Chapter: 6A - Shinji leaves the apartment and heads to the lake at top speed.
Choice Path: Start - 1B - 3B - 6A
Author:The Mustachioed Cat
The Third Child outpaced Misato to the stairwell. She had been coiled and ready, body oriented to kick up and over and through the front door, and Shinji Ikari had still managed hit the stairs a full four seconds ahead of her. Which was pretty nearly impossible... but not unexpected.
Ritsuko had called it 'substrative genetic substitution.' It was what happened when LCL soaked into open injuries at a particular stage in the healing process. Meant, basically, the difference between Eva and human DNA was stapled onto the kid, here and there. He had gone into Unit One's entry plug all busted up and come out with patches of brown-gray flesh and a new red eye. And also, apparently, the stamina and agility of one of those African jungle cats they were always trying to breed up in Kyoto. A snow leopard.
Misato hit the stairs and vaulted the rail, falling a good eight feet to the flight adjacent. Landing was a wave of physical protest. Just socks rolling off bare concrete, tits operating in free-fall and full-stop, and nothing to gasp but stale, bitter air. But she was in front of the kid now.
Getting him out of the lab had taken a while. Getting him out of the Geo-Front had taken even longer. There had been finagling. Promise-making. Responsibility-assuming. She had managed to convince a number of people, a few of whom totally should have known better, that Misato Katsuragi was, in addition to being the effective head of Tactical Division, also a responsible adult.
He wasn't looking at her. Didn't seem to be looking at anything. Taking the steps two at a time, one hand floating down the top of the stair rail, the other jogging a short beat through the air. A salaryman trying to catch a train.
"Shin... ji," Misato panted. "Shinji, I need you to stooOOARRH!"
Like hitting a wall. A moving wall that was all shins and elbows. Misato hooked an arm around his neck and held on as best she could, feet kicking out behind him, trying to keep her balance.
Losing the kid in the Outer Ward should have destroyed her career. The state he had been recovered in should have earned her all kinds of retribution from the Commander. And this business with Unit One 'fixing' him - that could have been laid on Misato as well. Quite possibly, the consequences for all that were still ahead of her. Maybe Section Two would arrest her once this operation was over. Maybe there was a cell in the deep dark bottom of Central Dogma being prepped right now. Maybe dragging Shinji out of the land of mutism would make her disposable.
Either way, Misato thought, kicking up and wrapping her feet around the kid's middle. Either way.
Legs and arms squeezed waist and throat, with just enough slack to cant her body a few degrees, trying screw the kid's center of gravity up. That slowed him down, but only a little. The salaryman had missed that train, gone to bar to have a few cups of watery sake, and now moved with a curving drunken purpose. But it wasn't enough. Why wasn't he going down?! Misato had his neck in the crook of her arm. He shouldn't be able to breathe!
The kid made it to the next landing. Misato loosened one leg and kicked the rail as they were turning at the bottom of the stairs, which sent him into a stumbling twist that smacked his passenger against the wall, hard enough that her grip loosened...
And suddenly Misato was on the floor with a scrap of the kid's shirt in one hand, head ringing like a fucking bell. The kid was across the landing and then gone.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
inSANITY MODE ACTIVE!
Outlasting his pursuer slowed Shinji down not in the least. He continued down the stairwell and out of the building, heading down undeveloped hillside and then across residential road.
He could hear them. Could see the silver-shimmer in the distance. It sped up his pace. Made him hard. And then the buildings fell away and he was moving across grass, moving faster than he had when fleeing the monster. Faster than he had ever run before. Feet eating up green distance to that flat water, and the reeds, and the things in the reeds. The things he needed. The right shape.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Misato rested on the landing for a good minute, trying to chart the kid's progress in her mind. It was... tricky - staying focused. Feet and hands were scraped up the stair landing, but not raw. Her tits hurt about as much as her head, though. Free-fall and full-stop. The damn kid had probably given her stretch marks.
She waited until he was probably out of the building. No hurry. He was probably heading down to the Ashino lake. If he didn't, if he headed east or north, up the hill, she was over. That was it.
Shaking badly, and experiencing a slight case of stair-related PTSD, Misato headed off the landing and down the hallway, jabbing the elevator call button and leaning against the cool metal of the recessed frame.
Stupid. Stupid stupid fucking dumb fucking fuck worthless screw-up almost sent yourself to the hospital for fuckwhat
The elevator arrived and Mrs. Keitsuwu was inside. Of course. Woman was mid-50s, had probably weathered Second Impact in one of the green wards. Married to Colonel Keitsuwu, Maintenance Division. Okay guy, ex-military, seemed slightly autistic. Mrs. Keitsuwu took a brief, encompassing look at Misato - shaking, still breathing heavily, night clothes twisted around her body, one foot drawn up in a limp - smiled briefly, and then spent three floors doing her best to ignore the Captain. Perhaps Misato could take lessons from her. A little less empathy and she wouldn't be in this situation.
Back at the apartment, Misato retrieved her phone from the futon in the hallway and called Section Two's exchange. A professional voice came on and informed her of the Third Child's whereabouts, and a good deal of stress went out of her. The lake. He had gone to the lake.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
inSANITY MODE EXHAUSTED!
"Shinji!"
New: the name, and the exclamation point. It had been a while since anyone had used just his first name. No one had ever bothered to be emphatic about it.
"SHINJI!"
Louder now, but at the same time... intimate? Familiar, and therefore unusual. The name and this hot brightness. Had teacher left the stove on? Was the house burning down?
Water splashed (splattered) against him. Because, right. He existed. He could be touched. Shinji Ikari blinked away the blur. Something in his eyes. Slickslime. He tried to rub it away.
He was standing knee-deep in water, in the middle of what looked like a ruin. Big blurred tombstone buildings stretching up. Bones of monsters. Something was splashing toward him. Something that could talk.
"Um... good morning?" he croaked, offering the source of the sound a wave that was more of a twitch. Only seemed polite, to greet a person that had already said his name twice.
Ruins. Was he in Old Mito? Had he done something wrong? What...
His vision cleared well enough for him to see what was coming at him through the water. Girl in a bathing suit. Conservative, but two pieces. Flesh seemed to seep light. Who came to Mito to sunbathe?
"Put that down," the girl said in a woman's voice.
He shifted toward her. A mistake. The ground shifted unexpectedly, sent him down, and on the way Shinji remembered that he could not swim, and that the only lakes in Old Mito were yellowing chemical sumps that looked like they belonged on Precambrian Earth, or the surface of Mercury.
And then he was splashing around, trying to find a stationary spot among the slick stones lining the lake bed, and the woman was yelling at him to "calm down" and "if you get my hair wet" and "son of a godfuckingdammit!" Eventually he managed to wedge his feet against two sturdy but slick rocks and raise himself up.
Wiping the scum from his eyes, Shinji tried to get his bearings.
He was not in Old Mito. The buildings rising up around the lake, which he had mistook for ruins, were modern and unweathered and there were too many of them. And the sky was blue, not the nasty purple-orange that the chemicals sumps somehow caused.
The woman, several feet away, cursing and wringing out her hair... he knew her. Katsuragi. Right. That picture. And she had been there when they had pulled him out of the hole. And...
"Is this Tokyo 3?" he asked, tentatively. "Is my father here?"
"Of course, of course he is," the woman replied, flipping a wet braid over one shoulder. "Now I need you to put that down and come with me."
"I d-don't know how to s-swim," Shinji said. "I can't. How did I get out here? There was... I was on a train, and then..."
"I can get you back to shore, Shinji" Katsuragi was saying. "But I need you to drop that, first. You have to leave it, and everything to do with it, here in the water. Okay?"
Shinji proffered his hands again, to show her they were empty. Only one of them wasn't. In his right hand was a bloody column of grayish bone. His hand was fastened so tightly around the gristly item that he had to use his free hand to disengage the fingers and let the bone - the spine- splash into the water... water, he noticed, that was tinted red...
He did not scream, but an acid heat bloomed in his gut - like his heart had exploded and the bits had drained into his stomach. Because, see: there were bodies in the water. All around him, floating on the surface. How had he not seen them before? Bobbing torsos. Half-sunken severed wings. Tufts of down. A simmering beneath the water as fish nipped at the carcasses, jerking decapitated limbs about in a parody of life.
And the babies. The... yeah, the goslings. They were orbiting him in a rough circle six feet across, honking quietly as they navigated the ruined remains of their parents.
Nnnghr.
Don't throw up.
"...what...?" he finally managed. And that was all he said, the only word he could give form to. He repeated it constantly as Katsuragi got behind him and walked him back to the shore.
Men in black all along the lake's edge. Company men. Dad's company. What was it called? The men chased the goslings away, gave him and Katsuragi towels, and then loaded them into the back of a van. There was another woman there. Another person from the dream-haze, though Shinji would have figured the blonde hair an embellishment of his imagination.
"Are you quite done?" the blonde woman asked, glaring between Shinji and Katsuragi.
"I... yes?" he tried. "I'm, I'm sorry. This is Tokyo 3, right?"
"Do you know who I am?" Katsuragi put in.
"Katsuragi," Shinji repeated the name. "You work for... my father. He's... everyone's boss."
"And where does your father work?" the blonde woman asked, her inflection betraying... amusement?
"Nerve," Shinji said, which was to say: shinkei.
"No," the woman corrected, and then said a foreign word.
"Nerufu?" Shinji tried.
"And what does nerufu do?" the woman continued.
"I... reconstruction?" he guessed. There had been big construction equipment all around when they had pulled him out of that... hole. "What do you call it... urban reclamation?"
The blonde snorted, looked down at something in her hands, some kind of thin computer.
And then she said another foreign word.
"What?" Shinji asked.
"What?" the blonde replied, not looking up. "What did I just say?"
A long word. Or maybe a phrase. Maybe just foreign-sounding. Maybe she was clipping the phonemes. Had a speech impediment, or something. "E-ba-n-ge-ri-o-n-u?" Shinji tried. "Like. The seafood dish?"
The blonde woman sighed. Turned her glare to Katsuragi.
"Are you quitehappy, Captain?" she asked.
"I just ran a division-wide operation in an urban area and everything went to spec," Katsuragi - who was apparently a Captain - like, the military? - replied. "And the kid is responsive. So yeah, I'd say its a pretty good day so far. Hair's a little wet."
The blonde returned to her slim computer. Katsuragi wore a thin, faltering smile. Shinji was too confused to say anything. So he didn't.
The van doors opened eventually. The outside had changed. The lake had been replaced with an athletic field, and the crowd of men in black had been replaced with middle-school students being dragged through a P.E. class.
The blonde got out of the van and vanished around the side without another word.
"Um," Shinji leaned out of the back, noticing the kids on the athletic field noticing him. "What should I be..."
Katsuragi was escorting him out of the van and onto the field before he could fully register what was going on.
"Come on," she urged. "You've been on break for long enough, Shinji. Time for you to meet your new classmates."
"Buh..." Shinji was looking down at himself. He had been dried off, but he was still covered in lake and red... stuff. Wait. Break?
"Yeah, this is way better than you sitting around the apartment getting bossed around by a penguin, isn't it?" the crazy woman continued, leading Shinji around the edge of the track.
"Penguin?" Wait. Why is there a penguin in... "What apartment?!"
"You'll be living with me while you're in Tokyo 3," Katsuragi replied.
The kids were still looking at him. Starting to drift toward Shinji and his escort. Girls. He wanted to curl into a ball and disappear. Being dragged along by an adult. Being covered in filth. Why was this happening? Where was Father?
inSANITY METER! 0%... 15%...
Shinji started to ask the Captain, but stopped. If he asked about Father, the woman might actually produce him. They worked together, right? And hadn't...
Shinji stopped.
Hadn't this woman been part of his father's trick? Luring him down to Tokyo-3 by train, then stranding him in the middle of a... something military. Shattering buildings. Fire and darkness and... ngggh.
inSANITY METER! 15%...35%...
"Come on, Shin," the woman had noticed him stopping, was coming back toward him. Entirely too familiar. Too close. Much too much too much...
He stepped away from her, hands up. "Ngggh," he had to force the word out: "No. I'm not going anywhere with you." The picture. Sending him a picture. Luring him to the cold and the dark. Nnnnaarrgh.
inSANITY METER! 35%...40%...
The athletic field was ringed with chain-link eight feet high. If he could get past Katsuragi and make for the break in the fence where it ran into the hill, or he could turn around and head back toward the van. But those company men would probably be there. Maybe if he just headed across the field and up to the school...
"Please don't run, Shinji," the woman was saying. Something in her voice made him focused on her again. She wasn't trying to close the distance between them. Wasn't even tensed. And her voice: wet and brittle. Tired. It sounded honest, and that in itself was... wrong. There was something... disproportionate here. How could she be so... investedin his response?
She had pulled him out of the hole... taken him to a place, a series of vehicles connected together like a transforming robot. And the blonde had been there, and Father... but what had happened after that?
"H-how long have I been here?" he asked.
"You've been in Tokyo 3 for nearly a month," the woman answered, arms crossing. She wasn't looking at him, now.
inSANITY METER! 40%...50%...
Shinji looked down at his feet. Looked at the students, who were now being herded away by a teacher. Looked up into the sky, a blue sheet with a couple of white burns set in it. And, oh.
Now Katsuragi was standing over him. That was strange. How.
"How?" he asked, grinding the back of his head against the track's rubber grip. "I was at the train station. There was an explosion. And... and then the lake, and now. A month."
"You were... involved," Katsuragi said, offering him her hand. "There was an incident. You were hurt."
"My head?" Memory loss, right? He ran both hands through his scalp, expecting to find some evidence of a wound.
"Sorta," the woman replied, half a grin on her face. She waggled her fingers. "Come on, thinking about it won't help. Getting back to your feet, that's the thing, isn't it?"
inSANITY METER! 50%...40%...
The Captain pulled him up easily, and kept a grip while he worked through a wave of dizziness. When he was settled, mostly by fixating on his hands and assuring himself that the world was, for certain, not going to flash forward another month, Katsuragi continued up the track to what Shinji figured had to be an equipment shed. Or a pump house. Or something. Exactly what it was remained a mystery, because Katsuragi took him behind the building, not into it.
There was a man back there. A company man. The Captain clapped the man on the shoulder as she walked past.
"This guy is going to be giving you a quick bath, 'kay?" Katsuragi said, waving Shinji up against the wall. "Then you can dry off and," she walked around the corner and came back with a plastic bag, "put this on."
Shinji looked from Katsuragi to the company man. The man, suddenly, had a loop of hose in one hand and a spigot in the other. The hose was hooked up to the side of the building, and to the spigot.
inSANITY METER! 40%...45%...
"Be thorough, please," Katsuragi was saying. She had put down the dry cleaning bag and was heading back around the building.
"Oh," she leaned back, "and that means you have to strip down. Sorry. But if you don't get yourself super clean, there's a chance you'll get infected with that brain-eating parasite that grows in lake water."
"...Miss Katsuragi?" he called after her. "Why" didn't you take me to a bath house. Or the showers at school? Why are you doing this to me?
But Shinji didn't get a chance to ask even one of those questions, because something had slid across the cement and come to rest against the side of his foot. It was a bar of soap. He looked up to the company man just in time to catch a bottle of what turned out to be shampoo.
"Hey!" the boy complained, "you could'aaaaaaahhhg!"
The company man had squeezed the spigot.
Cold cold cold coldcoldcoldcold...
inSANITY METER! 45%...50%...55%...
Shinji had never had to introduce himself before, and kinda flailed through it. Name, date of birth, blood-type location of the unincorporated village from whence he came. After, he sat down and tried to be invisible and resist the urge to scratch his skin too openly. Felt like lake scum and goose gore had soaked into his skin, teriyaki into eggplant.
inSANITY METER! 60%...
He'd showered thoroughly, the disgust at being so filthy overriding immediate terror at being naked and outside. The company man had said nothing to him, just kept the hose pointed at Shinji until the boy was finished washing the shampoo foam from his hair - that had made it easier. But now, of course, that deferred shame was heaping up on him as well.
inSANITY METER! 65%...70%...
The class passed slowly. People kept looking at him. Shinji tried hiding behind the laptop the school had given him when he had signed in. The teacher was talking about citrus fruits, and how the modern, post-Impact climate had driven most 'natural strains' to effective extinction, and how companies that designed 'modified strains' had squelched efforts to preserve the 'natural strains' because of patents, somehow. And then the 'modified strains' had been found to be 'carcinogenic.' The teacher broke for lunch by concluding that the chain of events he had just described was how the majority of genetics companies that existed pre-Impact were now in a form of corporate indentured servitude to the United Nations, because of a surprisingly literal construction of the 'crimes against nature' statute in the UN charter.
Clearly something significant had been said in all that, but Shinji had no idea what. According to the schedule he had picked up downstairs, the previous hour was supposed to have been a lecture on "Pre-Calculus."
inSANITY METER! 75%...
When class broke, he fled. As he cleared the room, someone shouted after him: 'Ikari,' but he pretended not to hear. The whole situation remained surreal. The city had hot and cold running crazy. Everything here was inexplicable, he had no context. He had lost a month. He lived with a woman he did not know and, for some reason, a penguin. The acid warmth in his stomach had turned ticklish, like butterflies, or maybe ants. If he started giggling, Shinji was not entirely certain he would be able to stop.
inSANITY METER! 85%...
