NHOrus had an awesome thought that I'm going to mention here in hopes someone uses it:
Know the beef bowl delivery girl from the P4 anime, who can always find people and then pick up their bowls no matter where they are left? Clearly she has been touched by the noodley appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. It should totally be her persona.
In terms of crazy-making, war beats eldritch abominations hands down. Consider the time period when cosmic horror was relevant. Think about where they got their inspiration. Think about World War I.
Just. World War I. There's your epic futility, and people discovering that under the myth that war is glorious is a terrifyingly bleak reality. Cowering in trenches waiting for the shells to hit – there's your powerlessness in the face of the universe, with knowledge and technology just making man worse off. I like the crashcourse (look it up on Youtube, so much useful worldbuilding stuff – oh, and knowledge about our world) summation of this book that summed up WWI: it turns out that modern war doesn't make you a man: It rips off your manparts.
That generation thought they were going to glory, and got hit in the face by Reality with an unidentifiable piece of something that used to be a person.
That's informing the JPs veteran attitude here. Eldritch abominations? They're very bad news, but hell, we get paid for this and if they're coming to kill us, better to take some demons and kill them first, or try anyway.
The killing civilians? Let's not do that again. Really. Let's not.
So yeah, if one takes a look at the 'if this ever happens again' contingency planning they did afterwards, it would likely show that the actual septentriones were a relatively minor concern compared to what happens when a species of persistence hunters and their children get hungry.
I am still amused that there is a Global Strategic Reserve of maple syrup. O, Canada…
"Are you sure it isn't a demon?" Asuka asked as they left the food stand.
"It's not a demon, it's Jungo," Hiro said, as though that was an explanation, nodding his thanks to the JPs employees who had given up their places in line for the Vice-Director and one of the heroes of the hour. "How he taught his cat to make sushi we don't know, but it's, well, he's Jungo."
Asuka looked at her food dubiously. How did that food stand pass this city's cleanliness inspections, with a cat in the food preparation area? Governmental corruption and JPs' influence?
"Eat up," Hiro said, eating his chawanmushi with practiced quickness as they walked across the park near Tokyo Tower towards the Evas. "You never know when you'll be trapped in battle after battle, and it's important to stay in good condition. Also, Jungo makes really good food. Both of them."
That explained the line that trailed halfway across the park, even though this area should have been cordoned off because of JPs taking over Tokyo Tower and the presence of the Evas and their crews.
"Remember how the other pilot," who hadn't been able to come with Asuka and Shinji because her Eva was still being repaired, "said that you needed to open your heart to your Eva?" Hiro asked as Asuka's eyes widened, the tuna melting in her mouth. "Dr. Otome ran some tests-"
"Evas and their construction are classified," Asuka reminded him.
"Nothing that would hurt him," Hiro said reassuringly. NERV and the Committee were UN, while JPs reported to the Japanese government. They were looking at an international incident if Gendo Ikari or his superiors wanted to make anything of it, but word had already leaked that NERV had intended all along to send children out to fight the angels, "but the Evas are genetically human." Hiro didn't add 'mostly,' or 'as human as most people are, anyway,' because the fact that the average human was either fifty or ninety-plus percent demonic? That was something best kept under wraps. The Shomonkai, this SEELE, that Mesian business shortly after Yamato was born: they had enough crazy cults as it was.
And that wasn't 'ranging from fifty to ninety percent demonic' that was 'we're absolutely certain that at least half our blood is demonic, but history and a little application of common sense says that it should be closer to ninety percent, so the only reason it looks like fifty is that the demon blood is hiding itself well enough we still can't spot it yet.'
"That would make him a person, and someone even younger than you are," was what Hiro did say. "So, don't you think we should at least try to make contact?"
Contact… that word made Asuka uneasy for some reason, but he was right. What if the mind of some little boy who didn't know any of the theory or tactics woke up and started trying to control her Eva, his own body, in the middle of a fight? Unless he knew to be quiet and let Asuka handle things, he'd get them both killed.
