2.2 9 : [ Heir to the White Moon ]

Du drehst dich im schwarzen Licht

Dein Schatten explodiert wie ein Vulkan

Du bist wie ein Stern der spricht,

Verfallen bin ich dir in meinem Wahn

In deinem Bann

Du mich ertränkst

Unsterblich dann mir Leben schenkst

Öffne das Tor den schwarzen Legionen,

Schließe den Kreis des Bösen,

Das Omen

Ich senke mein Haupt vor dir

Wenn du im Orbit glänzt

Ich spüre die Macht

Wenn du mich von den Göttern trennst

Du bist mein Heiligtum

Du bist das Licht im Raum, du bist das Leben!

Du bist der Fluch

Du bist das Omen.

Du bist die Kraft,

Die Macht,

Und die Prophezeiung in Ewigkeit

Du bist DAS OMEN

[:]

You turn in the black light

your shadow explodes like a volcano

You are like a star that speaks

In my madness I fall under your spell

You drown me in your enchantment

then you gift me immortal life

Open the gate to the black legions

close the circle of evil – the omen

I bow down before you

as you glisten in orbit

I feel the might

when you separate me from the gods

you are my sanctuary

you are the light in space

you are the omen

you are the curse

You are the power,

the might

and the prophecy for eternity

You are the omen

E Nomine, ‚Das Omen'

I knew of you long before you came to the place where we should meet, I knew your name long before you were even aware of my existence, and I had fallen for you long before you became my damnation. I had already forgiven you from the moment we exchanged our first words, long before we met, and before the time of our farewell came, and before you lay in my arms, before you opened your heart to me, and unfortunately, contrary to all that I had tried to offer you, I finally had to sin against it;

I loved you long before I became the last ray of light of your darkest hour, your best friend, your closest confidante, your faithful ally, your first lover, and your last, worst tormentor, the one who finally broke you...

You were the kindred spirit I had been waiting for since I was born, and I became the curse that would haunt you to your death...

My damnation, my devotion; the redemption of your soul and the grave of your hope...

O ye glorious desaster of mine !

You may have been a sinner, but your innocence was mine;

You only had eyes for your own ugliness, so your beauty remained my secret forever.

It was ultimately not possible to coexist, that had been set in stone and programmed into us both before time immemorial , and so ultimately I could be nothing but gasoline in the fire of the destruction of all that you are, fuel in the flames to which everything in you was given: Your hesitant, cautious gestures, trembling in the moment and yet daring to go further, even if it was only a little bit, your eyes, like en closed universes of sapphire, your hands, which were those of a boy, big enough to hold another hand firmly, the line of fate stetching from the middle finger down to the wrist, thin enough to connect, but already so clear to see n spite of your youth , not so thin and fine that one could not imagine the way you would have gone about your daily business with those hands , how you have made your journey with them , the way you have taken this hand with which you have created things and performed miracles, with which you have dug up the ground and dis pensed destruction, on which you have lathered blood, and collected thin scars which h ad long robbed them of the softness which they had possessed before you, untouched by suffering and love, had done even a single hour's worth of work with them , but they still had this slightly clumsy quality about them, your fingers and the way they tapered towards the end, your chewed-up fingernails, your lips a little bit cracked, a little bit bitter in taste, but still longing just as much for kisses as everyone else, your bright, unsteady little voice and your way of rejoicing in even smallest things, your long, narrow neck, your slender legs, presented i n ignorance by your short trousers as you lie on your side immersed in yourself, the way in which everything of yours first shrinks fearfully under my touches and then slowly relaxes, the dissonant, polymorphic screeching and squeaking of the strings that played the melody of your heart, the thousand-and-one ways in which you are completely lost, your silent strength, even your way of being fascinated by the abyss and loving the emptiness;

My eyes, my ears, my fingertips, my lips;

Everything about me exists to experience you .

But of course I wasn't aware of it then, when I had spent only a little while within this world.

...

Since the helicopter was now "parked" more or less briefly and no longer flying, the rotation of its rotors had now slowed down, and instead of forming a dense disk of shadow, they interrupted the sun only one by one, now and then taking away the warmth and the shine of the polished colors beneath the unemcumbered daylight.

Nevertheless, this movement was still sufficient to send circular waves over the grasses of the flat heath that grew both in front of and behind the fence that enclosed this secluded plot of land, connected to civilization only by a single country road.

The exit ramp was extended, and two figures, who could hardly have been more different, stepped out of the flying vehicle – at the front walked an ancient man in an anthracite robe, supported by an extravagant walking stick carved from oak, his face wrinkled and austere, with prominent eyebrows, his eyes not yet concealed behind a cybernetic visor, but hidden only by dark sunglasses, and behind him followed another passenger, who also had silver-white hair, but clearly for a completely different reason, because the being that was cautiously, hesitantly following behind the old man had not yet been touched by age and transience, and did not fall under the rule of such decay, but belonged instead to those things over which it had no power at all - Certainly, the being was far from mature, and the process of ripening would continue until it was ready for the purpose of all life: to achieve the goal of all evolution and to try to bring more life of his kind into this world; It was nothing remotely ephemeral, however much his small feet lingering on the threshold of the metallic ramp may have resembled those of a male human child of about five years.

The chasm between it and mankind was wider and more absolute than the strip of emptiness between Earth and Alpha Centauri, the difference was greater than the mass of the galaxy and lay deeper than the soul itself, but what the untrained eye would probably have noticed first was the unusually bright color that was not only found in his hair, but also mirrorred on his skin, uninterrupted by any flaws such as blemishes, evidence of previous injuries such as abrasions or bruises of the sort that small children were usually wont to cover themselves in while playing; there were not even reddened spots or small irregularities, no visible pores – nothing of that sort. The small body seemed to perfect even for a statue, for sculptors too were people who made mistakes, and this child had no flaws. It was however alike to a statue in that it was made from a completely different material, of a completely different essence, and had only been cast into a form similar to their own by the handicraft of the humans themselves.

But just as a statue, no matter how true to nature, would reveal itself as a stone at a simple touch, even the shape of a young boy could not prevent its true nature from seeping out of all the nooks and crannies of its deceptive outer shell - such an indication was, for example, this extremely light tone of his skin, which made it seem as if the perfect little body were only just touching the sun for the very first time - And that was not so far from the truth; In its existence thus far, the creature had not met the mother star's rays especially often, but that was not really the cause of its appearance - Nevertheless, one of its first reactions had been to raise its hand to shield its eyes, whose deep wine red color was yet another indication of its true nature; It was accustomed to the never-ending darkness of an underground laboratory complex, hidden in a corner of the rocky, icy coasts of Scandinavia where few souls ever strayed without having good reason - Of its undertakings, this being was probably among the ones that SEELE had kept the most secret – it had been no small feat just to salvage it right under Ikari's nose right after Second Impact, but here it was.

Ironically, Ikari was to finish his own counterpart much later, but even though they had had their sample for much longer, in the end they had used Ikari's technology, repurposed from the facilities he had had built at Golghota base despite their watchful eyes. Whatever Ikari had done to secure the unconditional loyalty of this Akagi lady was paying for itself every day. But that was the story of another day.

At the moment, the child was busy somehow arranging its hand so as to keep the grossest of the brightest midday light away from its eyes, but not cover them completely; At the same time, its little feet had not yet moved away from the last strip of the metallic ramp on which it was still standing - inches further, the high blades of grass began, the uneven, loose ground and all the life that was crawling around in it, just one step further, and it would feel all this under the soles of his bare feet, and would be able to grasp every little bit of those few square inches with its own sense of touch – it longed to experience this moment consciously, prepared to take the time to let the impressions permeate its thought, and not waste this momentous occasion in rushing forward while it was still halfway through getting used to the light.

Its feet, by the way, were by far not the only thing about this child that was naked; in fact, it was almost completely undressed, except for a white coat that was much too large, wipped around his small body by the wind of the rotor blades.

Even the labcoat was a spontaneous donation from one of the scientists in the laboratory, a kind of farewell gift, perhaps from someone who, despite knowing its true identity, had been deceived by its appearance and mistaken it for something human, for something that would require shelter from the elements, for a child that needed attention - regardless of its form, this timeless being, detached from everything, could not have "needed" anything at all.

With a distant astonishment, not quite reaching the point of fascination, and not free from an undertone of disgust, Lorenz looked at his creature as it stood at the threshold with this almost thoughtful look, while the wind tousled what outwardly resembled human hair, but also had a telltale quality about it, like a stream of molten metal, not dry, not greasy, and certainly free of any split-eds, and much, much too smooth to the touch, too easily parted by one's fingers, without ever forming knots or offering much resistence.

"What is it, Tabris?"

"This is your place of dwelling, right?"

"I own it." Lorenz replied dryly, with a certain amount of contempt. "You can stay here while you are being prepared for your divine purpose..."

"I know, but... I'm just surprised that it's so far out here... Wouldn't you be better off in a colony of other Lilim...?"

"I guess it can't be helped that you would struggle to understand that bothersome concept of 'individuality'… For now it will serve our purpose."

"Mm-hm, I truly do not grasp it. You consciously chose to set yourself apart from the others though it is contrary to your nature... You have been here for a long, long time, so you have already formed your image of others, and you seem to think that it is unlikely to change, no matter what your eyes and ears might still get to pick up.

You are certain that you know and understand everything there is to know, so even the future you long for is eternally static – as if nothing in this world could make a difference in any way!

I really do not understand..."

