2.32: [The Maw of Saturn]

Boku wa tada kimi ni

Sayonara o iu renshuu o suru

-Kubo Tite

[:]

I am merely practicing

saying goodbye to you.

The glass tube was moved back up into the device and the little blue-haired girl, who had previously just been carefully draped on the platform, now stood on her own feet, even though her red eyes continued to stare rigidly forward, not especially aimed at the two men standing in front of her.

"Do you understand what I am saying?" asked a deep, rough male voice.

"Positive." she confirmed mechanically.

"Awaiting instructions."

"I am your commanding officer and your creator, Ikari Gendo, head of GEHIRN. You will obey my every command from now on. Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Your name is Ayanami Rei. Your function is to further the human instrumentality project. Its completion is the purpose of his existence.

"Yes, sir."

Next, it was the second man's voice that spoke: "Good. We will conduct some basic tests now. Can you tell me what color this card is?"

"Blue."

"2537483. Repeat the number sequence I just recited."

„2537483."

"Very good. Can you move your right arm?"

She could.

"Okay, one last test. Can you recognize who is on this screen here?"

"This is the object that is recognized as Ayanami Rei."

Fuyutsuki gave his superior a questioning look.

"That's good enough..." he said to the old ex-professor and went to the little girl to help her down to the platform belonging to the tube, setting her down on the floor and finally taking her by the hand.

"Let's go..." he said to the girl.

"We're going to do some extensive testing to make sure that you are fully functional."

"Yes, sir."

She followed, quiet and soundless, but it was as if Ikari just didn't notice - each flare of this little voice, which was a little girl's but still carried a familiar quality, deepened his thin, cold smile and the glow of madness behind his lenses, as mentioned earlier: Mostly anticipation, but also something else, a joy that had been missing at the birth of his real child - but even the joy of this moment, regarding this other child here, ought to be in doubt; The excitement and perplexity of four years ago had at least been real and immediate, but the joy of this day had been a dispassionate, cool thing, more a ghost of a positive feeling or something similar to it, something similar to things he would never feel again, not since that big, dark hole in his soul gaped where once the only source of warmth in that hell that, for the lack of a better world, was referred to as "The World". - One might think that the girl would have merely reminded him of joy, just a spark of memory awakened in him, a long faded aftertaste, a distant echo, a vague idea of how joy had once felt a long, long time ago, as it had been; He could never hold on to the memory of it for too long, it just hurt too much, but the burning of melancholy was one of the last flames that warmed his icy heart, even if it was only a little bit.

By this colorless, faded illusion of the past, he overlooked that his actual child was still in this world, that the boy was alive, that he was real, that his life continued even when his father was not around, and that somewhere on the surface, far away from him, he was forming new memories of which his father would no longer have any part, that at this very moment the child was waiting for him to come back, crying himself to sleep night after night... At this point Ikari hadn't sent his son away completely, but had already turned away from him, absorbed in his work, seeing only his own failure in every minute they spent together.

In the beginning, the boy had regularly asked for his mother, but for some time now he had probably given up and begun to suspect that he would never see her again, at least not in the flesh, at most in the light - at home with the boy there was nothing but thick, dark stagnation, if not slow decay, and he couldn't stand it, finding more and more ways to escape this whole situation. Of course, the child was not alone at home, he was too young for that, but the constantly changing babysitters didn't give him any more support than his father, who was at most still physically present in their house, and even that less and less often.

When he came home, the child was usually already asleep, and he brought him to the nursery as soon as it opened, early in the morning, usually unloading the half-sleeping boy wordlessly, without ever really responding to the kindergarten teachers' requests that he should get in touch with them for a talk - now and then he would protest that he was looking for a free spot in his schedule, and in those moments he even meant it seriously, but nothing came of it.

Everything was easier when he was engaged with the project, more understandable, not so overwhelmingly bleak - it was coming along just fine, very well even, the successful creation of this girl should be the best proof.

Here he was in his element, here he knew what it was that he had to do, how things worked.

It was around this time that he spent the first night at headquarters, returning to his house early in the morning for the sole purpose of leaving it immediately and escorting the boy to the nursery.

But even at GEHIRN there were one or two unforeseen developments - After his suggestion regarding artificial pilots was accepted, and the old men had nothing left to do but accept Rei, he had initially attached little importance to the next activation experiment with EVA 02 - Everything had gone according to plan so far, all the trump cards were in his hand, and for his plan everything except Lillith, Adam and Eve 01 was irrelevant for the time being - Dr. Dr. Zeppelin-Shikinami was privy to the truths of the project only so far as strictly necessary for her work - As far as she knew, they were building defanged, controllable copies of Adam, with the sole purpose of fighting the angels with equal weapons - That's all she needed to know to build the production model; EVA 02 was a "slimmed down" or "castrated" model, as one could say, really just not meant for any higher purpose than the fight against the angels, and as such it had no need for the higher functions of the original – it would be less than ideal as a medium for an impact phenomenon, but it was not to be expected that the thing would get out of control.

On the whole, it was unimportant, nothing but a foot soldier, and the same applied to Dr. Shikinami herself - she was the head of the scientific department in the 3rd branch office in Germany and as such was mainly present there.

Of course, international cooperation demanded that she sometimes had to do business at headquarters, but then she had mostly dealt with Yui than with him directly, since she had belonged to Yui's department - apparently the two women were old acquaintances, or at least that's how Yui had put it - she cared as little for rivalry as her two descendants eventually would, even if it was more because they had not a drop of ambition in them - Yui herself had had more than enough of that, her goals reached as high as the sky, her plans included periods of time and scales that made people look like insects - and that's what it was, she had much higher intentions, much bigger plans to compete with a simple human - The truth was that she actually appreciated Shikinami and her work, and liked to include her in the conversation whenever she and Makinami talked about how cute her children were -

To be honest, Ikari had never been interested in all that talk, and he hadn't made a big secret of the fact that he had only listened half-heartedly to what Yui told him about her colleague from Germany - but if he remembered correctly, Dr. Shikinami himself had a daughter who was only slightly younger than Shinji, the name had just slipped his mind. Amaya? Astrid? Annika?

It is said that the little girl could already write her name when little Shinji and Mari were still struggling to draw stick figures.

(Akagi was also invited occasionally and asked what her daughter Ritsuko had been like when she was that age, but the last thing Akagi would talk about at work was her daughter, and the last thing she wanted to hear about was the harmonious family life of the Ikaris - Shikinami had, although for very different reasons, also only extremely limited interest in it since her own marriage had fallen apart. Maybe that's why she couldn't resist extending her rivalry to child rearing and telling the others how her daughter could do everything better, but apart from that she didn't really talk much about her daughter, and when Yui and Dr. Makinami were talking about something absolutely funny or cute that one of their children had done, (Yui smiling confidently or giggling determinedly, Makinami rarely without a full-bodied, inappropriate laugh that made her whole body shake) Zeppelin-Shikinami was often quick to rebuke her, pointing out that they were here at work and not at some tea party for bored housewives.

That their daughter could write her name was true, however. And the first thing she did, once she had mastered the five letters, was to quickly brand all her possessions by writing her name all over them - her pencil case? Asuka! Her coloring booklet? Asuka! The inside of her caps and hats? Asuka! Her slippers for the kindergarten? Asuka! Everyone ought to know whose stuff this was.

Only on the dress of one of her favorite dolls did not really want to retain the ink of her felt tip pen, at least not after its last trip to the washing machine, which promptly caused the little one to run sulking to her mother, telling her the tragedy that her name was no longer on it. Then the good Ms. Shikinami took out her sewing box and embroidered it in black stitching, so that it was preserved for eternity: ASUKA.