"It's possible there isn't much of a mind in there," adding all those mechanical parts? All that surgery? Might have given him a lobotomy. According to Fumi, she wouldn't be surprised if that was the idea, since a lot of the artificial parts were seals and restraints, not enhancements. "But we should try, don't you think?" It was Asuka's Eva.
"It's the right thing to do," Asuka said, because as much as it annoyed her when people looked at her and saw a kid who had no business fighting, this was her choice. This was something she'd trained, prepared, fought for. If they were going to worry about someone, they should worry about Shinji, even if he was surprisingly non-useless. Still, at least Shinji had chosen to pilot: if the mind in her Eva didn't even know what was going on? And Asuka was the one piloting, so she was the one responsible for that life, the one risking it as well as her own? Either way, she wanted to know.
What else weren't they telling her, about her own Eva? The one her own mother worked on?
The brown-haired woman waiting by the feet of the red Eva looked extremely mild-mannered. "Hello, Hiro," she said with a bright smile that made Asuka wonder if they were more than friends.
"This is Io Nitta," Hiro introduced her. "She's one in a million. One in a billion, I mean. Her channeling abilities are, too."
There was maybe the remnant of something that would have been a blush on those cheeks, but Io was used to compliments now. Even if this was Hiro. "I have channeled people who were still alive before," she told Asuka. Mostly at the request of Dr. Otome and her colleagues. For the dying, who fought to survive. Or not.
"She specializes in gods, though, so even if your Eva has an unusual soul," when the bodies of the shito were also genetically human(ish), what kind of soul was inhabiting this Eva? "it won't be a problem for Io. Right, Io?"
"I'll do my best," she said, exuding confidence. She might have almost died the first time she channeled, but on top of being her first time, that was a divine soul that had been shattered and partially deleted. There wasn't a death clip this time and Hiro was here, so even though Dr. Otome and Fumi had informed her of the risks Io really wasn't worried. "I've already felt her presence, I've just been waiting for you to get here."
"Wait, her?" Hiro asked.
"Yes." Definitely. "It's a warm, motherly presence."
Hiro looked at the Eva with a little caution, not really as though he was expecting it to attack but this was a reason to be wary. "Really?"
"What's wrong?" with my Eva? Asuka wanted to know.
"It's genetically male. So if there's a female soul in there, and a mother's instead of a child's, that means someone's possessing your Eva." Not that there was such a thing as 'male souls' or 'female souls,' but it was still a matter of personal identity. He guessed that the neural link with Asuka could be responsible for the female part – if the Eva never got to interact with anyone else, it might have imprinted on her, developed as a sort of echo or twin of her even if it was biologically male – but Io was a mother and Asuka wasn't. Io wouldn't make a mistake about the Eva feeling like a mother and Asuka couldn't be responsible for that.
"She isn't malicious," Io reassured them both after Asuka demanded an explanation. Or possibly an exorcism, stat. Hiro couldn't tell: he didn't know any German that wasn't related to food. English and Classical Japanese had never been his best subjects, but after what happened, he'd decided to work for (and/or take over) JPs once he got out of high school. He still had to study several languages, because the Hotsuin clan had done what amounted to kidnapping and sealing gods from all over the world and not being able to read ancient texts or warning labels in an emergency was very bad, but German wasn't one of them. "And she wants to speak to Asuka." Desperately.
"So why hasn't she?" Was it Asuka's fault for not opening her mind, or was it the thing in her Eva's?
