the Second Impact memorial."
Misato was quiet for a moment. "What are you doing there?" she said quietly. "Never mind, stay there. I'm sending a car for you. We have some lead time before this thing gets here and I don't want Shinji out on his own."
Asuka nodded, as if she expected Misato to see it, slipped the phone back in her pocket, and sat down on the cold stones to wait.
Mari followed Ibuki through a series of security checks, all of which were surprisingly light. The guard flipped through her bag idly, looked at the Jarvis-pod, and tossed it back in the bag. Mari watched with a practiced indifference, but sighed inwardly when she was waved through the checkpoint into the corridors of Nerv proper. She looked around and noticed a surprisingly lack of ornamentation or distinguishing marks. For a military base, it was rather twisty and inefficiently designed.
"This place is a maze," she mused.
"Yeah," Ibuki agreed nervously. "It takes some getting used to. I got lost all the time."
They stopped at yet another checkpoint, where Ibuki had to slide a card through a reader to grant them access. The walls were a slightly different color here, as if that helped. Mari followed her with interest, trying to note any details and finding none. She wasn't completely sure she could find her way back out on her own, if she had to. An awkward silence prevailed until they arrived at Akagi's lab, where Maya knocked twice before opening the door with her key card.
Mari had seen an engineer's lab before, naturally. She found the quiet chaos of it somewhat reassuring. Akagi clearly smoked and had a fascination with cats, as she had several of them strewn about the lab in miniature porcelain form. For the leader of a project as massive as the Evangelions, it was a surprisingly small, cozy space. She had a feeling that these two spent a great deal of time in here. Akagi herself was seated at her terminal, smoking a cigarette and worrying at something under her collar, probably an ache in her neck from staring at a computer monitor all day. Akagi turned around, ground out her cigarette, and mutterd "Sorry." It was almost a sigh.
"Well," Mari said brightly, "You made an appointment, and I'm glad to accept your hospitality. What can I do for you?"
"Save the world," said Akagi.
Mari cocked her head to the side. "Oh?"
"I'll be blunt, Miss Stark. I understand your father's objections to developing weapons. He was a great man. He was a little one sided on this, though. Evangelion technology is not going to proliferate. At this point, I can't share the details, but I can tell you that this city defends an existential threat to mankind as a whole, and you would do the entire world a great benefit by reconsidering your father's decision not to share arc reactor technology."
Mari rolled the strap of her bag off her shoulder and gently lowered it to the floor. She looked expansively around the room.
"I'm open to the idea," said Mari, "but I'm not convinced. I can't simply hand over the technology, you understand, even a working reactor. The miniaturized arc reactor is an incredible resource. Powered repulsor technology is an incredibly powerful weapon."
Akagi sighed. "I understand that. I hope you'll see that our intentions are benign, Miss Stark. I had hoped to arrange a meeting with our Commander and discuss the possibility of bringing on Stark as a contractor for us. It would be worth opening our technology to you in exchange for a more reliable power source for the Evangelions."
Mari smirked. "I understand your giant robots need to be plugged in."
Akagi stood up and thrust her hands in her pockets. "They run off the national power grid. I don't think nuclear is a viable option in a combat machine that fights its enemies hand to hand, so to speak."
"About that," said Mari. "Not much information has been released about these angel creatures. You're being awfully hush-hush. I understand the first two attacks were met with a total blackout."
"I can't discuss that," said Akagi. "I'd be happy to present you with some specifications and schematics to help you make up your mind. Nothing classified, of course, but it'd be a start."
"That would be great," said Mari.
"Excellent," said Akagi, "I-"
She was cut off by a thumping alarm. A blue light flashed over their heads, and Mari raised her eyes slowly, quizzically. "What's that?"
"It's a blue pattern alarm," said Maya. "An angel has been detected."
"A blue pattern?" said Maya.
"Classified," said Akagi. "Maya, I have to get to the bridge. Escort Miss Stark to the shelter and report at once."
"Yes, ma'am," said Maya.
"I'll leave my personal number with your assistant," said Mari.
"Great," Akagi said in a hurry, rushing out of the lab.
Maya smiled warmly, or tried her best to fake smiling warmly, anyway, and led Mari out of the room. Neither her nor her superior noticed that as Mari picked up her shoulder bag, the miniaturized Jarvis pod slipped out, sprouted legs, and scuttled under the desk.
Shinji felt an odd sort of warmth of his cheeks the entire day, only for it to intensify whenever he looked at Hikari. His stomach clenched and he felt his heart flutter against his backbone, like a bird trapped in his ribs, as she guided him away from the main yard where most of their classmates were eating lunch. She kicked at the ground a little bit and stared at her feet, and then half-looked at him, hiding her eyes under her hair. He swallowed, hard. There was something wrong.