This was one of the last good memories Asuka had of this woman, and one of the only ones, everything else that could have been good times sank into the fog of early childhood - But the few pictures from "before" probably seemed much sweeter in the girl's memory than they really were, for her it was the time before everything had gone straight to hell )

Probably a little bit offended that she hadn't gotten around to outdoing her rival during her lifetime, but not entirely dishonest when she claimed to want to finish her work so that she didn't die in vain, she went through the data of Yui's activation experiment several times, and worked out the procedure for the test with EVA 02 to such an extent that, in her opinion, it simply had to succeed - But even though she was proud, she remained a scientist, and left records with precise instructions for the evaluation and interpretation of the data, in case she did not return - If she did not meet the appropriate criteria for successful activation, it should be possible, if everything went according to plan, to calculate how far her parameters deviated from the ideal, and in what range the tolerable values were that should be used to select the candidates – The selection of potentially revelant parameters was entirely Dr. Shikinami's contribution, though the bioinformatics algorithm to determine which of these parameters were significant was contributed by Akahi, who had assembled it with the help of Miyazawa from Complex Five.

But even though the German-born scientist had planned for the worst-case scenario, if only to outdo her rival at least from the grave, she was planning to bag her laurels in person - she went through exactly what went wrong in the last experiment and took precautions to keep the molecules that made up her body all neatly together, but she was not told enough about the true nature of what she was working on; A similar result would come in handy to those who already knew what it was all leading up to, and so Activation Experiment Number Two also went down in history as a terrible debacle - Admittedly, the precautions worked, they got the woman's body out of the core of EVA 02 as intact as they had put it in, but whatever was left in it was not Dr. Dr. Shikinami, at least not all of her.

She had become another one of the countless human sacrifices that this project had claimed, one of many cadavers that had gone unnoticed on the pile of bones, skulls and blood that had already been poured into the throat of this pact, and her end polished up the altars for many new sacrifices – the requirements for sucessful synchronization, which could be worked out in terms of conditions from the results of the experiment and supplemented by further considerations, were undoubtedly cruel, and grew out of partly conflicting preconditions - on the one hand the candidates had to be able to establish a functional connection to the Evangelions at all, on the other hand it was of little use if they were directly absorbed like the scientists who had tested the man-made gods before – the goal was to hit the narrow range in between.

One of the main results was that Dr. Shikinami's name was at the top of the list of participants of the published work, but the final paper did not contain a single line written by her personally (she was no longer capable of taking part) In that publication, it was concluded that even the otherwise insignificant contamination from the matter blown into the environment at the time of the Second Impact was enough for a theoretical chance at synchronization, without the necessity for further modifications to the extent that those had been done with the First Child – Ultimately it became known as the as nine-zero system, one to nine billion, and on the planet only scarcely three billion humans were left, of whom only the fewest had come into the world after Second: As much as one might think that it people ought to be bringing forth offspring in heaps to repopulate the world, the sad truth was that children had become a scarce resource in this present world.

And now some of them would have to be burned for the project. It was soon clear what this would lead to.

Based on this alone, the existence of viable candidates was theoretically possible, but the chances of any of them running around on Earth were measurably small, it would have taken several Earths full of people to recruit what it might taKE to save a single one, but there were other, somewhat more closely guarded factors that, if several of them came together, would lead to viable results - for example, if the test subjects who were still in utero at the time of the Second Impact or at least shortly thereafter, the contaminants from after Second Impact would be especially effective. That these children would then be around the peak of puberty at the predicted time would likewise be fortunate, at least in the sense that a body that was already undergoing a transformation would be more likely to cope with the stresses and demands of contact with superhuman, unnatural constructs of divine nature due to its with greater adaptability.

As far as the plasticity of the brain is concerned, toddlers would actually be the ideal choice, where the patterns and connections adapted to life were still in the process of forming, but toddlers were impractical because it was difficult to give them orders - teenagers did not have the most reliable reputation either, but you had to take what you got. As their brains were undergoing their final burst of rewiring, they could likely be made to adapt that wiring to the demands of piloting - at the expense of the natural process of maturation and growth, of course.

Behind some of the things on the list of criteria were indeed only obscure physical or purely genetic characteristics, others were inconspicuously formulated expressions behind which there were far fewer innocent preconditions.

There was half a paragraph of descriptions that could be summarized much more easily, just as an obscure parameterization with sine and cosine and the like would result in a simple circle.

Even before the first activation experiments it had been worked out that a substantial part of the connection to the biomechanical combat machines should run over the A-10 nerve, and thus involve parts of the brain that were normally responsible for bonds between people - also in lovers, but mainly in the bond between mother and child - The fact that they had already given birth to children then also explained why Dr. Ikari, Dr. Shikinami, and also Dr. Makinami, who suffered a similar fate under slightly different circumstances before the results of the last experiment were fully evaluated, and thus made her own contribution to this evaluation, caused reactions but did not return, instead of nothing happening to begin with...

If one were poetically inclined, one could say that these enormous, terrifying fighting machines were driven by nothing other than the power of love - But that would be a rather ornate romanticization of reality: People came into the world with "programming", first to form bonds - if one wanted to use this "channel" in another way, it had to be free.

Therefore, the ultimate, most important prerequisite, the main ingredient in the recipe of a useful candidate, soberly and bluntly expressed, was orphans. Half orphans at least.

It was like something out of one of those fantasy films for children, in which the wicked witches drew their magic from the tears and nightmares of the target audience - A single nightmare, and it had begun long, long ago.

No less piquant was one of the factors in which one of Complex Five's specialties came into play: The research on human AT-Fields, unimpressive as they had to be compared to the projectable version of our celestial cousins. It was quite obvious: The potential pilots would need an above-average field strength in order not to be absorbed right away.

The matter was in itself much more complex than that, but as a rough rule of thumb one could already say: Isolated people, who would find it difficult to get in touch with others would do just fine. This was a parameter for which there was only a rather narrow tolerance range - too much, and the test subjects would shut themselves off from the Evangelions from whose greedy brethren they were supposed to be protected, at least for a short time, and become useless, too little, and it would end with them as it had with the female scientists who had built the infernal machines in the first place.

It was a morbid guessing game to estimate how different personality types would probably affect these mechanics, and fans of gallow's humor could have remarked that the gruesome fates of the scientists had a silver lining after all - the core units of the Evangelion were already at the beginning intended as mediators between the small human mind and the divine machines, and from the very beginning it was also planned, at least to some extent, to exploit man's natural predisposition to form bonds for a cold, mechanical act of warfare, but the bond would of course form most easily with that for which it was actually meant for: Another human soul, just like the ones which the EVAs 01 and 02 were now equipped with.

And it was also clear which young children would work best - even if that meant using test subjects who might well have a family predisposition to something that had contributed to the ugly end of the original activation experiments.

There seemed to be nothing about this project that did not amount to making unfavorable situations worse and making hard lives even harder, supposedly all in the name of the end result: Even before the actual grading and classification processes in Complex Five were completed, it was practically clear who was to be the second candidate, just as little Rei was here practically only as a formality, just as Complex Five's own artificial construct, Subject 23, was here only to prepare some official explanation for his presence on the candidate lists: a little girl who had already lost enough through the project, Dr. Zeppelin-Shikinami's little daughter, Shikinami Asuka Langley, and very soon, probably designated pilot of Evangelion Unit 02.