"Ikari."
He looked up, smile fixed in place. He had been hiding beneath the stairs on the basement level. It was quiet here. If anyone saw him and asked, he planned to say he had a migraine. Teacher used to do that, sequester himself in the school basement on break with a bag of ice and a glass of clear liquid that was not water.
The lie died on his lips, though. The person that had spoken to him, the girl, had blue hair. She was covered in bandages, and held a plastic shopping bag in her one good hand.
Crazy. Hot, and cold.
"Hi," Shinji managed, aware he had waited too long to respond. "Uh, I have a migraine. I was just trying to, uh, do I know you?"
Something vague. A hint of memory that was, for some reason, more tactile than visual. The blue hair, like a punk, like a Tokyo idol. But not the metallic, shimmering blue of a wig. Some kind of subtle dye, maybe after bleach. Her hair was lighter than the sky, but just and only.
"We were in proximity at Dr. Akagi's lab," the girl replied. "May I sit."
Shinji gestured. Why not. Who was Akagi?
The girl produced two bento from the plastic bag, and wordlessly handed one over to Shinji.
"Um," he said, weighing the plastic container. "Thanks?"
"Captain Katsuragi instructed me to provide you with food," the girl replied, opening her own meal. "This is from the store. It is adequate."
Shinji opened the bento. It was a small vegetable meal, prepared with too much brine. He picked at it while the blue-haired girl ate.
"Your parents work at nerufu too?" he finally asked.
"My guardian," the girl responded.
Shinji stared down at his bento. Began to speak, then stopped. He wanted to ask a question, but couldn't decide on which to ask first. Normally he was afraid of other people, girls especially, but this place, this city, it seemed dangerous. Too dangerous to be shy about.
"Do you know," he said the words carefully, "what is going on?"
The girl shrugged.
"Did Katsuragi tell you why I'm here? I mean, did she tell you anything else?"
The girl nodded, and withdrew a mobile phone from her schoolbag and handed it to Shinji. "I was told to give you this."
Shinji turned the phone over in his hands. Clicked through the contacts. Nothing.
"I was also instructed to inform you that Captain Katsuragi will be picking you up from school at 1600 hours," the girl continued. "Do you require medical attention?"
Shinji blinked. Right. Migraine. "No," he said, looking away, "no, its fine now."
They sat in silence, eating, until the bell rang. As the girl got up, Shinji stood with her. Nothing important had passed between them, in fact, barely anything at all, but she was his age, and connected to nerufu, and that meant... something.
"I'm Shinji Ikari," he said, offering a school bow. "I guess you knew that already. Um, who are you?"
"I am
(((Rei Ayanami)))
Age: 14
Injuries: Acceptable
Measurements: Unimportant
Fun Fact: Unavailable
Blood Type: Classified.
the girl replied, and then started up the stairs. Shinji waited until the sound of her footfalls were indistinguishable from those of the students overhead. He was looking down at his bento, thinking: about the gossip he had overheard between classes - giant robots that lived in the hills, or maybe just among the hills; and nerufu; and a person with natural blue hair and - he had noticed it only when they stood - one good blood redeye. And mostly, right then, he was thinking about how hungry he wasn't. How unnecessary the food in the bento in his hand seemed. And eventually, he figured out what that meant.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The restrooms were nice. Western. Shinji opted to throw up in the toilet, rather than the sink. The stall felt safe. Enclosed. When he was done he pointedly did not look at what had spilled from him, already certain most of it would be raw meat and pasted down. Those bodies in the lake, he could sort of remember what he had done to them. The feel of spurting blood across the roof of his mouth and flesh ripping beneath resisting feathers. The death sounds of birds. The crunch of hollow bones.
inSANITY METER! 90%...
He flushed the toilet, then bent down and threw up again.
Later, he was at the sink, swishing and spitting. There were a few stray bits of feather stuck between his teeth that had probably been there all day. Nnngh. Filthy creatures. He was probably infected with some strange bird disease now.
Which really didn't matter if he had some other, different defect that made him lose his memory and occasionally go completely rabid.
Shinji looked at himself in the mirror, carefully, looking for scars. Something was missing in his understanding - something important had been destroyed, or something unwanted had been gained, and now he was the kind of person that killed and ate geese. The idea that there was raw meat in his stomach had driven him to vomit, but even now he didn't... feel bad. He knew that what he had done was wrong, that you're supposed to respect living things on general principle, but the idea of all those dead birds hanging in the water did not fill him with any sort of shame or disgust. Eating them had clearly been too much, and the violence itself was distasteful - or maybe simply inexplicable, since Shinji was not normally a very physical person - but the idea that a flock of geese had been ended, that that particular flying V would never again cross the sky, that seemed okay...
He leaned in closer to the mirror, focusing on his right eye. It was... bleeding? A sickle of red traced the underside of his blue iris. The missing color seemed to be oozing upward, from the top, a pale blue-green spilling into the white.
Shinji blinked. There was no pain. Gingerly, he pressed a finger to the eye, to examine the extent of the injury. A thin membrane came away with his fingertip, circular and painted a patterned blue. Shinji examined the object with growing panic. Had he just removed something important? Had he just made it worse?!
He looked back to the mirror. The iris was now blood red.
inSANITY METER! 95%...
"Shitfuck." It was the most profane thing Shinji could think of, which was, in turn, all he was capable of saying. He leaned in quickly, inspecting the newly-revealed iris, his mouth a twist of whimpers. He examined the other eye, the surface of which did not peel off when he touched it. He examined the object he had removed from his eye. Smelled it. Bit it. It was tough - he felt it crack between his canines, and the painted blue pattern blurred when he rubbed a finger across it.
More time at the mirror, taking in the shape of his eyes, looking for less obvious differences, and finding none. The red eye didn't look like it had been hurt. There was no depression where the surface had been scraped away, or any kind of pain. Hesitantly, Shinji brought the concave membrane up and pressed it against his eye. The blue cover was no longer perfect, but it still -fit- there. It wasn't a part of him, but it was supposed to be there.
He waited until the end of the hour, then went back to class. The teacher didn't notice him come in; the old man was talking about the general re-purposing of industry post-Impact by way of a general freeze to certain types of financing, a rationing of corporate growth, and the creation and socialization of the International Patent Bank. According to Shinji's schedule, all of this in some way related to "Chemistry."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"Hey."
Shinji looked up. There was a girl standing at his desk. At least, the person was wearing a girl's uniform. 'Her' hair was so short he had to take it on faith that the school did not allow cross-dressing. City people were weird.
Apparently class was over. People were leaving. He had lost another two hours. The laptop's blinking cursor had hypnotized him into a doze.
"Yeah, Ikari," 'she' was saying in a decidedly female voice. "Don't know how they did things in that podunk shithole you came from, but we actually show up to class after lunch."
Female voice, decidedly unfeminine speech. Shinji cocked his head to one side, thinking. Breasts weren't obvious, but she was leaning toward him. Face was angular, the right shape for a girl, but 'her' arms were a little hairy.
"This whole place is insane," he said by way of reply. "Hey, are you really a girl?"
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
inSANITY METER! 100%...100%...100%...
At 4:15 a partially-demolished blue sports car pulled up to the school. Katsuragi got out and made her way over to where Shinji lay, in the shade of a retention wall. He was staring into the sky, one eye at a time. To his normal eye, the sky was still blue, just and only. His red eye, by contrast, was showing him some kind of weird, throbbing rainbow that seemed to hang at various depths in the sky. When he looked down, the effect went away. He was trying to decide if this was some kind of unique property of the eye, or damage that was only visible under certain situations.
"Hey," Katsuragi said.
The shade was cool, and nice. Made the air smell sweeter. At least Tokyo 3 had shade. At this point, Shinji would not have been at all surprised to find the city's madness to extend to natural constants, replacing all relaxing shadows with pockets of unbearable steam, hot coals, or maybe just a biting, impossible cold. To Katsuragi, he shrugged.
The woman knelt, legs together. "How'd it go?"
Shinji showed her the phone. Pressed the phone's stubby antennae into the flesh below his red eye, where his class representative had hit him. Giggled, and then managed to stop.
Katsuragi got down on her hands and knees now, leaning in close, staring into the red eye. Then she smiled, and stood, and for the second time that day, pulled Shinji to his feet.
"Its going to be fine, okay?" she said, confident. "The first day always sucks."
inSANITY METER! 100%... 99%...
Shinji shrugged a third time, and wordlessly was led into her horrible, horrible car.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
They were going to see a Dr. Akagi, Katsuragi explained. She would want to check up on him and replace the contact lens, if that was alright. Shinji shrugged, and then clarified his position by saying "okay."
inSANITY METER! 99%...98%...
They drove into a machine, which carried them underground. Underground, and high in the air. Something his father had done, Katsuragi explained. Excavation. Amber light pushing into the car, water and amber-green trees far below. He had been taught about these at school, massive shelters dug into the earth by governments across the world in the years following Impact. Proof against luminal comets. A geo-front.
They parked, and she dragged him down a series of moving walkways. A curious symbol recurred in prominent places, and he asked about it. The red half-leaf with the characters N-E-R-V - that was nerufu's logo. Nerufu. Neruvu... Nervu...vuh...vvv... NERV!
inSANITY METER! 98%...90%...
"There you go," the Captain complemented. Shinji blushed. He hadn't realized he had spoken aloud.
"So," he started, and almost couldn't continue. "So, why am I here? I mean. Why did Father
inSANITY METER! 92%...
want me to come here?"
"There's something we need you to do," Katsuragi replied. "Something very special, something that only you can do."
"Pilot, you mean," he remembered. "But don't you have people for that? I mean, specialists? Military?"
"Nope," the woman said. "No one but you can do this, and the thing you'll be piloting, its really quite... potent."
"Ebangerionu?" he tried the word out. "No. No, someone told me this before. Back then. Evan...gerionu. GeRuhion. Evangerion."
The woman nodded. "Evangelion."
NERV. Evangelion. Things were becoming a little clearer.
inSANITY METER! 85%...
"You met Rei," Katsuragi was saying. "She's like you. An Evangelion pilot."
"And an Evangeri..luh...li...lion is what?"
"You don't remember?"
"...no, I guess not."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The kid was encased in impact gel and dosed to the gills on anesthetic. The drugs had quickly dragged him under, way past REM-state, where he remained as the automated medical system took skin, blood, and marrow samples in a process that physically hurt Misato to watch.
"How many times are we going to have to do this?" she asked Ritsuko.
"This is a bad idea," the other woman said by way of reply. "Him being a pilot. There are five points on the Third Child's body that are more Eva than human. If someone acquired a single cell from any of those areas, they'd have access to something uncomfortably close to the entire Unit One genome. Letting him off-base is a huge risk."
"He's a kid," Misato replied. "He needs to be around other kids. Section 2 has that school buttoned up, and if someone wanted your precious data there are facilities less-secure than this one. Wasn't Berlin compromised a week ago?"
"That was a cyber-attack," Ritsuko corrected. "Current science can't fully sequence Eva DNA. The production process is... analog. A hacker could maybe steal something to do with building an Eva from DNA, but without an actual sample? Useless."
"And if they did get a cell from Shinji," Misato came back. "...or Russia, or Germany, or America, or... we're building a production facility in Australia too, right? If someone got a cell, I suppose they'll also have a two-hundred-trillion yen production facility and enough secrecy to build an Eva without alerting us or the UN? And what are they going to put on this incredible secret Evangelion, aluminum foil? Don't those armor plates cost like..."
"It would reflect poorly on NERV," Ritsuko interrupted, detached. "And development decreases the cost of production. Unit Zero took six years to build. Unit One took six months. Unit Two all but leapt from Gregor Langley's forehead, fully-grown. And now Matsushiro is working on a mass-production genome variation that can grow an Eva to term in a month..." she paused. "An Eva that can also grow its own armor, and weaponry."
The doctor waited. When it was apparent Misato had no quick reply, she finished: "With the right information, a single cell can be replicated a near-unlimited number of times - into a forty-foot tall weapon of mass destruction."
For a time, the observation booth was blessedly quiet.
"What happened to his eye?" the doctor asked.
"You'd know better than me, Ritsu."
"I mean the bruise, where did the bruise come from?"
Misato leaned against the observation port. The skin around the kid's red eye was going purple. "Huh," she said. "No idea."
"The tissue trauma makes for good readings," the doctor said. "Look, see this?" she gestured at the monitor. "This line is the metabolic function localized around that injury. Its human-normal for a subcutaneous injury. Nanometer says the DNA is all his, too. Means the foreign tissue in the eye and optic nerve hasn't gone opportunistic."
"But this stuff is affecting him, right?"
"Certainly," Akagi said. "Section Two clocked him topping 65 kilometers an hour this morning, and according to your report, he was able to haul 70 kilos of dead weight without slowing down."
"When did... HEY!" Misato kicked the other woman's chair into a spin.
Ritsuko let the chair settle to a stop. "His aggressive actions, however, don't track with this... augmentation. Like I said, from what we can tell, his brain isn't contaminated at all. And we already know this behavior pre-dates him getting into Unit One. It appears to be an unrelated psychosis."
"...good. So that, at least, we can fix. Bitch."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Shinji woke up on a gurney. His body was numb, and mostly wrapped in gauze. Wonderful. Sitting upright, he unwrapped one arm, to reveal a series on circular bandages the size of a hundred-yen coin, secured with spirals of medical tape.
"Don't move," Dr. Akagi said, coming up behind him. "You're up too early. Hold still." Something was pressed against his neck, and there was a slight pinching sensation. The numbness intensified - he could no longer feel the gurney beneath him. The doctor was saying something to Katsuragi. Something something... purification. Unforeseen effect.
inSANITY METER! ...NULL-NULL-NULL-NULL-NULL...
Am I better now? Shinji tried to give form to the idiot question, but all his mouth did was hang open and drool. Gross. He tried to wipe it off, which sent a tingle of sensation through his arm. He was screwed up. Comfortable, in a mental haze. They put him in a wheelchair.
Eeeevangelion. Katsuragi said the word, and it drifted through Shinji's mind in slow motion. Something foreign. Those el sounds. It was the reason he was here. Something he was going to pilot. Something Rei Ayanami piloted. That meant they would be working together? Rude girl. Quiet. Weird hair...
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Misato leaned forward to make out the kid's muttering, looked back to Akagi with a conspiratorial grin.
"He doesn't realize he's doing that, does he?" she asked.
Ritsuko shrugged. "He's processing a huge amount of dophymethylmin. He should be unconscious - comatose. The foreign-tissue areas must be doing something, passively purifying his blood. I just don't know. We're still vetting medical staff with appropriate clearance to do a full work-up on his physiology. Its lucky the general anesthesia still works at all."
"You realize," Misato said, her grin now tight and angry, "that if you did put him into a coma, we would have no active pilots, right?"
"The timeline for the First Child's activation trial is being accelerated," Ritsuko replied. "And this kid is dangerous, Misato. In all kinds of ways."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Ugly purple metal thing. Statue. Crumpled, elongated, black pits like eyes... eyes? Eyes!
inSANITY METER! ...NULL!NULL!NULL!NULL!...
Shinji was out the chair and ghosting off the platform. Still couldn't feel anything, not the temperature of the room, or the pressure of his bare feet on metal. He was off-balance though, spilled to one side, nearly slid off the platform. Dr. Akagi was laughing.
Flat head. Like a fish, a fish that lived at the bottom of the ocean. Purple metal flat fish with black eyes and a mouth and a horn and. And Katsuragi was coming at him, not freaking out, and Dr. Akagi was still laughing, so. So maybe he could just calm down. Just. Just. Just calm down.
It must be a statue. Yeah. Something not alive.
"Yeah," Katsuragi agreed. "Its a machine, see? And its turned off. It won't move. It can't hurt you." And then she said: "Akagi, shut up."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
So the Evangelion was a weapon. A huge machine on two legs. Father
inSANITY METER! ...NULL!...NULL!
had built it.
Evangelion could move like a person, and use weapons. This was explained to Shinji as he shuffled up and down the catwalk, his gaze never never never leaving the creature's face.
This is Unit One, hello. Purple and black and green. Colors didn't seem that military, or maybe he just didn't know military? It had teeth, and a horn, and was powered by a cable. And Shinji should know all this stuff already, without being told because, it was explained to him, he had already piloted it before. Right after they had pulled him out of the ground. They had sent him against an enemy, and he had obliterated it so completely that only carbon fragments of that enemy's core remained. So he knew all this already. He could pilot it. He could make it move without being taught. He was, Dr. Akagi said, an idiot. Savant. Something.
So. Great. Father
inSANITY METER! ...NULL!...NULL!
had brought him here to do this. To pilot Evangelion (Eva, they kept referring to it as Eva. Less of a mouthful. No el sounds). And great. And great great great. There was his value, in perfect, simple terms. Not a son, a pilot. A user. A... test-type?
And apparently he was the third. The third pilot. The Third Child. He wasn't even father's go-to. Rei Ayanami had been First. But he wouldn't be working with her. Or rather, they would not be in the same Evangelion. There were other Units. Ayanami had her own. It was orange. Shinji was a better pilot than Ayanami, apparently. Unit One liked him. Liked him enough to fix him up after the hole. Liked him enough to scoop out injury and pour itself into him, giving him five areas of what could well be, Akagi claimed, 'undifferentiated neural matter.' Katsuragi said it had made him as mighty as a snow leopard. This observation caused Dr. Akagi to laugh again. Sad-looking woman, somehow. Easy laugh. Desperate.
