Work of fanfiction, folks! Just like 99.9% of this site's content!
NERV: ADA
"Hey, Selais?" asked Shinji as the two teens walked towards the NERV hospital, "Is Ayanami your girlfriend?"
The other boy laughed. "Now why would you think that? And call me Ker."
"It seemed like you were pretty concerned for her."
"Yeah. But she's a fellow pilot, ne? A comrade. No way in hell could she be my girlfriend."
"Why? If you don't mind, that is."
"I don't know. I'm just not attracted to her. I know she's pretty, no doubt about that, but nothing calls to me. Besides, she'd definitely turn me down." The last sentence was definitely in a more humorous tone than the rest of the answer.
The boys got into an elevator. "Sel…Ker, how did Ayanami get injured?"
The other boy closed his eyes and contemplated a memory stored in his mind. "An activation test went bad, and she was ejected, inside. It wasn't pretty."
Shinji started to second-guess his choice to stay. The rest of the elevator ride passed in silence.
"I'm going to stay out here," said Ker. "Remember what the doctor said."
Shinji nodded. "I won't stay long." He stepped into the room and walked over to the bed in which the girl lay. Her eyes were closed and her breathing was even and regular. Shinji couldn't think of any other explanation: she was asleep. "Oh." He turned around to walk out the door.
"Why are you here?" asked a quiet voice.
Shinji nearly jumped through the ceiling. "Ayanami?"
"Why are you here?" repeated the albino.
"I don't know."
This confused the girl slightly. She remained silent, waiting to see if the boy would elaborate.
He did. "I mean…I guess I felt like I should check on you. See if you were…alright," he uneasily clarified, "I mean, well, I only got into that thing so you didn't have to." Though he was addressing the ruby-eye girl in his mode of speech, it almost seemed as if he was talking to himself. "I didn't want you to die."
"Why? You do not know me." She sat up.
"It wouldn't be right. I couldn't let that happen."
"Your words are confusing."
"I'm sorry. I'll leave."
"Yes, the doctors do not like me to be sitting up," she lay back down, "but I think I would like to continue this conversation in the future."
"Oh…okay." Shinji walked out of the room feeling confused, just like the blue-haired girl.
"He's living alone?"
Ritsuko looked over at her old college friend. "He didn't seem to want to live with his father. I guess being apart is natural to them."
"He shouldn't have to live on his own though!"
"Why not? Both Ker and Rei do."
"Rei didn't have a choice, and Ker asked to."
"Shinji doesn't have a choice either. Besides, they seem fine with it."
"Maybe. But I don't think Shinji should live alone."
"We could have him move in with Ker," she motioned to a video monitor, "They seem to be getting along nicely."
"Ker likes living alone. But maybe…I've got to go Rits!" yelled the purple-haired woman as she jumped up and dashed out the door.
"What are you doing!?" shouted the short-haired woman after her friend's retreating back.
"Hey, Shinji."
"What?"
"Sorry, man but I have to go."
"What for?"
"Combat practice. I have it three days a week, for three hours, intensive simming. Monday, Wednesday, Friday."
"When do I have to do that?"
"Don't know. You're schedule will probably get worked out in a few weeks." Ker's cell phone rang. "Yeah?…Yes, he's right with me…Junction 34…Right." He ended the call. "That's suspiciously good timing."
"What is?"
"Captain Katsuragi wants to see you. I don't know why. She'll be here in a minute or two. I've really got to be going."
"Okay. Goodbye, Ker-k…san."
"-kun works just fine, Shinji. See ya." As Ker walked towards the locker rooms, one thought flashed through his divided mind: Shinji, you'll go far or fall early. Let's make it the first, my friend.
As Ker walked into the locker room, he shucked his upper body clothes, leaving his torso bare. A few scars marred his skin. He removed the last of his clothes and put on the skinsuit that was the first layer of his piloting garb. The leg armor went on over that, snapping onto the matte-black bodysuit. He stepped into the boots, then started to work on the waist and stomach plates, a time-consuming task.
