Creation began on 09-09-18
Creation ended on 01-28-20
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Modern Day Legend of a Rage-filled Anchor: Pray for Me
A/N: I'll admit, the title is inspired by the song from Black Panther, and should have some influence on the chapter.
Seven days in the hospital to recover from his injuries. A whole week in the hospital, just to recover partially from the injuries sustained from the fight against his father…and he would have to endure another week of recuperation before Dr. Maya Ibuki even considered the possibility of Shinji being fit enough to go home. He couldn't argue against her or anyone else, for that matter, since what he went through at Mikage International and almost succumbing to his injuries at home…were the closest he'd ever been to actually dying. His memories of his time in the Eva could no longer compare to his current situation with the celestial side of these different families, bloodlines and generations. Not even in the slightest degree, because he literally had to get his hands involved.
At least he was recovering. His breathing got better, he had more energy, and he didn't need an IV tube as much. And his frequent visits from everyone helped in his recovery, too, especially from Asuka and Rei, more than ever.
"…So, I heard from your mother that they took you off the IV completely now," said Asuka to him as they walked down the hallway, "but why do you still have the pole?"
"It's only in case my right leg gets weak," Shinji explained. "I gotta exercise my feet more."
"If you exercise too much, you could become an anorexic."
"Huh?"
"Because you already look skinny, you look like you weigh only less than a hundred pounds. It's…concerning, health-wise."
"I think I could probably eat an all-you-eat buffet and I'd still look a little underweight."
"I don't mind a bit of weight, so long as it's spread out. There's some energy bars in the cafeteria that help you gain weight instead of lose it."
"Then I gotta try one sometime."
As they headed to the cafeteria where Rei was waiting for them, Wei Fei Li had gone over the boy's medical file and was pleased to see that he was on his way to recovery. He had become concerned that he would have to neutralize the boy's father for causing his premature death and ruining Kagami's plans for a perfect world.
What concerns me are his back scars, he thought, discovering that, while Shinji was getting better, the boy had lost some significant tissue mass from his back, not just having it cut away, which, according to his file, was going to take longer to regenerate, if his body could ever replace the lost mass since the medical staff decided not to do any skin grafts for him. Even if he recovers without any significant rehabilitation, those scars will be permanent. Unless he has some untapped power of recuperation, I don't see how this Ikari is going to endure having scars on his back.
-x-
It was a strange feeling for Rei to now be somewhat involved with the alternate of the same person as Asuka, but it was also to help Shinji in his recovery after he asked the both of them to act as his anchor and keep him tethered to life. She didn't deny caring about him, even though they didn't really know each other quite well after their chat on the hospital roof, but didn't wish any pain on him. If there was any hope for the three of them in the long run, they would have to find a way to make this relationship last.
I want for there to be hope for the three of us as time passes by, she thought as she selected a packaged salad from the vending machine. But with time, there's a lot of uncertainty. Nothing is for sure as we go beyond the present and into the future of the unknown.
Then, just because the thought of it occurred in her mind, she thought about the dreams she had that felt like memories that had to be from the alternate of herself from the world this new Shinji was from. She recalled being in the Entry Plug, facing a giant diamond, a giant eye in the sky with hands, being naked in the plug for a prolonged period of time, and watching Shinji fall into a deep, dark hole and ending up here. There was even the dream/memory where she went and slapped him just because of his response about not having any faith in his father's work; knowing the man was a monster in more ways than the monsters they were forced to fight, she'd have no faith in the guy herself if she had to live in his universe. One of her biggest disgusts with her alternate self was that she lived in a dump, and not one of those cracker box apartments, either, but a real rat hole in a condemned neighborhood that was loud during the daylight hours and cold during the night hours. There was no way in Hell she would wish such a dwelling on herself or anyone, not even a homeless person with a criminal record.
"…Without you, I'm quite alone…" She heard the speakers in the cafeteria playing some music as she sat down at one of the tables. "Who gonna pray for me? Take my pain for me? Save my soul for me?"