"It might have something to do with all those seals built in to the hardware." Even Fumi, who had studied the Hotsuin clan's seals, a collection built up over centuries, hadn't seen half of them before. She'd identified the esoteric traditions in question, but even if quite a lot of Enochian, Kabbalah and alchemic secrets were common knowledge these days, which had allowed the Hotsuin to crib from them and reverse engineer quite a few useful things, like the Seal of Solomon, the real, expert practitioners had kept their secrets. "Sorry, Asuka." Hiro had thought they could take care of this relatively quickly: if it was something that would increase Asuka's fighting power like Rei said, then helping her know and connect to her Eva would be not just a good way to say thanks for her help, but help her help them in future. After this, though, "I'll have set some wards on Io, just to be on the safe side. It shouldn't take too long." But she'd have to wait around a bit while someone brought Hiro some ink and paper so he could draw out custom seals. He was carrying the standard kit of pre-printed, ready-to-activate seals, of course, as well as a few he'd made up himself, but since keeping the spirit from entering Io's body would defeat the purpose, he was going to have to come up with another way to protect her.
When Yamato stuck his head out his office and told the people waiting there he needed someone to escort Shinji to Hiro, they'd all been eager to volunteer. Not too eager, not in front of the Director when there was serious business afoot and most of them were waiting there because they had something important to report, but once they were far enough away from Yamato's office that it was safe to fanboy, Shinji had the disconcerting experience of being told, "That was amazing," by someone who wasn't Hikari, Touji or Kensuke.
Misato and Hiro had both said, "Good job," of course, but that was because Misato was a friend and Hiro was just, well, Hiro was just overflowingly nice. Shinji thought calling him the Shining One made sense now: he wasn't a star, stars were cold and remote (Shinji remembered Gendo looking down from that balcony, disdaining to come within a dozen meters of Shinji after all that time spent apart). He was a cheerful yellow sun, and somehow that made it easier to accept praise from him because Shinji could tell himself that Hiro was just being nice to Shinji because Hiro was Hiro and Shinji was there. It made some part of Shinji want to be around him in hopes he could have some of that warmth, while Rei awoke a muddle of feelings in him that made him not know what to do even when he did have Null Auto set.
"No, really," the man went on when Shinji didn't respond other than by blushing. "It was like the Director, or what happened ten years ago. The Vice-Director, Airi Ban in Nagoya." Hadn't she been around Shinji's age?
"I only beat one of them, and I'm the one that let Israfel get a piece of it."
"The Vice-Director only beat one of them. It made landfall by three of the towers, and the volunteer tamers along with a few of ours like Commander Sato and Dr. Otome divided up into teams to attack them simultaneously – a lot of us who hadn't met them yet thought it was crazy of the Director to give them that responsibility, but not if we'd seen them fight." Glancing sidelong at Shinji, he seemed to realize that the boy was hunching into himself because he was uncomfortable with praise.
"You were here when you fought the septentriones last time?" Shinji asked, hoping to change the subject.
"Well, not for all of them: some of the Mizars got me." He shuddered. That three-toothed mouth… it wasn't the ridged tentacles that featured in his nightmares, it was the other Mizars starting to sprout from the sides of even the separated parts of Mizar. Dividing, again and again and again, until what was left of the world swarmed with them. No matter how many you killed, there were always more, and he remembered the moment when he'd looked out at what used to be a perfectly normal city street in Tokyo, with a bakery that used to be good but was now closed because there wasn't any food and saw the tumbled-down buildings, the scorched wrecks of cars left over from the first day because no one had the time to care about clearing the streets and knew that they weren't going to survive this. The deletion of the rest of the world had already leaked out, and even if the Director had kept three cities and this much of JPs alive this long, their food wasn't going to last forever… He knew fear. He'd fought demons for four years already, since before the Director's voice changed, so he knew fear. Demons certainly knew how to use it against you.
That wasn't fear: that was dread. Fear was about possibility, uncertainty. Dread was knowledge of inevitability, not if but when.
A little under two minutes later, in his case.
"Do you… mind talking about it?" Shinji asked carefully, glancing at the JPs officer out of the corner of his eyes.