The child smiled, finally setting foot on the land, wiggling its toes, filling the texture of this particular piece of ground with the geometry of its foot, nestling in with toe and heel.

The next foot followed, and then again the first, several careful steps and a steadily growing smile, a real, joyful glow that grew with every detail, sounds of amazement and genuine, honest enthusiasm.

At first its steps had been timid, one might have thought that it was not sure that his feet would really carry him, but that was more the overwhelming effect of the experience, of the many, many impressions; Soon, one would have seen him running around in circles and loops, so that despite its words, which had seemed too mature for its age, too big, it looked indeed like an ordinary five-year-old child, overflowing with joy over the tiniest trifles.

Lorenz commented on this apparent paradox with a raised eyebrow and a wrinkled forehead.

"It's all so... beautiful..." the child marveled with shining eyes.

"Mister Lorenz, why didn't you ever tell me that this world is beautiful?"

Behind them, the helicopter was about to take off again, and the shadow of the accelerating rotor blades rejoined to form a disc that covered more area than the individual blades themselves, but was far from being as dark, and indeed seemed to disappear more and more until it could no longer be distinguished from the sun-drenched surroundings when the helicopter finally took off, leaving the two passengers in the wind, the old man stern and severe, the child with an open smile, waving enthusiastically after the vehicle and its pillot as its oversized white sleeve trailed after its arm like a flag.

...

GEIST Laboratory Complex Number Five, DARWIN Garden of Master Project, Interim Report 2.5.8, written by Deputy Research Director Kuze Tetsuo, Subject: SCHUTZENGEL Project, Subject Number 23, Code "Tabris".

The following photographs are for the exclusive use of the Committee for the Human Instrumentality Comittee . The sanction for their unauthorized reproduction on any medium, whether mechanical or biological, is inevitably the destruction or, where appropriate, liquidation of all vessels that unlawfully contain this information.

The professional announcer's voice gave way to a somewhat less polished, slightly noisy recording, most of which featured the serious, heavy voice of a man nearing the end of his fourth decade of life.

- – „

Nevertheless, the subject does not appear to be openly uncooperative or even rebellious in any way thus far . For example, the detailed database on NERV and other details of the project that we have provided to it for the purpose of preparing it for its mission has been devoured with astonishing speed and willingness, and a great deal of unexpected ease in dealing with something as human as information networks - We had initially suspected that one of the main problems with this project would be that it would be difficult for it to grasp such fundamentally human concepts, but the uncanny, frightening truth is that it is almost better at it than us actual humans.

The database is just one of the lesser examples - so of all the stimuli we exposed Code Tabris to, it was an innocent piece of music that caused the strongest reaction. It wasn't even a deliberately planned experiment - it was simple melody that the director had been absent-mindedly humming to herself while operating a console. The subject developed a pronounced fixation on it, and asked to be brought a grand piano and be shown how to use it - The trigger, according to the subject it self, was its curiosity about a grand piano he had seen during its recent stay at the chairman's residence, and it claimed to have already made some attempts to teach it self its use.

Because it seemed like a relatively simple concession to keep the subject cooperative and busy, we granted this request, especially since the director quickly found in her young assistant Miyazawa someone who knew how to play such an instrument and agreed to serve as a tutor for the subject, even though it would involve exposing herself to the proximity of the subject without any protection.

Morbid as it sounds, it still amazes us that Code Tabri s , a creature whose primary raison d'être is to destroy our kind , still hasn't killed her , even though its powers should to do so at any time. Coexistence should be completely impossible, and yet we seem to see something that looks so much like a perfect, successful communication... We had already begun to consider her as the proverbial virgin sacrifice, thrown into the crater to appease the raging volcano god... Miyazawa herself does not seem to see it that way, and even if the corresponding examinations did not show any result, I begin to suspect that it has done something to her head... that, or maybe she has simply fallen for its "charm"...

Ever since Miyazawa began giving piano lessons to the subject, the whole laboratory has been filled with music; we receives inquiries from other parts of the laboratory about what the "heavenly sounds" might be , and the subject's music has spontaneously moved many to tears many who did not expect it - We have already had to force some employees to take a week off because they crept in and out, even outside their actual working hours, just to hear the subject playing - I personally have avoided listening to it up until now. I don't believe that these sounds are something that human beings are meant to hear.

It has long since surpassed its teacher , and yet it continues to request Miyazawa's lessons - I fear the day when it will realize that it has already learned all she had to teach him - Apart from herself, I think we all assume that Miyazawa could soon become another of the many victims that this project has already claimed. Like all participants in this project, she will probably be buried at the Second Impact Memorial grounds .

One might think that "playing the piano" would make Code Tabris seem human, at least in the eyes of its "teacher", but if it were human, a doctor in charge of human maintenance would probably classify it as being as quite sick in the head - sometimes the creature spends entire days doing nothing but playing piano, on and on, without interruption , asking for nothing, never craving for anything else, no interruptions for food, Sleep or the excretion of bodily wastes - even if it is a human activity, a human could never do it as the creature does, even a ghost would at least pause for the coming and going of the day, and so the more rational among us are inclined to explain this... music it produces, and the vile things it does to the human soul, by the greater amount of time it is able to devote to its practice.

But here in the laboratory, we usually have business that requires us to interrupt its playing from time to time - If Miyazawa is to be believed, the subject claimed to have played the complete works of Beethoven in the chairman's house in one sitting , in the exact order in which they were written - Beethoven, if you must know, is its favorite...

If you look at it that way, you can really have no doubt that Code Tabris is truly complete, the true homo superior, - an improved version of the human being...

And thus, homo sapiens is truly obsolete.

The subject, as mentioned above, continues to show a strong interest in the human psyche and behavior, and, having worked through the NERV-specific database with special attention to these aspects, has asked to receive further data about us humans as a whole. Surprisingly, as it seems, I think it might well be possible to draw conclusions from this behavior about the other angels that are waiting for us in the future - what we see here is the end of the developmental path they will eventually take...

As far as this request of the subject' s is concerned, we wanted to c heck with you first, before we make an arbitrary decision, to ensure this fits with the scenario.

My recommendation, however, would be to refuse it . It is quite possible that this being is collecting information about us so as to consider how to best destroy us when the time comes... if we are the ones to provide that information , we shall have the blood of humanity on our hands...

GEIST laboratory complex number five, wing C, facility 4a - 22. S2-Graph experiment.

Subject: number 23, code name "Tabris"

Senior experimenters: Deputy director: Kuze Tetsuo, and the senior director.

"...And?" asked the tall woman with a lightness of tone that was inappropriate for the taste of her deputy. "...What did the committee say?"

Kuze was a gentleman in his mid-forties. The top of his head had already turned into a shiny bald patch, although there was still surprisingly thick, black hair left around it. He crossed his arms, as he often did when he did not like a particular turn of events - his superior, of course, often gave him much cause to do so with her manner, which these days often seemed just a little bit too serene for his liking - she wore her long, black hair as an elaborately braided, crown-like wreath of hair, under her white gown sat a long, high-necked dark green dress decorated with small, white flowers.

She was one of the last advocates of dresses and skirts, and as much as the perception that had become mainstream towards the end of the 1990s usually claimed the opposite, she found pants much more uncomfortable and constricting.

The difference to the rather smaller, wrinkled Kuze might have been grounds for amusement.

The two stood in a not too big room full of consoles, machine noises and large, angular computers with a multitude of blinking lights - The floor was mostly covered with cables of different colors, here and there you could hear it beeping, and there was at least one slit, which continously spat out a strip of paper that collected on the floor in a heap of loops, and on it was printed a continuous wave pattern.

"Rejected, and sustained."

"Very telling, Kuze-kun." She joked cheerfully.

"...the request to curtail the subject's… development was rejected, the one for the database you let him have was accepted..."

"Well, well, well, you sound almost reluctant... You're not doubting SEELE's scenario, are you?"

Located in the actual test chamber, separated from the two by a thick glass wall, but not at all incapable of understanding them, the creature, similar to a small boy, looked over to them with a sigh.

His small body, otherwise only covered by a shiny metallic tarpaulin, was covered over and over with electrodes and the corresponding cables, two of them had been glued exactly to his cheeks, two were sitting on his forehead, partly covered by his silvery hair.

"Ah... It all seems to be going according to Lillim's plans..."

...

" The body is nothing but the vessel of the soul. The soul is the tyrant and the body the puppet. But eternal life is not granted to the body. Therefore, in order not to fall into dust, it must make use of another flesh. For this reason the soul deceives, humiliates and kills."

There had once been a time when SEELE's number one had found much more frequent use for this residence, including benefits of a private nature - but now its secluded location would serve the purposes of the project.

In the hands of their organization was Tabris, „the angel of free will", the last messenger, the incarnate avatar of Adam, and thus the last bell sounding that would ring the end of mankind: Control over the beginning of the Last Judgement.

And in order to be able to use this important switch, it was necessary to prepare him for his tasks, and to do this carefully - it was to be assumed that he, as the last of Adam's sons, would have a certain instinctive knowledge of the realities of the cosmology of this world; he spoke of "things he had always known," no, more firmly felt than something so distant, and above all human as "knowing".

On the other hand, Adam had also been just another creature to whom the Creators had left only a carefully chosen part of their heritage, even if his limits were hard to fathom, he was not omniscient, and in order to put their plan into action, SEELE had no choice but to take advantage of it.

So when the ambassador was not in the lab, he was usually here, in this little house near Germany's northeast coast.

Of course, the chairman did not have to be physically present for the indoctrination and initiation of the alleged boy - the usual method of communication was sufficient.