She bobbed her head to the beat; this was a recent song that she and Asuka liked to listen to sometimes because it felt like one of those songs to listen to at night.
-x-
"…You'll be relieved to hear that your son's recovery has improved," Kagami told Gendo as the injured man sat there on the floor of his cell. "It looks like for now, you'll live to see another day."
As Kagami left him alone, Gendo frowned at how pathetic his current situation was because of Shinji. If his son had died, his fate would've been decided upon, but since it was confirmed that Shinji would live for now, he was allowed to see another day until these people decided to get the boy.
But so long as the boy is alive, I still have a chance to get the Ikari hagoromo, he thought as he still pondered how to gain possession of the coveted treasure belonging to Frenzia for his own purposes. A powerful heirloom is many times more invaluable than whatever artificially-made relic belonging to these people.
He refused to be swayed into taking the hagoromo that Mikage had created; it had to be the one belonging to the Ikari…or he'd kill Shinji himself so that he couldn't have it, either. There would be no way he'd let himself get beaten so utterly by a child that had done nothing worth any significant measure to be considered an achievement.
-x-
"…That's strange," went Maya as she examined Shinji's back lacerations as he laid on his front.
"What is it?" Shinji asked her, feeling concerned.
"Five days ago, your lacerations were bordering on severe, but now they're showing signs of improvement. This is a remarkable status update, Shinji."
"Really?"
"Yes. If this keeps up, you might just have some minor scarring on your back."
"That…wouldn't be so bad."
Then she applied medicinal cream onto his lacerations and re-bandaged him and had him wait outside while she spoke with Yui, who came inside the room.
"How is he doing?" Yui asked her.
"He's doing a lot better than the last time he was here," Maya answered. "Whatever's going on with him and each of you from a week ago, it's helping him recover from his injuries."
"I don't think it's got anything to do with all of us," Yui expressed her opinion. "I think it has to do with Asuka and Rei."
"Rei Ayanami? Asuka Soryu-Ayanami? Blue hair and eyes? Red hair and eyes?"
"Yes, them."
"What do they have to do with his recovery?"
"Young love."
"Now, that's something medical science has yet to confirm if it truly affects the body's recovery rate. I believe in love, but not being able to physically recover through love."
"When you believe in something like love, it probably can't be explained in any other way. And science can't really answer the more interesting questions that exist in the world. Not that it ever could for me, that is."
"Aspiring to become a philosopher?"
"Philosophy never hurt anyone."
-x-
"…Are you ready, Asuka?" Misato asked the redhead as she sat in the Entry Plug of Unit-03 as she prepared to activate the black Eva for the first time.
"Yeah," Asuka answered her.
As uncomfortable as she was inside an Eva that wasn't her Unit-02, she would have to grin and bear it until these two Angels were defeated.
Central Dogma was at work with preparing the black behemoth for battle deployment.
"Beginning activation," Maya announced.
The countdown commenced…and all systems were in the green.
"Evangelion Unit-03 is now activated," another voice announced.
"Asuka, proceed to Terminal Dogma," Ritsuko ordered the Second Child as the black Eva began to move, albeit slowly due to Asuka's synchronization with it being five percent less than it had been with Unit-02.
"What exactly is down in Terminal Dogma?" Misato asked the faux-blond.
"Probably the only weapon NERV has that can actually harm the Angels."
Since Gendo wasn't present and Fuyutsuki was in charge, Ritsuko was taking a large risk in gambling with the future of the human race by exploiting the Lance of Longinus without authorization. But it was only because Gendo wasn't here and they were unprepared for two Angels at the moment.
Fuyutsuki, on the other hand, as acting commander of NERV, felt the priority of the Angels needed to be resolved first, and that meant using every available resource they had at their disposal, and right now, this included the Lance of Longinus. Even if Gendo returned at a later time, because he was not the one in charge of the operation at this time, there would be little he could do to ensure that the lance wouldn't be compromised in any way that it was used.