But they weren't the only ones who had arrived at Complex Five that day - the children who were brought here were partly orphans who had lost their families in the Second Impact and could therefore easily be made to disappear without anyone missing them, cannon fodder to whom various members of SEELE had had access through their economic and social influence. Here and there, where the infrastructure had meanwhile allowed it again, there had been an opportunity to sample the populace for genetic markers of compatibility, especially in the somewhat richer countries. The most interesting candidates were found in and around Japan, which was probably related to the current location of the black moon and thus another source of minimal contamination with relevant material - in itself it did not mean much, that it came from the same source as the people themselves, but in combination with what the Second Impact had put in... well, it was dozens of orders of magnitude too scarce for any reaction, but it increased the likelihood of finding viable candidates. And, of course, all members of GEHIRN had to set a good example and let their own children be screened for PR reasons alone, (The higher ranking officials, who were sufficiently initiated to understand the threads of destiny described in the scrolls and in the scrolls themselves, had reason to believe that this was the case anyway, that the test subjects, or, as it was rather called in these higher circles, the chosen ones, would in any case be found mainly there) above all the head of the organization, who had brought both his own son and this mysterious little girl, of whom only a few suspected where they had suddenly come from.

Had he asked others to offer up their children for the project and kept his own away, he would have been called a selfish hypocrite, but his dragging them here without further scruples or emotion filled many of his subordinates with great unease.

The reactions of the relatives of the remaining children, where they were still present, formed a broad spectrum - Dr. Makinami's partner, a certain Clark Stradlatter, had the understanding to realize that it would be of little use to resist this summons, but with his crossed arms he made it clear from the beginning that he didn't like the whole thing here at all, and that he wanted the greatest possible distance between his daughter and any strange events; Likewise, here was Mitsurugi Minoru, the man who, ironically, had made a major contribution to the facilities in this complex without actually seeing them, was not really enthusiastic, even though he was more likely to be nervous about running up and down and fearing that his son would get all too high on the list of candidates - a man named Aida even declared that he would only consent "Over my dead body! "while his freckled son was happily busy with some toy airplanes in the distance.

But there were other reactions as well, such as that of a gentleman named Suzuhara, who was certainly happy to keep his little son company here, but had his hands full with keeping his tiny daughter busy - She had slept on the way here, but now she didn't want to be stuck in her baby seat any longer.

A certain Horaki, on the other hand, seemed proud to offer his daughter to society for this, even if naysayers might have chalked up his nonchalance to a great abundance of daughters in his house. And then there were those present like Edmont Vincennes, who didn't really believe in the already unlikely possibility that his daughter of all people would be selected - at the other end of the spectrum was Sebastian Langley, who showed up with his new flame, did not seem too worried about the gruesome fate of his ex-wife, and was obviously grateful to be rid of little Asuka for a few hours without having to pay a babysitter.

("Asuka will be fine. She's a smart girl.")

For some of these children, this was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, after which their lives would continue normally, it was quite possible that many of them were too young to even remember this later, or could hardly distinguish this from a visit to the authorities or a doctor, just another strange incident, where they had been sitting in cars, trains or airplanes with their fathers for a while and then had to wait somewhere, as it sometimes happened in the life world of a prescholer and was accepted without knowing exactly what was going on.

For a few of them, however, their lives were to change forever today, so deeply that any hint of normality that might have existed in their lives before would soon seem like a faded dream, and as innocently and carefree as they were now playing here in the heart of the DARWIN garden of Complex 5, this would be the last time.

Somewhere here in this room they were, perhaps meeting for the first time, long before their cruel destiny would be fulfilled: The children of prophecy. But what exactly did that mean, "The children of prophecy," what did that genitive there truly entail? The children the prophecy was about? The children who belonged to the prophecy, the ones it had possessed, no, had been botched? Or even the children who had come forth from the prophecy and the measures for its fulfillment, at least when one considered the people they would end up becoming?

Every now and then there was an announcement that the next few children should be ready for the "muster" (any other name would have been an obvious euphemism): "Numbers 25 to 30 please, 25 to 30! 25 to 30! 25: Ayanami Rei, 26: Aida Kensuke, 27: Suzuhara Toji, 28: Ikari Shinji, 29: Itoshiki Kirio, 30: Maria Vincennes, please gather at the main entrance!"

Children with numbers - A nightmare that Fuyutsuki could only watch in powerless terror.

This could not possibly be what Yui had meant when she spoke of that bright future of hers!

Which of the many candidates were meant by this block of numbers became apparent when a few of the children interrupted their play to set off.

One freckled boy put down his plastic airplanes, with which he had just simulated a bombing of a building block city contributed by a quiet, relatively dark-skinned girl with a ponytail. In the other corner of the room, a black-haired boy was just about to give his father a hand in entertaining his tiny sister by sticking out his tongue when his father pointed out that it was his turn, and a little further back, a girl with plaited hair rose from her seat, where until now she had been quietly but listlessly leafing through a picture book, watched not by a father or stepmother, but by a woman who was too young to be anything other than her older sister, and near the center of the room one could also see a small, blond girl being led by her father's hand to the main entrance.

And of course there was also this quiet little boy, who flinched slightly when he heard his name and looked up at his father, seeking both help and reassurance; However, the man only gestured for him to get going - For the little girl in red, that was all she needed to set off directly, but the boy hesitated, finding the thought of crossing this noisy, big, strange place alone a little daunting - But all that earned him was a somewhat brusque "Go!" from his father, so that he saw no choice but to run after the inexplicable little girl, without ever getting too close to her or anything else, just looking at her from a distance.

(YEARS LATER

- HE AND SHE MET AGAIN)

But Fuyutsuki and Ikari were not the only ones who kept a keen eye on what was going on in the heart of Complex Five - no process so central to the very reason for the institution's existence could have taken place without the watchful eyes of Director Kuze Tesuo and Miyazawa Haruhi.

The latter was still far from a doctorate at the time, but at that time, after the sudden death of the previous director, she was Kuzes assistant, although it was usually the case that he took care of his own work and she of hers.

"It's hard to believe that the success or failure of humanity depends on one of these kids..." Kuze commented, shaking his head.

"My youngest son is about that age, only slightly younger... when I tell him not to do something, he ignores me at best and grins at me at worst, his favorite words are "No!" and "I don't wanna", and when I tell him not to touch something, he's all the more keen to do it."

Miyazawa giggled a little. "It's still a little while before the angels return, Mr. Director. I do think they should be a little taller by then..."

"That doesn't soothe me one bit." Kuze said. "Everything you can say about toddlers goes double for teenagers." The director of Complex Five sat down.

"Ever since my daughter reached that age, I've had many sleepless nights..."

This had probably mark the point where the number of his gray hairs had begun to incrase in quadratic rather than linear growth, as Miyazawa thought in silence while pulling out another stick of dark chocolate pocky from the pocket of her labcoat and nibbling on it absent-mindedly.

Kuze was beginning to get used to it, however much her carefree crunching might have irritated him.

Only a little later, another fleeting encounter took place, though it, too, would not take on its full meaning until much later, a little later, when the next announcement was already calling for candidates 31 to 35, and the previous load of potential child soldiers had been let out again, including a quiet little boy who drifted to the center of the room without haste or determination, like the larger components of a mueasli that came to the surface through simple physical conditions, because he had no other place in the room where he could really return or strive to.

The corner, where a certain tall man in dark clothes stood, did not seem any more welcoming than anywhere else, and he did not have the feeling that he would get an especially warm reception there - it was a corner like any other.

So he arrived at the center, simply because the paths seemed to lead there, taking only half notice of the fact that this one blue-haired girl, still small in comparison to himself, had followed him, with a ghost of quiet curiosity on her thinly smiling lips. He saw her, but he didn't know what to do with her existence, especially since the impossible truth staring him in the face suddenly held much closer to the surface at the time.

Instead, he just walked forward, because he didn't know what else to do, and somehow felt strange about just standing still while others were walking around.

Not really together, but at the same time, they both finally reached the sandbox in the middle of the room and he looked wordlessly, standing still because the path had come to its end.