Even with the other members of the organization, Keel hadn't been in the same room as them for years, this brotherhood had been in the shadows since their ancestors had brought it into being centuries ago, and the possibilities of modern telecommunications had made covering up traces and avoiding risky meetings all the easier.

Although he was not much in favour of modern science and technology, which with their paradigms inflated to dogmas by their egos and their so-called logic even wanted to replace the gods in heaven, but where it became practical and convenient for him, Keel Lorenz also liked to indulge in a little hypocrisy, although he of course did not see it as such.

It was only technology that had allowed him to experience the end times at all, but he would probably be the last one who would have a veiled picture of this misconstruction of man - to counteract his decay did not mean to mitigate or even stop it, but to prolong it, and under other circumstances he would also dismiss such an undertaking as pointless, but he had been fortunate enough to lead this organization in a blessed time, when the end of all days was at the gates, as once had been the case with the chosen people at the gates of Jericho, the trumpets already sounded, rattling on the walls like a violent wind shaking the doors in their hinges.

Here, for once life and death actually made a difference, if only so that he might reach the day of prophecy, when the doors to paradise would be opened at last.

When that moment had come, he would be only too happy to receive the sacrament of death, with thanksgiving and kisses.

But until then, or at least until those at the Tabgha base started with the construction of his EVA, the deceptively human-like angel would stay here in this house - even if it was not the case that he never left this villa, Lorenz thought he knew well by now that he wandered more often in the heath-covered landscape, most often probably towards the beach, to look at the sea, whatever he might find there.

However, these escapades were by no means significant, the chairman knew very well that the ambassador would have had to run for quite a long time before he would even come close to the greater civilization from here.

It wasn't that he hadn't asked to see a human conglomeration, a couple of times SEELE's number one had granted him this request and sent him with a scientist or a security guard to one of the next bigger cities, for example the superhuman child had already had the opportunity to carefully study a carnival procession in Hamburg or to enjoy the Kieler Woche, once he had even been to Flensburg; It was perhaps remarkable that he asked for small souvenirs like an ordinary human child, always remaining polite in his requests and modest in his wishes, so that even hardened security personnel, who knew what he was, found it difficult to deny the little boy his wishes.

And they were constantly being told what a well-behaved young man they had there, what a charming, attentive, adorable, absolutely irresistible child he was.

He even went so far as to ask his guards what they would like to do to have a good time, and just came along without ever interrupting that joyful, open smile on his lips for more than a few seconds.

That he familiarized himself with the scrolls (or rather, the parts of them that his jailers of SEELE let him see) could not be avoided, but it was only to the occasional occurrences that the original owner of this residence decided to put a more or less short stay there in his densely packed calendar, where Keel Lorenz could observe what else he did with his time there - He didn't stop at the dead sea scrolls, they were just what he started with - In his villa, Lorenz had a spacious library with a high ceiling, two or three normal floors high, all full of books in shelves of dark tropical wood, from a time before the Second Impact, when people still thought they could afford hack holes in the Earth's green lung.

Sadly, it had taken the Second Impact and with it the disappearance of the seaweed to make people appreciate the last strip of rainforest that had been the last thread between the survivors and total destruction - so furniture like this was now nothing more than artifacts of a bygone era that could no longer be replicated, as was the human who owned them, even if there wasn't too much humanity left in him.

But now this room was there, full of books and the knowledge in them, a collection of decades, and the silver-haired child, as soon as it had learned to read, had quickly set about working its way through the mountains and piles of old, dusty tomes, mostly encyclopedias, guidebooks or philosophical writings to satisfy his almost inexhaustible thirst for knowledge about the outside world - he also soon learned to handle the somewhat antiquated computer of the villa and from then on had his dear joy with the wonders of the Internet. However, since most of the real contact he had with people took place in sessions with SEELE's inner circle, he gradually picked up their flowery vocabulary, generously peppered with metaphors and philosophical references.

But even if the words were borrowed from them, the philosophy he expressed with them was significantly different.

But the thing that the boy probably liked most about the culture of humanity was the music. He sat next to this old record player for days, listened to the newest, most modern songs on the Internet, and had all kinds of music from the various home countries, cultures and subcultures of the scientists working there supplied during his visits to the laboratory, but in the end, he ended up favoring classical music. One could put it down to the fact that Keel's old records were one of the first kinds of music to which the angel had been exposed at all, and thus may have left a special impression on him. The chairman preferred above all the arts of romanticism, of which for example Wagner or Brahms had been a few of the most famous - with time, however, certain differences in his preferences appeared, first only subtle, then crystalliing ever clearer toward what might now be called personal taste or actual recognition of objective perfection by an external, unbiased entity, Tabris, in his further exploration of the classical spectrum, found great favor with the musical representative of enlightenment, contrary to the tendencies of the chairman, especially Beethoven, who had quickly become his personal favorite, even if sometimes pompous music of the Romantics would probably always have a special place for the young ambassador; although the boy naturally always remained open to new things - that was simply the kind of personality he had, he was someone who took full advantage of the opportunities life offered him, however limited or generous they might be, always striving to enrich himself with as many new experiences as possible, and always willing to try something he had never known or tried before.

This included getting someone in Complex Five to teach him how to play the grand piano - Ever since then, he had been sitting day in, day out, by the old instrument that Lorenz had left gathering dust in the foyer of his estate - The old man had never touched it himself, but had bought it for his daughter, who had been gone for ages, and was now old, gray, and a grandmother herself, somewhere beyond the ocean.

For SEELE's number one, too, there had been no real reason to meet her physically for a long time, which did not mean that there had been any kind of disagreement, she too was working on the great work and had a similar list of priorities to his, on which things that were no longer worthwhile because the Battle of Armageddon was approaching daily were likewise far down.

She had also owned the room that Tabris had taken for his stays here. To have it prepared with all earthly comforts had been more of a measure that Lorenz had taken to keep up a certain appearance - for the public, the child, who could occasionally be seen in the villa of the chairman, who financed the activities of his organization among other things through his activities as the head of a billion-dollar company and probably the most important media mogul of the European Union, (which had also proven to be extremely practical for manipulating the public) was passed off as his great-grandson from Japan.

Such a great-grandson did indeed exist, but Lorenz had never seen him in his life - to say that the son-in-law was unpleasant to his daughter Berenice would probably be the understatement of the century, considering that it was Ikari.

For reasons of strategy and control, he had made sure to marry his daughter to the family that was prophecied to bring forth the promised messiah and herald of the end times

- not that Ikari Hajime, Lorenz's son-in-law, had not been a loyal supporter of SEELE until the end of his life, as his ancestors had been for generations, and would have gotten along with Berenice Lorenz anyway but it was her descendants over whom one had wanted to secure a firm hold - after all, it had been prophesied for ages that the final heir to the name "Ikari" would also be the catalyst of the final visitation: the Chosen One, the long-awaited Third Child - But one factor that thwarted these plans was Ikari Yui, a name that had never been pronounced in the circles of SEELE without mixed feelings - Without her genius and its contribution to the Evangelions and the scientific basis of artificial evolution in general, the whole project to perfect humanity would have been impossible, but she was a woman whose warm, pleasant smile had never once revealed all her secrets to anyone.

Her backers at SEELE had wanted a naive but brilliant prodigy, and she had given them one, her parents wanted a conscientious daughter, talented in everything, and she had given them one, the teacher who had taught her to play the violin wanted an attentive student, who nevertheless had wisdom beyond what her age would suggest in years to come, and that was what he got to see, her husband wanted a warm, caring source of salvation and understanding, and that's what he got.

But everyone who knew her, even her closest friends - and they said so the more they knew her - agreed that there was not a single person in the big, wide world who could have guessed who Ikari Yui might have been when she had beenshe was completely alone.

(Her one-time mentor, longtime close confidant best friend and secret admirer Fuyutsuki Kozo probably rightly boasted that she was proud to be the one who knew the most about her plans and to have received the most holistic view of her true self, but she also had let him see parts of her to which he had never wanted to admit - this merciless fighter, this stranger, this beast, the ruthless chess player, who had set out to weigh the sufferings and fates of people against each other like a superior to all else, untouched by earthly law, omniscient goddess high above good and evil, and the reason why she had chosen Rokubungi Gendo as the man at her side and the father of her child, a man who was content to see her as a great, unfathomable goddess, and to accept every one of her words and gestures as an absolutely and totally undeserved gift, like heavenly grace had smeared like balm on his sinful soul, and worshipped her with adoring devotion, and not Fuyutsuki, who tried to fathom and explain and really know the phenomenon that she undoubtedly was.)

But you could never mourn over spilled milk too briefly - in a way, it was somehow fitting that Lorenz had passed off the last of the angels as Ikari's son - after all, Ikari and his betrayal was one of the reasons he had created this creature in the first place.

But what surprised the old multi-billionaire was that the space he had provided to this being had actually been used.

He had already seen the angel blissfully asleep, or had caught him absent-mindedly sucking on some fruit, had caught him dressing in human garments assembled with careful love detail, and had caught him engaging in conversation and interaction with humans of his own accord, not only for the purpose of cooperation, but as something that he deliberately tried to bring about, and this was what puzzled SEELE's Number One beyond his understanding- It was clear, however, that this entity, once the source of the fruit of life and now still one of its bearers, really needed none of this. He was sometimes alone in that house for months at a time, and even though he indicated that he would prefer company, he was impervious to the madness that would have afflicted an actual human being in the face of such isolation. Nor had Lorenz and his other handlers ever left him money for food or the like. Sometimes he found him in the same clothes he had left him in, simply because the immaculate body of this being was no more prone to processes that would ultimately require a change of clothes than an actual statue...