Misato had to suspect that the "only weapon" Ritsuko was referring to was that red, spear-like object that was piercing the Angel NERV kept in Terminal Dogma. But if removing it from the Angel were to cause Third Impact, it was a move they shouldn't make, even to stop two Angels that showed up at the same time…unless, of course, removing it wouldn't trigger Third Impact.
"Proceeding to Terminal Dogma," Asuka uttered as Unit-03 traveled down a shaft towards her destination. "ETA is two minutes."
-x-
He saw Shinji…and Rei…and the Second Child…sitting against a large tree, resting comfortably, as though there were no hint or sign of danger in the world. And it sickened him to no end. The very sight of the three teens asleep against a tree, their hands holding onto one another (or rather, Shinji holding onto the hands of both girls on either side of him)…it just made him angry. As he approached the boy in the middle of the tree's base, Gendo, with his frown getting more inhuman by the second, raised his right hand to his face, the fingers thin and the skin withered, thinking of how much he couldn't stand to see him seemingly at peace.
"You ungrateful brat," he uttered, and saw Rei stir from slumber, looking at him with blue eyes instead of red eyes, revealing that she wasn't the one he had known.
"You can't hurt Shinji," she told him. "He's suffered enough. We've all suffered enough. Please, stop trying to make him miserable."
"What he's after, he doesn't deserve, Rei," Gendo told her. "The hagoromo belonging to Frenzia will belong to me, one way or another."
"Except what you seek carries a high price that even you will be unable to pay," he heard the Second Child say as she stirred from slumber, looking at him with red eyes instead of blue eyes, seeing that she wasn't the girl that piloted Unit-02. "Even if he doesn't inherit her power, you won't receive it, either. You're not of the Ikari bloodline. While you might've married into the family in one other lifetime in another world, you're not blood kin to Frenzia like Shinji is. Continue to pursue your desire at your own peril…but be prepared for more than just failure that awaits you at the end of the journey."
Then he saw both girls wrap their arms around the still-sleeping Shinji, as if protecting him from the wrath of his father.
"You can't protect him," he told them.
"And you won't have him," the Second Child responded. "You didn't want him then…and you can't have him again. You ran away from him like the heartless coward you are."
Then, just as he was going to attack both girls that stood between Shinji and his wrath, a dark shadow loomed over them all, and he turned to see that it was Unit-01, albeit without most of its armor and appearing like a skinned demon with glowing eyes.
"Death comes for us all," a dark voice said to him, "but something far worse will come for you."
Gasp! Gendo went as he awoke from his own slumber; once more, he had been dreaming of wanting to cause his son pain and misery, only to have these two girls that weren't Rei and the Second Child be near and telling him that he would fail in any attempt to take Frenzia's hagoromo for his own purposes.
Something worse than dying? He wondered as he sat against the wall of his makeshift prison cell on the ship these people were using. There is no such fate that is worse than one's final breath.
-x-
"…On a scale of one-ten, how would you rate your pain today, Shinji?" Maya asked Shinji after she examined his back again the next day.
"I guess I would rate it at four," he told her.
"It has been eight days now, so I must say that your recovery rate has improved over the time you've been here. And your visits from your family and friends have done well to motivate your body to recover faster. You should still avoid any heavy lifting for a few more days, but beyond that…I think you're of sound body and mind to go home today."
"Thank you, Dr. Ibuki."
As the boy walked into a small dressing room to change out of his hospital garments, the older alternate of the woman he had seen in NERV had to wonder if his recovery really was the result of this strange love triangle that was himself and the redhead and bluenette girls that came to see him all the time. It was hard to believe at first, but when she looked over his last evaluation and compared them, she had to consider the possibility, since medication, surgeries and painkillers could only affect the remedying of injuries to the body by so much. The limitations of the human body's ability to regenerate from harm only proves how little science and technology had progressed in advancing the human condition. Sure, some people could live to be a little over a century or be cured of soft bone conditions or cancer or leukemia, but what people had always wanted to achieve beyond these advances, what they have longed for since the beginning of their ability to desire such…was the ability of instantaneous regeneration, the ability to recover at will, to replace lost or damaged parts of the body from the very source.