"It… won't be coming back soon. Not until things change again so the septentriones think they have a chance. Alioth, then Mizar and Betesnach." The stars of the Big Dipper. "If you see any red-and-black teardrop shapes on the ground, or patches of red-and-black mist, stay clear of them. Alioth shelled us with neurotoxins from the air." Not that he personally had seen it: he'd been posted to Osaka when Alioth hit Tokyo and what was left of Sapporo (not for long…).
"Does it bother you? To work with Dr. Saiduq," Shinji elaborated, since of course experiencing something like that would bother people. Poison… Shinji knew about poison since he'd lived in the country and they had to deal with bugs. His classmates had always thought he was chicken for not liking to be around poison, not just insecticides but all those poisonous plants everywhere.
It was so easy to die, wasn't it? It would be so easy to opt out of everything, to decide he didn't want to take any more crap.
So why did he shy away from the means? Shinji had thought it was because he was a coward who didn't have the guts to go through with it, and yet now that he thought about it, he was really more afraid of poison than he was of demons, even after Scathach. Both of them would kill him…
No. Demons would kill him. Poison was something he could use to kill himself.
Was it really himself that he had been afraid of, all along? The single thing most likely to kill him? But why? Obviously he'd only kill himself if he wanted to die: anything else would be stupid.
Well, he guessed, part of him didn't want to die, otherwise it wouldn't be trying to keep him away from oleander bushes.
Oh, right. If he died now, people would be sad, wouldn't they?
That was a weird thought, one that started to make something in the pit of his stomach ache confusingly the way meeting Hiro had, so Shinji shied away from the thought.
"Oh, him? He's…" It was the JP's officer's pause to try to figure out how describe Dr. Saiduq that gave Shinji time to think those disturbing thoughts, so it was a relief when he resumed. "Contrary to what Ronaldo Kuriki used to say about us, JPs policy is firmly against kicking puppies. He's powerful," certainly, "but we were used to the Director long before Vice-Director Kageyama started working here part-time and made Saiduq appear and talk to people." Make the mistake of talking down to Yamato Hotsuin because he was short and eleven when he decided to take over JPs, and he would annihilate you. Al Saiduq, on the other hand, was delighted when people said hi to him in the halls. One of these people was scarier than the other, although the Director was obviously their scary bastard, and they were lucky to have him. "JPs exists to defend against supernatural threats, so we're used to demons and gods. If I got flashbacks just being around nonhumans, I'd need another job."
"You have flashbacks?" Shinji asked, then looked down at the pavement. "Sorry."
"What? No, it's fine. You're in combat, so you should be asking that kind of question." Before he got them himself. "I've never actually had a flashback, I was being rhetorical. I don't think there's anyone who made it to day three who doesn't have nightmares sometimes." And the ones who had lived long enough to see the void for themselves? Brr. "Only app users kept their memories, and not even all of them. One of my friends came to work the first day back and had no idea why half of JPs had stayed home and everyone else was freaking out." A lot of people had put in a lot of heavy training time after the world was fixed, and the entire force put on an average of ten pounds until Dr. Otome and the Director sent out a very strongly worded e-mail about that. He himself couldn't fit into the pants he'd worn back then, although some of that was muscle from the additional training. "I think the people who would have had flashbacks or gotten hit with PTSD that hard are the ones who didn't remember."
It wasn't going to be that easy for Shinji, though. "At least you're fighting monsters." That was something. "It really is harder if they're human." Thank the ten million gods he hadn't been in Nagoya, fighting off people who were attacking JPs trying to steal food for their families. They'd had riots in Tokyo, yes, but the organized attacks were from yakuza. And the occasional person who was pissed off that JPs 'wasn't doing anything' about all the demon attacks and didn't want to hear that they didn't have the manpower. It wasn't as though they hadn't tried: even if the Director was cold-blooded back then JPs existed to guard Japan's people against supernatural attacks.