He had only a limited understanding of the how and why of any action, beyond the fact that it was just an instruction to follow - there was not much going on in him as he stood there and absorbed the image in front of his little feet, and concerning the girl behind him one could have argued about how far she even had an idea about her own presence.

In one corner of the sandbox sat a little girl in a black dress, with two bead-like hair ornaments holding her beautiful red hair in place.

She knew that the room was there, and all who were in it, she knew that she herself was there, and she included all of this in her choice of her next action, and it was by no means that she didn't care about the rest of the room - which is exactly why she saw the need to seal herself off from it, planting herself firmly in a corner of the diamond-shaped sandbox, and turned her back to the rest of it, with her small body defining an area within which she was busy in the construction of a kind of tower made out of sand, but without much decoration, knocked together only so far that it would be stable, scraping the sand from around it, with only one aim: Higher, higher, ever higher, and it was not allowed to collapse; whereever the stand theatened to escape its allotted bounds her little hands would knock it into place, or pat it down - But she did not seem to derive any joy or pleasure from her activity, was perhaps not capable of it at all due to the circumstances, her facial expression was completely serious, at the very most a little determined, but not much, as if an ordinary heap of sand was not worth it.

The sandbox was large and several children sat together in groups, but only one other girl built alone, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the box, in a sometimes quite extravagant little dress with frills and bows, nothing that one would get anyone over the age of six into without considerable effort, the girl herself was about five, with her first, squeaky red glasses on her nose, and a blue headband in her hair, and smiled quietly to herself, regardless of the fact that she was alone, disregarding everything that was going on around built her own sand construction (it didn't really look like a castle) the way she liked it, without following anyone's suggestions, and found her joy in it alone.

But there was another noteworthy child, also around five, a boy in simple light-colored shorts and an orange t-shirt with some kind of print, though this outfit seemed an unworthy packaging for him.

He looked up at the quiet boy and his blue-haired companion in red, before the two of them had even really stopped, stood up, and through all the activity around the three of them sought the gaze of the two newcomers, as if everything else in the room had suddenly ceased to exist.

The blue-haired girl looked up seemingly distant but not altogether uninterested, even if it wasn't a particularly strong reaction, and the boy - he felt his legs trembling and would probably have retreated if this possibility had occurred to him, but he could not think of any course of action whatsoever .

(And even the silver-haired child had no idea what was to follow, or just who was gathered here for the first time in this room - he recognized the girl immediately for what she was; As for the boy, he only had a distant interest at this time, and the impression that the boy before him seemed somehow sad and lost. )

"Hello." He greeted directly, openly and firmly.

He took a moment to look directly into the girl's equally red eyes, and she just looked back, perhaps exchanging a silent confirmation with him.

"I wanted to ask you if you would like to keep me little company..."

"...us?" the younger boy quietly returned, a hesitant little voice like a breath of wind, from which - erroneously! - could have given the impression that even the most glaring scream that could be produced with it could not be significantly louder than the ticking of a clock, like the erratic flickering of a candle that could be blown out by every breath of air, so, so easily drowned out.

It was the first time in a long time that this voice was used at all.

"Yes. Would you be interested...?"

The forgotten son of GEHIRN's director looked questioningly at the blue-haired homunculus at his side, hesitating to make a decision on her behalf, perhaps hoping to guess what she wanted or thought about all this, but she just looked back in silence.

The combination of the open smile of his counterpart, his direct question, and the general insecurity that followed his mother's disappearance finally made him give in and produce a cautious, minimal nod.

Had the two of them not just crossed over, the silver-haired boy would probably have gone to one of the two girls individually crafting their various sand buildings or invited both of them, and he did not forget so quickly that they had at least entertained his interest, and the end result was that he was interested, that among the pictures taken here to archive and document the run on possible candidates, there was one showing all five of them building a sand castle together, long before they would meet their similar, cruel fates. Tabris could be trusted to do the impossible - he had not shot the picture, but it was Miyazawa who ultimately selected it for the files, even if the fact that she found it so cute was only one of many factors, why this picture of all things was chosen for the report - As it turned out, it showed some of the candidates that had led to the most interesting results.

There they were, one-two-three-four-five, really gathered for the first time, the five pillars of the world, the Five Fingers of God's Hand, the four great basic forces (gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear power) and the dark energy, the five points of a pentagram, the five flavors (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami), the five elements (fire, water, earth, air, and depending on which model you followed, metal, energy/quintessence or emptiness), the five basic ingredients for each color, (black and white, red, green and blue. ) all in one picture: The Goddess, the Warrior, the Chosen One, the Medium and the Fallen Angel, Heaven and Earth, Sun, Moon and Stars.

On this day, many things were threaded that were essential for later developments, and for most of them Miyazawa and Kuze were directly responsible, but there was at least one mystery that made them wonder whether they were the threaders or the threaded ones, and it presented itself to them in a rather obvious way:

"There's not enough shovels, baldy."

"Wh-What?" Kuze drove around until he was convinced that no one but Miyazawa was in his immediate vicinity - the fact that she was trying very hard not giggle was not conducive to maintaining his dignity.

"In the sandbox. There are five of us, but there are only three shovels, baldy."

The guilty party was a little girl - apparently a good deal younger than the rest of those present - in a little red dress, with short, blue hair.

Neither of the two scientists had heard her coming, but while this Kuze instilled a certain instinctive respect, Miyazawa turned to her and crouched down partly to be at eye level with the little one - But that's exactly why it should have been impossible for her to overlook a certain spicy detail - red eyes. Which she saw not for the first time, of course.

But when she noticed it, it certainly didn't seem to put a dimmer on her smile.

"You know, you really shouldn't call other people baldies."

The little girl narrowed her eyes.

"But that's what you call it when someone doesn't have hair on their head, isn't it?"

"Actually, yes, but it's not very nice."

"Why?"

"Because most people don't like to hear it."

"Why?"

"Because most people don't need to be told what they look like."

"Why?

"Because they already know from every time that they look in the mirror."

"Why?"

Miyazawa giggled slightly. "Listen, why don't you look in that wooden box back there? There should still be shovels in there."

Without a word of thanks, the little girl turned around and left.

Miyazawa stood up straight again with a sigh... and as soon as she was sure that the little girl had moved far enough away, she laughed so loudly that she could only hold back with no success.

"Excuse me, Mr. Director..." came out in between. "But that girl is really something..."

She first took a few seconds to calm down.

"Ah, small children always say sometimes the funniest things - I know this already from my brothers and sisters. My mother said that it was always a real sport for her to make a serious face long enough to scold my little brother - after all, she had to teach him to behave himself at some point - and then run into the bathroom as quickly as possible, because she couldn't keep her laugh down anymore..." she told him, casually pulling some dark chocolate pocky stick out of the pocket of her white coat and, to Kuze's further irritation, immediately started munching on it.

Reveling in old memories was the furthest thing from his mind right now.

"This... this child was..."

Miyazawa completed "Schubtschekt 25" with a full mouth, heartily unconcerned, no matter how much the noticeably distressed sounding Kuze had hoped to trigger problem awareness with this topic - but slowly he began to give up.

At least one reassuring fact remained, for a very relativized definition of "reassuring": in a way, Miyazawa was becoming more and more similar to the late director in her manner.

"...Ikari's daughter, isn't she? You can see the family resemblance. Looks just like Mommy."

"Foster daughter." Corrected Kuze. "He claims she's the child of someone he knows, but..."

"...he could not have meant the director, despite her last name, she had no children, unless you count Tabbie-chan. But it's a nice homage. Nice homage. "

"...I have already had everything checked. There are no records whatsoever... Either, Ikari is trying to hide her origins, or-"

"...or she's artificial. It's not exactly hard to overlook. Like I said, you can see the family resemblance."