Maybe we're just too far away for such a goal to be realized, she thought as Shinji pulled away the curtain screen after he was fully dressed. "You should take your bandages off tomorrow afternoon and continue to apply medicinal cream on the healing skin."
"Yes, ma'am," Shinji responded.
"One more thing, Shinji. Unless it's just life-threatening condition of some sort or just the flu, I'd rather not see you here again until your next appointment. You're a young man who should be out in the world doing whatever it takes to enjoy life, not shorten it."
Shinji gave a small smile and bowed his head to her.
"So I'm told," he expressed.
The more you live, he heard his deceased counterpart say, the more you experience in the world and the more you enjoy what life has to offer.
Leaving the room, Shinji met up with everyone that was around to support his recovery.
"So," went Aki to him, curious about his prognosis, "what did the doctor say?"
"I'm well enough to leave," he revealed to them. "But I should definitely live a little more."
"Yeah," said Rei to him, "you should live a little more. When was the last time you went and…did anything with anyone?"
Of course, Shinji couldn't answer that question because "anything" could've meant…anything unrelated to what he either used to do because his father forced him or had done prior to getting injured by his father due to his arrogance and desire for what wouldn't be his. In truth, Shinji probably only spent time split between helping Aya save her brother, her lover, deal with her family's Ceres problem, which was only halfway accomplished, discovering that he had a deceased alternate of himself that committed suicide a year ago because he didn't want to risk murdering his lover due to a rage curse he couldn't control, being part of his alternate's life when he met his mother and grandmother, and then discovering the alternates of Misato and Rei. It was like…he was suffocating himself with priorities instead of riding a wave of fulfillment that rewarded those who actually lived.
Even the deceased Shinji Ikari could tell how his doppelgänger from another universe where half the world was taken away and the rest of it crippled beyond people's ability to repair without paying a high price.
"My life has been rather…complicated," Shinji told Rei, sighing over how pathetic what he was going to say next would be. "To think that I would do something similar to my father, who is clearly not good at…"
"Living," went Asuka to him, knowing what he was talking about because she had seen his memories, "which is not true with you. You can't be able to live until you actually do something you enjoy, that makes you smile or laugh."
"We all need to do something today that we enjoy?" Misato uttered.
"You have any suggestions?" Chidori questioned.
"What does anyone do for fun around Magatama Town?"
-x-
There were many questions Asuka had about what she saw down there in Terminal Dogma when she retrieved the Lance of Longinus. But her two primary ones had to be why there was an Angel-like creature down there and why NERV never mentioned having a weapon that could penetrate the AT-Field of an Angel. If she had been informed about the lance earlier, she would've pushed for using it against the Angels every chance she got. Maybe then, they wouldn't have been in the previous situation with the Angel that decimated NERV HQ or the Angel that swallowed up and displaced him into another dimension where he was with people similar to some of them, but having no association with a paramilitary agency created following the aftermath of a devastation that never took place. And maybe NERV would've seen that it was unnecessary for additional pilots when she was all they needed.
I still can't get that scream of his out of my head, though, she thought as she carried the lance out onto the outer city limits. A scream of so much more than just defeat.
If everything they had come to know about what was mentioned about the existence of alternate universes was true, and that there were other worlds just around the corner, one for every possibility, every eventuality, including the most unspeakable or impossible, then it meant there was probably a few (if not just one) where the end of the world took place, where NERV had failed in stopping the Angels or just couldn't prevent the unavoidable because of other circumstances they couldn't foresee.
"Okay, Asuka," went Misato over the intercom. "You'll take out the Angel on the ground before spearing the one in space. Be careful."
"Got it."