So why?

Lorenz himself, and his whole organization, they had been striving since the empires of antiquity to strip themselves off flesh with all its restrictions - he had got rid of the body with which he had been born, piece by piece, he had everything human cut off and thrown away, piled up in dishes of medical waste, for it was the closest thing to the dream of perfection that could be attained before the day of prophecy... and this creature, this young man-made God, who was completely free and detached from earthly vices and carnal pleasures, indulged in them willingly though he could freely choose to abstain from them.

Apparently, because he seriously thought he could derive some kind of joy from it!

Lorenz had now lived for a long, long time, and in all these years he had never come across anything so ridiculous.

He wondered if this creature found human existence so beguiling only because he had never been chained to such a miserable, imperfect body as the Chairman and the rest of SEELE? Or was this just his way of mocking them in their imperfection?

"Don't get cocky just because you're immortal, Tabris!"

"But Mr. Lorenz... I would never disrespect you. If I have allowed that impression to come about, I would like to affirm that I deeply regret it, and that it was never my intention!"

And it actually sounded honest.

Of course.

One thing was certain: Lorenz Keel could not remotely understand the being known as "Tabris".

But anyway, it was not up to him to understand the gods, or even to question them.

Even if they came to dwell among men of their own free will, even if they learned to taste death itself, they were still easily revealed by the fact that they did and could do things that men would never be able to do.

Thus the incarnation of gods ultimately served only their own vanity - The creators knew that if Lorenz Keel had belonged to their Olympus, he would never have turned back to earth after the tips of his toes had last loosened from the ground.

It was not in the nature of gods to be understood anyway - they existed far away from humans to answer their prayers and fulfill their requests, and to these the last of the angels had been very amenable thus far.

Everything was going as planned.

And when the old fanatic once again went his way, and as so often happens, disappeared into the air in a helicopter, a single child with the hair color of an old man and the elegance and perfection of a demigod was left alone, sighing to himself.

His smile did not disappear, but still looked tired, like the kind you would give to cope with a long, busy day.

...

Excerpt from the introductory preface of the 2014 edition of Miyazawa Haruhi's published doctoral thesis.

The following text is only for authorized persons with a current authorization certificate issued by authorized UN personnel with minimum level CCC-41-a.

(Unauthorized possession, distribution and reproduction of this work is strictly prohibited and may be punishable by penalties ranging up to $10 billion fines, life imprisonment and execution).

There is only one way to acquire information reliably - with a hypothesis and an experiment to put it to the test.

This is the scientific method, the most intrinsic treasure of mankind and since then its strongest weapon against disease, fear and natural disasters.

The twenty-first century is a time in which we scientists are no longer so concerned with acquiring as much knowledge as possible, but rather with sounding out the limits of what we can know at all , whether in physics, where we come up against the realities of the uncertainty principle, or in mathematics and computer science, where we reach the limits of our ability to prove things or further perfect procedures. We are scratch ing the ceiling of the world.

For a long time we humans worked from the assumption that we do not know very much , and will not see the great questions of existence answered in our lifetime, but what I found more interesting about Stephen Hawking's "grand design" than the actual communication of knowledge was his brilliant illustration of what human science, the "fruit of knowledge", is all about, as we know in our circles, actually is, and his demand that we should perhaps finally turn around and turn back to the big questions with which we started, and start to finally insert the many puzzle pieces which we have won in the last 10000 years of civilization history, in order to finally get our answers to exactly these big questions of existence.

And there is no field, no discipline except perhaps our colleagues from physics like Mr. Hawkings, which is closer to solving so many of these fundamental questions as we are.

Before Dr. Ikari Yui's groundbreaking work, "metaphysical biology" was for a long time only a peripheral area, which was just barely surviving on the borderline to pseudo and cargo cult science.

In this respect, her work is comparable in meaning to the theory of evolution itself. - Before Darwin, biology could only describe, only afterwards was it able to really explain its records and findings, to assign reasons to them. And evolution made it possible to actually create something like cross- link s between the many, ever-increasing sub- disciplines of biology: Whether embryology, genetics, systematics, the explanation of metabolic processes at the molecular level, or yes, metaphysical biology, all of these are sooner or later connected with evolution and find a common root in it.

A similar leap in knowledge gain and significance, even in the mere ability to gain knowledge or have significance, was made in the field of metaphysical biology by the work of Ikari Yui -

Of course, like any scientist, she too built on the work of her colleagues and on the knowledge that her backers had already accumulated for mankind, and when you look at the actual new gains in her work, it seems as if she had simply connected the last two dots that made the overall picture recognizable, but the same could be said about many groundbreaking works in recent history - Einstein's merit, for example, was that he interpreted simple laws for impulse in four dimensions, thus explaining the light ether away.

In science, it is often only a question of asking the right questions and then checking them, or having the courage to draw the right conclusions from the results you get, to stretch out your arm and proclaim loudly that the emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Dr. Ikari's work has turned metaphysical biology, until now only a forum for the exchange of vague speculations and half-confirmed events, into a science with highly topical practical application potential - application potential where the use of the word sounds almost ridiculous, considering that soon it would be our mere survival that would depend on our mastery of this knowledge and the creation of EVA - truly, if man is the crown of the creation born of Lillith, then EVA is the crown of human creation, if only by crowning us - Because just as there are many other life forms, which are much better developed for their own habitats than we are, and animals and plants, which can do things we are not capable of, in the end it was humans who finally unravelled the how, why and wherefore of life, it will be the EVAs, which represent our sense and purpose, which will secure us a place in eternity

- Questions of practicality and pragmatism forced us to hide the light we had found under an ugly lampshade and keep it to ourselves; most of humanity will probably never know what these men and women have done to keep us all warm and safe, and the incredible truths we have seen.

Other big names that are Fuyutsuki, cannot be avoided are Katsuragi, Akagi and Zeppelin-Shikinami in addition to Dr. Ikari. No plagiarism-free work in this field, not even this one, could in any way avoid quoting their works.

With the wonders that the work of all these people had done for the relevance of their field, it was not surprising that the Laboratory of Artificial Evolution in Kyoto had a lot to do - just as the gentlemen from the committee had always foreseen.

And when a lot of work comes together, it is divided, as so often in the history of mankind - In disciplines where there is currently a great increase in knowledge, there are often more and more partial aspects, which leads to the fact that ultimately the discipline itself is divided into sub-disciplines, and this is exactly what happened very soon after the Second Impact in the Laboratory for Artificial Evolution - While some of us, including Dr. Ikari, were mainly focused on the practical side, the actual creation of our ark called EVA, which was to be carried out in the black moon as part of Project E, and the organization GEHIRN, which was founded for this purpose, while we from Project Master and the DARWIN Garden turned more to basic research, the more detailed study of the mechanics of souls and AT-fields, and the predictions of what exactly this next stage of evolution that our colleagues were trying to bring about would entail ... And just as the at least partially public organization NERV finally emerged from GEHIRN, our branch of the great work became the somewhat more discreetly operating company GEIST...

However, it is by no means the case that there is no overlap, as in all sub-disciplines of the same area - an important factor of our work were for example also those souls which should finally be placed into the thrones of the entry plugs.

Yes, the chosen children, whose fates had been predestined - Our children of prophecy..."

TWELVE YEARS EARLIER -

Deeper and deeper the elevator soared into the ground, largely bordered by metal meshes, as they could often been seen in front of the doors and windows of closed jewelry stores.

On the journey downstairs, two women, one tall, calm and carrying a certain elegance, which was only enhanced by the long black dress under her lab coat and her infallible woven black wreath of hair.

Her companion, on the other hand, had a certain awkwardness about her, not only because of her youth or the thick horn-rimmed glasses over her dark eyes, or the single, blue-black strands of hair that protruded from her rather amateurish ponytail.

"...So then this project "SCHUTZENGEL" is also part of GEIST's area of responsibility?"

"Yes, indeed. It fits very well with what we are doing here, but one of the bigger reasons is probably also that the gentlemen of the Inner Circle like to use us, who work directly under them, for things they would rather not tell the gentlemen of GEHIRN about.

"Really?" The younger woman asked with interest, turning away from the view beyond the grating surrounding the elevator, which had captured her shining eyes until now.

The elder woman – the Director - just smiled, and continued speaking with perhaps inappropriate, unbroken calm cheerfulness.

"SEELE has been working in a very decentralized fashion ever since ancient times - the fewer people involved know, the easier it is to cover up something and the less damage is caused when there are losses, if someone is exposed or turns traitor. I and Kuze-san were also entrusted with only a few of the small puzzle pieces - it is already said in the old writings that the most direct servants of the divine will only receivesuch knowledge as they absolutely need to accomplish their task... GEHIRN, GEIST, the UN, the IPEA, and even SEELE's contacts with the numerous governments and their militaries, all these are small pieces of the great work, which shall finally come together on the day of prophecy... just as we too are only small pieces of the whole, splinters of the original soul, of Adam Kadmon, the real last angel...

That the work of GEHIRN will sometime reach the public will not be avoidable, because the Evangelions, once they are finished and fighting, will be hard to hide. It is planned that as soon as everything is ready, they will pull some strings at the UN to put together a kind of paramilitary organization including PR, of which only a few very few individuals will know about the completion project...