"Need help?"
"Raziel! How many times are you going to do that?"
"Complaining?"
"I could've been naked," replied Ker, to the 18-year old who looked as if she should be Ms. Middle East.
"Come on, how long have we known each other?" asked the Israeli girl in a teasing tone.
"Since you came on the project. Four years."
"And I've seen you naked how many times?"
"Zero."
"Right. And I'm feeling cheated," she finished with a smirk on her picture perfect face.
Ker laughed and put on the rest of the body armor and slid on the armor sleeves. He absent-mindedly looked at the open palms of the gauntlets. "Too bad." He sighed. "God, I'll be glad when I get the new flight suit."
"You won't look like a knight in shining armor."
"I don't now," laughed Ker, "No, I'll look like some black-ops agent." He walked past her to the door to the simulators.
"Ker."
He turned around. "Ehh?"
She smiled, holding his helmet. "You forgot this." She put it on his head and raised the visor.
He smiled. "Thanks. We'd better get to our respective posts."
She nodded and he walked out of the room. She, however, stayed. Damn. She shambled over to the bench and sat down. Why, why, why? Why didn't I?
You know. You're a coward. You don't have the guts, little girl.
Shut up! Besides, why him? He's not that great! He isn't even really good-looking!
But he's smart, funny, and he's a pilot. You want him. And there's nothing you can do about that fact.
Shut up.
No. Just try to get him. I guarantee you'll get him. And you'll be happy.
FINE!
"Where the hell is Raziel?" asked Rob, "She knows that today is her day for ranged weapons data. Fuck. Call the NERV tech, what's her name? Ibuki."
A man with long azure hair put his hand on the scientist's shoulder. "Don't. We don't need the data. You know the simulator data for ranged weapons is shit."
"Dammit, Kit…"
"You know I'm right."
"Yeah."
"You also know there's really no point for us to even be doing this."
"We need to build up a combat profile on him."
The ex-marine scoffed. "Combat profile? I can tell you it right now. High-speed combat, aerial combat, orbital combat. In every one of those situations, he will destroy whatever his target is."
"Confident in him, aren't you?" asked the less deadly man, looking over at his friend annoyedly.
"But of course," he said, smiling. His expression shifted however, to a much more serious look. "Look, you know how I can fight. Perfect soldier and all that shit. He just might be the next one."
"Pfft. I know he's good, but I think you're underestimating the Angels. The AVA is the perfect anti-Angel weapon, but it still needs a pilot."
"Now you're the one being arrogant. Load the dammed simulation, he's ready."
"Fine, we'll be doing an endurance test today, duration: six hours."
"You are a bastard sometimes, Rob, you know that, right? A six hour sortie?"
"Saving the world here, Veras."
"And making big corporate money."
"Mr. Selais! Pay attention! Second Impact has greatly affected you generation, so you should have a vested interest in what I'm telling you! You need to know this cataclysmic event affects your life seriously!" yelled the rather old teacher at Ker, who though he was not asleep, might as well have been.
"No shit," mumbled Ker through his arms. No one heard him. Second Impact is the reason I'm this damn tired. Soul is at about 45%. "Yes sir," he grumbled, trying to hoist himself upright. No good. He flopped back down on the desk, but the teacher was already looking out the window, going on with his lecture.
It was the same stuff every day! Well, it wasn't quite the same lecture, but it was on the same basic subject. And it was as pointless as learning to defend yourself from a person armed with a piece of fresh fruit. Someday, Kensuke was sure, he would snap, and walk up to the teacher, bang his notes on the teacher's desk, and yell, "THIS IS AN EX-LECTURE!"
Not today though. He was worried about Touji. Or, more accurately, worried about what he would do to the new kid, uh…Ikari! Touji was already convinced Ikari was the pilot of the giant robot, and Touji's sister had been badly burned by the blast of the thing's jets. Ikari was going to get it. Touji wasn't top jock for nothing.