The Eva had dropped an eye into his head too. It had about a trillion photoreceptors. But there was no need to worry. Katsuragi promised him that they'd find a way to put him right again. And that was... that was...
inSANITY METER! RESTORED!
He could feel the floor beneath his feet. He could feel the air. He could feel a thousand pinpricks of pain all down the length of his body.
"So," he said the word carefully, and when it was produced without slurring or drool, he finished: "that's a giant robot."
"If you like," Akagi said, at the same time Katsuragi was saying: "Yes."
"You want me to pilot a giant robot."
"Yes," the women said it together.
He could taste the air now. It was bitter, unfamiliar. Probably given off by the bizarre purple fluid most of the Eva was submerged in. "Where is my father?" he asked.
inSANITY METER! MAX%...
"He's... busy," Katsuragi said.
"Yeah," Shinji agreed. "For nine years. Teacher had to schedule our grave visitation a month in advance. I guess he was making this thing, right? That's... nice. I think I want to talk to him now."
"You have a condition, Shinji," Katsuragi said, moving toward him. "We aren't sure what the... parameters are, yet, but being close to your father seems to cause it."
"Where is my father, please?" he tried again.
Katsuragi made him sit back down in the wheelchair, and took him away.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
They had him sleep in the barracks, in a tiny room. He recognized the place. Katsuragi made him promise not to leave, but it wasn't like he had a choice in the matter. He had heard the lock engage when she and Dr. Akagi left.
When he unwrapped the gauze and peeled off a few of the coin-sized bandages, there wasn't a mark on him.
This whole place: Crazy. Hot, and cold.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
LEVEL COMPLETED!
A TRANSFER
(((Shinji Ikari)))
Kills: 13 Geese
KOs: 1 Misato
Highest Combo: 6x
Gained Enemy! Sakkamota-san
Gained Class! 3-B
Gained Associate! Rei Ayanami
Gained Doctor! Akagi
Gained Eva! Unit One
Gained Achievement! Heterochromaniac
Gained Achievement! The Crying Game (1/3)
Gained Achievement! Mumblecore
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Misato Katsuragi)))
Gained Achievement! Gainax Bounce
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Time passed. He slept, and then was woken up by a company man, who had brought him a fresh school uniform, and who drove him to the school.
Class happened. Shinji filtered out the noise coming from the front of the room. He tapped into the laptop listlessly. Behind him and to the left, a company man sat. Before class, the man had announced he was conducting a security survey of the school, but Shinji knew he was really there to watch him.
The bell rang. Lunch. People began to shift out of the classroom. On his laptop, Shinji had typed out:
"flat fish is not dead
it burns hot, and to nothing
Evangelion"
Rei Ayanami came up to him, and offered Shinji another black plastic bento. He eventually summoned the focus and impetus to accept it and cram the too-salty meal into his mouth. The class representative, the maybe-boy Keija Sakkamota, came up as lunch was ending and offered an insincere apology for punching him in the eye. To this, Shinji responded that he understood, and commented that Sakkamota's hobby must leave him very emotional. In Shinji's fugue-state, this seemed like an incisive consideration of the other boy's condition. Sakkamota responded by punching Shinji in the other eye. Behind them the company man tensed, but did nothing.
The bell rang again. Ayanami excused herself and returned to her own classroom. Shinji was sorry to see her go. She was a pilot, after all. He wanted to ask her what that was like. Relatedly, he also wanted to ask her how she had been hurt, and if her bandages were just for show too, and why it was that they shared an eye color. Dr. Akagi had given him another contact lens, which was in place, but the blood eye still saw weird things when he closed the blue one. Thin arches of colorless lightning, patches of odd light on the walls and ceiling that seemed like it could correspond with the wiring of the various fixtures. Did Ayanami see this way, too?
Losing the chance to talk with Ayanami roused Shinji somewhat. For example, he was now aware that Sakkamota and several classmates were looking at him in a very unpleasant way. One of the boys, thin, and with long hair, stared fixedly at him and slowly made a fist. The day passed much slower from that point on. Some of the loud droning from the front of the classroom had became understandable:
Apparently, the post-Impact climate shift had turned most of the Pacific into an ideal breeding ground for the humpback whale. A surprising resurgence in the whaling industry had followed, and the recission of laws protecting that animal, according to the teacher, best embodying the fundamental shift in human priorities post-Impact. All told, an excellent lecture on "Language Arts."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Two days passed. At the end of each, Shinji would hurry outside and into a black van filled with company men, who would transport him back to the barracks. Sakkamota and his friends were the wrong shape, he couldn't fight them, he hadto run away. Dr. Akagi would come by sometime thereafter and take him to 'training,' where he was crammed into a tube and taught to breathe liquid and to center a target in the reticule, then pull the switch.
Until the LCL began to rise around him, Shinji had doubted what Katsuragi and Akagi had said. That he had piloted before. But as he submerged, he had vivid flashbacks of screaming and pounding on the hatch as the liquid soaked into his clothes and mangled eye socket. He had only realized the liquid was like air after being roused from a blackout and finding himself inexplicably alive.
The systems were easy enough to learn. It required some amount of focus, which brought Sakkamota and his gang to mind, but most of the time Shinji did all right. Conversely, moving the Evangelion in the narrow, underground corridor Akagi had provided was all but impossible unless he allowed himself to to losefocus a little - to the point where the arms on the monitor were really his arms, and the forward motion of the Eva's legs only what he would have expected of his own.
Two days of that. Father never appeared. Katsuragi came by to observe, but didn't talk to Shinji at length. And she didn't take him back to the apartment.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
On the morning of the third day, the company man had to walk Shinji through Sakkamota's gang, who had gathered at the school entrance. Apparently, they had decided to kill him. No one touched him, but one of them later went after Ayanami, or tried to. At lunch she informed him that her security detail - her own company man - had been compelled to taze someone who had invaded her personal space. The thin boy with long hair that had made a fist at Shinji had received two million volts of electricity at point-oh-three amperage to the back of the neck.
This focused Shinji's attention. It made him downright sane. And that was annoying, but Ayanami was like him. They were both pilots. Presumably, she had been drowned in LCL and made to walk and turn for three straight hours in a cramped space the length of three soccer fields. And by pointing out Sakkamota-kun's weird obsession with dressing like a girl, Shinji had put Ayanami in harm's way. It was beyond his ability to ignore something like that.
So Shinji Ikari came to, after nearly three days of drifting, into a classroom that was palpably hostile and a computer with a screen full of haiku, the final stanza of which was always "E-van-ge-li-on." Ayanami was sitting with him, Shinji knew, because Katsuragi had asked her to sit with him. In his hand was a black plastic bento, its too-salty contents half-consumed.
"Grah," he said. "Okay."
He had dealt with bullies before. Never a bully that liked to wear dresses, but still. Running away was the best strategy, but if they were going to bring Ayanami into it, confrontation was the only answer. Of course, to Shinji 'confrontation' merely meant 'getting beaten up in a location and time of my own choosing.'
Elementary school had not been fun. At all.
So he stood and wandered the halls until he found Sakkamota-kun and a small harem of girls eating in the entryway. When the group spotted him, they crowded in close, several arming themselves with tennis shoes.
"Sorry," Shinji said.
"You're an asshole," Sakkamota replied. "You're a piece of garbage."
Shinji considered this carefully, and said: "Yes."
Sakkamota pushed him. Told the girls to go away. Pushed him. Pushed him. Told the girls that he was serious, go away, I can handle this wimp. He pushed Shinji into a room recessed from the entryway that looked like a guard's station, or coat check.
"I'm a girl," Sakkamota alleged, pulling at his shirt. Pulling it open. Pulling the plain white bra up.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Keija Sakkamota)))
Class: 3-B
Rank: Student Representative
Gender: Completely and Utterly Unambiguous
Cup size: At leasta C
Shinji's breath caught. The world froze. She was girl. Of course she was a girl. How could he have possibly thought otherwise?
And then she punched him three times, twice in the stomach and once in the jaw. No company man materialized. No taser sent Sakkamota-sanflying forward into a heap of burnt hair and soft, exposed breasts. She pulled her bra down, buttoned up her shirt, kicked Shinji without much force, and left. Shinji's company man, his alleged security detail, shifted to one side to let the girl pass.
Shinji decided that was just about fair.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Two more days passed. The Eva instruction continued, and progressed into the use of knives. The classroom was no longer openly hostile. Ayanami was not accosted again. The thin boy with long hair now had short hair - the tazer had singed him badly. Sakkamota ignored Shinji, and he mostly did likewise. He had seen her chest. She owed him nothing.
Horrible haiku kept appearing on Shinji's computer whenever he drifted off, which was often. The teacher continued to drone on about Second Impact, oftentimes repeating himself - Shinji wasn't sure if this was for effect, or because of dementia. He had mentioned this to Ayanami, who reported a similar situation in her class, 3-A. Apparently the two teachers were identical twins.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The next day there was no school. Katsuragi collected Shinji from his cell and took him to an Eva cage, wherein there was an orange giant robot much like Unit One. It was time for Ayanami to connect with her Eva. To start it up. This did not seem like much of a deal, and Shinji started to lose focus, to fugue. Then Katsuragi told him that the last time Ayanami had tried this, she had been badly injured and spent more than three months in the hospital, so could you please stand up straight and look like you actually give a shit, please?
Shinji focused. He stood up straight. And then he noticed that Father was there. They were in an observation room, dominated by an amber light emitted from monochrome monitors and recessed lighting. One side of the room was composed of two large windows. It was there that Father stood, regarding the orange Eva in the room beyond.
inSANITY METER! MAX%
Shinji started forward. Katsuragi tried to stop him, but it didn't take. A few seconds later she fell off. Company men had materialized from everywhere, were closing in from all directions. No one else noticed. The technicians were attentive to their screens, father kept his gaze out the window. Or, Shinji realized as he got closer, intothe window. The man was looking at Shinji's reflection, looking him right in the eyes. And there was no acid warmth in Shinji's gut now, just a cold gap of nothing. Father. Father. Hey, Father.
SHINJI IKARI has gained CALAMITY TRIGGER!
inSANITY METER! transformed into MANIA!
"Father." They were side by side, looking at one another in the glass.
"It's been awhile," the man responded. "I'm working now."
"You always will be," Shinji responded. "So, why is it you sent for me? Why did you make a giant robot that only I can control?" The fear was there, but detached. He could acknowledge it, and not let it be a part of him.
"You were the only one," his father responded. Shinji examined these words. Found they meant nothing.
"No, I'm the thirdone," Shinji replied. "So why... what is the point of this? Drowning me for fun? Tricking me? Couldn't you have just left me alone?"
"Rei, can you hear me?" Father said, turning away from Shinji. "We're going to start now."
"Yes," Ayanami's voice seeped out of hidden speakers.
Shinji looked out, now at the orange Evangelion. Filtering Father from his focus. Grinding imaginary hollow bones between his teeth.
"Good luck, Ayanami," he said.
"Yes."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The activation was successful. The amber lights turned mostly green. The orange Eva did not move at all, but apparently that was a good thing.
Father went away after the activation. Katsuragi patted Shinji on the shoulder, and took him up, out of the Geo-Front, to a restaurant. He was making progress, she said. He had made a major breakthrough, she said. Shinji couldn't really make sense of any of that. Seeing Father had filled him with a nervous energy, a hungry sort of purpose that mediocre sushi and fried octopus could not sate. He needed something. Needed to spread it open and pulp what was inside, to feel it smear hot onto him and grow cold.
Once again, he needed the right shape.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
LEVEL COMPLETED!
HEDGEHOG'S DILEMMA,
or,
RIGHT IN THE FACE!
(((Shinji Ikari)))
Gained Title! Garbage
inSANITY METER! transformed into MANIA!
Description: Amassed madness becomes an active poison, sickening the heart and mind.
Use (before decay): Unleashes inSANITY MODE! at 50% reserve.
Gained Item! CALAMITY TRIGGER!
Description: Rare item gained only when inSANITY METER! is at MAX%
Use: Unleashes user's latent psychoses.
Gained Achievement! Neon Genesis Matsuo Bashō
Gained Achievement! The Crying Game (2/3)
Gained Achievement! The Crying Game (3/3)
Gained Achievement! BOOBIES!
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Rei Ayanami)))
Orders followed: 15
Gained Eva! Unit Zero
Gained Achievement! Guardian Zero
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Keija Sakkamota)))
KOs: 1 Shinji Ikari
Highest Combo: 3x
Gained Achievement! Coat Closet Exhibititionist (1/2)
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Unit Zero's activation had been without real incident, but by the time Katsuragi had gotten Shinji to the restaurant, he had begun to feel it: a swell of energy raising him up, sweeping him forward; a MANIA. The past began to fade, to fray. Loose sushi and flash-fried squid took on an absurd importance: the best meal Shinji had ever eaten - and maybe his last. Old memories, of carnival sweets and red meat and buttered fish falling apart in savory curves were simply out of his mind, locked, inaccessible. Everything about his surroundings became fundamentally unfamiliar, unknowable, threatening.
He managed to keep all this to himself until the barracks cell was closed and locked, and he was alone, whereupon Shinji closed his eyes and tried to count to ten, to give Katsuragi a little time to get out of earshot. He started screaming at four, and spent most of the night knotted in bedsheets, sweating and staring at the ceiling, making it his whole world. The walls of the room crowded into the corners of his vision, looming threats. Even the ceiling became an enemy, crowding into his mind so completely that Shinji began to suspect that it had always been. That everything before it was a lie. That he was a dream of the ceiling viewing itself, and soon it would wake up and he would vanish in a puff of logic; either unmade in a moment, or falling into some deep, pitiless black void.
By the time the company man knocked on his door, Shinji was... indifferent. He had spent all night sweating and being mentally tortured by his own imagination; he was dehydrated and exhausted; his death no longer held any meaning. So rolling out of bed, being assailed on all sides by treacherous floors and uncertain walls, was now something he could do without dissolving into a screaming, gibbering mess.
Wonderful.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
By the time his transport arrived at school, the MANIA was seeping back into Shinji's mind. It provided him with rational reasons why he shouldn't be indifferent to his own impending death, and solutions to stave that death off. As the transport door rolled open, the MANIA informed Shinji that they were ten blocks from the lake. As a matter of fact, if Shinji were to look to his right, he'd be able to see the flat flickering silver of water, wherein dwelt the right shape. The MANIA massaged its suggestions by reiterating the dangers of chinstrap geese, and how the school could be blown up by inexplicable monsters and become a cold and darkhole into which the geese could charge, in order to devour him alive.
Even in the face of this irrefutable logic, Shinji was unable to act. Still too indifferent. He got out of the transport and let a company man escort him to the entrance. He did not look to his right. He did not bolt, and rush the lake. He did not feel the wonderful release that came with a chinstrap coming apart in his hands, turning a squawking would-be attacker into quiet, twitching ropes of meat. Shinji kept his eyes forward. Pretended that the school and all of his surroundings were familiar, and that every person he laid eyes upon was not a potential victim for the threat he had been too cowardly to deal with.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"ending flat walls trick
me. apartment. must have. please.
evangelion
fine kitchen apart
meant for me, fresh clear. Father
evangelion
She: Katsuragi,
shapes wrong shapes hurt you
evangelion
dark, cold, fighting pain
blood warming, bones cracking. Die.
I will kill them all."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The morning sped past. The class had P.E., but Shinji was excused. The company men were worried he'd go snow leopard on his classmates at track. He sat on a bench by the athletic field, laptop balanced on trembling knees. The day was clear and hot but parts of Shinji's body were ice-cold, and he was sweating again. A headache was building behind his eyes, and he knew if the pain didn't stop growing it would swallow him up, and he would die. It would be a better way to go, dissolving in that slow build. Better than the spikes and strips of agony that dulled with time. Better than to be torn apart slowly, bit by bit. This was fine. This was good!
At lunch he retreated to the basement, to under the stairs. It was dark and close down there. A perfect place to shiver and shudder and sweat. He sat compact, knees on the floor, bent over, hands over his head. They were close: he could think of nothing else. They were coming. They would be here soon.
"Ikari," they said, and he laughed. Of course they could talk. "May I sit?" they continued.
His laugh dissolved into a giggle. Come on, he thought. Come on come on come on come on come on come on come on COME ON!
Something touched his shoulder, and he exploded. One arm whipped out, knocking what had touched him aside, and he was up and then falling, clawed hands descending and blue
Blue.
He stopped, then reached out and grabbed the front of Rei Ayanami's uniform, holding her upright. Keeping her from spilling over. The girl's expression was one of angry calm. She righted herself, whirled out of his grasp, picked up her schoolbag, and left. A black plastic bento lay spilled across the floor, where Shinji had knocked it.
No. No, that was... It was a trick. They had tricked him, before, and now they had made him attack Ayanami. He hesitated a moment, considered diving under the stairs and never coming out, then decided to follow her, catching up with the First Child on the stairs between the first and second floors.
"I'm sorry," he blurted, as he closed on her. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry Ayanami. I didn't mean to do that. I didn't want... I didn't mean to... hit you. I don't want to hit you. I don't want to hit anyone."