But there are also some things that our superiors didn't want to reveal to anyone, but for which much less personnel is needed, and to whom the existence of SEELE itself can be entrusted - This laboratory is exclusively reserved for GEIST, but a large part of our work is also done explicitly in the same facilities that GEHIRN uses or will use, just in the background, unseen by their eyes...".

"Then GEHIRN is indeed the physical, world-influencing manifestation of the hidden SOUL, but the SPIRIT is something more subtle, fleeting, which is wandering...haunting it. Okay, that... sounded a lot better in my head..." the younger woman, identified as "Miyazawa H." by a name tag on her pink t-shirt, finally gave in, smiling embarrassingly and scratching the back of her head, further destroying her blue-black pink-tail despite the best efforts of her lime-green braid. "It was a, uh, eventful day today, Madam Director..."

Her older companion could only smile at this amusedly, but amused in a good-natured way, like a mother whose offspring had demonstrated his most adorable infant logic. Perhaps by lisping out an assertion like that they had to have a bee inside their itching knee, which they kept poking from the inside, or that a robot lived in their belly which processed cookies into excrement.

"It's okay, Miyazawa-kun." She reassured her companion. "You're actually doing quite well - I told you so much, and you still listen enthusiastically and ask questions - Most people are usually too overwhelmed after the Second Impact Declaration to absorb any new knowledge... I'm glad that you accepted my offer."

"But how could I have said no when they baited me with the question whether I would like to see the next stage of human evolution, Madam Director?

Admittedly, this was not the only reason - it was also because it was precisely she who had asked - a baiting phrase would not have been necessary.

Miyazawa's first encounter with the woman who had now made her her assistant had happened when she was still a student, not untalented, but very disorganized and therefore somewhat haphazard in delivering the exercise sheets - but this patient woman with the wreath of braided hair had picked her out personally and told her that she would have been very sorry if Miyazawa had not been admitted to the next exam - a simple gesture of appreciation of the kind that Miyazawa, as one of five children with a very busy mother and a frequently absent, unemotional father, had rarely received. Since then, this woman had gained the respect of this young student and she had really put her heart and soul into her work in the second half of the semester, if only so as not to disappoint this person - and as soon as Miyazawa had bagged her diploma, her lecturer came and recruited her for her secret organization right away, showing her further great confidence that she certainly did not intend to disappoint - she wanted to make herself useful for once in her life, no matter how.

Finally, this appreciation was also based on mutuality.

The young woman admired the self-confidence and unshakable calmness of her mentor, and there was nothing she longed for more than to be like her one day.

...

Excerpt from the 44th Quarterly Final Report on the PROJECT SCHUTZENGEL , Section B, Subsection on Subject 23, code name "Tabris" - Written by Deputy Director Kuze Tetsuo.

"Admittedly, very little went as we had imagined from the start of this project - even before Second Impact, we designed the storage tank in which we would lock the subject up after its creation and recovery. An important contribution was made here by a noteworthy technician named Mitsurugi Minoru, who years later brought an improved, state-of-the-art version of the system to Bethany Base.

We had thought of everything, a location deep in the ground in the heart of our complex, which would make every ounce of reinforced concrete used here a barrier between this being and the exit, resistance to heat, pressure and immense exertion of force, the dimensions of a skyscraper, a hollow core that ran through our entire complex like the vacuole of a plant cell, Thousands of cables and hoses, lock bolts held in place by magnets of the sort that were otherwise only used in particle accelerators - indeed, a particle accelerator full of the most unstable primeval matter in the universe and the means to direct and detect it would not have been better equipped for its purpose than this tank.

We had considered all the possible shapes and forms that this being could have taken after breaking its embryonic cocoon out of the Bakelite with a jackhammer, in which it had been packed for recovery and transport - That the angels resembled human embryos in their early stages was something had all considered purely cerebrally as a scientific curiosity, as Miyazawa would say, even if I don't like to use that kind of language, a "fun fact".

We had only realized the implications on a purely rational level.

But the longer we observed the subject, at first from far away, with tons of metal and bullet-proof glass between us, on some kind of screen, watching as it sloshed around somewhere within the width of this tank, the more we realized that at least this one angel had never discarded its human-like form and would not discard it in the future...

It had taken on the one shape that we had probably expected last - our own.

Maybe it was the human DNA that the colleagues from the Katsuragi expedition used for the contact experiment, which finally resulted in the Second Impact and thus the creation of the subject, a direct scion of Adam...

Perhaps it was also a cheap trick to sneak into our midst and lead us to our destruction, an enemy who looks like us, hides among us, sneaks into our midsts and only then pulls out its claws when the opportunity arises.

Perhaps it was also down to us, and something we did during the salvage, storage and preparation of the subject which disturbed the natural process of its development, and what we received was a vestigial rudiment, a bud held back in time by frost which could never begin its natural metamorphosis - after all, this messenger here should have been the last of all to awaken, and we had awakened him first, long before the promised time.

Or maybe that was even its natural shape - It was to be expected that the angels would be very similar to us in their DNA, and that they would also become more and more similar to us as they continue to play their roles - It is said that the yin and yang, which mostly exist as irreconcilable opposites, should align like faces in a mirror shortly before returning to their undivided original state - And what we see in the case of Code Tabris is the peak of that alignment.

I personally considered it a matter of the highest priority that since it would be vital for humanity as a whole to have effective anti-angel weapons within a few years, we should immediately begin to test our weapons and countermeasures on the only compatible test subject we had available at that time, but the extensive analysis I would have liked did not occur until the third angel was recovered in the ice of the Arctic Ocean and Bethany Base was established around his tomb.

Since the scenario for Code Tabris had a very specific task in mind, we were asked to prioritize the subject's intact development before we could even think about pulling the flesh off its bones-and the director agreed, yes, it didn't seem like either she or the committee needed to revise their plans much because of the... nature of the subject.

But it is not up to me to measure what the great plan for the future had revealed - it is said that the work of the creators would unfold on unfathomable paths...

However, the fact that the shape of Code Tabris was becoming more and more like that of an ordinary human fetus brought us a completely different problem, one that was also quite low on the long list of eventualities what we expected.

Simply put, a human, or at least human-like fetus was usually much less autonomous than the isolated cocoon of a typical angel, and the previous sentence was a major understatement.

It later became the standard procedure to incubate everything that was biologically unfinished and needed some kind of incubation in LCL, but this was not available in a sufficient degree of purity so shortly after the Second Impact, especially since we had not yet recovered the Second Angel and it would take some time until the necessary infrastructure was rebuilt.

But the alternative, which was only available due to very special overall circumstances, probably sounds rather radical: a human surrogate mother.

And the one who agreed to deliver the unholy fruit of the womb was none other than the person from whom the idea had come: Our Madam Director, Ayanami Kagura.

Yes, this name was by no means a coincidence, but not in the way one would first think.

There was a causal connection, certainly, but the connection was of a rather indirect nature.

It was probably easiest to explain it that way: At one time, there had been a photo, showing them all, the many actors in this great tragedy of fate.

It had not even been a meeting for people from the project, especially since some of the people in this photo had not yet been initiated into the higher mysteries; some of them had never known, some had not even been recruited.

But it seemed that fate could not resist the possibility of bringing them all together at least once.

The picture was taken in 1999 at a convention for metaphysical biology.

The fact that pretty much all of the great minds that were here sooner or later ended up on SEELE's payroll in one form or another was due more than anything else to the fact that the organization was very effective in securing such talent for itself.

On the far left of the picture were Dr. Katsuragi Byakuya and his then young, blonde-haired protegee and assistant Edmond Vincennes, who were able to illuminate completely new methods of biotechnological energy production with their supersolenoid theory, and one more, Akagi Naoko, pioneer of many disciplines, probably best known for her achievements in the field of biological supercomputers, hung with pearl necklaces and covered with a cake of make-up to scare away her age.

The right edge, on the other hand, showed, unimpressed and with folded arms, Dr. Kyoko Langley, with a short, utilitarian haircut and the icy blue eyes of a lonely wolf alight with the determination that none of her colleagues (that is, competitors) would beat her to the next discovery.

It was an open secret that she regarded Ikari Yui as her arch-rival, working day, night and twilight in her laboratories to outdo her in some way - and of course she ultimately made a major contribution to the progress of the project, especially since it was the data from her experiment that ultimately made it possible to work out the correct conditions for the successful steering of an Evangelion - But she did not have the time to evaluate these data herself, because for this information, for this greatest of her successes, the woman had to pay the ultimate price only a few years after this picture was taken...

But the center of the picture was filled by the true elite smithy of their field - the working group around Dr. Ikari Yui, above all the lady herself, the undisputed center of the picture, tall, with a noble palor, unfathomable emerald eyes and a smile of unshakable composure, and accompanying her like her shadows, two men: First there was her mentor, and the actual leader and founder of this productive furnace of a work group, Professor Fuyutsuki Kozo, at that time still ignorant of the conspiracy in which so many of her colleagues had already become entangled, to her right, and to her left, her fiancé, Rokubungi Gendo.

If you saw Yui as a born genius from a good home and with good manners, if you saw her as a prodigy who was expected to succeed because of her pedigree, then he was probably what was called a mad genius, unpolished, shabby and grossly negligent in dealing with people, but too ingenious to ignore what came out of his big mouth; You'd have to put up with his dark, angular face, as well as those clear, deep blue eyes that didn't really fit into the rest of his appearance; In contrast to his relatively dark skin they seemed almost unnatural.

This man was a phenomenon in himself.