Miyazawa continued to stuff her mouth without much perturbation, making it appear that, despite her apparent carelessness, that this was by no means synonymous with actual cluelessness.

After swallowing the last bite, she paused to talk.

"If the committee didn't already know more than we did, they would have told us everything they had so that we could investigate the case..."

"Anyway, this is Ikari we're talking about... We'll know more when we get her readings, but-"

"It is unlikely that he told them everything. They will probably want to have these readings sent to them posthaste... But I already suspect that they will probably look very, very familiar to us..."

Kuze replied, "Impossible," after it had become clear to him what his assistant wanted to imply. It was true that the former director, if he remembered correctly, had also suspected something like that, but this seemed much too far-fetched.

"This little girl... ...Even Ikari wouldn't dare..."

Miyazawa glanced over to the man himself as he was standing in another corner of the room, who was in the process of talking to his subordinate - Fuyutsuki - beyond her earshot.

She didn't seem worried on the outside, but that didn't mean anything.

TWO YEARS LATER -

THE SAME ROOM

Although the sandbox had already been replaced by the tree, which was a little smaller shortly after it was installed, most of the toys were still standing where they had been - but anyone who suspected the exuberant background noise of a typical kindergarten was wrong.

The few groups of now correspondingly older children, who were now sitting around some toys, did this in heavily carried grave silence. There were also considerably fewer, only a few here and there, not to be compared with the huge gathering of the first day.

If the first glance aroused suspicion, the second or third were a shock, it didn't take much to realize that there was something fundamentally wrong here - the games happened too quietly, too orderly; Until then, several children were sitting around a table with a board game, and one by one, each of them moved a piece without saying anything.

The next thing that stood out was probably the exterior, because man was a visual creature after all - iyou could have thought at first that it was the lighting, or your own eyes, because it was everywhere, hair, eyes, skin, it was as if a layer of paint had been peeled off everything, like in one of those detergent commercials, hardly any of them really filled out the clothing they were wearing, which were still radiant in bright colors like ordinary children's clothes, and when you looked, you would begin to notice... things.

Individuals who were not sitting on chairs but in wheelchairs, the odd child who was completely alone between boxes and toys, with dark eyes staring into the distance, who seemed to be oblivious to the rest of the world, and the odd sight that finally crossed the line - a chubby boy, leaning against a box on the floor, his hands hanging down unused, his head only half upright, his eyes open, but staring into the room completely unfocused, another boy, small, with a scoop of curly hair, lying on the floor next to a rocking horse as if scattered about, like a doll on a shelf that had simply fallen over, a bald-headed child that had curled up tightly under a table to form a ball, and a girl in a lovely pink dress, for whom a camp had been set up near another group of "playing" children, because she seemed too weak to sit herself.

And in the middle of this bizarre circus, Kuze and Miyazawa, the latter with a thick folder in her arms and a remotely melancholic expression on her face.

"...The first signs of the new era were minimal, but in our desire to make the seeds germinate, we fed them such harsh fertilizer..." she remarked strangely saddened.

Kuze saw the whole thing somewhat differently: "It was ugly, but unavoidable - you can't investigate human AT fields without human AT fields. We were as gentle as possible."

Miyazawa's calmness did not disappear, but the amazement was real: "I always thought that you, as a family man, would have something to criticize about it, Mr. Director."

"A personal question?"

"If you like."

"One is my work and the other is my private life. I prefer not to mix them, that only leads to unnecessary complications. The former director saw it the same way, at least in the beginning... And as for my children, the most important thing is that they are safe and will be safe in the future. They will never know what has been done to keep them safe - getting your hands dirty is the duty of us who have already given away our innocence".

"Innocence?" Miyazawa repeated. "Is there anyone on this planet who has not yet been tainted with guilt? I'm not quite sure if you are excluded from guilt just because it was someone else who decided to stain you with it..."

Again one of those things that one did not expect.

"Not that there is much to stain in this case - sure, we have results to show for it, and some of these subjects will be useful for the project in the future, but they are all quite peripheral - in the end, the only one we could really use was the subject that came from this institution from the beginning: 23, Tabris.

The door with the big 23 on it stood practically directly opposite the two of them.

"I'm the last person to overestimate our work, you know that I'm concerned about security, but even so I have to say that you belittle our results - it's hardly surprising that the subjects didn't return many promising results - After all, we could only use fourth-level candidates, the worse half, the ones whose disappearance would be easier to explained - We needed all the better finds as pilot candidates for Project E - They want to gather all the remaining fourth- and third-level candidates in Neo Tokyo 3 soon, as soon as the construction of the city has progressed sufficiently... Our research here has certainly made great contributions to the handling of the Evangelions - the fruits of our labor can already be seen quite clearly - apparently the first serial tests with our newly assigned Second Child are quite promising. "

"Subject 19, Shikinami Asuka Langley..." Miyazawa had opened a page in her portfolio that showed a small, red-haired girl who looked resolutely into the camera, seemingly refusing to smile - Among them were all sorts of numerical codes and snippets of gene sequences, but also a graphic depicting an approximate circle whose outer line behaved like a kind of wave - The serrations were mostly red and orange, and appeared noticeably symmetrical.

"Poor little girl. Dr. Shikinami's death wasn't that long ago, and we're about to take the rest of her childhood away from her, and she's only five... But what can you do, her values are useful, and we have an EVA with a compatible soul. That makes her a level 2 candidate - we have less of those than we can count on one hand..."

"Having them trained can certainly not be a mistake. Even if she is just a fairly ordinary person, she is of extraordinary intelligence and seems to respond well to the training so far - According to the simulations she won't get over a certain upper limit, but for the production model this is just right - We essentially need nothing but a reliable weapon against her angels".

"But, but, Mr. Director. Never underestimate normal people... This "upper limit" is only a very short distance below the secondary omega border. Never underestimate a person's ability to grow beyond their limits in extreme situations. It's quite possible that with the right motivation and a little sweat, she could be capable-"

"In theory, yes. But it is doubtful that it will even come close to the Omega borders - that was an extreme estimate..."

"Do not underestimate normal people, Mr. Director! Is anything concerning the omega borders of a non-speculative nature?"

"It's true, they interest us because we are theoreticians."

"Not necessarily... It is a very human thing to want to use everything to the full limit, always to see if there is more to it - man is rarely satisfied, and that is why he has not yet come to a standstill..."

"But we are approaching the border, the asymptote."

"Then standstill is inevitable, and it's only a question of whether we want to suffer?"

"The committee certainly sees it that way. It is true that the restlessness you are praising is the result of man's inability to maintain happiness or contentment for long..."

"An interesting paradox, isn't it, Mr. Director?"

"I don't quite understand..."

"Isn't this another example of the very way of thinking that they consider outdated? This is undoubtedly about remedying a deficiency, overcoming a limit with which they are not satisfied. Nothing is too difficult to the engineer! Yes, they like to think that they are prophets, and look down on us, and, the tools, the gears, which they consider so limited, we, the scientists, the engineers, but they too are nothing but engineers! Yes, exactly!"

"Don't you think you're getting a little cocky, Miyazawa? It's an old and sleazy tactic to accuse the other side of doing the same thing, only more miserably - the religious accuse the non-religious of science based on facts and evidence of being just a belief, and the scientists in turn decry religion as a cheap, antiquated attempt to understand the world. Don't sink so low, Miyazawa."