The girl turned, her expression still that angry calm - eyes narrowed slightly, jaw tensed, mouth a straight line. "I was ordered to provide you with food. You spilled that food. This is not my concern."
"Not that," Shinji replied. "It doesn't matter. I'm okay. I'll eat the food anyway. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you off."
"I am unafraid," the girl responded as she climbed the stairs. "I am removing myself from the vicinity of your psychotic episode."
"No!" hearing the word 'psychotic' tore into him. "No, its okay, see?" he started after her. "I thought you were them. I thought you'd come to get me. To tear me up and kill me. I'm sorry. I'm..."
A sound in the distance. A wail, growing, then fading. Students began to scream. Ayanami was coming back to him now, and grabbed his arm.
"I am not a goose," she said, firmly, staring into him. "I am not the enemy. Do you understand?"
Shinji nodded, grateful. He was sorry. He knew she wasn't the enemy.
She pulled him down the stairs and out of the building. The black van was waiting for them.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The entry plug pressed around him, a comfort. The tapered ends of the cylinder were hard to discern, and it was like the walls, ceiling and floor had wrapped around him, letting him keep all of them in sight. The plug suit was another layer, and it felt different from clothes. More like armor that left only his head exposed.
An enemy had come. Katsuragi said so. They had put him in the entry plug, but were going to let Ayanami try her luck before they 'deployed' him. Katsuragi had explained this on the radio, saying that they did not want to put a less-experienced pilot at risk unnecessarily, and that Rei had been training her whole life for this sort of thing, so have some faith, okay?
So he sat, and he waited, and he enjoyed the therapeutic geometry of the entry plug.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Unit Zero was a prototype. It had not been built for actual use; it was, at best, a proof-of-concept for Unit One. Data obtained from Ayanami's first (failed) activation attempt had refined both the various entry plug technologies, and the general activation protocols. If the Fourth Angel had not been so discourteous as to show up before a few Production Models could be delivered, Unit Zero probably would have never been removed from cryo-stasis.
Unit Zero was a prototype. It had no shoulder pylons, its battery supply was externally mounted, and it had no sensor suite to speak of. And even worse, Unit Zero had been built before the various Evangelion support technology standards had been finalized, including the launch catapult system. Since Unit Zero lacked shoulder pylons or accessible hardpoints, Ritsuko had arranged for an improvised compression harness to be mounted to the catapult. The harness held Unit Zero in place long enough for it to be delivered to the surface.
Unit Zero was a prototype, and it was with trepidation that Misato Katsuragi deployed it into combat. Unit One had the pylon system, and mounting hardpoints, and a sensor suite that could both discern and tolerate the face of God, but the pilot... Katsuragi trusted Shinji, but was pretty certain he was not entirely in control of himself.
Unit Zero was a prototype, which explained its first contact with the Fourth Angel, and the protracted retreat that followed. The orange Eva had reached the surface and its compression harness had promptly experienced some catastrophic failure, a short forming between the harness and Unit Zero's power cable - which had also been improvised to mesh with modern Eva tech - effectively electrocuting Unit Zero.
By the time the entry plug computer had re-asserted dominance over Unit Zero's nervous system and Rei had been able to rip herself free of the harness and rail, the Angel had nearly been on top of her. This first contact had been brief but violent, the Angel's crackling-neon energy whips carving through buildings and Unit Zero's umbilical cable. The orange Eva itself was spared only because its AT field slowed the whips and partially mitigated the heat they produced.
At Misato's helpful direction, Rei bugged out. Ritsuko and Ibuki were setting up a fallback position on the city's western rise. Shinji was waiting to be deployed in Unit One, his face an impossible picture of placid myopic intensity.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Eventually, the radio crackled to life. Katsuragi again. She sounded anxious.
"Shinji, we're going to start you up now, okay? We're moving you to the launch catapult."
Light shimmering off water, a million shades of white, and the Eva cage faded into view. Too many threatening surfaces. He was totally outnumbered. But he didn't react, didn't attack. If he focused a little, he could make out the metallic surface beneath the video image. It was okay. He was still wrapped up in a million pounds of armored giant robot.
"We're sending you to up to the western rise," Katsuragi was saying, speaking so quickly it was hard to understand, "with a pallet rifle. Get the rifle and wait. Rei is leading the Angel your way."
Angel. The enemy was an Angel?
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Ten minutes later:
Unit Zero: facedown at the bottom of Tokyo 3's western rise, its entry plug ejected. Rei Ayanami was being recovered some distance away.
Unit One: standing on the rise, clutching a spent palette rifle by its top handle, facing down the Fourth Angel. Shinji Ikari was out of his seat, up against the end of the entry plug, getting as close as he could to the impossible enemy. His face was a passing mixture of joy and rage.
Misato Katsuragi: trying to convince Ritsuko and the Commander that simply deactivating Unit One where it stood wouldn't be the most prudent course of action.
Shinji had followed orders, up to a point. He had retrieved the palette rifle and used it to cover Unit Zero at a distance. When Rei had tried her close-quarters gambit and been bodily hurled two miles, right into Unit One, Shinji had managed to catch her and, when it became obvious the geology of the rise would not support the weight of one Eva carrying another, flipped Unit Zero onto its stomach so Rei could eject. Then he had gone back up, dodging around a closing Fourth Angel, and had nearly been to the recovery catapult before he froze.
And now he was pressing his hands against the spherical cap of the entry plug, face contorting to betray thoughts that were wholly unknowable to Misato, but probably completely insane.
"We can't win," Ritsuko was saying. "And that's the end of it."
"He can fight," Misato said. "We've seen what he can do. We just have to give him a chance to..."
"He obliterated the Third Angel, Katsuragi," Ritsuko interrupted. "Totally. And we don't know how or why, just that he somehow managed to intuitivelyuse Unit One's AT field. Which isn't something human beings are supposed to be able to do."
"So he's screwed up in a way that helps us. Not ideal, but how is this bad? What is the point of risking a perfectly functional weapon? Can you say for certain we'll be able to recover Unit One before that thing slices it and Shinji to bits?"
"The AT field is too powerful to be in the hands of someone like him!" Ritsuko was starting to shout. "Providing cover for Rei was fine, but now he's gone into that damn state. If you tell him to 'grab the red ball' again, he could ignite the atmosphere. He could drag the moon out of the sky. He could crack the damn planet in half. But, more to the point, he could shield Unit One from all electromagnetic signals, which mean we won't be able to shut him down! With our luck, he'll form an S2 circuit with the AT Field and go off the grid entirely! Even if he kills the Angel, we can't win!"
"Unit One is all we've got left!" Misato countered. "Even if we manage to recover Zero, the damn thing is too buggy to..."
"Send a code 54-7," came the Commander's voice, from on high. "Captain, do your best to control him."
"What is that?" Misato asked. "Code 54-7."
"Code 54 shuts down the entry plug system," Ritsuko replied. "The syntax gives it a seven minute delay."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
He had noticed them when working up the rise. Hadn't thought anything about them, at first. The enemy, see, had these things on the top of its flattened head. They seemed flush with its shiny skin, or carapace, or whatever. Eyes. Stylized eyes with red pupils.
Katsuragi was talking again. Said everything would go blackin seven minutes. Shinji giggled. The world began to blur...
SHINJI IKARI used MANIA!
inSANITY MODE (RESERVE) ACTIVE!
50%...49.9%...
The enemy had remained stationary for a time, as though watching Shinji watch it. The moment he moved, it responded. The twin lines of neon pink energy whipped towards Shinji, but his hands were already up to block it.
Pain. In his chest, right next to his heart. He couldn't look down, couldn't look away. His arm burned and the thing was looming, right in his face.
"Its them!" Shinji screamed in defiance, addressing all the world. "Don't you get it?!"
One of the tentacles had wrapped around his arm. The armor was beginning to blacken. Shinji snapped the arm back, tauting the tentacle, and then slammed the empty palette rifle into the sizzling pink thread over
"See? I told you!"
and over
"Don't"
and over
"you"
and over
"get it!?"
and over until the it snapped free of the enemy's body and darkened. The cord was baked into his arm, and the palette rifle was in pieces, but he didn't care. The other line of pink energy was stabbing into his chest, and that
was just
fucking
hi-lar-i-ous!
"HAAAAAAAAAAAAARRGHHHHH!" He tackled the floating purple-red thing, and they tumbled down the rise and into the city.
"Hey, Misato Katsuragi Captain ma'am!" Shinji shouted over the blaring white pain in his chest. "Hey, hey, they built a giant robot too!"
There were a set of weird, white insect arms in the thing's stomach. They bit into Unit One's leg. Armor sizzled. Shinji jerked his leg away and punched the recessed cavity the insect arms were housed in. They smashed up easy. Reminded him of Teacher, slipper in hand, crushing cave crickets that would pop around the house in the the cooler months.
Dripping lines of colorless acid were digging into the armor on Unit One's hand. Shinji flicked the wrist, splashing the surrounding building, which instantly began to smoke.
"Hey, that's a pretty good trick!" he said, rising as he surveyed the burning, melting surroundings. "The energy tentacles too! Color's a little off. You want," he stomped on where the thing's 'head' and 'body' joined, "something red" stomp "like, evil looking, okay?" The enemy was trying to jerk its gay little streamer out of his chest, but Shinji held it in place.
"So we're just going to take you open, okay? We're just going to spread you out a bit. I want to see you, I want you to stream out in a great shattered cloud."
A moment of confusion: he couldn't seem to open his mouth. But then came a great cracking sound, and Unit One roared, and Shinji bent down and found some of the enemy's soft meat, where the head coupled to the body, just behind the red ball. The blood was thick and a dark purple. Shinji let go of the thing's tentacle and forced the thing's head and body apart, so he could get further in. The enemy was keening now, a great heavy choral rumble that shook the earth. Interesting resistances yielded to Shinji's teeth, tissues of varying densities ripping, strange orange polyps rupturing. There was no taste, and that seemed like a waste. They had built it for him, knowing he might take it apart. The taste was part of their expression, see? And he couldn't experience it.
Finally, his teeth hit something hard, and he pulled back and shoved a hand in, grasping the object and pulling on it. The enemy's lower body began to compact as the spine was extracted, column by spiked column.
"They did it!" Shinji shouted. "They did it. Tried to get me again. Building a robot. Eva. But they aren't going to get me, they'll never get me, never ever ever get me, I'm going to kill every last one of them!"
He ripped the last of the spine free. The red ball came away too; the top of the spine was fused to it. Shinji tossed the lolling gore aside.
"Now where are you," he mumbled. "I want to see you. I'm going to break you, I'm going to pop each and every one of you. Where is it. Where is your entry plug..."
He tore the thing's body apart, starting at the 'neck', where his teeth had first opened it, and ripping the wound further and further down, spilling more purple blood and unfamiliar meat. The gay pink streamer was now a limp cord and hung forgotten from his chest. The chinstraps had lost. They weren't going to trick him. He slopped through the body, ripping out orange organs until it was clear there was nothing like an entry plug in there, which made no sense.
He was cracking the enemy's head open when the world went dark.
5.5%... 5.0%...
The dark black coldagain. The hissing, honking place. Where he had been thrown like garbage.
4.0%... 2.0%...
He knew he was in Unit One. In the entry plug. Safe. But the dark black coldwas still there, with him. It had come in with him. It was always going to be there, in the past, waiting for him to remember...
0%...
inSANITY MODE EXHAUSTED!
A brief moment before he passed out the space around him brightened, seemed to expand. A room, a white room...
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
And now the world was a traincar, bathed in amber light. Ayanami and Katsuragi were there, and they were talking to him, but Shinji couldn't make out anything they said. He had a goose in his hands. He had ripped off one wing and jammed his hand into the ragged hole, and was in the process of extracting the filthy creature's tiny, beating heart. The creature gave a feeble, delicious honk before dying.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"SHINJI!" the voice brought him out of the comforting warmth of some wonderful dream. Shinji jerked upright, saw Katsuragi and Dr. Akagi and white bedsheets.
"Uh," he looked around. Clearly a hospital. "Did I. Was there another accident?"
A pause.
"Did you slap me?"
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"So the psychiatrist arrived today," Misato said as they left the Third Child's room. "Section Two is trying to find a Japanese-German translator that isn't, you know, me. Worst-case, some poor embassy employee out of Tokyo 2 gets shanghaied for the duration."
"Some good news, at least," Ritsuko replied. "Its going to take ages to disinfect Unit One. I barely have time to be here."
"Yeah, I... appreciate you coming, Ritsu."
"You don't feel safe with him anymore?" Akagi asked, precisely editing the sarcastic tone out of her voice that stating this foregone conclusion required. "I can't believe you were willing to share your apartment with something like that."
"I took precautions," the Captain replied, quietly. "I... its just so. He seemed so normal when I pulled him out of the lake. He was... confused, but he was sane. You saw him. He was normal. Embarrassed. Afraid. He..." they had cleared the hospital corridor, and were in the waiting area. Misato had to sit, and was grateful when Ritsuko joined her. The woman promptly took out her tablet, but still.
"I did this to him. I... I didn't get there in time. He was in that hole because of me and. He's not supposed to be like this. He was normal before. This was supposed to be easy. Well. Easier than this."
"Not your fault," Ritsuko replied, fingers working over her tablet. "The Third Angel emerged faster than predicted. Blame it, not yourself."
"Thanks for the psychology textbook, Ritsu," Misato replied, helpless. Her vision was blurring, aw dammit...
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Everyone at the hospital was nice, but they wouldn't tell him anything. It was getting kinda scary. The last time he had lost memory, he had come-to with a goose spine in one hand and a belly full of pasted down and raw meat. He must have done something worse, this time. The last thing he could recall was Sakkamota's three-combo punch in the school entryway. Had he... maybe... like... had he hurt her? She'd punched him in the face three times, if there was already something wrong with his head...
Shinji spent most of his time out of bed, walking around the room, his imagination torturing him. It helped matters not at all that his body was uninjured, and that he appeared to have lost another week. No, he had done something, something terrible, that people were afraid to talk to him about. Even Katsuragi...
The nurses were polite, if noncommittal. They gave him food and magazines, and always made sure he found his way directly back to his room if they found him wandering the halls. At least they didn't lock the door. Shinji was getting sick of locked doors. Sick of this whole place.
Ayanami came to visit on the third day. Her bandages were off, and for the first time Shinji could see that both her eyes were blood red. He asked her what he had done, why no one was talking to him. She had given him a stack of papers - school assignments - and said the information he wanted was classified.
"But... I did it, so I should be able to know about it, right?" he persisted. "I mean. I. Did I. Was I violenttoward someone? Was it Sakkamota? Did I hurt him, eh, her?"
Ayanami thought about this for a moment.
"This location is not secure," she finally said. "I cannot divulge specific information."
A hot flash of annoyance flashed through Shinji. Was no one going to tell him anything?
"But," she continued, saying the next bit slowly, as though reciting something in a foreign language, "you can know that you saved my life. This is something about which you should be proud. The Commander is grateful."
"The Comma... father?"
The girl nodded. "My guardian."
No further questions for Ayanami, or any response to what she had said. No questions about how he could have possibly saved her life. Shinji went to the bed and laid down and pulled the covers over his head. Eventually, Ayanami left. Shinji yanked the covers back down. The ceiling was blurry. Aw dammit...
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"That DNA is changing," Ritsuko said, as soon as Misato walked through her door.
"Unit One is contaminated?"
"No, the stuff in the Third Child. The extra stuff. I just got the report back." Ritsuko helpfully slid some technical nonsense across her desk for Misato to stare at. "Since we last tested him, the Eva DNA in those points around his body has changed by about 3%. It probably happened during the fight with the Fourth Angel."
"Its spreading?"
"No," Ritsuko gestured to the technical readout. "The code, the composition of the matter in those parts of his body has changed."
"...okay."
Ritsuko sighed. "Okay, let's just... the code doesn't track with anything we've developed, but its still managing to change while maintaining a superficial, functionalresemblance to the Third Child's internal structures."
"...okay."
"That should be impossible, Misato. I know you took Genetics, I dragged you through it, remember? This was a designed effect. Unit One has contaminated Shinji's body with DNA that expresses as near-human tissue while in Shinji's body, despite having the wrong number of chromosomes. It doesn't make any sense. It frightensme, understand? I'm trying to tell you: this is another reason for keeping the Third Child out of Eva. It changed these parts of him, and it could well do it again. The composition of this stuff seems as benign as the last, but we have no way of knowing what will happen the next time we put him in the entry plug."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
A week passed. Then two.
They made him see a psychiatrist, a fat gaijinwith a beard, who couldn't even speak Japanese. Through a translator, the fat man asked Shinji about his mother and father, about his teacher, and what had happened in the Outer Ward.
Shinji dutifully recited his history. Very boring. The fat man kept trying to trick him into things, into admitting that when he had slaughtered those geese in the Outer Ward and Lake Ashino (apparently the name of the lake where Katsuragi had found him) he had really been thinking about people, or something. The idea of that kind of irreparable harm to other humans made Shinji physically ill, and he often clammed up during these suggestions. It made the killings seem distasteful, somehow - asking Shinji to second-guess what he had felt.
