A little introspection and thinking about characters chapter. Because a character without blind spots would again be too perfect, and there's the imagery of Shinji in the sandbox alone in the original series. What would LCL do to sandcastle construction?

Although Shinji isn't a very assertive person in the original series because of the psych damage, to remove that character trait would be to remove a lot of what makes him Shinji, so in this it's not so much lack of self-worth or learned helplessness as learned passive-aggression. Direct confrontation with adults is something he's rarely won for various reasons, including the fact most adults in the Evaverse are too messed up to listen to reason, so if reason doesn't work he doesn't have any experience winning via confrontation, just avoidance and obstinacy (in the 'refusing to be moved/work to rule' sense, among others). His social-fu with enemy agents (and he's met a lot of people actively out to harm or sabotage him), is to sidestep/redirect attacks because a kid, trying to confront adults, is viewed as automatically in the wrong and fighting back means he loses.

He actually is a more aggressive person in this 'verse, but because he's focused on how to get what he wants more than what people whose opinions he often doesn't give a damn for think of him, Asuka's still right that he doesn't stand up for himself. It's something he needs to learn how to do, when I turn this into a proper buildingsromun, although it will be one centered around multiple characters.

Also, Mother Nature is a bitch. Angels don't lack humanity's ruthlessness, it's just channeled differently because they have a different priority set. They're not hunters, they're ecosystem managers, which is interesting to think about.

There was a thing. It was shiny, but not metallic. It had a very weird shape without any angles and was also a strange color, never before seen.

It must be an angel!

Kill it!

Light refracted off it oddly: it must be powering up an attack!

Run away!

Rei watched with wide red eyes as one of her clones repeatedly charged at and then jumped away from a bright green apple. If the kitten had actually been scared, Rei would have explained that apples were for eating and taken a bite out of it. Shinji had told her that the bright green apples like that were tangy and good, when he'd taken Rei along when he went shopping to introduce her to foods that would be interesting things for the kittens to taste and experience.

Since the kitten was not actually mauling the apple and licking up the tasty juices that leaked out, or truly seeing it as an enemy to be afraid of (after all, the mommy was here), this must be 'play.' Running simulation tests of future activities.

Like the time Shinji showed her and Kaworu (although Kaworu already knew and was just pretending not to for Section 2's benefit) how to build a sand castle. In Rei's experience, living in the fortress city of Tokyo-3, humans spent a great deal of time and effort building well-defended castles and then rebuilding them when they were damaged. So it only made sense for younger humans to experiment with different materials, even though sand wouldn't hold up very well in the face of an angel attack. She had also found the cooperative aspect of the endeavor pleasing: one of them would be sent to get a bucket of water from the sea, in order to wet the sand. The water and the LCL improved its ability to stick together and from a structure. They would also suggest different ideas for design and improving the defenses or aesthetic appeal.

A seemingly pointless activity was in fact training to run Tokyo-3. Just as the kitten imagining that the apple was an enemy was equivalent to battles against angels in the simulator, with the kitten's imagination serving as the virtual reality simulator, eliminating the need for expensive equipment.

All the toys Shinji recommended to her were relatively simple. Balls that rolled when pushed, things to climb on so they didn't damage her sheets by climbing up them to the top of her bed (mostly): things that did things, and not with the press of a button but so that the kittens, who hadn't been able to interact with the world before, could see the action and reaction and figure out why what happened happened.

Once again, Rei wished she had a big brother like Shinji when she was a smaller child. It wasn't as though she was too old to see the appeal of a bouncy ball's role in testing reflexes and ability to calculate vectors and respond correctly. Quite the opposite, actually. She just wished she'd been introduced to these things sooner, that she'd had more Shinji. Well, the kittens didn't have a big brother, although Rei was willing to share Shinji, but Rei would make sure they had all the wonderful things.

Several of the kittens were chasing each other around, playing a game that Shinji would have described as a variant of tag, but mostly rejoicing in the fact that they could move around, and touch each other, and crash into each other while going fast enough to send both kittens tumbling, which they decided was very funny and should be done again after they verified that their sisters were okay. Three were playing a game where they deliberately limited their options for movement, in order to learn how to move despite handicaps and avoid hazards: once again, Shinji would have recognized it as The Floor Is Lava. Although he and his friends had mostly played it outdoors, with trees and big rocks.

