I suppose I was used to sunlight by now.
Luckily, the press conference was held indoors.
Carson was ready to "present my lovely presence to the world". He still insisted on calling me Precious.
The conference had been in planning for weeks. He had fussed over every tiny detail. He had the conference room scrubbed three times, floor to ceiling, until he was satisfied that it was clean. "No sense in letting the public eye know how bad a state NERV was in," he reasoned, almost cheerfully. Even so, I never saw the first cleaners of the room again.
On the day of the conference, Carson had kept me out of sight from everyone even remotely associated with the press. It went on all day.
I could watch it on a screen out of camera lines until the inevitable question came up: How does the Evangelion operate? Carson smiled charmingly and said, "I'd much rather let my associate handle that question. Mei?" At that point, I walked out into camera sight and up to the table on a raised platform, trying to get used to the millions of light flashes that went off and continued to go off.
The questions poured in as I sat down. The first one clear to me was, "Mei, what is your job here at the rediscovered NERV?" A tall blonde woman of middle years -- who looked incredibly old to me -- was asking the question.
Carson turned to me, smiling encouragingly and put his hand on my back, pushing me forward towards the little black thing on the table in front of me. "You speak into it," he whispered in my ear.
I leaned forward, clearing my throat and hearing it echo over the whole room. Startled, I leaned back, only to be pushed forward again. The gathered crowd was growing impatient.
"I um...I am the pilot of Eva," I said, surprised to hear my voice thrown back at me.
The crowd buzzed excitedly.
"What do you mean, 'pilot'?" the same reporter demanded over the noise.
I hadn't had a chance to see Tashi, ask him what I should say or couldn't say. Carson tried to keep us seperated as much as possible, though he was trying to hide it. He didn't do a very good job.
"Um, well, I'm the pilot," I said, a little confused. "I sit in the entry plug and Eva responds..."
"Entry plug?"
"It's a long tube...the pilot sits in it and controls the movements of Eva..." The flashes going off were beginning to hurt my eyes.
Carson took the microphone. "Ladies and gentlemen," he said charmingly, "I think this would be much better explained if we were to see the Evangelion."
I was really uneasy about letting so many people near Eva, but I didn't have much of a choice. The look on Carson's face as I turned to protest wasn't exactly what I would call sane, and I wasn't about to risk angering him. Maybe some other time, but not now. So I shut up and led the way to Eva.
They all watched in rapt fascination as I climbed into the plug, shut the door and activated it. It slid in as smoothly as ever, filled with LCL and showed the perfect view of the outside world.
Why are THEY here? Shinji demanded coldly. I hadn't moved; the reporters standing all around me were still intent, though getting impatient.
"Shouldn't they be?" I asked, confused.
Eva was a top secret project, he informed me.
"I'm sorry," I said, feeling like I had somehow betrayed him.
I'm not mad at you, Mei; I know you didn't know. I'm mad at HIM for exposing the world's deadliest weapon to the entire population of Earth!
"It's not moving," I heard one reporter say on the externals. He sounded annoyed. "Are you sure it's piloted by that girl?"
"Mei, why don't you show these nice people that the Evangelion is a machine?" Carson asked persuasively.
I turned on my speakers. "Why don't you get the catwalk out of the way so I can move?" I replied sweetly before shutting them off. I watched as Carson herded the reporters away, into the glass-walled room above, while the technicians cleared the cage and moved the catwalk away from my neck. I paused, making sure that everyone was watching very, very closely. They were.
I walked out of the cage, loving the feel of the huge Eva responding to my commands, even the subconcious ones. I paticularily enjoyed the look of shock on their faces. I walked out into the bay and did a little dance, which probably looked pretty stupid since I didn't have the first clue about dancing.
"I present to you once more, Evangelion," Carson said.
I bowed. This was my show, not his, whether he knew it or not.
I despised him now.
Carson had somehow translated Tashi to be a threat to me and kept us apart at all times. He had security people around at all times, ready to keep us seperated. I started to hate everything. I hated my doctor, my dietician, the technicians who worked on the red Eva, Carson, even Risa. She was progressing so far in her studies. I barely saw her anymore, except during sync tests, and even those were becoming few and far between. I was even starting to hate myself, because I was becoming Carson's puppet, and I didn't know how to stop. I didn't know how to stop him from controlling me.
The only things I didn't hate were Shinji and Tashi.
I snapped at Shinji during a sync test one day, and instantly regretted it. He withdrew, and wouldn't speak to me. I felt so bad that my ratio dropped to below what Tashi had determined to be the standard starting ratio, and the test was lost. Carson was mad at me for the sudden drop and had a several loud words with me right afterwards, when I still dripping with LCL, shivering from an internal cold that I could never warm on my own, and feeling worse than I ever had in my whole life.