It was about survival, Shinji explained. In the Outer Ward, the geese had tried to kill him. He was acting affirmatively to ensure they would not be able to try and kill him again. And after Lake Ashino, they had responded, they had built a robot that was like them in the same way Eva was like people, a great flying creature of scrabbling talons and searing wings and empty red eyes.
The fat man came back with a bunch of crap about the behavior of fowl in breeding season, and how whole flocks of ducks, swan, and geese had been known to file into a storm drain because one of their young had accidentally fallen into it. Because, see Shinji? These things aren't intelligent. They're lesser creatures. They cannot think, or plan. The behavior you have interpreted as aggression was simply an instinct to protect their young.
So what, Shinji had responded. What about mukade, what about venomous snakes? Crescent bears? Just because they're acting on instinct, we shouldn't eliminate them until they actually kill someone?
The fat man launched into a long and difficult-to-translate rant about the dignity of living things.
Shinji thought about Sakkamota's breasts.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Ivan Ivanovitch, the redundantly named Serb late of Germany, presented his psychiatric evaluation of the Third Child to Misato three weeks after the vivisection/consumption of the Fourth Angel.
"The boy's father," the man drawled, in German, "is the root of this, yeah? The man, he brings Shinji into a new place. There are bad consequences. The boy attributes these consequences to his father, yeah? This is usual. A coping strategy by children to control the people that regulate them, which is to say: their parents. A problem only enhanced by the early death of the boy's mother."
"This incident in your outwards wards. The geese, the violence. Shinji's emotional state appears to have regressed, at least, assuming a normal baseline for a boy his age... and assuming my colleagues have not misled me about the specifics of gender and social identity unique to the Japanese male teenager. Even considering the absence of a mother-figure, regression can still be inferred. His future desires: entirely inchoate; his sexual identity: either non-existent or being carefully repressed. The geese have become a substitute for Shinji's father, and an outlet for this uncertainty and repression he should be feeling, but is not. They have become an alternativeto this powerless situation he finds himself in."
"This is a tricky thing; normative amorality. Nothing is physically wrong with his brain, there is no evidence he has experienced prolonged direct or physical abuse, but his mind is still," Ivan twisted a hand.
"We talk about the geese, I argue with him, to an extent. He doesn't listen, or he misunderstands, and it is genuine, yeah? Not idle, automatic disagreement. There is a block in his mind that prevents him from comprehending what you and I understand about the world. He thinks the geese, as a flock, as a species, actually tried to kill him, and that their efforts are ongoing. You see? He has experienced a break with reality, and is now in a sort of permanent, quasi-hallucinatory state where the certainty that these animals are trying to murder him overrides any evidence to the contrary."
The man was rambling, and Misato was having trouble following the narrative. "The geese are a placeholder for Shinji's father. So... Shinji thinks his father is trying to kill him?" It didn't seem necessary to mention the Oedipal reciprocal.
"He has strong, aggressive feelings toward the father that are currently being projected, magnifiedonto something - the geese - Shinji can understand as deserving punishment," Ivan corrected. "These feelings toward his father: probably milder, would be mitigated by social custom, emotional ties, subconscious familial recognition, and the like. He refuses to talk about his father. I do not know how literal the emotional transitive state is."
"So... what do we do?" Misato managed to put in. "What do you advise?"
"This is tricky, yeah? A kind of OCD co-morbid with normative schizophrenia. The compulsive disorder seems to regulate the schizophrenia. Not categorical. It is unique. I recommend starting him on antipsychotics. Therapy should continue. It would help if we could get the father involved."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
It was a month in total before they let Shinji go back to school. There were two company men in the back of the class now, and a general understanding in the student body that they were there to protect Shinji, because his father was Somebody Important. The boy himself was pretty sure the company men were there to protect the other students from him.
Katsuragi had finally shown him footage of the fight with the enemy, the 'Angel.' He hadn't talked to anyone for three days afterward, not even Ayanami. What Unit One had done on that screen... that wasn't him, wasn't anything he wanted to understand. The purple-red giant monster had been utterly destroyed. Meticulously unmade. Purple blood and thicker stuff flowing down streets, the twitching motions of severed limbs, the way its skin had stretched out in Unit One's hands, growing thin and transparent before tearing...
And the spine. He had gone for the spine again.
Sakkamota came up to him at lunch, to collect his schoolwork for the teacher. She seemed surprised when he actually produced it. After a week of being cooped up in that hospital room, it had been a welcome diversion.
"So, what's your excuse?" Sakkamota asked, tucking the papers under one arm.
Shinji considered. "It was the hair," he finally answered, honestly. "I've never met a girl with hair that short."
She kicked him, hard. "Dumbass! I mean, why weren't you in the shelter?"
"He was with me," came Ayanami's voice. The blue-haired girl came up behind the class representative, handed Shinji his bento, and sat down.
"Oh, that's good," Sakkamota threw up her hands. "And why weren't youin the shelter?"
Ayanami opened her own bento and began to eat.
"Look, I'm the one that gets blamed if he doesn't show up."
Ayanami's chopsticks halted in mid-motion. She appeared to consider. "No," she finally said. "You are not. Your position is designed to aid teachers by mitigating certain burdensome aspects of the educational process. It is also used to pacify the younger generation with nominal representation. You have no authority and, therefore, no responsibility."
"Yeah? That's neat," Sakkamota replied, and backhanded the unopened bento from Shinji's grasp. "I have a moralresponsibility. To me. So Ikari? What is all this? Were you and Ayanami doing something indecent in the equipment shed?"
"No," Shinji answered evenly, going after the bento. He was a little surprised to find that he wasn't blushing. Those pills the fat gaijinhad given him were screwing him up. "We were..." Ayanami was looking at him carefully. "...we went to a different shelter? My, uh, guardian made us...?"
"And then you got hurt," Sakkamota continued, for him.
"Our shelter was compromised. There were fatalities," Ayanami answered for him. "Neither of us wish to talk about it."
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
A week passed, pleasantly. The medication, prescribed by the fat gaijin, was stuffing every emotion Shinji had with cotton. Katsuragi didn't take him to Eva training anymore, and they stopped locking his door. After school, he was free to wander around the Administrative Park to his heart's content. Sometimes Katsuragi or the fat gaijinand his translator would walk with him. Once, Ayanami even joined him, and as they passed under the gleaming curve of the express car transport, Shinji admitted that he hated her, just a little, for having his father as a guardian.
One day he came back from his walk and some shipping boxes were on his cell bed. Inside were all of the belongings he had left at teacher's house, including his cello and some old cassettes. Someone, presumably Katsuragi, had included a new SDAT player to replace the one that had been destroyed in the Outer Ward. There were also some new cassettes, still wrapped in cellophane. Katsuragi was probably responsible for that as well - it was hard to imagine any of those company men going into a store and buying E-Pop.
SHINJI IKARI has gained CELLO!
SHINJI IKARI has gained SDAT PLAYER!
SHINJI IKARI has gained SDAT DISK!
Two more weeks passed, in a haze of souring indifference. The medication was affecting Shinji's judgment and emotional balance. He could feel it happening and disliked it in a very diffusive, ineffectual way.
One day, Sakkamota joined him and Ayanami for lunch. The class representative's regular circle of friends were home sick with Chinese measles, or playing a sport match in another school, or building a low-orbit delivery system for a thermonuclear something-or-other. One of those.
Sakkamota tried to strike up a conversation with him, and he accidentally replied with the wrong honorific again. She punched his arm, not softly, then tried to continue the conversation, tried to get Shinji to talk. He gave her perfectly generic replies, and when he got bored of the interaction, asked if he could see her breasts again. Actually, he called them 'tits.' This was evidently the incorrect colloquialism, as Sakkamota slapped him (how many times was that, now?) and left the classroom, and missed the next class hour. Shinji had to actively restrain himself from going up to her at the end of the day and informing her that, in this class, students were expected to actually come back after lunch.
Later, scratching his way through a shoddy rendition of Ode to Joy in his cell, Shinji finally got a good view of that encounter with Sakkamota. Between the tearing cords and his shifting fingers and his mind, always dancing a half-measure ahead, he arrived at a place of embarrassment and shame, and awareness that he was no longer himself, that the pills he was being given were causing him to hurt the people around him.
The next day, he started fake-swallowing the pills when the company men gave them to him, and then spitting them in the toilet. They were making him hurt people. Whatever evil they were supposed to be preventing, it wasn't worth the cost. He had told Ayanami he hated her, and he had probably made Sakkamota cry. Ayanami, at least, was worth a few dead geese.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"The boy has stopped taking the medicine," Ivan announced as he walked into Misato's office. "A good sign, I think."
Misato squared her paperwork and gently pushed it aside. Knotted her hands. Said, very slowly, "How exactly is that a 'good sign', Ivanovich?"
The man folded his hands over his expansive belly. "The boy's condition is normative, as I said before. Nothing is wrong with his mind, physically. The break with reality has engaged his fight-or-flight impulse continuously - his psychoses are reinforced by constant reference back to that impulse, which informs him that geese are wicked and trying to kill him. The pills allow him to experience more deliberate mental behavior; or rather, the pills deaden autonomic mental processes like fight-or-flight."
"And how is that good, Mr. Ivanovich?" Misato repeated, her hands beating the desk. "We need him stable, we need him able to pilot."
"I was getting to that, my dear," Ivanovich said with a wholly-unearned tone of familiarity. "Contrast is key. A break with reality is in most cases impossible to repair, but Shinji is young enough that we should at least give him a chance to fix it himself. The pills show him a more sane, deliberate world. If he is able to contrast that with his delusion, he may be able to quell the fight-or-flight impulse that causes his condition to persist. He could, quite literally, reason through the quasi-hallucinatory state his brain is fixated upon."
Dammit. "I need him able to pilot," Misato said. "I need him reliable."
"The drug's effects are cumulative, I'm afraid," the psychiatrist replied. "We must either reinforce the regime now, or allow Shinji to see the world both ways. If we do nothing, there is no way to safely alter his neuro-chemistry immediately before putting him into combat."
Misato beat the desk, this time with her forehead. Ivanovich probably thought she was bowing to him. No matter.
"I would advise..." Ivanovich began, then stopped when Misato raised a hand.
"There's a chance this will fix him?" she asked, raising off the desk. "As in, he won't have to take any pills, he'll respond to commands, and this whole thing with geese will go away?"
"Experience shapes us," Ivanovich said, by way of response. "The boy has done things while psychotic that will shape the rest of his life. There is no chance of the Shinji Ikari that existed before the outward wards incident... there is no chance of him returning. But if this works, he will share the same general, sane view of the world most of humanity enjoys." The last word was clearly sarcastic.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Rei Ayanami had responsibilities at NERV that Shinji did not. Some days, she would be absent, and one of the company men would have to buy Shinji food. Today was such a day. Shinji ate his bento - which he had been allowed to pick out, and so contained delicious smoked salmon - by the window, watching the gravity rainbow stretching across the sky, and trying desperately to control himself whenever an errant bird fluttered through his field of vision.
Sakkamota sat down in the desk in front of him. Shinji turned to his computer, so he could sort of pretend to maybe listen to her.
He really didn't get her; why she kept talking to him. He wouldn't want to talk to him. There was something strange between the two of them now, probably just the knowledge of her chest. Maybe she was just hanging around to make sure he wasn't telling other boys. Because he had so manyfriends.
Her hanging around was strange, especially since she seemed so popular, but today was to be extra-strange. Because she opened with a complaint about a friend who had betrayed her in some small way, progressed to the unnecessary observation that 'the blue-hair' wasn't around, and then said "it would probably be a good idea if we got together after school."
"Well, if you're after her number, I don't have it," Shinji answered, offhand. He had found a game on the school network called 'JezzBall,' and that was occupying most of his attention. Right up until Sakkamota slammed the screen down on his fingers.
"Shit!" he shouted, drawing the attention of several classmates. "What? What!?" a blast of unbalanced emotion leftover from the pills. "I don't have her number, I said!"
"I meant," Sakkamota said, evenly, and in a tone of voice that suggested it would be so wonderful if Shinji would please MODULATE THE VOLUME OF HIS VOICE, "that you and I should do something after school. Today."
The world froze. A slow shudder passed through Shinji. He found himself at a precipice above sudden, unimagined futures.
But... he was still screwed up from the medicine. His first impulse was to leap from the metaphorical precipice and sprint down the path that involved seeing more of Sakkamota's chest, and hey, maybe the rest of her. But, since that first impulse was probably because of his chemical imbalance, he ignored it and went with the second option: wholly embarrassing honesty.
"I have to go, um, to NERV after school," he said. He had never heard anyone in the school utter 'Geo-Front,' and wasn't certain if it was common knowledge or not. Ayanami had made it plain that he wasn't to talk about Eva - Shinji wasn't sure what else was off-limits.
The girl with the c-cups frowned. "What about tomorrow then?" she pressed.
"I... I have to go NERV after school," Shinji repeated. "Every day. Maybe I could ask the Captain if I could get a day off, but"
"Captain?"
Not this again. This... information-gathering.
"Stop. Asking. Me. About. NERV." he recited this slowly. "I can't talk about it. You know I can't." And that was good, that was exactly what needed to be said... and then he screwed it all up by adding: "It isn't any of your business."
Sakkamota stared past Shinji, over his shoulder. Opened her mouth, closed it. Shrugged herself upright.
"I, um. I'm a friend, right?" Shinji tried. "I can't talk about that stuff, and you know it. I'm trying to not get anyone into trouble."
"You're an asshole, Ikari," Sakkamota said, by way of reply. "I can't believe I almost let that happen."
You don't know me, Shinji thought. You don't know what I've done. Getting close to me is stupid. I've got bird diseases. And a spine fetish.
Another slow moment. Sakkamota wasn't moving. He hadto say something.
Pretend she really is a boy. Someone you know. Someone you talk with all the time. Someone who has just been beat up, and needs a little reassurance.
"I like you too, um, Kei," he said. As a friend, you know. I've even given you a nickname, see? "I just don't know why you, um, like me." Um um um. I cannot imagine. One of my eyes is made of blood. I see things that are not there. If you knew any more about me than you do right now, you'd want nothing to do with me and I've been thinking about you, about your chest and everything else and sometimes you turn into the purple-red monster I tore apart and you must have a good sense of humor but this isn't a joke, there's nothing funny here, and the only reason I am not running away is my feet are wrapped around the legs of this chair and please walk away, please just keep hate me. You keep slappingme, so you must hate me, so we should just keep it like that. It would be so much easier to understand.
Sakkamota sat back down, facing him. The chair creaked as Shinji's legs tensed. "If it helps, a little," she said. "Think of it as convenience."
Her hands rested on the seatback, folded together, kneading. "I. You made me angry. I showed you something I shouldn't have. And it would be neat, it would be tidy, if we started. You know. Going. Since we've already done some of the... stuff."
"I'm not going to tell," Shinji replied, but his resistance flagging. Because, seriously, why not? Even if he couldn't quite fathom why. He thought about her sometimes. It could be... fun. It could be right. "I didn't mean to bring that up again, not where Ayanami could hear. It was," he searched for something appropriate, flattering, "a gift."
Sakkamota snorted. "It was me being pissed off beyond rational thought. And this is just plain stupid, if you think about it."
Shinji nodded.
"I mean, we've known each other for all of what, two months? And you don't do anything but annoy me. It would be irresponsi - no. No no no no NO!"
The sirens were wailing again. Shinji's cellphone rang.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
LEVEL COMPLETED!
MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE
(((Shinji Ikari)))
Kills: 1 Angel
Highest Combo: 8x
Gained Frienemy! Kei Sakkamota
Gained Item! CELLO!
Description: An instrument. Used to produce morose music.
Use: Makes bitches moist. Smashes up chinstrap geese in a pinch.
Passive Effect: Resentment for the past indifference of adults +10.
Gained Item! SDAT!
Description: An unlikely progression of local technology. Alternate-history mp3/CD analog.
Use: Allows guided, repetitive internal focus / exclusion of outside sensory input.
Passive Effect: While possessed, enhances appeal of solitude.
Gained Item! SDAT DISK!
Title: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys
Use: Emotion. Irony. Possible songfic.
Gained Achievement! Candy from Strangers
Gained Achievement! Ass Magnet: Cello
Gained Achievement! Irony!
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Keija Sakkamota)))
KOed by:
Rei Ayanami (rhetoric)
Shinji Ikari (embarrassment)
Tits: Still C
Gained Achievement! Some Strings Attached
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Ayanami was going up first, of course. They'd never lead with him - the walking (biting, ripping, killing) calamity. It was hard even being in Central Dogma, knowing everyone there had seen him lose his mind and rant like an idiot (savant? something) while ripping that purple-red creature's spine from its body. Anywhere but the barracks cell, Shinji kept his earbuds in and his head down, because everyone knew who he was. Even with E-pop blaring, he could sort of detectthe murmurs that followed in his wake, a pattern of hushed whispers and hurried footsteps.
He was wearing just the one earbud now, in the entry plug. Everything was being piped through there, small windows playing video:
of Unit Zero, drifting toward the launch catapult;
of Ayanami, in her entry plug;
of the bridge in Central Dogma, where the Captain and Doctor Akagi were moving among subordinates with inscrutable purpose;
of the blue-diamond Angel, hanging in the sky;
displaying black-orange contrasted changing graphs, what Akagi had called a 'data stream' during training;
and over all that, the near-mechanical droning voice:
"LOWER FRAME MERGE
ANTERIOR LOCK DISENGAGE PROCESS INITIATED
LATERAL TRANSFER COMPLETE
BAFFLES RELEASED
LOWER FRAME DISENGAGE
MOVING TO THE LAUNCH PLATFORM
ELECTROKINETIC FRAME MODULE CHARGED
COMPRESSION HARNESS VERIFIED..."