Whack! Shinji went flying to the ground. "Ohhh…"
"Stupid pilot! You nearly killed my sister! You're supposed to save us, not hurt us!" He pulled Shinji to his feet and knocked him down again. "You hear me pilot boy!? Huh!? You protect us, right, you bastard!? YOU HEAR ME PILOT BOY!?"
At his last shout, nearly fifty kids ran over to where Shinji lay, pushing Touji aside in one confused moment, showering Shinji in attention.
Rei, recently released from the hospital, glided into the crowd, and knelt down beside him, assessing his injuries. She looked up at the crowd and spoke: "Pilot Ikari is injured, and requires medical attention. I will take him to the nurse's office. Please disperse."
Strangely, they did, even Touji.
"Ayanami?" asked Shinji of the azure-haired girl.
"Yes."
Another person joined them, the obviously-fatigued Ker. "No time for the nurse's office. We've got an incoming Angel. Alarms will be going off in a few minutes. C'mon." The three pilots walked off for the school's exit.
Kensuke watched them walk off. "That's not the way to the nurse's office…" he said to himself. Then the Angel alarms went off, and the thought was put on back burner as he scrambled for the school's shelter.
Shinji helped Ker put the armor on over the American teen's black skinsuit. "Thanks Shinji," said Ker as he put his helmet under his arm.
"Will you be okay?"
"Yeah. I'm a little down on soul energy, but that nap in class helped. Hey, after this is over, get me invited to Misato's party, huh?"
"How?"
"Did I know you were living with the captain?" Ker smiled. "Dr. Akagi was ranting about it for a long time. I'll try to make the fight entertaining for you guys in the control room, okay?"
"Just kill it."
"Right, Shinji. See ya." Ker walked out the door.
At about the same time, Kensuke and Touji were in the men's bathroom of the shelter.
"Okay, what's so vitally important to talk about?"
"I need your help to open the shelter's blast door."
"WHAT!?"
"Quiet! I gotta see it, just once."
"You're going to get yourself killed."
"I rather die out there than in here. These things won't really protect us, just draw out our deaths. Besides. You hit that pilot pretty hard, twice. He saved the city."
"Maybe," admitted Touji grudgingly
"So doesn't that make it your obligation to watch?"
"I give up. You'll do anything to get what you want, won't you?"
Kensuke snickered.
"Ker, your soul energy levels are low. Under 65%. Is something wrong?" asked Misato.
"No, ma'am." The pilot sat in his seat, visor open, and hands wrapped around a pair of joysticks.
"We can't send him out like this. Why are his levels so low?"
Rob looked up. "Oh, that. We did an endurance test yesterday. He was at ten percent at the end."
Misato grimaced. "No more endurance tests. We need him at a fighting level."
"How high?" asked Veras.
"75% or over."
"Okay. Hey Ker?"
"Sensei?"
Veras then demonstrated why he had been a very successful drill sergeant for a while. Shinji was cowering at the end of the tirade. "Now go kill that Angel you maggot!"
The AVA blasted up its launch tube, breaking Mach 1.
"What the hell did you do?" asked Misato.
"Oh, that?" asked Veras pleasantly, "I just boosted his energy levels by pissing him off. Temporary fix. He'll be ready to fight when he stops the supersonic stuff, but he'll be rather irritable. Don't talk to him too much. He's got quite a mouth on him."
Misato just looked at Ker's combat instructor with a disbelieving look.
The AVA hovered over the city. "Okay, you angelic bastard," he asked, eyes scanning the cityscape, "where are you?"
"AWESOME!" exclaimed Kensuke, "This really paid off! Hey, wait. That's a different one from last time."
"Yeah. It kinda looks like the robot from that game of yours."
"ZOE 2? Yeah."
"There you are!" crowed Ker as he pulled the AVA's pulse pistols from the thigh containers. He emptied the paired pistols into the squid-crustacean with a multitude of sonic booms and the whining of high-power capacitors. It did nothing to the Angel. Damn. If only the particle weapons were ready, this would be over right now. Well, time to do this Shinji's way. He cut the thrusters and dropped to the streets.