"Shinji, I…"
"I messed up on our date, didn't I," he said sadly.
"No," she said quickly, "It's not that, it's just… my sister doesn't want me to go out with you again."
"Does that mean you're not going to?"
She bit her lip and nodded, her eyes shining a little with tears. "I'm sorry, Shinji. My family is important to me."
"Yeah," he sighed. "Too bad I don't have one."
Her eyes widened, and her jaw dropped open. "Oh, Oh God. I didn't mean it like that, I'm sorry, I didn't-"
"No," he shrugged, letting his chin droop to his chest. "I know. I wouldn't want you to upset your family."
"You're really sweet, you know that," Hikari whispered.
"If you say so," he sighed.
"It's just…"
"I should go," he said quickly.
"Wait," she said, "I-"
She perked up suddenly, her eyes going wide, and she looked to the south. At that moment, the evacuation alarm spun up, wailing like a lost bird. Shinji's phone buzzed in his pocket, and he slipped it out and answered it.
"Get to the staff car at the front of the school," Misato ordered. "We have an angel on approach. We have some time before it gets here and I want to work out a strategy."
"Yes, ma'am," Shinji sighed.
He ended the call and thrust his hand in his pocket, the phone along with it, and looked up. Hikari was gone.
Misato stood on the bridge, in a fury. The giant screen in front of her showed an overlay of the angels' approach. The signal was massive, and moving at a fair clip towards the harbor, not far from the city. It would take the Evangelions ten minutes after deployment to relay from umbilical point to umbilical point to meet it, and she needed intel and a strategy to put together. She steadied herself, took in a deep breath, and looked up at the Commander, seated behind her, Fuyutsuki at his side.
"Sir, permission to radio shipping traffic in the area of the disturbance."
"To what end?"
"I want a visual report on this thing, if I can get it."
"Proceed," Gendo nodded.
"Hyuga, give me a rundown on the shipping traffic."
"There's an oil tanker, but it's too far out."
"What else?"
"There's a cargo ship on its way here. Kobayashi Maru. According to this listing," Hyuga turned around, "It's carrying biological samples from Antarctica."
"What?" said Misato.
At that moment, Nathaniel Essex, skin as chalk white as his labcoat, dark eyes burning, appeared on the bridge. "Lieutenant," he said, pronouncing the word left-tenant, "radio that vessel immediately and inform them of the danger. They must divert course at once."
"I give the orders around here," Misato snapped, rising to her full height.
"Captain, I don't think you understand the gravity of the situation."
"What kind of samples are these?" she demanded.
"Extremely dangerous ones," said Essex. "Trust me."
"Like hell," Misato snapped, but she relented. "Hyuga, do it."
He nodded, turned to his console, and began speaking into his headset. He exchanged a few frantic sentences with someone on the other end, then pulled the headset off and turned back to her, eyes wide.
"Too late. They've already entered the harbor. They say there's a wake from the angel coming up on them now, they're abandoning ship."
"They must not," Essex boomed. "They must secure the cargo!"
"I don't have time for this," Misato snapped, "I have a defense to coordinate."
"Listen here," Essex growled, "You-"
"Essex," Gendo said flatly. "Leave."
Essex eyed him for a moment, then turned and walked off the bridge in silence, flourishing his labcoat like a cape. Misato sighed and turned back to the tactical readouts. "Where the hell are my pilots?"
Tomoyuki had seen things in his life. He'd spent sixteen years at sea before taking a job on the dock, spent five years traveling the world on a tramp freighter after Second Impact. He saw red seas in the Antarctic Waste, and heard tales of freak waves the size of ships while in distant ports. He had never seen anything like this. Standing at the pier, he watched the inbound vessel, her markings reading Kobayashi Maaru¸ desperately trying to outrun a vast shape, as if a mountain had dove into the sea and chased after her. The thing, whatever it was, made the mightiest wale into a minnow. So huge was its white hump of a back that he thought it must have been walking on the seafloor under the harbor. As it passed by the Maaru, a wave as tall as a skyscraper, great and frothing, surged toward her and lifted the ship up, despite its titanic size, and send it sliding along the surface on one side.
Tomoyuki bolted to his feet and ran, ran for his life. The ship seemed to take forever as it moved towards the piers, such was its size. By the time it reached the lengths of wood, it towered over him like a building. He looked up to the other side of the vessel as it careened into the piers with a series of rippling booms, ripping the structures free from their moorings. It rocked up against the shoreline with a great crash, throwing debris and heavy metal cargo boxes across the shipyard around him. He ran, ran with the waves lapping at his heels, and darted up the stairs of the nearest gantry crane, panting. Each step clanged under his feet, the shock stinging his knees, until he was high enough to see.