He mostly ignored the window displaying the Angel - the monster. Because it was absurd. It hurt to look at. Giant monsters were supposed to be men in suits destroying scale-reproductions of famous landmarks. That thing on the surface was just... offensive. A blue, seemingly-transparent octahedron, just floating in the air, not doing anything. Looking at it started a shudder going in Shinji's shoulders. Blue. Floating. Seemingly harmless. Geometric. So why... so how, did it look so much like a spider? Like something dark, and covered in bristles, and that had too many legs. Something that could fold itself up in a crevice where sinister walls meet uncertain floors, to wait and pounce and bite and tear...
...yeah, best not to look at that window. Maybe a bit of the bridge. Maybe a little of Unit Zero, with a dash of Ayanami. But looking at her made Shinji feel little... hrm. That white plug suit left little to the imagination, really, at least the parts of her upper body that were visible. While it was a little hentai, Shinji couldn't help but observe that Ayanami's chest size appeared to be just about identical to Sakkamota's.
Okay, so maybe don't look at that window, either. His plugsuit left little to the imagination, too. Not that anyone was actually paying attention to him. No one wanted him to be there. Everyone was focused on Ayanami. They desperately wanted him to not matter. Because, see, he was crazy, right? Insane. Psychotic. He was the normative schizophrenic with a unique dash of violent amorality that made him more pathetic than immediately dangerous. Oh, and he was also a hentai. With a thing for spines.
But not mattering was okay with Shinji. He didn't want to matter. He didn't want to fight. He didn't want to lose any more of his memory, or humiliate himself in front of everyone in Father's company. Really, honestly, he'd be happy to just keep on living in a cell and going to that school. You know, where Sakkamota and her breasts were.
Unit Zero launched.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Misato Katsuragi was watching Unit Zero burn.
Rei had managed to get her Eva's AT Field up moments before the Angel opened fire, scattering the beam - what Ritsuko was calling 'an ultracoherent positronic emission' - into Unit Zero's immediate surroundings. The catapult housing and several other support buildings around Unit Zero were dissolving into a shiny substance that scattered like ash and flowed like liquid.
Ritsu elaborated on the nature of the Angel's weapon thusly: "That's positronic, Captain. The MAGI is also detecting what looks like proton-antiproton annihilation." And that meant poison and heat. Misato wasn't so good with genetics, but she knew her high-energy weaponry. When positrons and electrons met, they cancelled (or 'annihilated') each other out, releasing energy in the form of gamma radiation. Proton-antiproton annihilation was worse, releasing a burst of sub-atomics - mesons and elementary particles and other quantum things- in addition to basic atomic destruction. The energy radiating from Unit Zero's dissolving surroundings was the radioactive equivalent of a shotgun blast to the face. A continuous shotgun blast of cancer and heat that was cooking Rei alive.
Katsuragi considered all of this in the space of time it took Ritsu to describe the MAGI's analysis. Lieutenant Hyuga reported the catapult frame was dissolving. Maya, in a pleading tone, informed her that the LCL in Unit Zero's entry plug would begin to boil in thirty seconds, after which Rei would either asphyxiate or burn to death.
The whole block would have to come down, then.
Commander Ikari agreed.
The signal was sent, and nothing happened. The shiny blue octahedron kept spewing death down on Unit Zero, which remained where it was.
The various radiant properties of annihilation, Ritsu concluded, had damaged the machinery in the Geo-Front superstructure, fusing the block on which Unit One stood to those adjacent.
Rei would be dead in fifteen seconds.
They were going to have to use the base self-destruct, Katsuragi realized. At this point, the only way to get Rei underground was to activate every explosive fail-safe attached or proximate to the discrete recovery chutes under each block, then blow the support bolts for all blocks in a 3x3 grid centered around Unit Zero and hope superstructure would give way. And that the Eva was intact enough to survive the drop.
But before she could give the order - or rather, advise the Commander to issue that order - the Angel stopped its attack. Lieutenant Aoba confirmed that the high-energy reaction in the Angel's interior had disappeared. At Maya's near-hysterical demand, Rei shifted Unit Zero's AT Field from beam-shattering barrier to passive defense, which began to normalize the Eva's thermals.
So dig, Katsuragi urged the girl. Tear a hole down past the damage, into the recovery chute. We'll send up a utility crew with an umbilicus and...
And Ritsuko was shouting again, waving at Maya's terminal. Talking techno too fast for Katsuragi to track:
Anomalous AT Field event.
Pan-cranial hindbrain lobotomic embolism.
Opportunistic high-R activity in autonomic centers 1-15.
Total destruction of A10 nerve connections to the AT-gland.
And as she spoke, her voice directed overhead, to the Commander, she was, for some reason, gesturing at the readout for Unit One.
Katsuragi suffered a moment's indecision, then fixed herself on Rei's egress, filtering out her friend's voice before the obvious panic could infect her. Katsuragi was the tactician, and Unit Zero was the only Eva, at the moment, in a tactical situation.
Specifically, Unit Zero was trapped. The Eva's legs were encased in the shiny liquid/ash the surrounding buildings had dissolved into during the Angel's attack. The unknown substance had hardened, and was beyond the damaged Unit Zero's ability to break free of. Rei was withdrawing the Eva's progressive knife when Ritsu came over and told Katsuragi they needed to get Unit One to a launch catapult, RIGHT NOW.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The moment Ayanami's orange Eva vanished upward in a cascade of blue electricity, a thought popped into Shinji's head. Just a random idea, innocuous but anomalous: a white room, with him right in the middle, standing upright.
It was pretty great, an inversion of the cold dark that was never far from his thoughts. The idea made him giddy, so he focused on it, imagining that box in detail: illuminated from nowhere, the lines where walls and floor and ceiling meet just barely visible as a slightly brighter shade of glowing luminous white. A useless idea, but a vivid one. It filled his mind, driving out the chatter of the open comm. Drowning out the shouts, and the screams.
There was something on the walls of the room. Numbers. Math.
Shinji recognized functions and derivatives, clumped together here and there in something
that faintly resembled a physics proof. The symbols were flowing, spreading, writing themselves across the walls and ceiling and floor.
And they were starting to make a certain amount of sense.
It was like music. Like holding the performance in your mind, always staying a half-measure ahead of your fingers. Except the music of these equations had a certain narrative meaning to it, a certain language.
The language was compressed, or maybe fractal. Between the lines, between the big, unspeakable ideas, was written a hidden saga: the sharp saw, pinch-snapped cords scraping up the board, fingers torn and dripping. His body vibrated - a leg, an arm, an ear, a tooth, the blood eye - in step with the soundless music.
His own vibration was different from that math-music-language-vibration though, just a little. More refined. Perfect. All that math scribbled across the interior surface of the room was stunted. Limited. On the walls a melody built, and swelled, and came to nothing. But that missing climax was still there, in a way. It was written in the earlier measures, in the cadence, in the difference between the math and his own vibrations.
There was a cello at his shoulder, now. He was sitting in a straight-backed chair, bow and fingers working, math flowing from the f-holes and settling onto the wall, mostly duplicating what was already there. The leg, the arm, the ear, the tooth, and the blood eye all whispered to him, guided his hands.
The end came. The crescendo swelled, ready to pop. The missing climax was realized. New math settled onto the wall, landing burning, bloody, bright.
Far away, the world was screaming.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Katsuragi was brought over to Maya's terminal, which was displaying what looked like an MRI picture, a cross-section of Unit One's brain, labeled "ANALYZING..." The normal orange tint was covered in splatters of red and purple. An adjacent monitor displayed a document, entitled: "Speculatory Meta-Gene Expression [[#aa1]]: Autonomic AT Field."
Something had happened in Unit One. Something impossible. The Eva's AT Field had emerged anomalously, without any kind of active interface. That AT Field had vaporized certain structures in Unit One's brain, and then vanished. The brain was already repairing the damage, but the newly-grown structures were differentfrom the originals.
"It looks like," Ritsuko confided, "that the phenotype of the R-center's meta-gene template has been altered."
Katsuragi understood just about none of that.
"Its changing," Ritsuko tried again, "into something the restraint systems implanted throughout Unit One's body cannot control."
Okay, that, Misato got.
The Eva was transferred to a launch pad. It shuddered in the catapult frame. Inside the entry plug, Shinji was floating over the pilot seating. One side of his face pressed against the top of the plug, the rest of him was slack and drooping in a painful curve.
"LCL isn't dense enough for a human body to float in," Ritsuko was saying, voice rising, and under those words Katsuragi heard: I told you not to put him back in there. I told you, Misato! That point of contact holding him in place? Its that red eye! I told you, dammit!
And now Unit One's thermals were spiking, nearly as high Unit Zero's had been while under gamma bombardment. On the launch pad, Unit One began to steam and change.
Oh my God, Misato Katsuragi thought, apropos of nothing. "LAUNCH!"
On the big screen, Rei was cutting one of Unit Zero's legs off just below the knee. The Angel was spinning, and drifting toward her. It would be directly overhead in seconds.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
He was back in the entry plug, pressed face-down against the seating, immobile. The comm center was screaming at him, all alarms, and Katsuragi, and a mix of other voices... and also a weird, quiet cough that was somehow more distressing than all the rest put together.
"Nnngh," he tried. Still couldn't move. Finally noticed the vibration (in his leg, his arm, his ear, his teeth, the blood eye). He was being launched. They had put him on the catapult and fired him like a bullet at that blue not-spider thing without even... telling...
And then he remembered that white room. The daydream he had fallen into. He remembered the math-music-language-vibration, and the faint impression of the world beyond, screaming him.
What the...
"Katsuraaaaaa!" he managed in a shout. He still couldn't see the comm. Had he left the mic on? Couldn't even begin to remember how to enable it if it was switched off. Stop it, I just fell asleep. Why this, why is this happening? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, just stop stop stop STOP.
"Shinji, what happ..." the familiar voice came, only to be interrupted by: "What. Did. You DO!?" He was pretty sure that was the blond doctor, Akagi.
The vibration increased, but the g-force diminished. Shinji had a moment of familiar mobility - it wasn't over, the launch pad was just switching from a vertical track to a horizontal one. He was upright for about two seconds, got an eyeful of comm center, and then the horizontal catapult engaged. Shinji was thrown, his motion slowed by the LCL, up against the spherical cap of the entry plug.
That eyeful of comm center had been too much:
The command center - Misato was concerned, the blond doctor was angry, and the brown-haired girl/woman beneath them had seemed afraid.
The world above - dripping and molten-bright. Unit Zero was trapped in what looked like lava, dismembering its own feet with a knife. A red substance had been oozing from one severed ankle, and spurting from the ankle that was still partially attached. Almost like Unit Zero was... bleeding. Like a living thing.
Rei Ayanami - hunched over, breasts now irrelevant, making that sinister-sounding quiet cough. An eyeful of comm center had been too brief for Shinji to be certain, but it seemed that her cries coincided with the motion of Unit Zero sawing through its own ankle.
The Angel - looming. Drifting. Closing.
"Stooooaarrgggghppppp pleeeaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!" his shout was stretched into a wail by the weight of the catapult's motion.
Death. He was being shot up to blue, geometric death. He could barely make this thing, this Ebangerion, work, and he couldn't even reach the controls. They had that video of Unit One tearing apart that red-purple monster, but he didn't remember that; had no idea how any of it had happened.
They were throwing him away. Getting rid of him. These people could sit down in their geo-front while the world went molten, and machines bled in convincing spurts, and children died. The whole thing had all been a trick, a nested deceit. Father was just building a... a paper trail. Working on his alibi. So when Shinji died in a tragic accident, they wouldn't be able to put the older man in prison. This was Father acting. This was death, wrapped in inscrutable machinery, gone and erased in ways science and the law could not explain.
Just like
"Moooooaaaaaaaahhhgmmmm!" this time, the wail wasn't induced by g-force. Maybe if he screamed loud enough, she'd hear him all those years ago. Maybe she'd step away from the experiment that had swallowed her, the one that had looked so much like an entry plug. Maybe the past would change, and this whole scenario would disappear in a puff of logic. Shinji screamed for his mother, which is to say: MAAAAMAAAAAAAAAAA!
"SHINJI!" a voice blared, so loud it crackled. Shinji's fading vision danced - no, no, something was being projected into the entry plug cap. The comm center, it had shifted from the seat to down here, just in front of him. All the text was reversed.
He tried to straighten out, to brace again the cap, but the crushing weight held him in place. His vision dimmed, but he fought it. Because if the world faded to black, it was never, never, never going to come back.
"Shinji..." Katsuragi. The volume had been lowered, but the Eva had failed to stop. The woman's voice was wet and brittle again, like back at the athletic field. "Unit One has been contaminated. You've been contaminated. Its... complicated, but we're going to help, okay? We've got you on the exterior helixical rail, remember that? We have to get you to the surface a safe dis...t...a...n...c...e..."
The world slowed, and finally faded to black.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Hey.
...
Hey!
Shinji was down in the hole, looking up at a moon framed by wreckage. His gaze was fixed, empty, blank.
Dead.
Something shifted behind him, maybe a gosling stalking the secret, narrow places past the wall of broken wood and metal. Shinji's head lolled down, beheld his moonclad corpse. They'd torn open his stomach - his intestines stretched out from his stomach, into the darkness at the other side of the hole. Everything below that had been stripped out, the meat on his thighs and groin simply gone. Nothing but wet red bone down there. Further down, his legs were ripped up but good. One shoeless foot was missing all its toes except for the big one, the skinless, odd shape resembling nothing so much as a great webbed claw.
Another shift, and the corpse was on its side. The motion hadn't come from behind though, not exactly. Another shift, a vibration, a groan, and an adult chinstrap emerged from his emptied torso, a glistening red hunk of gore speared by its beak.
Hey, did you forget?
The chinstrap shook its slender, snake-like neck until Shinji's heart slipped free. Then it gave him a gargling honk, spread its wings, and disappeared upward.
Hey, remember? That feeling of bones, crunching? That feel of spurting warmth, all across your body? Remember, that first time?
That first time... he had been hurt, bloodied. The chinstraps had been massing overhead, and two were already in the hole. And Shinji had briefly thought to just hug the wall, cover his head with his arms, and hope the geese forgot about him. He would have stayed that way, even as they swarmed over him and tore him to pieces. Even as they splayed out his guts and tore apart his feet and rooted around deep inside him until his heart was theirs.
Hey, remember? This isn't how it went, is it?
Ye...yeah! He had... he had fought, and killed, and filled the cold darkwith the warmth of spilled blood and the surety that he could destroy anything that came out of the shadows and tried to hurt him.
That's right! You met that honking chorus, that cacophony, with your own composition. In ripped knuckles and swollen tears and cooling splashes of blood! In shattered wings and crushed skulls spurting gray jelly! You silenced their attack, their evil, their malice!
The corpse rose to its mangled feet. Its flayed intestines caught, and ripped free of their moorings, but Shinji didn't mind. Because the cold darkwas gone, but it was also always with him. It was in the past, waiting for him to remember: back when he had been able to stand up and control his own destiny for the first time in his life; back when he had made a choice that had prevented his own death.
Your own song, your great work, recorded in chilled gore at the bottom of a hole.
He had forgotten, somehow. Forgotten about the geese, about how they had swooped in to kill him. Between the memory loss and the pills the fat gaijin had fed him, the chinstraps had become mere animals. His animosity towards them had, at some point, become perfunctory.
Basically, at some point, quite possibly when Kei Sakkamota expressed an interest in dating him, Shinji Ikari had broken the chain of his psychoses. The fat gaijinwould have been overjoyed.
He had lied to himself. Deluded himself into believing that lie.
The corpse raised its hands skyward. The air above was filled with the sound of beating wings. The first chinstrap dove into the hole, angling for the corpse's face. Torn fists came together, crushing the animal's head before it could strike.
Remember this, Shinji? The crushing, killing motion? You made it up as you went, but it still has a nice ring to it, a pleasing pattern. Even when it was over and there was nothing but dark cold, it still echoed in your mind, sustaining you when all warmth had fled.
That Song of Agony.
More flying shadows rushed the corpse, all at once.
SHINJI IKARI used CALAMITY TRIGGER!
Misato didn't even see the kid get up. Rei had finished cutting Unit Zero free, and the Captain was focused on getting the Eva to crawl to an intact extraction point, the closest of which was several blocks from its current position. Digging through the block had proven impractical since the pilot needed to hold the AT Field in reserve in case the Angel renewed its attack.
The Angel was turning slowly in place. Ritsu was pretty sure it was tracking the Eva's course around the perimeter of the Geo-Front.
She didn't see the kid walk up the length of the entry plug with no apparent difficulty - maybe a little exertion to make it up the incline, that's all. Five-times gravity? A stroll through the Administrative Park.
She only looked back to the entry plug comm feed when the altered Eva approached the end of its transit; when the thing Unit One had become tore itself free of the catapult harness. By then Shinji had collapsed into the seating, a tangle of twitching, spastic body parts.