Rei didn't really like that two of them were gnawing at a bone after the others had already picked it clean of all the meat but the meat that was at the center of bones, according to the butcher, but according to Shinji real cats needed meat. Even though Rei hadn't objected to being fed food that tasted mostly of chemicals before, after the grocer cut open a crisp green apple for her so she could have a bite of it, and a bite of the other one so she could taste the differences, she wanted better and more interesting things for the other Reis.

She hadn't been aware that life could be so good before she met Shinji. That the mere process of getting food, of acquiring sugar, fiber and various vitamins could be a shock like diving into cool water, could make her mind perk up with happy interest the way the kittens' were because this was interesting and it was good. The hunger for data, for new tastes and sensations and new things to try, new tools to use.

Now Rei definitely agreed with Kaworu now: school had to be a SEELE plot, because otherwise how could information acquisition possibly be boring?

She wished she could have gone with Shinji and Kaworu on their hunt, but it was imperative that Rei watch the kittens. Both sets of her inner programming agreed that not only was it the most important thing, but the most wonderful thing.

If Rei had known how to be more emotionally demonstrative, she would have been jumping up and down and going, "Eeeeee!" to demonstrate that she was experiencing a glee overload that was compromising her judgment. On some level, it was fortunate that she wasn't, because seeing Mommy signal that she was currently insane would have worried the kittens, while Mommy calmly and lovingly watching them instead signaled that all was proceeding according to the proper path for terrestrial human development and they were to proceed with the experimentation in the knowledge that Mommy would let them know if they were doing anything potentially fatal.

Oh look, that one had gotten herself wrapped up in the white toilet paper again.

…Aww. Rei had stopped putting rolls out after the first six times the kittens clawed them apart, so they must have figured out how to get into the cabinet.

It was things like this that made Rei wonder if these ingenious little things were really her clones. Either she was underperforming even more seriously than she thought or Tabris was right about how Gendo had stunted her.

Kaworu hummed happily while he pulled out the weeds from Kaji's plot, after watering them and checking soil balance and other factors.

Shinji found it a little interesting that Kaworu, who was a vegetarian and cared a lot about environments, not to mention that he didn't want to hurt people, was ruthlessly killing plants. While he was leaving the ladybugs alone, any bug that ate watermelons would have been quite casually crushed.

Even though Kaworu had red eyes and magic powers (actually sufficiently advanced technology powers), it was hard for Shinji to think of him as a potential danger, even now that he'd fought other angels, because Kaworu was Kaworu, Tabris or not.

There was a Star Trek movie about how terraforming could actually do a lot of damage, since it was overriding the way the planet had been before. Kaworu showed him that movie not just to introduce him to some concepts, but as part of explaining Second Impact. How the seas were turned to LCL, how the seasons Lilith had designed could be eliminated, and how putting them back would damage the environment again, because live had started to recover by adapting itself to the new circumstances.

Most people talked about Nature as something wonderful, something else lost to the world because of humans and Third Impact. Kaworu had taught Shinji that life was so precious because if nature was left to take its course, things died. Changing the environment, even to make it hold more life, meant killing a lot of the plants and animals that relied on the previous environment.

Angels weren't supposed to hurt sentient beings, but Lilith was Gaea, was Earth's Mother Nature. And she was one hell of a bitch, which was probably part of why humans were still around despite the pissed-off angels. Obstinate determination to hold on to a planet no matter who had a problem with that was a survival trait.

Shinji was pretty certain that if Kaworu created earth, if humanity was descended from him, they would have wiped out tigers, lions, cougars, crocodiles and every other predator species that thought it could eat humans for breakfast before they even invented guns. Kaworu liked to think that he wasn't like the other angels, and that was true: Kaworu wasn't insane, but if he had gone insane like the rest of them?

Lilim didn't read as human to angels, not with their AT fields closed. They read as malformed, stunted proto-homonids that were going to go extinct with the next climate shift anyway. Proof Lilith had screwed up such a wonderful planet.