The thing emerged from the water in a great crash, so immense that the seawater streaming from its body was as rain. Each clawed foot, as it came down, crushed the roof of a warehouse to kindling, and fires from gas lines and loose wires sprung up around its feet as they sparked and sizzled. The simple scale of it overawed him, and he nearly fell over. Its body was mostly white, dappled with grey spots, and when it opened and closed massive jaws the size of a battleship, the raw movement of them sent a wind whipping around his body, trying to tug him from the crane. It looked like a whale, but no whale ever grew to such a size, no living thing grew to such a size. It was as though a mountain had torn itself out by its roots, swum the ocean, and dragged itself on land on short, stubby legs, like a crocodile's legs. When it opened its mouth and roared, he felt more than heard the sound, a deep rumble that vibrated his chest and left his ears ringing.
He heard a series of metallic bangs from the cargo boxes below. One box flew open, the metal end kicked away, and a great cat slinked its way out, low and hunched, shoulder blades revolving under its skin. It was longer than a man was tall and had great fangs that were far too large for its head. It looked about with a snarl and darted off into the darkness, huffing a deep breath in its massive chest. Tomoyuki felt his heart pounding and clutched at his chest as a nearby container burst open in a squeal of steel. More containers opened, and he saw a collection of beasts from children's nightmares. Things the size of turkeys with tiny feathers like down emerged, swirling around each other like a tiny flock of birds. They stopped to gnash their teeth, like needles in their mouths, and at the end of each foot there was a long claw that clicked against the ground as they walked. A lizard-thing the size of a small bus stomped free, waving a head adorned with a great crest and three horns, sharp and lethal. His mind scrabbled for names lost in childhood, but found none.
The largest and heaviest container slid along the ground, slid each time with a great impact and a huge, three-toed dent in its side. With a great tearing sound the beast within tore free, and the other creatures scattered, roaring and chittering in terror. Standing on two legs, it was as tall as a building, and the ground shook with each of its steps, so heavy they cracked the pavement under its feet. It swung its enormous head round, and he saw its beady eyes search, huge nostrils open and close, snorting in quest of prey. His hands were shaking and he instinctively covered his ears when the thing leaned forward in a predatory crouch and roared.
With a roar of rage from ages undreamed of, the tyrant king of lizards claimed his new kingdom.
Author's Note
Poor Asuka. Poor Hikari. Poor Shinji.
I wrote the symbiote's perspective in the second person and present tense as an experiment in conveying that it has an alien way of viewing the world. We'll see if that works or not.
Anyone paying attention to my other works may have noticed that I now have four active, ongoing stories. I made the choice to roll them out before finishing Valkyrie to avoid one of the pitfalls of Last Child of Krypton, where certain scenes and ideas came out as forced because I wanted to rush through to the conclusion. Spacing out work on different stories at the same time allows me to keep them all fresh much easier. My profile will announce which story I'm working on at any given time. Since there's four, my hope is one update for each story per month, amounting to a different one each week. If this works I may roll out Misato's New Car, since I have the first chapter sitting on my hard drive unposted. If anyone would be interested in beta reading it, PM me.
I shouldn't do this, but... there are currently three characters in the running to wield the hammer. Someone is going to be picking it up at some point. Anyone that mysterious one eyed stranger has taken an interest in is a candidate...
Also, most of my works are building towards a mega-crossover. Hints have so far appeared in Valkyrie and Follow Your Spirit, referencing Last Child of Krypton, and The Riddle of Steel will be linked with it as well, although I can't say for sure whether Shadow of the Bat will be. Samsara, Orpheus, and any other one shots I do probably won't.
A note for non-Marvel fans: the dinosaurs appearing at the end are from the Savage Land, a mysterious jungle preserve in the Marvel Universe's Antarctica. It may seem odd that "biological samples" from the Arctic were preserved given Second Impact, but they were on the other side of the continent at the time. The opening flashback of a prior chapter which first hints at Misato's past history with Venom discloses the exact point where Second Impact took place in this continuity. I chose it for a reason.
Some poster on Spacebattles naturally questioned whether Doctor Doom would allow his domain to fall into famine and unrest. He wouldn't normally. I'm bending his character a little to make a point, but there is an in-story justification for it. The game has changed, and Doom has much, much bigger goals than making sure some villager is happy.
Next time: The Savage Land comes to Tokyo-3.