It almost looked planned, the way things turned out. The former Unit One hit the catapult terminator without any restraints, going at least 50kph, shooting into the sky. It drifted upwards in a slow arc, trailed by a thick gray cloud that now seemed more smoke than steam.
Misato watched, open mouthed, as bad timing transformed the kid and his Eva into the super-expensive maybe-not-mecha-at-all equivalent of a targeting discus. Maybe a targeting discus merged with a C-20 cartridge self-propelled rocket flare. Either way, a shooting gallery.
And then, of course, Lieutenant Aoba was shouting about high-energy reaction readings coming from inside the Angel.
"Fire!" Katsuragi shouted. "All of it! Fire it now!"
The city above erupted with the full might of NERV's ground defenses. High-explosive carrier missiles, DU slugs, energy mortar, charged AA magneto-chaff, palette shells, even a few defense partitions rocketing upward, their restraints disabled and emergency rockets unleashed. The only thing held in reserve were the six N2 mines the UN had granted NERV custody of after the Third Angel's attack - Unit Zero was still up there, crawling on its elbows toward a waiting access hatch.
The Unit One thing hit the ground with a dull crack, passing through red-brown earth until Geo-Front armor plating stopped it. And then that smoking mass moved. Twenty blocks in one step; from the edge of the city, right into Misato's battlefield, where it crouched low among the surface defenses.
Central Dogma's view was obstructed by surface barrage and the gray smoke that was still pouring off the Eva, but everything Katsuragi was able to make out was... not Unit One anymore.
Its torso appeared to have lengthened; the armor on its chest and back had separated into parts, extended brown-black dermis visible between bands of green and purple, like the flexing thorax of some psychedelic insect.
The Eva's shoulders had rolled down, shattering armor on the high back and destroying the pylon mountings. Arms were folded beneath its body, altered joints bent to balance inward. It was not simply on all fours - it was quadrupedal.
The bits of face she could make out were the worst part. The facial armor seemed mostly intact, but the mouth... She had seen Unit One's teeth before, back when Shinji had broken Unit One's forward restraints to tear into the Fourth Angel. Those teeth had looked human, more or less; white boulders, as edged as blunt, all of them maybe trending a bit to the canine. But now she was seeing glimpses of dull gray triangles. Too many, it seemed, to all fit in Unit One's mouth.
"Berserker!" Misato said, she insisted, because that was something she knew about, and could begin to understand. "Right? What you were telling me about, when the hindbrain uses the pilot as a conduit...?"
"No," Ritsu answered. "Worse. The worst possible outcome."
Maya's terminal dinged. On her main monitor, the following appeared:
Metabiological Phenotype Analysis Complete:
Unit One operating at theoretical capacity;
phenotype #aa1;
Designation: BEAST MODE.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The world was molten, overlapping shadows dancing in the orange light of endless explosions, trembling in sympathy to that first step he had taken. His Prelude.
The world was molten, columns of black smoke issued from ragged trenches blasted into the metal ground. That smoke rose to meet the enemy, which formed the roof of this small, loud, awful world.
A burning destructive nothingness whispered to Shinji from three seconds in the future, and Unit One shifted four blocks to the right as a beam of pure white hit where he had been standing, briefly carving a new smoking furrow in the city's skin before flickering off.
Last time, the chinstraps had built an Eva, twisted to their own image. This new thing was obviously where that Eva copy had come from, a flying fortress. A chinstrap variation of the Geo-Front.
He moved, moved, moved, drifting at the perimeter of the world, eyes upward, ear cocked to the future. The enemy kept sending death down at him, but too slow. The Song of Agony that was wrapped around and through him had gone tachyon. The speed of light wasn't nearly fast enough.
He moved, moved, moved. His skin and face and eyes and throat and heart burned with an intensity he should not have been able to survive, much less enjoy. But that huge blue spider-thing up there, it was so small. So slow.
Another whisper from the future, but this time he lingered, diving away milliseconds before the attack - because this was what the Song of Agony required. And the glancing impact of that attack, which obliterated the armor on one side of his body and burnt the exposed skin black, that was glorious.
He moved, moved, moved. More armor fell away now, knocked loose from the hit or torn free from hardpoints by his own hands. Bone splintered as mounting bolts were stripped out. It hurt more than anything; like a knuckle, sliced open by a spur of bone deep in a goose's stomach cavity. It meant that he was alive, that he had blood and skin and armor to spare.
And the Song was roaring.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Whatever questions Misato Katsuragi might have had about the nature of Eva before the arrival of the Fifth Angel were washed away in the visual onslaught of Shinji Ikari's self-mutilation.
Ritsuko said: He can't be dodging those attacks.
And Ritsuko said: Some kind of magnetic interference, in the torso, like its got a fusion plant where the heart should be.
And Ritsuko said: Why would he do that, why?
Misato barely took note of her friend's irrelevant, comfort-monologue. The Unit One thing had been dealt a glancing blow by the Angel's weaponry. If not for the armor, the Eva probably would have been sheared in half... only now Shinji was stripping off the remaining armor, a harsh harsh red light seeping from the cracks in the Eva's exposed and burnt dermis.
Directly beneath the Fifth Angel, Unit Zero crouched. Misato was not at all okay with keeping Ayanami up there, but was forced to acknowledge the necessity of it. There was no helping that - the surveillance network was offline, and the long-range cameras were picking up nothing but black smoke. Unit Zero's ancient, almost curosrysensor suite was better than nothing. The pilot herself appeared to be in shock, her pale skin now nearly transparent; Misato could only hope Ayanami was still capable of shifting Unit Zero's weight enough to tumble into the open access shaft beside her Eva when the time finally came to get out of there.
Unit One continued to rip off its armor, and as the Eva ripped a huge strip of muscle from its own arm, Misato decided she could either snap the fuck out of this horror-fugue and start making tactical decisions again, or else resign herself to Section Two putting a bullet in her brain sometime in the next twenty four hours, assuming the world had twenty four hours left in it.
Surface defenses were still mostly intact - the Angel hadn't really been aiming for them, once Unit One got in close - but also mostly exhausted. Misato put herself and Lieutenant Hyuga to the task of getting everything re-armed and re-targeted. They had six N2 mines; now was clearly the time to use them.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
His torso was bare, mostly black, orange light shining from the charred cracks. Arms were stripped down too, nearly to the bone - armor and flesh had melted together, and to eliminate one, both had to go. Legs and feet were mostly intact, but that was okay. The problem was his face, the mask.
No way to get a good angle on it. He'd lost too much musculature to tear it free, but even if he could, a shattered skull and possibly ruined vision would not yet do. The Song wanted the mask off, but it also needed him to move, to see!
This was... tricky. Like Bach. Suite One, G-major, moving from Courante to Sarabande - that one bit he always stuck on. There was the scissor-saw to the long pause - where he always pictured the path that ran behind Teacher's house, cut into the tall grass and then the forest, walking among the squat stone statues - and then that opening hum-saw at the Sarabandewhere he always got distracted, because the acoustics of the school basement created a very convincing auditory hallucination: like there was someone playing in step, just behind him. That mental walk down the forest path suddenly had to accommodate the presence of another, unseen person.
Sometime, maybe most of the time, the company of that imaginary otherwould bring the whole performance to a halt. The idea of someone behind him, someone that played the cello too, someone that would be inclined to follow him down a forest path or even anywhere at all... that image paralyzed him, while the truth - his isolation, the emptiness of the countryside, the emptiness of being an unwanted child - took advantage of the situation to suckerpunch him and leave him prone on his back for hours, staring at that ceiling he knew every inch of, filled with a nebulous hate.
The Song of Agony was giving him that same echo, but coming at him from a long way off. Like a shade from some alternate universe where he didn't have to walk that forest path alone. Someone else was there with him, a sister, a brother, a mother, (a lover?)...
Another prescient whisper. He dodged, dragging his arms through the column of light, screaming in step with the Song as flesh and bone were seared away. The armor on the hands was too complicated and interwoven to be removed without destroying the hands altogether, and anyway, the Song was giving him a weird tempo variance that suggested he wouldn't be needing them.
That echo again.
He moved, moved, moved. The Song had kept him at the perimeter of this smoke-choked world, but now he moved into its heart.
That echo...
Unit Zero. Ayanami. The orange Eva was hunkered down between several tall buildings. The Song was with her, and she moved with it.
The enemy was moving as well, rotating on its vertical axis - trying to reach a firing position.
He knelt by Ayanami, since Unit Zero could no longer stand. She grabbed the horn of his mask, and jammed Unit Zero's knife somewhere he could not see. He was still, silent. It barely hurt. He could trust her - she was not a goose.
The skullcap came off first. The mask followed easily, painlessly.
The enemy was turning, twisting, its octahedron shape warping. The Song done with this dithering interval. The surface defenses around them recommenced attack, and in the sky beyond the enemy was a sound like thunder.
Another whisper, fainter than the ones that had come before: a whole ten seconds away. Shinji could feel the enemy targeting him, could feel the reaction that came before an attack in his light-cracked skin. He moved to the edge of the battlefield with a thought - the Song building, building, building - and then charged back into the thick of things, right at Ayanami: four feet kicking, road and buildings exploding in the wake of his passage.
And somewhere in there, Shinji had the chance to think:
Hey, Ayanami. There's this place out in the countryside, a path that starts in the tall grass and leads into the forest. It used to be a holy place, back before Second Impact, but now its terrible, I hope you never see it.
The Administrative Park is much better.
It would be nice to walk there, with you, again.
The thing that had been Unit One collided with Unit Zero's angled AT Field. A an invisible barrier smeared with yellow-orange hexagons deflected Shinji up and over Ayanami. The mangled, de-armored Eva pinwheeled in a steep and, moreover, predictablearc.
The enemy's attack caught Unit One in the midst of that arc, and all but obliterated it.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Two carrier missiles armed with N2 mines were twenty seconds inbound when the Angel killed Shinji. Misato had been yelling at Rei Ayanami pretty much continuously for the last three minutes, as Unit Zero removed the last bits of armor from the other Eva's head. In her entry plug, the First Child appeared catatonic, and totally unresponsive to any orders given to her, even those from the Commander.
The Angel's beam engulfed Unit One, and Misato gave a great, hitching breath, caught between a sob and scream. Twenty more seconds. Just twenty more seconds and the N2 mines would have hit the Angel from above, while conventional defenses occupied its AT Field below. It was a desperate, baseless strategy, but one Misato would have given anything to see fail before the death of the Third Child.
And Ritsuko said: Its gone.
You mean 'he', Misato silently corrected - it was too much effort to stand upright for her to actually say that aloud.
And Ritsuko repeated: Its gone!
Misato's vision swam. In her entry plug, Rei was finally moving, lowering Unit Zero into the access chute. The girl (who could have grabbed Shinji when Unit One got in close and pulled him down that chute! Misato had, in fact, ordered her to do exactlythat!) would be safe for a little while. But she'd be just as dead as Misato soon. Third Impact would come to Rei Ayanami, and Misato, and Ritsu, and Kaji, and every other human life on this planet.
Rei was speaking now. She was telling the Commander to call off the N2 strike.
And Ritsuko said: Commander, its gone!
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The thing that had been Unit One hung over Tokyo 3, the point of one handless arm pierced into the Fifth Angel's untwisting surface. The Eva's lower body and other arm were gone.
In the white room, Shinji was playing the final measures of the Song of Agony. The last bit was familiar, a scissor-sawfading to a long pause that ended the whole thing. The walls of the white room were blank. In the milliseconds after hitting Unit Zero's AT Field, Shinji had wiped away all that burning bright math he had played into being.
The thing that had been Unit One was rotting. The Beast Mode process weaved an Eva's AT Field into its skin, musculature, and skeleton, essentially supercharging the properties of each. The former Unit One's AT Field was no longer reinforcing its body, and that exhausted body could do little now but fall apart. The Eva's AT Field was... elsewhere.
In the white room, the silence was sweet after all that deafening noise. Shinji savored that, an emptiness he could fill at will. He checked the bristles on his bow. He rolled his neck, producing a dull crack. He awkwardly scooted forward (he was sitting on a chair, right? He didn't really know) a few inches, right into the sweet spot, the place where he needed to be.
Bow to strings, lets start out with that hum-saw...
The Eva's AT Field was... elsewhere. Behind and below and above and without, in a space that had more in common with Shinji's white room than the interior of his entry plug. When Shinji had deactivated Beast Mode, the AT Field had decanted from its Eva-shaped container and promptly inverted into an imaginary space, enveloping most of Unit One's body and the entirety of the Fifth Angel's positron/antiproton blast. Now the Field was in that unreal, far-off space: moving, twisting, orderingthe continuous molecular annihilation within.
The first measure was flat, singular - the acoustics in the white room weren't what he had expected - but by the second measure there was an echo. By the third measure, the acoustic otherwas with him.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Beyond the white room, in the dark of an unpowered entry plug, Shinji Ikari's face is pressed to the ceiling. His arms and legs are twisting, jerking in random motions. As the Song in the white room became an honest duet, his body goes slack. With a drifting dream-like slowness, arms drift up and forward, grasping Shinji's SDAT and errant earbud, where they are float next to his body in the LCL. The earbud is slotted into place, while fingers play over the SDAT controls like jointed pistons. Click click click.
SHINJI IKARI used SDAT with SDAT DISK!
Now Playing: "Save Yourself, I'll Hold Them Back"
[[ youtube code: hXXP23rOgV8 ]]
And thus begins the Song of Triumph.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Unit Zero hobbled along Linear Railway A-4, trailing an emergency power supply. They had limited her synch rate to the point where Rei could no longer feel the stumps of her Eva's legs hitting the ground, but the pain she had already experienced was still with her.
Unit One and the Third Child were still broadcasting causal paradox; she continued to allow it to affect her. She could see everything proposed, and found nothing counter to NERV's tactical imperatives. Her participation was no longer necessary, would not aid in the destruction of the Angel, but would give NERV some logistical benefit.
So now she was moving down the linear railway, away from the heart of the battlefield. Another staggered mile and she would find another access hatch, and emerge upward, into the edge of things. In other words: a minimum safe distance.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The hand that reached up and into the Fifth Angel's body didn't exist just yet, but that was okay; the former Unit One's AT Field had returned from the land of white rooms and sunset-lit train cars and was now wrapping itself around the ideaof that reaching, searching hand. Invisible digits dragged very real furrows into the Angel's flank, which erupted in a shower of mirrored-blue shards.
The last bits of Unit One were rotting away. What remained of its torso was a tattered curtain of flesh dribbling bits of shattered ribcage and the few remaining complex organs left hanging in the body's trunk. The entry plug sat nestled between the ruin of two vestigial lungs, its internal mounting and power supply already destroyed. Even as the body around it rained down on Tokyo 3 below, the entry plug remained in place. The Eva's spine and skull likewise remained impossibly fixed in place, even as the great jaw emptied of those gray, triangular shark-like teeth - which would be giving Misato Katsuragi nightmares for the rest of her life - while flesh and muscle ran like hot wax off a skeletal frame that looked like it had been suddenly compromised by a hundred hundred years of spontaneous age.
The Angel was screaming, a great and terrible sound more felt than heard. If any human had been so foolish as to intrude on this battlefield of the weird and abstract, the sound would have killed them immediately. Its deep, keening drum passed through layers of armor, warping steel, crumbling cement, completely deafening three crews of emergency maintenance personnel.
Evangelion Unit Zero, three miles from the epicenter, had to roll into a ball and project a very weak omnidirectional AT Field barrier to keep the sound out. Rei Ayanami would suffer a week-long case of tinnitus which would go undiagnosed and wholly unremarked upon, because she would not consider it important.
Six times the Angel sounded, devastating the surface buildings down to crumbling cement and twisted steel frames. All remaining elements of the Eva corpse hanging from the Angel liquified, save for the spine and skull, which were merely cracked in places. The entry plug, locus of a series of counter-vibrational AT Field baffles, was entirely unaffected.
After the sixth long, slow, deep thunderclap, cracks began to appear along the Angel's own surface. Motes of mirrored-blue emerged from those cracks, which drifted down, as though buffeted about on incidental currents of air, to where the idea of a hand was working the muscles in the idea of an arm to leverage open a widening crack near the Angel's nadir.
Fingertips came first, the drifting blue motes compressing at the points of imaginary contact, fusing into new molecular forms in rapid flashes of yellow-orange light. The energy that had been enveloped by Unit One's AT Field was now put to use, carefully shunted through an array of complicated Field structures that produced heat and radiant energy to transform the quasi-organic, quasi-solid blood-debris of this Angel into a mostly-organic uni-substance that could be used to express the projected metagenetic template.
Fingertips came first, then the skeletal digits beneath, wrapped in ghostly-clear joints fed by a network of crystalline capillaries and translucent-blue veins and arteries. Muscle came next and slowest, sheets of of knotted nanometric collapsible columns wrapping around bone and integrating with the circulatory system. Finally came a gray-blue flesh, curiously pointed with numerous small divots. When the hand was fully-formed, it closed into a fist, reducing a hunk of the Angel into more blue dust. Expression was, it turned out, much more powerful than mere idea.
The Angel began to spin and twist and elongate, its shape contorting to allow its four previously horizontal vertices a range of motion sufficient to bring the Angel's unwanted passenger into the line of fire.