Seeing the Angel condense into a solid ring of light instead of its double-helical ring, Asuka gripped the lance and prepared to throw it as soon as it came close enough. It then broke off into a thread-like form and shot like a bullet towards her!
"Oh!" She gasped as she thrust the lance in front of Unit-03.
Slice! One of the two prongs of the bident made contact with the Angel and cut off a piece of it, reducing it to nothing.
"Okay," Asuka went, and thrust the lance forward again.
-x-
Sometimes, wandering through dark places like this reminded Shinji of how crazy his past was, having to be cautious of every dark corner, every unexpected possibility. Sometimes, he had to wonder which dark part of his past was worse than the rest of it: Was it the Angels, the Eva…or his father? He wasn't sure, as each one was…difficult to compare and just as difficult to bury in many respects.
"I'm always ready for a war again… Go down that road again… It's all the same…" He heard a male voice sang in the darkness as he pressed his back against a wall.
"You can run, Shinji, but you can't hide," he heard Yuuhi's voice say to him in the darkness.
Suddenly, a blue light shot out from in front of Shinji, who jumped out of the way onto the floor and rolled across to the other side of the tunnel.
He raised his left hand up, wielding a futuristic pistol…and firing yellow laser bolts into the darkness where the blue ones came from.
"Ah, come on!" Aki's voice cried out as the lights on his vest lit up green to indicate that he was hit by Shinji's laser bolts. "I wasn't even talking!"
Shinji smirked and got back up.
"Alright, come with it," he spoke, feeling cheerful. "Hail all heroes of Laser Town! Laze 'em! Tag 'em! Take 'em down!"
"Oh, yeah!" Misato yelled, taking down Chidori and Yuuhi with red laser bolts. "We're in the top laser coliseum in the galaxy! We're beholden to its majesty!"
"Not so fast, children!" They heard Yui say to them, appearing on a bridge with Anzu, who was holding a large disco ball in her hand. "We got the best gift of the game, and it's laser-flavored!"
Anzu threw the ball into the air and Yui fired her laser gun, illuminating the whole playing field with yellow light beams being fired at every angle!
Everyone's vest lit up and made sounds to indicate each player's status as defeated.
"Winner: Team Maternity!" A robotic voice announced, and the whole room lit up to expose the columns and corners where the competitors of the game hid or ran around. "Level Six over!"
With the objective being to live more, Yui had suggested going to Laser Town, one of Magatama Town's three competitive laser tag game centers, and was, without a doubt, the most popular out of the three due to having an entire building with eight floors worth of obstacles and excitement. They all split into teams of two or three: Shinji, Asuka and Rei were Team Dreamer, Aya and Toya were Team Lovers, Yuuhi and Chidori were Team Flirt, Aki, Misato and Q-Chan were Team Risk Taker, and Yui and Anzu were Team Maternity. So far, the game was having the positive effect of helping Shinji…but it was also helping Aki, Aya, Toya, Yuuhi and the rest; none of them had either done laser tag in a long time or had ever played it and were learning on the go quick.
"Okay, Mother," said Shinji to Yui as the door to the next level opened up, "you've used your secret weapon, so how do you hope to survive the next level?"
"Never underestimate the power of the previous generations," Yui told him.
"And don't underestimate the unpredictability of the current generation," went Rei to the woman. "We can do things that outdo you in an instant."
"Let's say the winner gets ice cream," Aya suggested.
"The losing teams pay for ice cream," Chidori added.
"I hope everyone brought their pocket change," Asuka told them.
"Let's do this," Shinji uttered.
-x-
With this Angel now dead before it could cause her trouble, Asuka could focus on the other Angel in space. Pulling back, the lance folded into a javelin as she targeted the Angel.
"Here goes!" She yelled, hurling it through the sky, just as the Angel shined a light on her Unit-02. "Aaaahh!"