They'd lost two towers because the commanders of those JPs branches ignored the Director's orders and overextended their forces trying to protect the civilians. In fairness to them, they hadn't expected the sheer number of demons they'd have to deal with. The Hotsuin clan might have been preparing shields capable of deflecting strategic nukes for the day Polaris attacked humanity, but JPs was used to dealing with exorcisms, tracking down weak demons and fighting the rare powerful one that managed to escape its seal. They weren't an army, hadn't had any idea of how to fight a war and if the Director hadn't thought ahead, it wouldn't have occurred to anyone to worry about things like feeding their troops once all the regions that once supplied Tokyo's food were gone.
The only chance JPs would have had to test strategies for unmanageable demon numbers before the crisis was the Lockdown, and the Diet had insisted in pulling all of Tokyo JPs out of Tokyo in order to protect the politicians instead of leaving them inside the Lockdown. The few members who had remained in the area before the Lockdown started weren't alive when it ended. Someone besides Director Hotsuin should have wondered why the people in there with training had a hundred percent casualty rate. Not that their training had been with comps.
By the time he died, though, they had almost started to feel like an army. The stupid yellow dress uniforms that no one ever wore on missions before because they were of the 'stand out in a crowd so your allies know who not to shoot' school of uniform design had actually come in handy. It was still a relief to go back to plainclothes.
Until now, when the uniforms with the standardized built-in wards had once again gotten dragged out of boxes in closets by order of the Director.
When the two regional commanders hadn't listened to the Director, their towers fell and everyone in those cities died. When the world was restored and reports were made, the Diet had come this close to hauling them up for treason, and would have if the Director hadn't defended them. If you considered 'it's not their fault they were born stupid' a defense, anyway, but his heart was in the right place. Every member of JPs who was still alive when Director Hotsuin finally announced his plan to let Polaris alter humanity so he'd stop trying to exterminate them would have walked through fire for him. Especially since the shield that protected the cities was already down, their last bastions were dissolving after the defeat of Mizar and the food was running out so they couldn't have protected the towers much longer anyway.
Nagoya JPs had been so shocked to be attacked by humans that Ronaldo's forces had easily overrun the base the first time he attacked. A few of the civilian volunteers had done most of the fighting against the other civilians because it just wasn't… Those were the people they were supposed to protect. After that? Here JPs was, doing their best to keep what was left of humanity alive, and those ungrateful bastards were…
Then the world went back to normal and they realized they'd used demons to kill scared, panicked people who were just trying to survive.
Getting eaten by an eldritch abomination was extremely unpleasant, but it was a hazard of the profession. He hadn't felt right talking to anyone about it to anyone, taking up a therapist's time when medical was busy hauling people in and putting them on suicide watch after too many officers ate their guns. It was one thing to die trying to do your duty and another to kill relatively innocent people.
Well, thank goodness this Ikari wasn't going to have to do any of that. Most of the world might be some degree of angry that NERV had intended to send fourteen-year-olds to fight, but the idea that teenagers couldn't fight was clearly nonsense to anyone who had met both Yamato Hotsuin and Keita Wakui. Fighting people, though? Shinji Ikari and Asuka Sohryu being so young just made the thought of it worse. They had their whole lives ahead of them: being weighed down all that time by something like that?
So far the loose demons were contained in Tokyo-3, but looking out at the park, at all the tents that had been sent up just in case the park had to shelter refugees again, the way it had during the Lockdown?
Well, this time they were ready.
"If I was going to hate Al Saiduq, it wouldn't be because he was a septentrione," he told Shinji, in the interests of fairness. "The Shomonkai had a reason for letting comps with failed contracts keep summoning more demons. That was how Tokyo was overrun during the Lockdown: demons summoning their allies in the War of Bel. They let it happen so that it would be easier to summon their 'god.' Al Saiduq let it happen because the demons would attack septentriones as well as humans, and so that the surviving humans could get stronger, strong enough they might have a chance. The loose demons still killed a lot of people."
