A Whole New Universe (of Problems)
Chapter 9
(Not So) Beautiful World
Please Read and Review. I'd like to know what I'm doing right (to keep doing it), and what I'm doing wrong (to correct it).
Tokyo-3 Ruins,
Beach
"Our situation is more complex than we had thought, John!" Almost running, Harvey arrived back to the beach; pushing a shopping cart, full to the brim with a wild assortment of stuff.
"Yeah, I had noticed, Harvey." Said Crichton sarcastically, shaking the shoulders of the unknown kid. The teenager howled desperately, his eyes wild and his breath ragged and irregular. His head turned violently left and right, as if he was surrounded by enemies, and looking for a way to flee.
Crichton held the boy´s shoulders down against the sand. "If he keeps like that, he's gonna give himself a seizure, Harvey! Help me hold him down. He´s gonna dislocate a shoulder unless we immobilize him!"
The boy wasn't even trying to escape, he just trashed uncontrollably in Crichton's arms, screaming his head off. His voice was raw and full of horror and hurt.
"Good… thing… this … is sand!" Harvey said between clenched teeth as he kept the boy's head from hitting against the soft ground. Repeated impacts would end up causing lesions, even against a relatively soft surface.
It took several long minutes for the kid to exhaust himself, while both Crichton and Harvey tried to stop him from hurting himself. Finally, his strength spent, the skinny boy finally closed his eyes, and fell into a fitful sleep.
"What's the PROBLEM with him?" Crichton exhaled violently.
"I don't know." Harvey passed a hand over his bald scalp. "He seems to be suffering from some kind of mental trauma." Harvey knelt down next to the boy, while Crichton paced around.
A female voice interrupted them, a steady stream of Japanese. The red headed girl had awoken while their attention had been centered in the boy.
"Woowoowoowoo!" Crichton said, waving his arms back and forth, before using his hands to form a letter "T", the standard gesture to ask for a pause in sports, a chance to conference with his companion. He turned towards Harvey, "How come we can't understand them? What happened to the translator microbes?"
"My guess is that we do not have translator microbes anymore, John." Harvey shrugged.
"Yeah, sure, as if microbes could cure you from your linguistic deficiencies." The girl said, with a mocking smile.
Crichton rolled his eyes, "And right now, both of you are speaking English. Her, I can understand, she´s an Earthling; but you Harvey? Just where could… you...?" He paused, shaking his head and raising his arms to the heavens, letting them drop almost immediately. "I am an idiot. Of course you can speak English, you learnt it from me while you rummaged in my memories. Right?"
Harvey nodded, "That´s right, but I wouldn´t say you are an idiot. You were simply distracted. Perfectly understandable. I am the idiot in any case. I didn't even realize I was speaking English instead of Scarran." He then proceded to say several words in a language both guttural and sibilant. "Yeah, I still can speak Scarran. For a moment I feared my vocal apparatus wouldn´t be able to manage the consonants."
"Have you two idiots finished with your idiocy?" The girl spoke English with a marked German accent. "I didn't come back from Third Impact just to be stranded with three idiots after the Gott-damned Apocalypse."
Crichton gaped at her. "You, speak, English." He remarked, somewhat accusatorily.
The girl answered smugly, her hands on her hips. "I can speak, read, and write fluently in German, Japanese, French, and evidently, English. Now, who are you two stooges and what are you doing with my idiot?"
"You two know each other?" Crichton asked arching his eyebrows, while Harvey silently studied the girl's face, his head leaning forward, like vulture examining a dying animal.
She answered after a couple of seconds, her eyes low for a moment, but raised defiantly in the next. Her voice tinged with bitterness. "Yeah. His name is Shinji Ikari. The Third Child. Evangelion pilot, he is a spineless worm, a pervert, and completely useless in the only fight that mattered at the end."
Gingerly, she touched the bandage covering her left eye. "Hmmph… do you happen to have a first aid kit at hand? I think it will be better to change this thing. Swimming in LCL cannot be good for an open wound. I can feel it crusting my bandages."
"Leaving aside for a moment exactly what LCL is, Harv, you are the closest we have to a doctor right now." Crichton said, not looking at his companion. "Now, Miss, would you be so kind to tell us exactly what happened here? Ah, is your name Asuka, by any chance?"
"I see my fame precedes me." She preened importantly, shaking her head to display her long red hair, though the effect was somewhat ruined by the crusted fluid that had dried over it. "I am Asuka Langley Soryu. Second Child and the best Gott-damned pilot you could ever find. And you are..?"