Rokubungi Gendo.

Rokubungi Gendo, the heretic, Rokubungi Gendo the schismatic, Judas, the unfrozen gaze into the sun The raven king of the desert lands, the enemy of the world. The phenomenon.

The sound of it alone: Rokubungi Gendo. Ro-ku-bun-gi Gendo

Gendo, at first an amazingly hard, dark sound for the fact that it actually consisted of relatively soft consonants, dry and dark, and then a conscious lingering on the second syllable -

If it were music, the closest equivalent would probably be the dark organ sounds of a church song.

His fiancée preferred the way Dr. Makinami pronounced it because she had this way of rolling words on her tongue like lozenges, and her little daughter parroted it to her with fearless zeal: "Gendo-kun.

(Of course Makinami could have taught her daughter some manners, but she would have had to have some herself first. One might have thought that a little girl with genes that came from both Japan and the home country of the famed fine English manners would have impeccable breeding, but little Mari did not do her heritage any credit in this respect. )

He himself preferred to hear it with an incredulous, shocked undertone, preferably as a whole and in version 2.0: Ikari Gendo. Ikari Gendo. Hers, belonging to her.

If only it was possible to carry out an activity in such a way that he could touch his fiancée on the side, he would do it in this way and this way only, and to have his picture taken was such an activity, from which it followed that he had demonstratively wrapped his arm around her and the shameless grin on his lips seemed to want to say, "Fuck you, fuck each of you, I am the happiest man in the world - I saw her first, so fuck you all!"

But there were also a few less famous members of the research group, two other female scientists, who initially worked with Dr. Ikari, and who had later pursued similar research. First, there was one of the two women, whose hairstyle consisted mainly of a horse's tail held together with a big red barette, and clap-red plastic glasses, which must have influenced the taste of her daughter - or this woman had simply had a hand in the selection of the squinting iron, which her daughter had then kept to preserve her memory when choosing later visual aids - The family resemblance was also to be seen in the somewhat inappropriate way in which this woman - Dr. Makinami Murasaki - waved enthusiastically into the camera, wearing a mainly yellow, but partly pink plaid dress.

And next to her, significantly more restrained, with an apparently elaborate wreath of dark hair and a wine-red dress under her lab coat, the second member of her research group: Ayanami Kagura, together with her previously mentioned colleague, framing the happy couple.

...

The house bell made itself noticeable with a mechanical "Dingdong", the door was opened shortly afterwards, and then - delight.

Behind the door, a woman appeared, with short brown hair, emerald green eyes and a smile that was meant to express honest positive surprise, even if it was not so exuberant that it would have destroyed her unshakable aura of calm.

She wore a rather plushy pink sweater and a longer, light brown skirt, probably a specially tailored piece, made to contain large, round bellies like hers. There were people who got ugly stripes from pregnancies, noticeable fat pads and a general loss of shape, bad teeth, bad mood and an overall somewhat "leeched out" appearance, but this woman was one of the lucky ones who seemed to have become even more beautiful, as if she had finally taken on the complete shape that had always been meant for her, like a dragonfly that finally unfolded its wings after countless moultings.

Ikari Yui had always projected an unshakable aura of wisdom, ever since she was a child, but now that she had felt the secrets of life with her mind, body and soul, which she had only been able to fathom with her mind until now, this aura had multiplied once again.

She was anything but small and showed an even, yet delicate build that was only a further indication that she had always had only the best of everything in her life, but the visitor who was waiting for her outside the door even surpassed her in height by a small margin, even if her height was less underlined than it would have been with her usual wreath-like hairstyle, now that she had braided her black hair into a simple, sideways braid, she seemed a little less aloof and professional overall, and the relatively wide, short-sleeved yellow dress she was wearing helped.

Some might not have expected her hair to be so conspicuously long when not pinned up - the end of her braid ended just above her buttocks and even now it was still braided.

Compared to her counterpart, however, Dr. Ayanami appeared quite plain despite her hairstyle and outfit - not that she was unattractive, but her appearance was not really so outstanding now that the first thought anyone had about her would ever be directed at her face. She was about in the upper third of average, and in the presence of Dr. Ikari, simply overshadowed, you might say.

It was probably due to Dr. Ayanami's disposition, which was not prone to envy, that the two women could now greet each other overjoyed with a friendly embrace.

"Kagura-chan!"

"Yui-chan!"

And another one right away. They were obvously both in a good mood, and they were also very familiar with each other.

"Man, Kagura-chan!" the younger of the women was the first to begin. "At last I get to see you again! I've hardly received any e-mails from you in the past few months, let alone anything else.

"Well, the toil calls." Ayanami began her explanation jokingly. "We had a lot to do in complex five, big fish, big project!"

"Big fish, huh?" asked the woman with the short hair with interest.

"This is of course all classified information. Don't even try it." She said it with a smile, but she said it. The woman in pink could not help but let a tiny bonnet of melancholy press on her cheerfulness, only with the weight of the appropriate amount of whipped cream, but still noticeable. "This is really a shame. Actually, I brought you and Murasaki-chan into this project so that there would be no secrets between me and my best friends..."

"With you, it is not possible not to have secrets, Yui. I suppose you'll forgive me if I want to have my own."

"Oh, I forgive you, but that doesn't mean that I will not continue to pursue my goals... It's worth a try, as Murasaki-chan would say.

Ayanami shook her head, but she did it with a smile.

"Yui, Yui... You are really incorrigible... But now that we are at it, how is Murasaki-chan? She was due in April, right?

"She had her child on March 31. It was quite a turbulent affair, she got her first contractions at my birthday party..."

"And?"

"A healthy girl. Mari Illustrious. Makinami Mari Illustrious. If you want I will show you some photos later. You won't believe how cuddly the little one is... I was honestly tempted to take her home myself despite all friendship..."

"Be patient, Yui-chan. Just wait a few more months and you'll finally have your very own baby.

But Illustrious? Well, it's obvious that Murasaki-chan decided this all by herself anyway. This is typical for her again..."

"Indeed. But come on in, no reason for you to keep standing..."

„Oh, thank you."

And in they went. The house in which Dr. Ikari had established her little nest soon after their wedding was well equipped and filled with every luxury - It was obvious that it must have cost the two of them several million, if only because of the large plot of land, some of which Ayanami had had to cross on her way to the front door - It included a whole, dense forest, and a beautifully planted pond; there was still room for a greenhouse and, what had not been there when Ayanami had visited her friend the last time, almost a whole playground in all colors, with seesaw, slide, climbing frame, turntables and everything else a child's heart could desire, including a deluxe sandbox with sun roof.

As her long-time friend, Dr. Ayanami knew that the owner of this house had been wanting children practically since she was a child herself, and had been preparing her little ideas and plans for this moment for ages - and one of the advantages of being a genius biologist working for an ancient conspiracy was lots of dough to make all these dreams come true.

Ayanami could practically imagine how her friend had examined the properties that her real estate agents had shown them from the point of view of how much playtime opportunities they would probably offer a small child - hence the high brick walls, which were probably intended to prevent the little rascal from running away unplanned in time.

This little creature, which probably either slept at the moment, sucked its half-finished thumb or played with its umbilical cord, would probably be showered with its weight in love every day...

Despite its size, the property itself was on the edge of what was once called Hakone, but was now to become the foundation stone for the project's new fortress city, at a time when, just over six months after the Second Impact, very few people still had a roof over their heads.

Yui had placed a small, dignified sign next to the doorbell next to the garden gate, of course, as a joke, in the form of an anchor - "Yui, Gendo and-" whereby they would probably add the last name once they had thought of a name for the child or the gender was determined.

In short, the Ikaris had really treated themselves to something with this place - Ayanami wasn't the type of person to stare, but she couldn't help but take notice of it all clearly while her friend led her through the hallway.

Even if the occasional paint pots standing next to the walls, and stacks of unused tarpaulin did not quite fit the overall picture...

"Gendo is currently painting the nursery." Dr. Ikari explained, noticing the questioning looks of her friend.

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yes, indeed. Our little Shin-chan is not supposed to come until the beginning of June, but when you look at Gendo, you might think that the little one is about to graduate from high school..."

"Then you already know it's a boy?"

"The last ultrasound image was a little... blurry. And before that, we probably always caught him in awkward moments. Or he's just shy. But I was sure from the beginning that it would definitely be a boy... call it a kind of premonition. But during the last examination the doctor said that he couldn't see it yet..."

"And let me guess, your husband is convinced that it's a girl..."

"We've compromised to paint the room yellow."

"I was really very long, very busy... in this underground complex you sometimes forget the time, without any sunlight... What else happened? How are all the others doing? Fuyutsuki-sensei? Dr. Akagi?"

"Fuyutsuki-sensei is fine, but Dr. Akagi seems to be having a little midlife crisis..."

"Midlife crisis?"

Dr. Ikari turned to her friend in a playfully quiet, mischievous tone.

"Every time Gendo leans forward to press buttons on any console, she stares at his butt"

"Really?" Ayanami pulled a face. "At least you have nothing to worry about with a rival who is twenty years your senior..."

After a short while the two of them finally reached the door to the kitchen, which was open and quite modernly furnished - in the same room there was a long dining table in modern style, where the master of the house had been drinking his coffee until now.

As soon as he heard their steps in the hallway, he looked up from the magazine he had been reading until now and grinned shamelessly at the two women.

"Ayanami." He said it succinctly, with a certain subliminal aggressiveness. "You are still alive."