"Cool, cool, cool!" yelled Kensuke as the AVA drew a pair of knives and boosted at the Angel, which had drawn itself up and deployed what looked like whips of energy. The Angel wrapped one of them around one of the biomecha's knives, ripping it out of Ker's fist. Ker willed his AVA to draw another one and flung the one in his right hand at the Angel. The Angel batted it out of the air with one of its whips, sending it flying towards Touji and Kensuke. They yelled and dove to the side as the monolithic knife stabbed into the hillside where they had been standing.
"Damn!" cursed Ker as the Angel's whips lashed his last knife away, destroying the handle. I gotta get another one! His eyes flicked to the side, noting the position of the weapon on a hillside, slightly out of the city. "There!" His acute situational awareness brought him back to his enemy's attack. He ducked under it and boosted backwards, transitioning to low altitude flight. He rode plumes of thruster fire towards the hillside, the AVA flying on it's back, in a horizontal arc towards the waiting knife. He reached down to grab the knife on the fly, not wanting to make another pass. That was when he saw them. Two civilians, cowering behind the knife. If he flew over them, the thruster flame would burn them to ashes. There wasn't even time to brake!
Touji and Kensuke screamed as the biomecha came flying in at them, thrusters blazing with over the combined output of all the UN armed forces' jet engines. I'm going to get killed by that thing, just like my sister was hurt! thought Touji. Kensuke was rooted to the spot, the camera still focused on their incoming death, not that it would survive the superheated windstorm, almost half as powerful as those created by the detonation of an atomic bomb.
And then, every engine, main and vernier, suddenly went dead. The thirty-seven story fighting machine plowed into the hillside, ripping a huge furrow in the earth, coming to a halt right in front of the frightened teens.
"Those fucking idiots!" screamed Ker. He had managed to move everything so it wouldn't be snapped off by the fall, but it had been close. He didn't think he would've lost the articulated main thruster pods as the pylons they were on had some of the best structural integrity in the whole biomecha, but if he did…ANGEL!
Ker snap-rose to grab the energy whips that slashed down at him, but he couldn't really get up and fight, for fear of crushing the two humans on the hillside. "Damn!"
"Ker, let them into the cockpit!"
"Yes Captain! Opening now!" Ker's left hand shot towards the holographic display floating in the AGAL and manipulated the immaterial display. The cockpit obviously jerked backward, the screens went dark, and the hatch above Ker opened. He could hear something being shouted over the loudspeakers mounted on the shoulder armor. Soon he heard two splashes.
"What the…water!?"
"My camera, my camera!"
"It's AGAL, now shut up and be thankful for your lives!" The cockpit shot back into the AVA's upper back and the screens came alive again. Ker rolled the pair of battling titans over, trying to crush the Angel under the AVA's weight. It didn't work. The Angel flipped the pair back over, it's energy whips still searing through the AVA's gauntlets. "Damn you, die!" Ker kicked the Angel in the lower body, releasing the whips as he did so. The Angel went flying over the city.
"Ker! Retreat and drop the students off!"
"Hell no, Captain! I'm going to kill that thing!"
"You're hands are damaged, and you have no weapon left! You crushed the knife!"
"I don't fucking care! And I'm not out of weapons!" The thrusters came alive again and the AVA flew at the once again upright Angel.
"Come on, retreat! Please!" pleaded the two teens behind Ker.
"SHUT UP!" The Avatar stopped just in front of the Angel, which switched tactics. The two whips speared at Selais's mecha's head. He barely moved to the side and caught them in his left fist, making a motion that would snap them, had they been a forearm. Then he delivered a powerful jab with his right arm to where the Angel's gut would be, before snapping the arm up in such a way that the elbow hit the Angel's core.
If the Angel had legs, it would have staggered back in pain. Ker had found the one soft spot in the Angel's defense, and what a spot it was! The Angel's skin couldn't be penetrated by many attacks, but the core, the very life of the Angel, it was wide open to attack. The dazed Angel floated back unsteadily.