Even insane, the angels weren't dumb. They were capable of strategies, and learned from those that came before. If he'd cared about getting to Adam, if he had to go through humanity's defenders to regain his sanity and his chance to finally create his children, Tabris would have picked them off in the casual way he was picking those weeds and putting them in a bag for the kittens. He wouldn't be humming the Rite of Spring, but other than that?

It wasn't as though there was much else for them down here in the geofront. There weren't any trees old enough to have dropped old, twisted-up branches that would shift around depending on where you stood on them, not even kitten-sized ones. Whoever emptied this out hadn't even bothered to leave behind any interesting rocks. Shinji would probably have to go to the seashore again to get some for his nieces. Pity the LCL meant there wasn't any more driftwood: his uncle had a piece that was worth several thousand yen.

Nieces.

He was an uncle.

It was funny that piloting a giant mecha and being responsible for saving the world hadn't given him the same kick in the pants first really realizing who Rei was and what that meant had, and now this. Well, it didn't help that Gendo wanted him to think of himself as a tool, and that was NERV's institutional attitude. Kaworu told him the fate of Earth was in his hands, but he'd been hearing that for awhile, so it was just Kaworu being Kaworu for him to think Shinji mattered. Apparently parents who weren't like Gendo were supposed to think of children that way.

He had nieces. Easily squished nieces. At least Rei now knew enough about her carrier admin-level AT field to fend off a conventional army and/or get out of range before they could lay a finger on her. He was going to have to make sure he knew how to identify the roofs of Rei's neighborhood from an Eva, because even though Kaworu had taught the kittens how to reflexively raise their AT fields if they were in serious danger first thing, there was no way NERV would miss almost a dozen AT fields being raised and flaring frantically for Mommy. Unless they decided to join the battle. They were made for dummy plugs and they did have combat programming based on Rei's simulator data, after all.

The thought of Asuka dancing around trying to shoot at or stab the things running around her ankles was funny only until he remembered that this was Asuka, so she might actually manage to hit one.

…Damn. They were going to have to let Asuka in on this. Otherwise when she found out, she really would kill them.

There was just something about Asuka that made him so nervous, that made him feel like he really wasn't qualified to deal with this in the same way the first time piloting an Eva and having to kill someone did. She wasn't the first person with a chip on her shoulder she'd met: a lot of the kids at his old school grew up having to fight for their parents to pay any attention to them too. Shinji was quiet at first because he was afraid of being abandoned again, but in some ways he thought they'd had it harder. Like the oceans even before LCL: water, water everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Their parents were right there, and yet the other kids didn't get much more affection than Shinji did from lost Yui and Gendo.

That was when Shinji realized that yes, it was exactly the same kind of fear as when he was fighting for people's lives. The kind that said this is important, don't screw it up.

So she scared him because he thought he might like her? And maybe he made her so aggressive because she thought she might like him? That was what Tabris though.

So she was fighting him off and he was trying to get away from her because they would be good together?

Shinji's eyebrows scrunched up, and he was lucky Kaworu was too busy with the plants and whatever was going on with whatever else he was doing to ask what was up. His cat body wasn't here, and Kaworu wouldn't want to get out of the habit of multitasking, so he must be doing something else.

Something other than noticing how Shinji's AT field had first tightened up defensively, because a logic hole in how he thought meant his mind was vulnerable to attack, and then relaxed, went back to the level of tension he'd felt because NERV was enemy territory before Asuka arrived and got in his space.

Still, was his relationship with Asuka really that important? If he screwed up in an Eva fight, more people would die. If he screwed up with Asuka, she'd punch his lights out, but no one's lives were on the line…

Shinji blinked. It was the same kind of worry Tabris had about Rei. Rei wasn't just important for her own sake, but if she was irreversibly damaged, then a world would never be made. If Shinji screwed up with Asuka, there were lives that might not be born.

"So not only am I thinking of Asuka," the crazy valkyrie, "as a potential mother of my children, but the potential that we might have that important a relationship was what was scaring me away?" Shinji shook his head, throwing his bag back over his shoulder after giving up on finding anything else interesting around here besides some hay and stray clover, scents that Shinji liked and the kittens should adore after being stuck with nothing but LCL all their lives.

Every time he thought he understood how crazy people were…

Shinji froze, hearing something out of place. No, Kaworu's Tabby-form wasn't here…

Huh, maybe there was something worth bringing back to Rei here.