The human tapped at his chest. "John Crichton, astronaut." He pointed his thumb at his companion. "And the creepy guy with the hideous Hawaiian shirt is Harvey." The former neural clone nodded slowly, his unblinking grey eyes set on the girl's own.
"Surname?" Asuka arched an eyebrow.
"No surname. Just Harvey." Crichton snickered. "Just like Madonna, or Cher."
Harvey and Asuka snorted at the same time.
"Indeed, just Harvey. Now, Miss Asuka. Let me see your wounds." Harvey rummaged in the shopping cart. He had, in fact, brought several first aid kits from the supermarket.
With unexpected dignity, Asuka sat on a chair Crichton had dragged from the street closest to the beach. She looked like a warrior princess. With some help from Crichton, Harvey and John put a gauze mask over their respective noses and mouths, and used soap and a couple of bottles of water to wash their hands; followed by disinfectant gel, as instructed by Crichton. Carefully, Harvey lifted the adhesive strips that held the bandage in place, while Crichton waited to help.
Harvey examined her carefully, delicately moving her head one side to another to better see the eye. "Hmm… No signs of infection. Your sclera is a bit red, I think it will pass soon. In any case, let's clean the area and change the bandage to keep everything clean."
Asuka nodded, but her surprise had been noted by the pair. "Hmmph. Any scarring? My sight is a bit blurry in that eye."
"I don't think so." Harvey mused, while he applied new gauze and adhesive strips over her eye. "Just some mild irritation. My best guess is that you must have rubbed some irritant on your face. Were you cooking with chilli?"
Asuka snorted. "No. Cooking is the Stooge's job." She pointed at Shinji with her thumb. "Now, check my arm."
Harvey looked at Crichton, who simply nodded. "Exactly what happened to merit a whole arm bandaged? Did you get burnt or what?"
"You see those white things on the bay?" Asuka looked despectively at the figures half submerged in the orange tinted water. "They came to invade my city. We had a big fight. I won. But they cheated."
"Oookay…" Crichton wasn't sure of what to think. On one hand, Asuka's fragmentary story was too wild to be true, but he had spent the last three years running around a far away part of the galaxy, chased and chasing and dealing with all kind of strange creatures. Giant robots would be relatively tame by that standard.
While Harvey worked carefully to remove the bandage, Asuka continued. "What? Did you spent your life in a cave? I am an Evangelion pilot. How come you two morons have no idea of what that means? Did you miss the Angels invading Earth? Hölle!"
Softly, Crichton answered. "We have been away. Very far away. Now, please assume that we have both been, indeed, living in a cave, and please explain everything from the beginning."
A long rant in German followed. Crichton and Harvey looked at each other, and shrugged.
Neither of them realized they were being watched.
Geo-stationary Orbit; Above Florida, USA
Moya's Control Room
Pilot directed the DRD's all over Moya, maneuvering the small droid-like drones to inspect every cubic decimetra of the living ship. "This is going to take a while." He mumbled, clenching his jaws.
He still monitored the satellite transmissions from Earth. Each passing arn, the amount of traffic shrank more and more, as satellites and repeating stations lost energy, or ran out of automated content. A pity, as some of the musical pieces broadcasted were quite interesting. Some of them even beautiful. The growing silence weighted heavily on the symbiotic beings' emotions.
Suddenly, Pilot and Moya had a growing respect for the planet that had produced John Crichton. The man himself could be a walking contradiction, irritating at times, but the world of his birth had some good things.
Pilot shook his head. He would commit to Moya's memory as much as he would dare. He owed at least that to Crichton's memory. To his people's memory, he corrected himself.
Tokyo-3 Ruins
Beach
Misato Katsuragi gasped in surprise, and hid behind a rock. She covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes very open.
There he was.
Literally, the boy of her dreams.
Tied up like some… like an animal!
She pursed her lips, and began to look around. Next to her, Pen-Pen tilted his head, looking at her with curiosity.
"A-ha!" she had found a house with the door open. "Wait here, Pen-Pen. I'll be back in a moment."
To her surprise, the bird nodded, and somehow, managed to sit down on the sand. While she looked towards where the boy and his captor had made camp, she moved towards the house with all the stealth she was able to gather at her fifteen years. The penguin simply leaned back against the rook, looking for all the world as if all he was missing to be completely happy was a can of beer and a newspaper.
Once inside the house, she looked around until she found a pair of scissors and a very sharp knife.
The beginning of a plan sprung in her mind.