"Yes, it's nice to see you too." Dr. Ayanami retorted directly as she sat opposite the only man in the assembly. "Is everything okay with you, Ikari? Yui-chan told me that the two of you were mostly engaged in "nest-building"..."

"Everything must be ready when our little Rei-chan is finally born..."

Yep, the two of them were definitely having a bit of a disagreement.

But that was not what made Ayanami immediately ask again in a playfully insulted manner: "What, Rei? But Yui... now I really feel forgotten. I wasn't gone for that long! I am really disappointed."

"I'm sorry, Kagura-chan. It's not as if I forgot..."

"Would you mind letting me in on it too?" the man of the house demanded to be slightly amused, sipping his coffee cup on the side.

Yui, who in the meantime had been working at the coffee machine to provide herself and her friend with hot drinks - of course of the decaffeinated kind due to her pregnancy - answered the question while she was still serving them: "Kagura and I actually promised each other as little girls that we would name our first children one after the other. But this would not happen anyway, because I am pretty sure that it will be a boy.

"It could still be a girl..." her husband interjected, to which Dr. Ayanami directly announced her agreement. "Exactly!

She put her own cup in the place next to her husband's. "I know, but since it was me who persuaded Gendo to start a family in the first place, I wanted to let him at least choose the name - he asked to be able to choose it himself, and now that I had finally infected him with my enthusiasm, I wanted to show him that I appreciate that, too..."

"But, but... are you saying that I'm not always enthusiastic about giving you what you want?" complained Dr. Ikari's husband, intercepting his wife before she could sit down, leaned back, reached back with one arm, and demonstratively stroked her cheek.

The brunette woman herself responded by first leading her own arms past his, over his shoulders, and bending over so that her upper body continued his chair back up, her arms crossed over his chest, and her upper arms framed his face.

„Of course not."

"Really, you two," Ayanami commented, "Don't get me wrong, but you should never have procreated with each other... You are some of my best friends, but you are scary people. I don't even dare to imagine what would come out of throwing your genes together. I'm not entirely sure that this world will survive that..."

Dr. Ikari laughed, stroking her husband's face after she had removed one of her hands from his top.

It was really obvious that the two of them did not miss any opportunity to stick to each other.

"Well, I don't see any problem there, Kagura-chan. If he inherits Gendo's good looks and follows me in the sense that he is musical, we should have the grandchildren in no time..."

"Have you ever thought that your child might get your looks and his talents? Or your talents and his personality."

"All right, all right..." said the man in red, whose grin now took on a sardonic touch. "I hope myself that our daughter, " And he insisted on that. "...doesn't get too much of my genes. The best thing would be if she looked exactly like you, Yui. Just beautiful."

"...and in return she would have all your little quirks, and would be just like you in everything else - devoted, loyal, purposeful and pure..."

There were many words that Ayanami Ikari would have used to describe Gendo, and "pure" was not one of them.

"But I'm sure it will be a boy anyway..."

"No, a girl. I'm sure. Call it some kind of paternal instinct."

"...What?"

"Anyway I hope that our son" And there she was just as persistent "...will have your beautiful eyes..."

"And all your talents, all those wonderful things you can do, and your warmth..."

Late in the evening he reached up with his other hand and quickly found the head of his wife, who had already bent over further to exchange a deep kiss with him shortly afterwards - and another one. And another one.

"You two! You do know you have to wait until the first baby is out before you can produce the next one?"

"'Sorry, Ayanami." Dr. Ikari's husband did not seem at all penitent. "I just forgot you were here for a moment."

Ayanami just smiled as they separated from er, and each other colleague finally sat down in her seat and remembered to empty her coffee cup before the brew finally got cold.

So her friend had really found herself an exquisite bastard. It was almost cute. Most people wondered what the successful Dr. Ikari Yui, who comes from a good family, could want with such a delinquent, but for Dr. Ayanami it was clear: two had found each other.

Crazy, both of them, it should be forbidden by law for such a pair to reproduce.

"But still... is it even worth having a child at this point? After all, the completion of the great work is already fifteen years ahead of now."

The Ikari couple saw this a little bit differently.

But they had not told Ayanami this - the fewer people knew about their little rebellion, the better.

In the end, it was the lady of the house who saved the situation before the entered silence became suspicious: "But, but, you don't seem to have let that stop you either. Don't think I didn't notice."

"What do you think?"

With the audacity of previous childhood pranks about which they shared a lot of common memories, Dr. Ikari, without warning, reached under the table and pulled on a corner of her colleague's dress that, when stretched out of its original shape, it needed to reveal more of the contours of the body enveloped in it than it was supposed to, which then revealed that Dr. Ayanami had also begun to curve around the center.

"I already hope that our two children will become as close friends as we are."

"I'm afraid that's not going to happen. This is not mine, this is an experiment. So I'd appreciate it if you'd keep quiet. "

Which also explained why she had so little contact with the outside world for the last few months.

The man in red leaned back with a thin grin on his face and you could practically hear how the gears in his head started to tick, how he took mental notes and went through everything she had said for information to get a complete picture of this... project.

Lab complex five was one of the biggest blind spots in the map of their information, even his wife was only so and so much was said about it. They knew until now that the old men had something in the works there, and in which direction it was going, but no results, no details and certainly not what SEELE wanted with all this...That was part of the reason why they has suggested that Ayanami ought to join it.

One could almost think that he also had some kind of silent respect for Ayanami for being so totally committed to her goals - that was the kind of drastic step he would have taken on himself.

His wife, on the other hand, was moved by something else, and although she always had the plans in the back of her mind, it was not these plans that made her feel seriously disturbed.

"Oh..." she said with difficulty, inevitably imagining what that would be like... She was almost more affected by the thought than Ayanami herself, who had told it more like... a casual comment about her work, yes.

"Kagura-chan..."

„Calm down, Yui." Then the third person in the group joined in, attracting the attention of both women. "It's not like you not to see it right away... Think about it, who's the director of Complex Five?"

There was a change in Dr. Ikari's facial expression, largely the softening of the compassionate component.

"Bingo. I don't think Project Master forced anyone to do anything. Not that the old men can't be trusted, not that they don't consider it just a small, if painful sacrifice,, depending on what this project is - In our times, no "pretty", "clean" or "honest" organization can survive - And I think Ayanami knows it. Who signs the approval for everything that goes on in Complex Five? Who would sign if GEHIRN were to carry out this project..."

Dr. Ikari understood what her husband was trying to imply, but it was the event itself that she did not understand. Nevertheless, it was confirmed by Ayanami immediately afterwards:

"The whole thing was my own idea, Yui."

"Your idea? But Kagura, we live in the 21st century. You're not... not a vessel."

"Oh yes, the female body is a vessel - just like the male.

What has changed in the last hundred years is only that we can decide for ourselves what happens to it.

In fact, in the 21st century we understand our bodies more as vessels than ever before - we no longer "are" hands and legs and heads, we "have" them, like a computer has software and hardware. And we also use them like something we "have". That's because we can now - we now know in detail what we can put in it and what effect it will have and why, we have traced our drives and our behavior back to simple biochemical processes down to the smallest detail, and if we want we can even change our shape to a limited extent - the limits are really only the possibilities of our technology. We are certainly always trying to improve it, with sports, food, cosmetics, drugs... Caffeine for better performance, alcohol as a "social lubricant", upsets and deficiencies with the production or absorption of certain chemicals are no longer irrefutable facts of our existence, but problems we can solve.

Our project could also be seen as an attempt to improve our forms, as a new technology to transcend the limits of others.

This is what humans do - and reproduction is no different from other functions. Today we can start reproduction artificially, even sort out properties that we don't like, and undesirable reproduction processes can be stopped at any time - it has become something quite cheap, such a reproduction process. My stomach is mine, so I might as well put an experiment in it; I was well informed."

"Kagura, Kagura, life doesn't come cheap. It is true that nowadays it is easy to destroy it, and that goes for all its forms. And we have also begun to understand it better - I am not averse to it at all. On the contrary, I have devoted myself to science, which strives to understand life because it fascinates me so much. I do not want to think that life becomes cheap or "disenchanted" by the fact that we understand it. Once we thought that nothing less than fantastic magic could explain life. Now we know it's not so, doesn't mean that life isn't still the same fantastic thing we once thought so incredible that only magic could explain it. Even more, the fact that all this complexity is made up of simple steps that we can understand is even more amazing.

Life has its value. To say that we never have to weigh it, that we will never find things that weigh more is naive indeed, but even if we decide against it, it doesn't mean that it was meaningless - something else just had more meaning.

But life is precious. We should not forget that.

And we should not be negligent..."

"But, Yui, you're always careless with life. Even mine. And even your family's. It's because you don't quite know. It's because you think everyone else has a full existence like you, it's because you're losing sight of the earth up there in your Olympus. You have so many hobbies and talents, a fulfilling job, a perfect family, it is only natural that you are optimistic. So optimistic that you let this master pessimist here do the job for you, to make fun of it every day, to convince him for the better. But you don't know what you would destroy if you disappeared. So many different things, universes that revolved around you.

You just have so much to worry about, think far into the future, and involve every single human life. Almost like a goddess, like the one, golden sun that shines down on everyone, good or bad. But nobody can have the sun all to himself.

And the result is that, without you meaning it in a bad way, no, because of your big, noble plans, we are much smaller parts of your world than you are for us. For some for us you are a big part of the world, for a few, the whole.

I was always your so-called friend, who always just listened to you and never had anything to say.

Apart from you and Murasaki, I didn't have many other friends, and unlike you, I haven't had much luck with love and family - it's still like I'm jealous.