The lance soared towards the Angel, breaking through the planet's atmosphere and colliding with its AT-Field, piercing through it. When it made contact with the light body, the Angel was wiped away, like a smear on a window getting wiped away.
In the Entry Plug, Asuka was reeling from the mild effects of whatever it was the Angel had tried to do to her. It felt like she was recalling the parts of her past she didn't want to remember, but instead of her strained relationships with her mother, father or stepmother, she was recalling the absence of Shinji and how he was residing in another universe with some people that were alternate versions of them, with different relationships that were unrelated to the Eva. Especially how she was feeling over Shinji being around that doppelgänger of herself with red eyes and having a more pleasant personality and was his doppelgänger's lover. What she suspected the Angel might've attempted to do with her memories was to get at some sense of dread or disgust she had over Shinji…being with her doppelgänger…just like his doppelgänger had been with her. But she didn't have any fear of Shinji choosing that red-eyed redhead and that undamaged world. She just resented the likelihood that Shinji…would do anything to escape the life he had here in this world…and there would be nothing any of them could do to keep him from making that choice.
"Shinji, I love you," she recalled her doppelgänger say to Shinji while he was in the hospital, sickening her with how much she truly meant every word she used. "Even if you don't feel the same way towards me, I just want you to know that."
She was in love with his doppelgänger…and now she's in love with him, she thought as she felt her head returning to normal now that the Angel was dead. He throttles her, and she doesn't take it personal. He could still do whatever he wants to her, and she defends his actions. Why can't she see that he's not a good person? He'll get her killed one day, and it'll be both their faults. What could she possibly see in a pitiful wimp like him?
"That sounds like jealousy, Asuka," Misato had told her when she expressed her annoyance towards her alternate's feelings for Shinji, suggesting that she herself had feelings for him.
"…Asuka?" She heard Misato's voice on the intercom. "Asuka, do you hear me?"
"Yeah," she responded.
"I said the lance has escaped the planet's gravitational field and is approaching lunar orbit. We can't retrieve it."
"Sorry. I screwed up."
"No, Soryu," went Fuyutsuki's voice over the intercom, "you did what you were supposed to, which is defeat the Angels, no matter what weapons we end up losing in the process. Return Unit-03 to base and then hit the showers."
"Yes, sir."
-x-
In the silence of space, the Lance of Longinus fell towards the moon and became embedded on its surface. Its presence on the white marble gave an indication that it was left by another race before all life vanished, as though life had once existed there as it once had on Mars. But now the question was who would leave such an object there…and why would they leave it?
-x-
"…Any last words, Shinji?" Toya asked Shinji, who was on the ground, separated from his laser pistol.
"Yeah, I got a few," Shinji responded. "How does it feel to be alive and free?"
"It feels…gratifying."
But before he could pull the trigger and remove Shinji from the game level, his own vest lit up, indicating that he'd been taken out.
"Nice try, Toya," they heard Rei behind the older man, "but nobody's taking out Shinji…except perhaps Asuka and I."
Toya turned to face the bluenette, and saw that she and Asuka had taken Aya hostage.
"They cornered me," she told him.
Shinji grabbed his laser pistol and then relieved Toya of his.
"Thank you for saving me, ladies," he praised them. "I thought I was done for."
Suddenly, all three of their vests lit up; someone had taken them out of the game.
"You three were done for," went Misato as she stepped out of the shadows. "And victory goes to… Team Risk Taker! Give us our props!"
"Props to you, Misato," Aya and Asuka expressed.
"This has been fun," said Rei to them. "This has actually been…the most exciting fun I've had in a long time now."
"Laser tag is so…so exhilarating," Shinji admitted his opinion. "How'd it get to be from something as simple as lights and sounds to being such a leisure game?"
"People blended two different worlds together," Yui explained as she and the others showed up. "The world of physicality augments the world of games and vice versa. To enjoy the game, the player must be able to move in ways they know they can't do in a simple video game, and to make the game itself more exciting, there must be factors that can't be predicted, like when the fog machines are going to release mist or when the entire room will shake with noises. It's because of these factors that these games are referred to as either role-playing games or live-action role-playing games."