Geo-stationary Orbit; Above Florida, USA
Moya's Bridge
D'Argo walked aimlessly around Moya. His trusty Qualta Blade at his back. Eventually, his steps carried him back to the bridge. He dragged out a stool and sat down in front of the compartment that contained the orange goo Crichton had been turned to.
"Pilot."
"Any news from Earth, Ka D'Argo?" Pilot answered a moment later.
"Not good ones. We found no one down there. The city seems to be completely empty. And our visit to the NASA building didn't really got us any useful information. The only thing I can say is that the strange girl must have had a lot of help to do the same to everybody in the city at the same time."
"Moya and myself have not been able to discern how she entered here. And the things she said make no sense, except to her, obviously."
"What really bothers me that even if she had help, and they managed to turn every living human into that goo, where are they now? Where did they disappeared to?"
Pilot took a few seconds before answering, "I must admit the thought hadn't occurred to me. Moya says she dopesn't know either. After the girl disappeared, Moya tried to track her. All her energy emissions match the ones from the giant. Exactly. And to the limits of Moya's senses. For all intents and purposes, the girl and the giant are the same thing."
"How is that even possible? Even Crichton duplicates had some variations to their structures, right down to the molecular level. It is as if the giant and the strange girl were one and the same."
D'Argo exhaled slowly. "Why not?" He stood up and pace the room. "Why could she be some kind of… what's the word..? worker dee? You know, those colony insects Crichton compares us with when we're all working at the same time."
"She would have to be a literal part of the giant, D'Argo." Pilot said after a few seconds. "Hmm… Even is your theory is true, I don't see how that information could help us recover Crichton."
D'Argo sat down again. "Neither do I."
Stark chose that moment to enter the bridge. "Maybe I do."
Tokyo-3 Ruins,
Beach
Major Misato Katsuragi, NERV's Chief of Operations, gasped a lungful of sweet air. She had no idea of where she was or how she had arrived there. All she knew was that things had really gone to hell.
She patted her stomach, looking for the bullet wounds that had killed her. But her clothes were whole, damp with a strange orange fluid, very similar to LCL. It even smelled the same. Whatever it was, it dried up quickly, leaving behind a sticky residue that flaked off quickly.
Disbelieving, she pulled up her blouse, looking for the wounds, even the scars.
There was not a single blemish on the skin of her belly.
She unbuttoned her blouse completely, the ragged scar that ran between her breasts was gone. The always present reminder of Second Impact had disappeared completely!
Misato looked around; her eyes wide as her mind accepted the inescapable evidence of her failure.
Tokyo-3 in ruins. The whole city had become nothing but ruins. Those SEELE bastards had won.
They had enacted Instrumentality.
They had finally won.
Cursing them, her fingers dug into the warm sand, impotently seeking a release for her anger, her sadness.
Hot tears fell on the sand as she sobbed. Her shoulders shook painfully with each ragged sob.
"Shinji… Asuka…" she whispered, looking back to the white monsters that had managed to do what the invading Angels, with all their incomprehensible power had been unable to do. To destroy her life and the lives of her wards.
And if what she was seeing before her eyes was the same everywhere, as she feared would be the case, they had destroyed the whole world too. There was not a single sound, except for the whisper of the wind, the crashing of the waves, and her own breath. The world was silent as a tomb.
For a moment, Misato Katsuragi seriously considered the possibility of having been sentenced to Hell. A little taste of Heaven before the Fall, just to make the torture even worse. She shook her head, as if to rid herself of those thoughts.
Trembling, she stood up, her fists tightly closed. Her nails dug into the flesh of her palms, but she didn't even notice the pain. Later, she couldn't say for how long she had stood there, just looking at the monsters as if she could destroy them with her angry stare.
Until a scream brought her back. A scream she knew very well, having heard it too many times before. A scream full of fear, pain, and horror.
Shinji's scream.
She ran towards the scream. It was at the other side of the beach. Pebbles and small stones almost made her fall down several times. She slowed her pace just a bit. It would do Shinji no good if she twisted her ankle.
Author Notes:
Yes, I am leaving this chapter right here (Evil Smile).
Explanations will be provided next chapter.
The original idea for this fic came from a scene I though would happen when Crichton and Harvey tried to communicate with Shinji and Asuka, they hear them speaking in Japanese, and without the translator microbes, neither can understand a word.
So they resort to using charades and gestures to try to communicate with the pilots. After a very long time, and lots of antics, finally Asuka and Shinji reveal they both speak English. Cue Facepalm.
Obviously, thing didn´t go that way in the story proper, but I had a lot of fun writing angry-annoyed Asuka.