I have no right to complain. If I'm honest, I guess I didn't really care, didn't really find the time to invest in more bonds - If I'm honest, it doesn't bother me that much either, you know I never really had that much of a social need - My family and one, two, three good friends were actually always enough for me. If I were to start talking to someone just because I was feeling lonely at the moment, that person would want to talk to me much more often than I'd like to, and there would be so many things to think about, so it wouldn't be fair to want to start a friendship to which I would hardly be present.

So I do not resent you for what you have. Precisely for this reason I want to stand opposite you as someone who is about the same, and also has a life of their own that I can tell you about. That's why I let myself be persuaded to join this project - because I wanted to have something to do with the big, deep things in this world.

So please, let me stay what I am and walk my own path..."

"If our paths have begun to fork, there is probably nothing we can do, but there is something you are wrong about, Kagura-chan.

It's true that when I was younger I probably had nothing that was more important to me than anything else, and maybe it's true that I have seen a lot from my admittedly privileged position... but it's not as if my path has always been the same. Or rather, you could say that I found my real, own path much more recently than you might think.

Now I have one of those all important things..." Dr. Ikari claimed with a warm and wise smile, emphasizing a hand on her stomach.

"And it's all because I met Gendo."

"Oh Yui, I am honored..." commented the man, who, after he had finished his coffee and article long ago, had put his fingers together in the usual way, and followed the whole conversation with a certain amusement.

Ayanami sighed and emptied her cup.

"Really, you two... At least name some stupid project or discovery of yours after me, okay? That's good enough for me, even if we don't follow the same path in everything. I have a little something I like to call Y.U.I."

(Ayanami had also been the maid of honor at their wedding - usually this role was reserved for the groom's best friend, and Ayanami was actually Dr. Ikari's friend, who had met her fiancé through her, but he made no secret of saying openly that he had no real friends who weren't also Yui's friends - and in fact, the majority of Yui's friends thought he was the biggest mistake of her life, and made bets on how long it would be before she finally threw him out).

(Apart from Ayanami and Makinami, there were probably few people who knew her well enough to understand why she would be attracted to this man of all people).

(Except for Ayanami, there were few who wondered if it wasn't Ikari who didn't appreciate her husband enough).

(Dr. Ikari appreciated him.)

(Only in their own complicated way, focused on the end result.

(He, of course, appreciated her unconditionally and would probably still have blown up the planet for her if she had only thron him a bone once a week with a few strips of meat on it, but most of her appreciation for him was sent on a wavelength he simply did not understand, in actions he would never grasp. And in a way, this was also true for their son. )

FOUR YEARS LATER -

"If I had known that it would come to this..." Dr. Ikari Yui commented, not without a limited, but clearly audible melancholy. "...I would have named something after Kagura..."

The woman with the black wreath of hair lay on the floor. It was not so obvious on her dark purple dress, but at the latest after it had spread on her lab coat and the floor, the red color of the blood was hard to miss.

Next to Dr. Ikari, two other figures were waiting in the twilight of the room, two men, their right and left hands - her husband was adjusting the cheap-looking, thick plastic glasses that had since become a permanent accessoryy, still holding the gun in the other hand.

"It's a real shame." he commented, putting the safety catch on his gun back in place. "We were pretty sure that she would be open to our cause, especially after they explained what was hidden from her, so we took a chance...

And then that was our only chance. After this incident, security in Laboratory Complex Five will inevitably be tightened, and if we tried to insert another of our agents without leaving any traces... in brief, we can forget about it. If we let the old men know that this place has attracted our attention, they will simply put all the incriminating material somewhere else, and we'd have to start the search all over again..."

He put his gun back in the pocket of his lab coat.

"And no matter how useful she might have been to us... it's true, we can essentially get over her loss as long as we have Akagi, who had the superior skills from the beginning, but I must admit that I found Ayanami much... more pleasant than that annoying old hag."

The man in black and red walked over his victim, dodging her puddle of blood only as narrowly as necessary - if it hadn't been for the detail that this would probably have revealed him as the guilty party, he would probably have stomped right through it.

He ran over to a desk like furniture, with the intention of searching at least Ayanami's records for useful material, like a scavenger plundering a carcass.

All the time his tone of voice, although partly regretful, had never been moved to great emotion.

"I almost liked her a little, but after we told her about our real intentions, she either joins us... or she knows too much. It's a shame, really."

He would pick out papers and put them one by one on a pile, as if he did it every day, really, an ordinary company Thursday, you might think.

The second man was not surprised - it was Fuyutsuki, who had been recruited by the other two only a short time ago, and he could not help but look at the corpse of the young woman from his perspective and fail to hide his disappointment.

His former favorite student had not been involved in this, but she had never said anything against it at any time.

She seemed unhappy, but he saw no remorse.

"...would this have happened to me as well, if I had not agreed to your little "offer"?" he asked into the room. Apparently nobody really thought it necessary to answer him.

Meanwhile, the younger man had clamped his "booty" of papers and files under his arm and marched out of the room past Fuyutsuki, apparently finished with it.

But Yui spoke to her older mentor - who wondered if this was really her answer to all serious questions.

"I wonder..." she began, certainly with a lowered gaze, but... for the sheer scale here, the magnitude of this event... it was too little. "...what moved Kagura to oppose us..."

"She was probably completely and utterly dedicated to her goals... she was finally ready to use her own body for it. „Her husband answered her from the corridor.

"No, I don't think that's it..." She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully. "But it could be related... When I told her the truth, she was shocked at first... She seemed to be seriously considering an offer, but when we said that her task in our plan was to significantly sabotage the infrastructure of Complex Five, and what information we wanted from her, she suddenly clamped up ... This "experiment" from four years ago... what is it? I wonder if it's still in Complex Five."

"If Ayanami did not want us to know about it, it must be something that endangers our plans by its very existence. At least in this respect, she has done us a last favor, albeit unintentionally: We now know that SEELE still has a trump card up their sleeve, which we may have to eliminate..." the bespectacled man remarked. "We are in her debt."

Fuyutsuki decided to focus primarily on the sad expression on the face of his student. He did not want to believe that this was really his life, this great misery he had to endure with clenched teeth without being able to find a satisfactory solution.

"It is really a pity that Kagura might have turned against us for the same reasons that I am pursuing this plan at all..."

She sighed. "But don't worry about Complex Five, Gendo. I'm sure in all probability we'll be explicitly invited there within the next year or two ..."

(With this prediction, as with so many other things, she should be right. Except that she would no longer be there to join us for this visit to the fifth complex, or more precisely, the DARWIN Garden. )

(In the short time remaining to her after this event, she did not have the chance to name anything after Ayanami Kagura)

(So he did it, for her, because she could not do it anymore.)

What none of the three knew was that they had missed perhaps the most revealing clue in that room t - when he searched Ayanamis' drawers for useful information, Ikari had suspected it in folders and files, the contents of which turned out to be just routine records; He did not suspect the upside-down frame he had found covered with other things at the bottom of the second drawer.

And he wasn't the type who would look at something like that out of curiosity - he had never been particularly fond of sentimental things like picture frames anyway.

But if he had turned it around and looked at the picture, he would have been able to conclude what SEELE was up to at first sight.

The picture showed what was outwardly an approximately four-year-old boy playing in the water on a rocky shore, a little boy with red eyes, silver-white eyes and a euphoric but relaxed smile.

...

(1) The cursive quote about the body & soul are taken from the videogame 'Vagrant Story'

(2) I really wanted to do something about the CR line with Yui's parents being SEELE members; There was no reason why they had to be related to keel but it's dramatic, saves me uneccesary characters, & deepens the sense of depht of Shinji's ignorance, though it seemed more realistic to put a generation in between. Blue eyes are a recessive gene anyways, so you'd need to have em from both sides of the family.

(3) I was always sorta wanting some sort of meaning behind why the name 'Ayanami' was picked – Q offers a sort of explanation but it's not really compatiple with the OG canon. I'm not the first to go with the idea that it was a mutual acquaintance of the Ikaris, though. I think in hindsight I would've structured her arc differently. Mostly it was meant to be another example of Yui miscalculating about the people around her just like when she thought Fuyutsuki & Gendo would cope without her, as well as a contrast. Though I was certainly going for the symmetry or gag value of "Oh look, Shinji's and Kaworu's moms were also friends!" Insofar as Kagura A. can be even considered his mom.

(4) I simply assumed that the 'Voice Actor's birthday' convention also applies to Mari

(5) With the mad scientists you get the narciscisstic, cold-dismissive type or the quasi-parental heroic ones with little in-between and I wanted to do something that is neither of those things. The idea was that Kaworu and his various handlers basically had a 'good working relationship' because, he's interested in humans, they're interested in angels, and he's just that charming… but it never got to enough of a deeper personal level that they would have moved him and solidified his final decision to the same level as his relatively brief encounter with Shinji did.

(6) One aim I had in this batch of chapters was certainly to convey a sense of 'otherness' while still keeping Kaworu benevolent and insightful; Shiftiness/manipulation or lack of understanding are kinda the typical old tools for that and as such kinda cheap shots, at least in that they don't really fit a part of how the character works… he's supposed to be genuinely good and awesome (someone "you couldn't help but like" as Anno once put it), because that's why it breaks Shinji so much to either kill him or get him killed by mistake, cause he feels lacking and undeserving by comparision.

(7) See the upcoming 2.30 [Heir to the White Moon II: Gates of Eden] for the continuation