The process of generation continued, spreading from hand to arm to shoulder to head and spine, and from there everywhere at once. Organs expanded downward like quickly-ripening fruit, bones emerged just ahead of the intrusive tubers of the circulatory system, just as quickly followed by muscle and that odd, divot-covered skin. The face was flat and inexpressive, the eyes were split into tri-lobbed pupils, the teeth were smaller and more human than those the Beast Mode metagenetic template had produced, and quickly covered by cheeks and thin, flat, gray-purple lips. Between chest and stomach there was an abscessed opening which - as the last of this strange, new Evangelion's skin grew into place - was filled by a pristine red sphere that appeared from nowhere (from behind and below and above and without). Only with its core in place did the light of life enter this creature's tri-lobbed eyes.
The most of the Angel's bottom half was gone now, chipped away and powdered and made into flesh. The four firing vertices had spun themselves out into curling points like tentacles. The new Eva was on top of the Angel now, fingers and toes dug in like fish-hooks as the Angel wobbled and twisted wildly. With one free hand, the Eva struck one of the Angel's four remaining triangular (more or less) surfaces, a hammer blow that shattered the surface in one great piece, sending out large slivers of the mirrored-blue debris. Arcs of yellow-orange lightning flared between many of these shards and the new Eva's skin. Plucked from the sky like airborn seeds, each mirrored-blue sliver was slotted into one of those odd divots on the Eva's gray-blue flesh, forming a cover of needle-like quills that then flattened into individual, triangular plates of overlapping armor, before finally hardening into a flushed, single piece of armor the same color as the Fifth Angel. The features of Unit One's discarded mask were neatly replicated, but the rest of the armor was leaner, without obvious joint-work or pylons.
From deep within the Fifth Angel a red glow emerged, at first concentrated in a sphere not unlike the one within the new Eva's chest. But soon the glow lost all definite shape, spreading outward until all but the contorted firing vertices were subsumed in its inner light.
Down in Central Dogma, Misato was screaming at Shinji to jump, jump! JUMP!
Several things happened in rapid sequence: First, the flattened, central remains of the Angel erupted, red spikes exuding upward from the surface beneath the new Eva, angled to stab it in places but also to immobilize it in a briar-patch of huge red-metal thorns; second, the red glow flowed from the Angel's thorned surface into the contorted firing vertices, which exploded in a simultaneous release of white light which would later be determined to be at least ten times more powerful than the highest variance of the Angel's earlier, 'standard' attack; third, Shinji Ikari woke up.
And he started laughing.
The four simultaneous positron-antiproton blasts filtered through the network of thorns and the Angel's lower body, scattering and refracting into different colors, shooting out sinister sheets of rainbow light that slammed into the ground and penetrate the horizon and the sky overhead. The new Eva, its armor constructed from the same material that had somehow managed to filter (rather than be utterly destroyed by) the positron-antiproton blast, probably could have deflected the attack entirely, and perhaps was doing just that before Shinji woke up and assumed direct control. The result of this interference was dramatic, though not in the Angel's favor.
In the wake of the Angel's attack, the new Eva's blue armor had gone entirely white. Doctor Akagi would later label this particular conformation of the armor as "zero-point configuration;" an absolute defense independent of the AT Field that was triggered whenever the Eva had reached its capacitive limit and could store no more energy. This defense mechanism was very inefficient - probably by design (but designed by whom? Akagi could guess), to drain off excess energy.
Shinji was unaware that any of this had happened. He only vaguely sort-of recalled what had happened in the white room, and the person he had met there. He was entirely free of the influence of any particular Song. All he knew was that there had been a flash of multi-colored light, and he appeared be encased in a great build-up of spikes, which he immediately identified as housing for the chinstraps.
It was also at this point that Central Dogma re-established contact with Shinji's entry plug. He heard the bridge transmission at some middle distance to his left, but for the Third Child, the entry plug did not exist.
"-ji... Shinji!"
"I know!" the Third Child returned as he twisted in place, shattering the spikes that encased him. "We're right here! Where they live!"
A pause from the bridge. The eventual question was slow and guarded, its answer foregone. "Who, Shinji? Who lives here?"
Motion came so easily, he could barely feel the spikes as he passed through them. They were mostly hollow, but decidedly uninhabited. No broken bodies or fleeing flappers emerged from the shattering spikes. There was something much like internal partitioning going on inside the spikes, but Shinji saw no evidence of water or grass or anything that might pass for chinstrap furniture.
"No one," he replied, angry. "They left. They abandoned this place, I..."
"Move," came the voice. "Shinji, you have to get out of there, now."
"No, it's empty," he said. "This whole thing was a tr-"
"SHINJI IKARI!" Misato's voice cracked at the upper limits of transmission. "Get off that thing! It... they... they've booby trapped it! Its going to explode! They're... they're going to kill you!"
And that's when the harsh red glow that had been building, unnoticed, for some time beneath Shinji's feet spread into what remained of the towering spikes and became entirely impossible to not see.
No!
Shinji pushed up with his feet, far harder than he had intended to. Instead of simply righting himself, he had effectively jumped off the strange glowing ruin, which turned out to be a battered floating platform suspended over what looked like some old pre-Impact ruin. He had just enough distance to realize this when the Fifth Angel exploded.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
The moment contact was reestablished with the Third Child, Rei Ayanami started to move. There was no longer any form of causal paradox to guide her, this was mere speculation and prediction, based on how Shinji Ikari had previously behaved. His irrational, indecentaggression combined with a foe which did not appear to have anything resembling the more traditional arrangement of interior parts suggested he would be incapable of dispatching this Angel as he had the previous one. More to the point, this Angel had already demonstrated a vast capacity to manipulate and contain S2-derived energies. Current models of Angel behavior, mostly generalized around their use of an AT Field in conjunction with an S2 organ, suggested a general morphology naturally capable of self-detonation.
The spiking pain of moving on her ankles was still there. She had had to remove the sync limiter during the Angel's auditory attack in order to erect a barrier against it. Now, her sync rate remained above 65%, as the full tactical requirements of her present action were unknown.
She stopped a mile short of the Angel and waited. Unit One - or the thing Unit One had become, was just visible at the edge of battered, barren ledge the formerly octahedral Angel had become. Captain Katsuragi was shouting at him to get clear, as the Angel became, again, to glow red. Only when Katsuragi acknowledge Shinji Ikari's reality - something Ayanami had been seconds away from opening a channel and doing herself - did the strange thing Unit One had become jump from the platform.
Incidentally, he was heading right toward Unit Zero.
The Angel's explosion was not what the models had led her to expect. Rather than a flash of white light quickly followed by incineration of both herself and Unit Zero (a distinct possibility, at this range) or a rising cloud of plasma expanding in the shape of a dissipating AT Field, the Fifth Angel's mass seemed to instantly change state into something that appeared to be plasma. Rather than conform to theory as the core within disintegrated, the plasma began to spin, forming a seemingly solid ball of light that proceeded to dive after Ikari who was...
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Misato winced as the two Eva collided. The way fate kept slamming those two into one another, you'd think there was more to it.
"Get up, you have to move!" the channel was open to both pilots. "Shinji, you have to help Rei."
The Angel was descending toward them. It was hotter than a solar flare. Ritsuko was giving them half a minute until the damn thing ignited the atmosphere. Misato only needed fifteen seconds. Shinji's Eva got up with such force it nearly toppled over. Then it grabbed Unit Zero and moved, moved, moved.
Both were well clear when the N2 carrier missiles hit, twin explosions sending the Angel into a plasma-spewing tailspin that would end several miles beyond the formal perimeter of the city, where the Angel's core, deprived of S2 organ and, therefore, AT Field, would remain, immobile and intact, until it could be trucked away for further study.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
LEVEL COMPLETED!
HERE COMES THE BOOM
(((Shinji Ikari)))
KOs: 1 Rei Ayanami (accidental)
KOed by: Keija Sakkamota (emotionally, accidentally. This time)
Unit One Gained Form: BEAST MODE
Unit One Evolved to: SUPER EVA
Gained Achievement! Heartbreak Kid
Gained Achievement! 5G Walkin'
Gained Achievement! The Zombie Ikari or He Left Behind a Beautiful Corpse
Gained Achievement! Blazing Blue Knight
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Keija Sakkamota)))
KOs: 1 Shinji Ikari
Gained Nickname! Kei
Gained Achievement! Jezzball Trolololololo
Gained Achievement! Kei, Beyond her Heart. Sorta.
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Rei Ayanami)))
KOed by: Shinji Ikari (whoops)
Ankles sawed through: 2
Radiation Exposure: 1,000 rad
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
(((Misato Katsuragi)))
KOs: 1 Angel motherfuckers, finally
Gained Achievement! Setting the Sun
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
"We got lucky," Ritsuko said from behind her tablet. "You have no idea."
"Of course we did," Misato countered. "We've got this new Eva for you to play with, and another Angel is dead."
"A new Eva that Rei Ayanami cannot synchronize with," Ritsuko corrected. "So for our immediate purposes, a uselessEva."
"It does have a pilot," Misato said. But of course Akagi knew that. He was the reason they were riding this tram down to the cryo-stasis bay.
"I may not be Tactical, but I anticipate many negative outcomes if you actually suggest that," Ritsu responded crisply.
"Yeah well, just because we won't be letting him pilot anytime soon doesn't mean we have to lock him up," Misato came back.
The tram stopped, the two women disembarked. Shinji was set into the wall, in a narrow alcove, his body encased in a translucent non-Newtonian fluid. From the screens set in the wall beside him, Misato could see that Shinji's life signs and psychograph were normal. He was asleep. Ritsuko was pretty sure they could keep him like this for a few months, at least.
"This new Eva is an unknown quantity, and it happened because he was in the entry plug," Ritsuko said. "Since restraining the new Eva is beyond our capabilities, and destroying it wouldn't be prudent, we have to isolate him until we can be sure whatever happened to Unit One has, in fact, stopped happening."
"He's a kid," Misato put in, stubbornly. "Look, he doesn't even likeEva. We can move him off-base, let him go to school, do kid stuff."
"Misato," Ritsu closed her eyes, pinched a temple. "This projection you're doing, onto the mysterious abomination of God-science? It's getting tiresome."
"He's a kid," Misato pointed at Shinji, significantly, and then at Ritsuko, "And you're being a bit of a bitch."
So, what's next? Either:
11A - NERV puts Shinji on ice. He's in a medically-induced coma until Asuka arrives. This leads to the following scene:
(The Second Child's first instinct was to turn around and walk away. This wasn't what she was looking for. He was the right age, but there was a squawking seagull in his hands. Asuka Langley Sohryu could not envisage any scenario that would require the mysterious Third Child to behave in this way.
He's messing with me, she surmised. Trying to be cool. Aloof. He knew Misato would send me after him. So, okay... "What are you doing, exactly?"
The boy looked up. One of his eyes was red - some kind of crude therapy repair? His expression was tight. "Inspecting," he replied. The seagull continued to screech and flap the wing the boy had not pinned.
"And uh, why would you want to do that?"
The boy rotated the gull, inspecting its underside. Then he tossed it overboard, where it alighted and flapped away. "Miscegenation," he said.
An archaic word, probably not even real. He was still messing with her. Or trying to, anyway. "What are you even doing out here? Misato and Kaji are waiting for us in the mess." See those names I dropped there? Note the familiarity. They may be your superiors, but I've known them for years.
"I don't like it in there, if that's all right," the boy replied.
"Don't tell me you're claustrophobic," she responded. You work in an entry plug, ass!
"Not really?" the boy shrugged, tossing more bread crumbs from his bag. "They keep me in a cell most of the time. I'm not allowed to interact with people."
Asuka rolled her eyes. As if NERV would let some criminal pilot Eva. This was just getting sad.
The Third Child snatched a diving gull out of the air. The bird's motion was trailed by a storm of white feathers. It shrieked shrilly, until the boy clamped down on its beak. "They won't let me work, either," he continued. "Against the chinstraps, I mean."
...chinstraps. "Against the what?"
"The geese," he replied, turning over the gull. "Black and ashy brown and white? A little bigger than a soccer ball? Their plumage makes it look like they're wearing little helmets, secured by chinstraps? I think they are from North America, originally."
…geese. "Why would you work against geese?"
He smiled, and crisply snapped the gull's neck. "Because if I don't, they'll kill everyone." He let the body fall overboard.
And now she did walk away. Backwards. Turning around suddenly seemed like maybe it wouldn't be the most prudent course of action. "You are Shinji Ikari, right? The Third Child?"
The boy was tossing more crumbs. Did he intend to 'inspect' every bird that was trailing this ship? "Yeah," he replied. "I guess that's me."
"What are you, crazy?" she asked, which was to say: Anata ki chigai.)
Or:
11B - NERV allows Shinji to remain active. This leads to the following scene:
(Shinji nervously edged out into the pool area. Bad enough he'd had to walk Major Katsuragi through a made-up itinerary (to her obvious delight, she'd been a little overbearing since the promotion), now he had to intrude on the swim club.
The pool was elevated from the track area, and enclosed by a chain-link fence. A small group of girls and boys both were using the pool. Discovering the club was co-ed was something of a relief. Seemed to decrease the chance he'd be pushed into the pool to drown for being a hentai.
Sakkamota was doing laps, or lines, or whatever you called going side-to-side in a pool. She was doing laps 15 minutes after she said practice would be over. She was doing laps 15 minutes after she said practice would be over, and no one else appeared to be done either. Oh, and look, one of those boys was the kid that tried to go after Rei...
It would now be entirely appropriate, Shinji decided, to effect immediate egress (another one of those weird words he had never heard before, but somehow knew the meaning of). Yeah, it was time to bug out, fuck off, and scram. He had told Sakkamota he couldn't swim, and she had basically tricked him into coming to the pool area where her thug boyfriend could dump him in the deep end.
No one expected him to be back in his cell for another three hours, maybe he could go down to that lake and see if any geese had migrated in...
"Ikari?!" came the yell. Shinji was backing into the shade by the building, putting a bench between himself and the pool. Those drills in Eva had taught him the benefit of having something solid between oneself and one's enemy. If they tried to drag him into the pool, he could latch onto the bench.
"Hey, that's you, right?" Sakkamota emerged at the edge of the pool, visible to her shoulder line. "Why are you here, huh?"
"You said to meet in the atrium at 4:30" he replied carefully, steadily. One of the girls standing by the pool had noticed him and self-consciously turned away.
"I said 5:00," Sakkamota declared, detaching from the side of the pool and drifting out. "How could I do any training in just thirty minutes? All the club meetings are an hour long, you know."
"Oh," he said, and made to leave. She had definitely said 4:30. So she'd either made a mistake, or this was all a crazy plot to drown him. Either way, annoying. He had been hoping to get some work in on Bach's Suite 3 tonight.
"Hold on, hold on," Sakkamota said, voice projecting weariness. "Look, just give me a minute, okay? Get me a towel."
Shinji waved without looking back, "I'll be in the atrium." Get close to the edge of the pool? No.
Not that he was afraid of the water, not really. His lungs were still full of LCL from yesterday's sync test. He could sink to the bottom of the pool and just sit there until everyone got bored with their murder attempt and went away. It wasn't like he wasn't willing to walk across the bottom of Ashino Lake to ambush a lazy flock of chinstraps. No, he was just tired of getting tricked by everyone, all the time. He was tired with his poor fortune being someone else's measure of success.
And maybe 'tired' was the wrong word. A more apt description would encompass the effort it took to not rationalize a chinstrap-like shape onto all these people who were trying their best to tear him apart. But that would be too much. That would be crazy. He'd just have to resign himself to only being able to trust Ayanami, who most assuredly was not a goose.
He lingered in the atrium for maybe five minutes before Sakkamota showed up, sports bag over one shoulder. She was wearing athletic shorts over her school one-piece and flip-flops and nothing else. Shinji was careful to make eye contact, which didn't stop him from noticing how poorly the swimsuit fit her.
"Okay," she said, swinging arms out, indicating her whole self. "Here I am."
Her chest was too large, was compressed by the school-standard suit into a single broad shape.
"Are we going to this place, or what?" she asked, pulling on a t-shirt.
If he had gotten her that towel, what else might he have seen? Thighs. Why did he care about thighs? Well, not so much the thighs as the you-know. Like Sakkamota was a puzzle half solved. Or maybe two-thirds solved. Or
She snapped fingers in front of his face. "What is it? What's wrong with you?"
Shinji blinked. "Sorry," he managed. "Sorry, its been a long day."
"Uh huh." She wasn't buying it. She knew exactly what he'd been thinking. Probably expecting it. Could have planned this entire encounter around it. "You slept through Pre-Calculus."
You were watching? "You were watching?"
"I'm the class representative," she said, sounding annoyed. "Are you taking me to this cake bar, or what?"
/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/
Author's Notes: Fair readers, this is all your fault. We could have had a nice, pastoral Shinji who just went around being canon with a slightly more tragic backstory, but you just had to have him go balls-to-the-wall crazy. You made be jam that Keija Sakkamota chick in there. You made me write like a billion words of Eva combat. What were you thinking?
Look, this is only going to work if you shape up and fly right. Make the right choice this time, already.
Anyway, I've got law finals until winter. The next Branch could be ready as early as Christmas. Assuming you don't screw up and force me to write another 30k catastrofuck.