"That was not my intention, Mr. Director. But it is true that at the root of the greatest divisions one often finds the greatest similarities..." she remarked. "...In any case, subject 19, even if it is of no use to us in theory, should far exceed it in its practical use - judging by the current state of affairs, it will take quite a while before it is ready for use, but according to the calculations and simulations, she could have surpassed our First Child in less than two years... And that's one of the things that amazes me... " returning to the subject, she turned the pages of her portfolio a few pages further, until, in addition to unfathomable numbers, she found the picture of a small, pale girl with short blue hair in front of him - Again, there was a small circular graphic, but where the waves recorded on a circular line previously formed regular jagged edges at the entry, which protruded outwards like the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun, they extended here almost equally inside and outside the circle and were more reminiscent of a standing wave - Also, all colors of the rainbow were present here and not just a certain part of the spectrum, but overall the lines never moved too far from the circle line - The wave graphs of the Second Child were sometimes two or three times as far out.

"Candidate 25 was practically commissioned as First Child right after the day of the first screening, it was decided before the screening even began - We already classified her as Level One by definition - As a candidate who was clear that she would be assigned to be a pilot - Only because of this she was created as an artificial construct, like Tabris... Our two Nephelim. "

"...and the angels became involved with the sons of men, and from their union giants emerged... The nephelim, forbidden hybrid creatures, in whose existence the earthly and the divine are mixed together."quoted Kuze. "I would have assumed that this passage of prophecy meant the Evangelions - literally giants."

"Surely, but not them alone - perhaps it is not clear at first sight in which respect the two are supposed to be giants, but the scrolls speak in many places of the two Nephelim children - the two keys to the fate of this world, and not least the left and the right hand of the chosen, if the scriptures are to be believed...

But the similarity between the profiles of our two level-one candidates is evident in the distribution and composition of several values, but not really in their intensity - admittedly, there are some additional... peculiarities with Tabris, but for the fact that she was created specifically for this task, both the simulations and the current results are quite... average."

"She is the result of trying to create something that would be compatible at all. And we were successful in this - even though it took seven months, she is now producing usable values.

"Our limitations, then?" Miyazawa asked, more as part of her own considerations than really expecting an answer. "...it's a possibility, especially since Ikari first synchronized her with that crappy prototype for testing purposes. This was the first Evangelion, after a long series of failures - the core unit is poorly constructed, and there is no compatible soul, never has been, unless, contrary to our assumptions, she was born the old-fashioned way."

"Does it offend you that something we humans created directly for this purpose would be outdone by the performance of natural life forms?"

"What she "trumps" is still a human being herself, Mr. Director. Miss Shikinami's results are still the product of a human being's work - that is, if this is really the intended purpose for Ikari's girl, and not just a secondary goal or a pretext to justify her existence...".

"Do you have a theory?"

Miyazawa shook her head. "No, just a hunch. It could never be more than a hunch - If Ikari still has his head on his shoulders despite all his audacity, it's because he never let anybody have any tangible evidence, even those he works with directly. And as the dear director used to say, he is cunning, and cover-ups are his specialty. Cover-up is practically his middle name. Gendo Cover-up Ikari...

But even so, those two girls are not our only weapons..." She flipped through her folder again. "...In case of emergency, there are still all the third level candidates and the rest of the fourth level candidates. We have reserves."

The page that Miyazawa had opened was not dedicated to an individual subject, but presented a selection priority list, name, number, a picture on the right, one of these wave circle graphs on the left. The curve amplitudes of these entries were relatively limited, but they were always quite symmetrical - the further down the list went, the weaker and more irregular the graphs became, until some of them did not even form a complete circle anymore, but had gaps.

And the page showed familiar faces - At number one on the priority list, subject number 27: Suzuhara Toji. Second place: number 22: Horaki Hikari, third place, 26, Aida Kensuke - and so on, and so on. Mitsurugi Nagato(52), Mayumi Yamagishi(114), and other perhaps relevant names were relatively far down the list, relatively low-ranking fourth-level candidates, who were known about and therefore placed in this class when they moved to Tokyo-3, because more reserves could never hurt, but whose possible usability was not worth gathering them with the others in Tokyo-3 before they found themselves there for other reasons. Informed parties might have speculated that this number's suitability as host to the angel, or at least the fact that she survived the whole thing, might have been related to the peculiarities that had also put her on this list, but essentially these candidates further down on the list were of rather little consequence.

"...and these are not even our own weapons, even if this is rather the result of an... embarrassing matter..."

"You mean the girl the Americans are about to start training?"

"Number 30, Maria Vincennes. Either they were searching on their own, or her father suspected something and leaked it, but nothing can be done. You know the Americans, no country throws out more money for the military, and that in our times, where the old-fashioned wars with tanks and bombs are long gone - to fight the terrorists, non-static organizations and Geurillia fighters of today, is rough at best - at worst they will smash a lot of porcelain, the era of the simple 'go and kill the enemy' tactics is over... But these machos in power there are all still living in the 18th century anyway. The thought that we have something like the Evangelions here makes these old machos very nervous, they all feel a little bit kicked in the tail..." Miyazawa lamented, unwilling to mince words. "Oh, politics! They think that this Vatican treaty is not truly a big disturbance and not worth an obviously visible intervention, maybe this is even a part of the plan that we don't know yet, but really! Such a great work, which is meant to secure all our futures, yes, maybe the only goal of 250000 years of Homo Sapiens, and they see it only as a glorified convertible to inflate their egos...".

"You must admit, Miyazawa, four Evangelions would be more than enough to reduce the whole world to rubble."

"To even think that we could turn such power in factions against each other..."

"Our ancestors did about the same thing when they gained the power to make atomic nuclei their playthings - and it went wrong several times..." Kuze admonished.

"As if that had stopped the Americans at that time - first they insist on the right to build units three and four, no, without a pilot they could not make any ostentatious threats, an evangelion without a will to move it is not so much to fear..."

"Isn't there the danger that they stick their noses where they shouldn't?"

"Don't worry, Mr. Director... One of the main driving forces behind this is the committee itself, the American representative is nevertheless somewhat patriotic, decentralized organization structure or not. He himself has big plans for Unit 04...the girl was just a casual thought, she's only a Level Three candidate, and she's not considered to be very important in the scrolls, so she hasn't even been assigned a Marduk designation as of yet, but they'll be whining about it soon enough.

She represents another foot soldier for us, and we can always use her...".

"By the way, don't you want to commission such a designation for subject 23?"

"Not until the gentlemen of the committee deem it necessary to disclose his existence. So as early as necessary, as late as possible... This whole thing is just a farce anyway..."

"Either way, the program has undoubtedly delivered its results. Not as much as it might have delivered, but enough to continue our projects, and with the best possible... material. "

"That is, 'as best as possible under the circumstances..." Miyazawa commented, turning the pages of her portfolio. "Unfortunately, the test subjects with the most promising test results wound up beyond the reach of the project..."

"You mean those two..."

"Who else could I mean? The scoring function for the quality of the candidates which I had compiled from the work left behind by the esteemed madam director and the data from the three previous activation experiments included five levels, not including level six for completely unpromising test subjects. But although it seemed to provide a reliable classification at first, we were forced to revise it on the very first day of the screening, for exactly two reasons: Number 41, Makinami Mari Illustrious, and number 28, Ikari Shinji. These two absolutely cracked the scale."

And indeed, the graphs in Miyazawa's folder next to the pictures of the two children looked as if they had been zoomed out a little further than the others - yet there were still isolated peaks in Little Mari's graphs that were "chopped off" from the edges of the picture, In terms of color, the whole thing presented itself in a gradient between dark green, turquoise and a hint of blue, but in the "knots" close to the circle line, which seemed smaller here compared to the rest of the image, there were spots of bright pink.