I drove him away, was all I could think, watching blankly as he stormed towards me, looking like the storm that had covered Tokyo-3 for so long. How could I have done that? He left...
"WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING?!" he screamed as soon as he was close enough for me to wince from the volume. I didn't wince though my ears did hurt from it. I just stared at him, my arms wrapped around my chest.
He came close to me, grabbed me by the upper arms and shook me. "We can't have dropping sync ratios like this, Precious," he hissed, lifting me off the catwalk and holding me in front of his face. "It'll destroy us if the public finds out about this!"
I just stared at him, knowing there was this blank look on my face. He only grew angrier and shook me some more. I felt like my head was about to fall off of my shoulders. I caught a brief glimpse of Tashi coming up the catwalk behind Carson. I remembered the look on his face...
"Leave her alone," Tashi said from behind him, quietly. It was the same quiet he had used on Kyle. I felt my insides stop. For a moment, I could see Kyle; it was him holding me and not Carson. I felt something inside snap.
I screamed and struggled to free myself, trying as hard as I could to get out of his grasp. I shrieked at him to let me go, tossing my head violently from side to side and kicking my legs as hard as I could. He was so startled that he did let me go. I hit the catwalk and almost fell off, but managed to gain enough wit in the short time it took for me to hit the grated catwalk to save myself. I backed away from him by crawling. I couldn't stand up. My ankle hurt abominally.
A ripping sound -- the horrible sound of metal tearing metal -- ensued then. Before anyone could move or even blink, and huge purple hand slammed down on the catwalk between me and Carson, bending the catwalk dangerously.
I couldn't remember a time when I had seen Eva's hand up close, although there probably was a time when I stood on it for some reason or another. Now, I stared at it in shock, noticing, perhaps for the first time, that it was battered, dented, chipped. For some reason, I thought of Risa's hands.
I looked up at Eva. It looked exactly the same as it did when in the cage. The teeth gleamed ever-so-slightly in the lighting. The yellow eyes glowed dimly in their dark sockets. Otherwise nothing had changed. I couldn't tell if anything even remotely alive stirred within that huge head. "Shinji..." I whispered. Then I glanced to the top of the hand. No one could get over that hand. They had to come in from the other side of the cage.
Tashi was the first one around to my side of the hand. He was breathing hard, like he had been running. He probably had been, I thought later. At that moment, I was just too shocked, too surprised, to think much of anything.
He dropped to his knees and slid on the grating a little bit as he fell beside me, catching me in his arms. "Are you alright?" he gasped, holding me tightly.
I was staring up at Eva again, the way he was holding me. "I'm fine...." I started, but then I felt the tears come. "Oh, it's just awful!" I cried. "I hate Carson! I hate everything about him, everything he makes me do!! I drove Shinji away, I told him to leave me alone and he left -- "
"He didn't leave you," Tashi assured me, even though I knew that he didn't like me talking about Shinji. He said that he didn't believe in spirits, and I wasn't going to try and force my own beliefs on him, especially since Shinji didn't like him. "See? He protected you. No one was inside Eva, no one else has been accepted inside Eva except you. He wouldn't leave you, I know he wouldn't." His words weren't very big, but they were comforting nonetheless. I didn't know he was wondering how Eva had activated itself and moved it's hand after it had been placed in the restraints. The thought didn't even occur to me until my mind had had a chance to calm down.
Carson had strolled the way around the cage and was now approaching us. He was absolutely livid. He stopped a fair bit away from us, but close enough for us to hear him as he talked.
"Let her go," he demanded, calmly.
"No," Tashi answered, just as calmly.
"Don't let him near me," I whispered. I remembered that tone of voice. I remembered what he had done to Kyle...
"If you don't let her go," Carson started, his voice threatening, "I will have you thrown out of NERV -- "
"And if you don't shut up, I'll break your neck," Tashi interrupted. I tried not to think about what it would be like to witness that. "Don't think I can't do it, or that I won't. I don't care what happens to me, but leave Mei alone. I won't take it if you turn her into something she doesn't want to be. Are we clear on that?"
I was actually shaking. This was so much worse than with Kyle...Had I ever thought that I would never survive a worse experience? Everything was so wrong now....so upside down. I wanted to cry.
Carson fumed silently for a moment before he spun on heel and stalked away.
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Characters & concept: © 1997-2002 Katsura /\ Evangelion © Gainax