"You mean, there's some way to stop the loose demons from summoning more?" Shinji asked, stopping in his tracks.
"Of course. Nicaea keeps track of who lives and who dies, so it knows when a registered user is dead. All the Ticos would have to do is deactivate that user's summon account. This time, though, the summon app is only working for JPs and within a certain radius of Tokyo-3." Of course, this wasn't keeping the demons that could disguise themselves as humans from using the 'kill and replace' technique to leave the city, past the security checkpoints. Most of them got caught, but stopping all of them? That would take a real Lockdown. At least it was something, though, even if the demons did have other means of summoning their own kind.
"It worked for me when I was out in the ocean." And it was working now, Shinji saw, opening his phone just to check.
"Welll, you're not a civilian, are you?" the officer pointed out reasonably. "The comps, though, are still working for anyone or anything, anywhere. If it weren't for the fact the app doesn't work for everyone…" They'd be coming down on that Minegeshi bastard like the wrath of Susano-o for reactivating them, the Vice-Director's cousin or not. "At least the ones who aren't contracted to humans can be ordered home…"
Shinji would have asked why they weren't just doing that, then, when people were getting killed, if they hadn't entered the temporary walled-off area they were keeping the Evas for the sake of keeping gawkers and spies who wanted cell samples to create war Evas for their countries away and seen that Asuka was crying.
Shinji didn't actually do anything, because he had no idea what to do if someone cried. There was also a woman holding Asuka, which might have meant that the situation was being taken care of if she wasn't crying too.
Why was Hiro just standing around? He seemed like someone who might know what to do about crying people, so why wasn't he? Except for waving for Shinji to come over to him by walking around Asuka and the woman. And the circle of paper talismans around them and the Eva.
So… giving her some space? Okay, then. Shinji felt very relieved that he didn't have to try to make Asuka feel better by talking to her, because what if he screwed up and made her feel worse?
"This is nice, isn't it?" Hiro said cheerfully, which was when Shinji noticed when he was grinning. "I always cry when family members are reunited, usually of frustration… I'm joking," he added when Shinji stared at him. "But this is nice. All kinds of illegal, here anyway, but it is nice. I should probably ask someone about how German law treats willing human sacrifice and the imprisonment of human souls."
"Giant robots. You guys have giant robots now." The blue-haired young man standing in the entryway of the enclosure looked delighted, shading his eyes in order to look up at the Eva and ignoring that Asuka and the woman were having a moment. "That's awesome. I have got to come back to earth more often." Looking down at Hiro and Shinji, he grinned. "Hey, little brother." Little brother? He looked almost a decade younger than Hiro. "So, is he yours?"
"You too? And I'm not that old yet."
The new arrival blinked. "Huh? Isn't this 2020?"
"No, it's 2015. And I would still not be that old," Hiro reminded him.
"Wow, the time dilation actually worked in my favor for once. And I can do math, I'm just teasing you because it's fantastic to be the older brother," he admitted, starting to pull off the cape he wore and roll it up. "I was too dead to be a proper older brother last time, and teasing hadn't been invented yet."
"I'm also not a manslut."
"Do you know how many of your widows I have in my army? A lot, that's how many."
Hiro rolled his eyes. "Knock it off, Abel."
"If it's only been three years since I checked in, why are there giant robots now? And can I have some?"
"Apparently they need human souls in order to operate, so they won't work in the demon world."
"…Necromantic giant robots now?" What?
'I know, right?" What kind of warped mind would come up with something like this?
"I have got to show Naoki this," Abel said, and vanished.
The 'is he your kid' joke is also because I named Hiro Shinji on my first playthrough of Devil Survivor 2, before I found out about the manga name. Since, come on, lots of Evangelion references. As well as awesome Nocturne references.
Incoming Demifiend. Excuse me while I drag Kaworu away from the piano. Apparently because he's the host of Adam's soul, he has dream/memories of being punched in the face by someone with glowing tattoos.