The file next to it stood out not only because of the similarly zoomed out graph, but also because of the picture - It showed a rather ordinary four-year-old boy, but the child watching it should be around six by now - The picture was different from the others in that it had not been updated. But this was not to say that the graph was uninteresting - In the case of the girl from the left side, there were only a few spikes that protruded beyond the edge, and they looked as if their end could be extrapolated from the course of the spikes, but in the case of this boy, every single deflection of the line led out of the "frame" of the picture, in a completely straight line - The structure was more similar to the spokes of a wheel or the rays of the sun than to wavy lines - It was also hard to imagine how far these "peaks" would go - But the inward components of the "waves" all met in the center of the circle - The colors could have been compared to a shiny water surface, a young giant star or the palette of the sky, not at all obtrusive or striking blue and white; A gradient of different shades of blue. But even if the shape was extremely symmetrical, the color was curiously not - On this blue and white ground, apparently without a discernible pattern, black areas were scattered, looking somewhat like sunspots or ulcers, proliferating darkness in the midst of the light.

"Officially, the two are also designated as Level Two, as highly compatible candidates for whom suitable souls have been "salvaged", but if these are the readings of a Level Two, then the Pope is Protestant" commented Miyazawa.

"...The two should have no problem manipulating an Evangelion to a useful degree at the very first attempt... "

(And she was to be right - number 28, later re-classified as "Third Child", was to successfully activate Evangelion unit 01 without any preparation, and had outperformed the First Child in terms of synchronization value in less than a month, and number 41, who was a little more prepared, reached a high enough value during her very first combat mission for her to suffer physical burns from the whole affair, severe enough that she was still wearing an albeit inconspicuous bandage at the time she snuck into Japan. Not to mention that she triggered a semi-beserk state in EVA 01, a phenomenon that could only be studied further in a very exceptional situation through the combined efforts of the Third and Second Children in the fight against the Seventh Angel and the data obtained in the process - data from which some quite interesting conclusions were drawn, not the least of which was the "inspiration" for the creation of the so-called double entry system... but that's a story for another time...)

"Nevertheless, this is nothing particularly wild compared to what subject 23 could be capable of according to the simulations..."

"I know." Admitted Miyazawa. "But that is because Tabris possesses Adam's soul - so manipulating Evangelions created from Adam should be little different for him than moving his own fingers, if not easier - It is a different phenomenon, and a much easier predict or explain.

The girl is an anomaly that makes the impossible probable and throws our simulations into wild chaos, but in the end she has limitations - I don't think we have halfway scientific sounding words for what this boy actually is. The lines of causality seem to bend in his presence... Some of these values could hardly be better without him being absorbed directly - And even so, all the Omega borders are all but blown away in some of the simulations...".

"Oh, there are words for this, Miyazawa, and I bitterly fear what it could mean to leave such a power in the hands of this little child - If we put this boy into an Evangelion, anything could happen... Such power cannot possibly exist without a hefty price, it would be foolish to touch it, there is no reason to wake sleeping giants... It is for the best that number 28 has nothing more to do with the project, and hopefully we shall never hear of him again...

The father of 41 wanted nothing more to do with the project after Dr. Makinami's death, and pulled some strings to have his daughter pulled out of the selection, but they only let him do it so as not to risk unnecessary trouble, because the girl will have limited use for training anyway - we know where she is, we keep ourselves informed about her and can have her recruited at any time. It's different with number 28, Ikari sits a bit higher in the hierarchy and has personally taken the boy out of circulation, even wiped him off the map - He must have placed the child with someone who knows at least a little bit about what's going on and remains staunchly on his side...".

"I guess even someone like Ikari can't easily get used to the idea of using his own child as a test object..."

Kuze shook his head.

"Naive, Miyazawa. Pure naivety. He's probably more concerned with having an ace up his sleeve and making sure the gentlemen from the committee don't get their hands on it. Probably also some form of millieu control."

"Brainwashing? ...how cruel that would be..." me Miyazawa, showing a certain urgent dissatisfaction. "How cruel it all is."

Suddenly, she became unusually aware of the environment in which she found herself.

"Don't get me wrong, Mr. Director, I certainly don't want to die, and when I go home in a few hours, there are many things that await me that I rejoice in, and I would never want anything to happen to the people I care about, but sometimes I can't help but think that we all deserve destruction."

"Naive, Miyazawa, pure naivete."

"It is said that the Mighty One, the third among the elect, the Son of Man, will be sent to this world according to the plan of the Creators, to judge whether it is worthy to continue to exist, either to open Pandora's Box one last time and let the remaining demons burst upon us, or to lead us into a new age, on the way to resurrection from the ashes, to a new Genesis...".

She had the photographed portrait of the old parchment in front of her on the kitchen counter, next to the sterilization machine, from which she was currently removing a clean baby bottle with practiced movements, but she did not really look down to read it, only squinted once or twice - that was all she needed, after all she had grown up with these words, as little as Fuyutsuki wanted to believe it, had always belonged to this crazy world full of prophecies, angels and demons, which Fuyutsuki's mind, which had already become rigid from time alone, still hadn't quite digested - No, that didn't quite hit the mark, it might have been more accurate to say that his brain had gotten a bad case of mental indigestion from it.

She had said that she did not want to keep any more secrets from him, and intended to let him in on everything, and he could not say that she had not said that - it was his own unwillingness to give up certain principles and precepts that held him down.

In a way, he felt like Einstein - Not in a form of arrogance that made him overestimate his own significance, but in a sobering way - Fuyutsuki felt like Einstein in his old age, when he drew conclusions from the conclusions others had drawn from his very own achievements, and refused to believe them, longing to hold on to the notion that god does not play dice - But he does throw the dice, as Hawking would answer years later, and sometimes he even throws the dice where you cannot see them - And suddenly you are standing in a completely changed universe, whose gates you yourself had pushed open.

Fuyutsuki did not claim to have Einstein's brilliance, but one could rightly say that he was just as stupid – but his problem was different.

During the last three days, his former student had taken all the time she could get to induct him into all the secrets buried under the former ruins of Hakone – On the first day, when she offered to let him stay in the many rooms of her richly furnished villa instead of driving home in the fog, he declined, feeling that he would much rather avoid witnessing more of her "happy family life" than absolutely necessary - But by the second day at the latest, he had urgently needed this readily available bed.

Once, so long ago that he didn't even know where, somewhere, he read that you weren't truly old until you were no longer able to accept the changes in your world - And as much as Fuyutsuki would have liked to follow this wise advice, he knew he knew that he truly was old by now.

Certainly too old to let his eyes wander to where they would have wandered if he had let them; It was hot, hotter than he could really stand, and she was lightly dressed, and plainly, as one would expect in her own home. When she raised her arms as she did now, her lime green top revealed something of the flesh of her breasts, which were now solely the private treasure of another.

She seemed completely undisturbed, as if unobserved, simply performing one action after another without doing anything else but what she was doing (Fuyutsuki tried to overlook what kind of activity it was exactly: She was filling freshly boiled but (in her opinion) sufficiently cooled tea into a plastic baby bottle - Oh, how gloriously the liquid ran over her skin and the veins that gleamed slightly underneath when she tested the temperature of the drink on her wrists. ) and, by the way, continued to speak to him alone, with a phenomenal a smile on her seductively plump, youthful lips, while she spoke with a moving yet knowing tone that made it clear she had to know far more than she was telling, a detail that made her reproduce the wording of the old texts with a personal warmth, while handing the bottle of tea to her son, who grasped it gratefully in his small hands, sitting in a nearby high chair.

"...It is said that the Chosen One shall come into this world as one of the least among us, and shall know all the weakness and fragility that is inherent in this world... that he shall walk through its darkest chasms, and bear the weight of all its ugliness on his shoulders... many trials await him, and many lessons, and he shall have all that this world has to offer, all the suffering, and all the love, all its curses, and all its gifts and glories... And when the promised day comes, he shall make his choice..." she said as she was about to wash out the teapot.