Then, probably because of the information overload, Asuka raised her laser pistol and shot Yui in the vest, causing it to light up with sounds.
"Oh, really, Asuka?" Yui asked her, and then Chidori raised hers and shot Yuuhi in the vest, lighting him up.
"Chidori, why?" He asked.
Then Anzu raised hers and shot Aki and Q-Chan.
"Hey!" They gasped.
"Rematch, anyone?" She asked.
"Oh, it's on!" Shinji, Asuka and Rei declared, and they all ran to hide all over again.
-x-
"…From what I can tell, the boy has made a stride in his recovery and is now just enjoying a game of laser tag with these people, including the Mikage twins and their associates," Wei Fei Li informed Kagami on his cell phone as he stood outside, across the street from the Laser Town establishment where Shinji and the others were. "To think that he'd be injured the way he was by someone related to him…and then take over a week to recover enough that it no longer impedes him. Those injuries to his back alone should've finished him…but he survived. What are your orders, sir?"
"Maintain your surveillance of them," Kagami responded. "If there is any indication that he's in danger by someone, you have permission to remove the threat or to extract the boy."
"Understood, sir."
And with that, Wei Fei Li hung up and resumed his surveillance of the laser tag building, just in time to see Shinji and the others walk out of it. From the look of things, it seemed that some of them had won several rounds in the building because they were carrying large, stuffed animals. All in all, just having a good time. He stayed hidden behind his newspaper so that they couldn't see him, not that they were looking his way.
Raising his right hand to his ear, he activated the listening device masked as a hearing aid to eavesdrop on their conversation.
"…That was a good game and everything," he heard Aki say to them.
"We should do something like this next time," Aya suggested.
"I'm all for it," one of the women he didn't know responded.
"Yeah," added the Katsuragi girl, "but Shinji, you should also focus on the goal that will put everyone at ease."
"I know exactly what you mean, Misato," Shinji had replied. "The sooner, the better."
"End the suffering that condemns people…and live to see brighter days," said the redhead.
"Where was it said that sounds about right?" He heard the younger Ikari woman express. "Someone said that…the seeds of the future lie buried in the past…for a better world."
"Yeah, someone did say that before," Yuuhi explained. "An enlightened bat…to a sage gorilla."
"I fail to see how that makes sense in this situation," another female voice confessed.
"In a way, to pave the path to the future," the elder Ikari woman spoke, "you have to a step not forwards…but backwards. To move forward into the future, you have to look backwards at what was and is to get to what isn't and can be."
"And…what was and is to what isn't and can be?" Aki asked.
"Frenzia," Shinji answered, "and the Ikari family's history, spanning back through time and into the present. Her greatest possession that has yet to be passed on to a new holder. That is what was and is…along with what isn't."
"And what can be…is you inheriting her greatest possession."
"That…remains to be seen…but the possibility exists, nonetheless."
Wei Fei Li got the impression that they were talking about something that an ancestor from the Ikari family possessed…and had yet to be passed on to a new owner, like how a will had yet to be established so someone or a group of people could ascertain what was left to who by who. But if this was in relation to something like a hagoromo, then he'd need to inform Kagami later on; one hagoromo was an advancement in the C-Genome project, but two were an improvement, especially when one of them was from a family with a celestial ancestress of greater quality than the one from the Mikage family.
To be continued…
A/N: Wow, I really missed writing this. I bet you're wondering what is going to be said and done about SEELE when they discover the Lance of Longinus has been disposed of, or what some people are going to say about Lilith in Terminal Dogma when Asuka went to retrieve it. And I don't think any of these characters have ever done something as leisurely as laser tag, and the Laser Town establishment was inspired by the reboot of Ben 10 with the quote mentioned later on about the past and future coming from… On second thought, I want you to tell me where the quote came from. Wait for the next chapter!