"And now it dies." The AVA went into a swordsman's stance and a slim, curved case on its left hip flipped up parallel to the ground. Explosive charges fired, exposing a handle. Ker's left hand shot down to behind the handle's guard, while his right hovered just above the handle. The left thumb flicked the guard, and the right pulled the sword out blazingly fast, assisted by thrusters.
Just as the Angel recovered, the AVA shot into the sky, flipped, and shot back down in a two-handed blow straight out of A Meji Swordsman Romantic Tale*. The bisected Angel fell in two halves.
"Got you." Mom, Dad, I killed it. The Avatar fell to one knee, supporting itself with the powered-down sword. In the cockpit, Ker fell back onto his seat, unconscious. Touji and Kensuke came around to look at the pilot.
"Selais?" they both asked, then looked at each other.
"Well, he's up, but he doesn't have much energy," said the doctor to Misato, "I suppose I can allow visitors. Honestly, I've never quite seen anything like it. Strangest case of exhaustation I've ever seen."
"Thank you." The doctor walked off. "Okay boys, you can go see him," she told Shinji, Touji, and Kensuke.
They nodded their thanks and entered the hospital room.
"Hey Shinji," greeted Selais from his bed. He was sitting against a large stack of pillows. "Aida, Suzihara." He nodded to them.
Touji looked embarrassed. "Kensuke and me, wanted to say we were sorry for nearly getting us all killed there."
"Yeah, and thanks for saving us," said the sandy-haired teen, scratching the back of his head.
"I know it's not much," admitted Touji, "But want to be friends from now on?"
The Gypsy grinned. "Yeah, sure, but no more attacking Shinji, and no mention of my job, okay?"
"Sure."
"No problem. By the way, turns out my camera is waterproof. I've got the whole thing on tape. You were amazing." He put the disk on the bedside table.
"Heh. Hey, Suzihara, what's with the bruise on your cheek?"
Shinji kicked at the floor. "Touji made me punch him."
"Yeah, and thanks again for getting my sister into NERV's hospital."
"It was the least I could do. Will you be alright Ker?"
"I'll be out of school for a couple of days, but I'll be fine. Oh, and Shinji?"
"Yeah?"
"Cancel the invitation to the party."
Shinji chuckled and walked out the door, followed by the other two Japanese boys.
Ker hadn't even gotten around to closing his eyes before another person walked into the room.
"Hi Ker."
"Hey Raziel." Ker sat back up. "What's up?"
"I wanted to thank you for saving us all." She moved over to the side of the bed.
"Part of the job. Besides, if I hadn't won, Shinji would've." He yawned.
"You look really tired," she observed, moving her face closer to his.
"Twelve percent," he admitted with a weary grin.
She stood up. "Then I'd better let you sleep." Coward.
He nodded as she walked towards the door. "Yeah, that'd be good. Oh, tell Ben I won't be there for a couple of days."
"Right. I just wish I didn't have to listen to him talk about his little sister."
"According to him, she's so innocent, that I question if she was even born. See ya, Raz."
"Bye." She opened the door, then turned around. "Hey, Ker?"
"Hmm?" The now-prone Gypsy turned his head to face her.
"Good job out there." Coward. She walked out the door.
And the latest Angel assault is fended off by Shinji's first Tokyo-3 friend. Ker and the Avatar have passed their baptism of fire. One must wonder, what is with his parents, why he's so dense with Raziel, and where he picked up the Ryutsutien. With two Angels defeated, attention for the pilots shifts to their other life, that of sophomores in Tokyo-3 High School. But soon, two new pilots will join the ranks. What will happen then? Find out next time, on NERV: ADA!
No, Misato, there won't be any fan service.
--God, I love my pre-reader. Anyway, Ker is not a master of Hiten Mitsurugi Ryu, but the attack was to perfect to pass up. By the way, my resolution for the new year is to respond to all signed reviews with good advice and questions in them. So, review! Flames will be dealt with by means of the Shoulder Devils HIFV Battalion.