The water ran glistening over her fingers.

"It will be a test for him, but it is also a test for us, for this world, and we who have preparations to make... The way things are going now they are not following the right path..."

"That much is obvious." Fuyutsuki retorted, more acerbic than he had intended.

But she only kept smiling.

"We have all heard many such stories - It is the role of the younger generation, who will once inherit this world, to make the decisions and fight the battles - The role of us older ones should be solely to guide and support those who come after us on their path so that they can reach and get what they strive for. It is so easy to misunderstand, precisely because it is so obvious, almost too simple to be the complete truth, the forest for the trees, written over every corner and every crevice of creation... Because life is something that is always in flux, like the information - The spark of life is always passed on, from father, to mother, to child and from there to the children's children... Like a tree whose branches are always moving.

It is in the nature of parents to sacrifice themselves for their offspring - In its most original form, a cell has to split fully into two when it divides, which means that it lives on in each of them...We cannot hold out our hand forever and profit from the novelty of life, we cannot remain children forever, marry our own parents, and, like Saturn once did, eat our children so that they will not surpass us. We have been given life, so we have to pass it on instead of keeping it only for ourselves... Life is a river, and stagnation is death, or difficult to distinguish from it...

But just look what we have come to, Fuyutsuki-sensei!

We have already made the decisions that our children should be entitled to, and we have mapped out their paths to fulfill our own wishes, so that they are nothing more than our chess pieces that we put on a predetermined path...

We are in the process of stealing their very own existence and their function in history completely for ourselves, for the realization of our own wishes...

Is that right?"

Fuyutsuki didn't know what to say.

"This... this is not a story we're talking about here, but the real world. Not everything works like a fairy tale, there's so much more to consider, so much at stake..." He tried, not quite believing that he himself was trying to extract material for a serious conversation from these madcap facts.

"You are a scientist, aren't you, Yui-kun? Anyway, you studied with me, and I am a scientist, not a sorcerer. What's all this about prophecies, rituals, and creators... you don't expect to join a group that caused a tragedy on the scale of the Second Impact because of some prehistoric esoteric writings!"

"If that would give you peace of mind, you can just think of the "creators" as aliens, and refer to them as the First Ancestral Race... The only evidence we have of their existence are the scrolls, and ourselves - who knows what they were like. They created us in their image, but the same could be said about the angels... You could also see the scrolls as an "instruction manual", if that is more comfortable for you... Many of our own words and concepts are shaped by our own perception and nature, so for example a word like "resonance" contains references to our sense of hearing, for us sounds are what other senses would call vibrations, and there is also our association with "up" as good and "down" as bad...".

"Then you mean to tell me that all this mystical mumbo-jumbo are the scientific terminology of those… those creators? Are you serious, Yui-kun?"

"If that's how you wish to see it, Fuyutsuki-sensei..."

"All I want to know is what's going on!" the old professor returned, not without frustration. "This story about these... creators is one thing, after all I've heard the panspermic hypothesis discussed before, but prophecies?"

"Sure. Nobody can tell you what you will have for breakfast tomorrow, but on large scales such as the prosperity or decay of an entire civilization, it is possible to estimate distributions and tendencies even in random processes, are more probable under certain conditions especially if the events are correlated - enough of such conditions come together, no, if they are brought together, some events can become almost certain... And if the great flow of things can be calculated, it also becomes possible to predict the paths of those who will play a decisive role in bringing about these great events...

People act according to ancient instinctive drives, learned behaviors and survival strategies which are not always rational, all of which are well researched as such, and the more you know about a particular person, the easier it is to predict his or her actions... on the other hand, even when you are shown the possible paths by society and genetics, which one you choose is always up to you. You are alone in making this choice... but that means that we humans, predictable as we all may be, always have something fundamentally unpredictable inside us.

What the scrolls show us are not rigid predictions, but possibilities, paths, of which SEELE has chosen a certain one in order to make it a reality... But one could also choose another one. Some of the most important pieces in this scenario are human beings. Our chosen ones will be such human beings... Perhaps they too will prove to be unpredictable..."

Fuyutsuki had little doubt about this.

After all, Yui had been one of the... most unpredictable people he had ever met.

"Every day the same weather... That autumn has disappeared from these lands is more painful than words can describe...

If SEELE's scrolls are indeed correct, Third Impact will inevitably take place in a little less than ten years..."

"SEELE... GEHIRN... The purpose of these organizations should be to prevent the last tragedy..."

"That's how you see it, and that's how I see it, but I don't think that SEELE shares your view there..."

"Fuyutsuki-sensei, it could be very, very dangerous to break this seal over this world..."

"I have sent Ikari all the material I have... This is not something a man can do alone.

There will be no repeat of the stunt I pulled last time.

And I got something like a warning - apparently it wouldn't be much of a problem for them to make me disappear."

"That goes for all of us who survived. It's really very, very easy to destroy people..."

"But that's still no reason for you to volunteer to be a guinea pig!"

"Everything will happen as it must... That's why I work for SEELE. For Shinji's sake..."

"...Then your true goal is to imitate the gods and continue their work with the creation of the EVAs?

"We humans can only exist here on this planet... but EVA will be able to survive for all eternity, together with the souls of the people who live with it, even after five billion years, when the moon, the earth and even the sun have passed... She will be alone, but at least she will be able to go on living..."

"As eternal proof that mankind has existed?"

"This, and as an ark to carry the torch of life to the next world... We have been given life, so it is only right that we pass it on... Sure, the one who will take this journey will have to make a great sacrifice and part with those who are important to her and to whom she is important, but in return she will be able to carry the memories of them with her for all eternity... so that they will never be forgotten, they, and everything else in this world, all because she - because I loved them.

(1) Vague Akira allusions wholly intentional

(2) Some commentary did indeed title the moment where EVA 05 opens its mouth as "Semi-Berserk State"; I think it's natural enough to conclude that the synch spike in ep 8 was a similar event. Some unused CR materials indeed place Mari's typical synch rate somewhere between Asuka's and Shinji's, but you can sort of assume this from the degree of physical injuries she sustains, there's still some bandages among her discarded clothes when she gears up for the big confrontation with Zeruel. Still, as Miyazawa says, ordinary humans should not be underestimated, especially if their name is Asuka *cough * EoE *cough *

(3) Here you also see how you correctly react to a sassy child, Naoko

(4) The only way I could reconcile Yui's stated benevolent intentions with her actions is to consider that while she's very much rebelling against them, she was still raised within SEELE's "belief system" & still partially sees the world in those terms. Maybe she thinks being the chosen one is a honor; At least, she seems convinced that TI cannot be prevented, just mitigated, redirected or undone; She might not even be strictly wrong, but as a parent and a wife she is at the very least somewhat flawed; the difference between her and Gendo might just be confidence and social skills; Shinji didn't really get to react to her actions since he only finds out when everything's already gone to hell – he gets one line questioning her in ep 25 (though it seems that they part on sem good terms like in EoE, the "goodbye" line is the same at least) and another in Q (just naming her in a list of parental figures he can no longer trust), but that's all. Though it's very much like Shinji to not want to accept that the one parent he could imagine as having been "nice" cause she wasn't around to prove him wrong is also flawed, also he's probably not going to start shit when she's leaving the planet for all eternity ; It might be interesting to make them have a confrontation or a temporary falling out of sorts; For further drama, it would probably tank their synch rate at an inopportune moment if they argued...

(5) Tbc in 3.33: [Heir to White Moon III: The Rooster's Feather] – aka. the quill slash hat decoration of Mephistopheles.