What chapter am I up to now? Four? Christ. If anyone's still reading this after the delayed uploading times, the massive and irregular schedule (good lord, the Ultimates have shorter breaks between issues for gods sakes…) then truly you are saintly people, with perhaps not enough to do. Unlike me, who has more than enough to do, but just can't really be bothered to do it. I was really happy with the way the last chapter turned out, but I doubt I can keep that standard up. For a start I'm going to start adding action sequences now groan, this isn't going to be good…

Hmmm.. Did anyone think that the last chapter was nothing but a load of filler? Was that just me? I personally feel I need to be more descriptive with my writing and spend more time on subjects before I move onto the next.

Disclaimer: If I owned Neon Genesis Evangelion it would be nearly as good as it actually is. But since it is, I clearly don't, QED. Tenshi Yamamoto however… yeah he's mine, sorry. Teufalmotors if I get round to them are mine as well.

NGE – Gospel of the Serpent

By Flash69

Space fortress Gilgamesh spun silently in the vacuum of space, it's huge frame hung above Japan like an invisible sword of Damocles. On the outside there was no light, all was darkness inky black and tinted glass. The inside however was bright and full of activity.

Inside bay thirteen, a swarm of engineers were working on an object that humanity thought it would never use again, Evangelion Unit 1.

It's purple form stood immobile in the middle, almost cocooned with scaffold and raised platforms, as white coated scientists swarmed over it like ants, prodding and poking it. It was like an upright carcass, empty and lifeless with scavengers picking it to pieces.

Commander Koworu Yaezaki leaned over the railing of a platform facing the purple behemoth and watched as the new scientists from the latest shuttle crowded around the golem, oohing and ahhing like five year olds. Just like all the rest, the first five seconds were always ones filled with wonder, the first five minutes were filled with anticipation, the first five hours were filled with excitement, the first five days were met with enthusiasm, the first five weeks were met with commitments and the first five months were met with boredom. It was true, familiarity did breed contempt.

Tenshi leaned on the railing beside him, his back to the purple beast, he sighed and looked up, his thoughts apparently on other things. His silence was strangely calming as white suits and engineers hustled and bustled around him, he was the eye of the storm, a centre of tranquillity, finite in nature and patient.

But like most things this was an illusion.

I found the presence of the EVA troubling, but somehow not terribly surprising, I was aware of my former position as the NERV/UN chief Liaison Officer but not through my own memories. It was a deeply unsettling feeling, being told you had done something and not having any recollection of it at all, it felt, hollow. Like I was  empty, and the emptiness filled me and typified my being, a great void of information that should have been present but was instead remiss. Sometimes that emptiness would shoot anxiety through my being and I would shake and weep for hours on end, adrift in my inner void. But for the moment I thought back to what I knew, and what my instincts told me.

I knew, no, I had been told, that the EVA's were Biomechanical constructs created over eight years ago as defensive measure against the Angels, that there were three of them, and at the advent of the Third Impact only the purple experimental type, Unit 01 remained operational, and then it disappeared. All other EVA's had been destroyed and without Angels there was no further need for EVA's and the Evangelion program was discarded.

My instincts told me to get the hell out of dodge and that I was in over my head, that this thing was dangerous and there was too much I didn't know or remember. But on the other hand, my instincts also told me that if I left now, I would never be able to get back here again, and if I'm not here, then there's no telling what the Commander would do with the EVA, I shuddered internally, for reasons I couldn't quite place.

"Does all this activity signify the resurrection of the EVA series?" I asked the commander, he didn't look at me and continued to look at a space in the distance, a random spot with little significance. But he did reply, in the same half-hearted tones he'd used since the beginning.

"There is some interest in that activity…"

There was something in the way he said those words that hinted at something else, that he had something more terrible in the wings of his mind, waiting and biding it's time.

"So commander, what interests you?"

The commander turned to look at him, ruby eyes tried to transfix him where he stood, but Tenshi ignored it as the Commander simply smiled and walked away. His steps making precise metallic rapports on the metal platform as he walked out view. Tenshi watched him go and as he disappeared from view Tenshi folded his arms and closed his eyes, his head bowed as he tried to grasp at the strands of memories in his head, but found them ephemeral.

The one constant sensation that danced between his eyes, a baseless instinct without memories was that this, was definitely not good. Not good at all.

He let out a low growl of frustration and resignation, he knew he should have told that over coated messenger where he could stuff his reactivation orders…

Kaneda Aketsu was a lowly wage slave working for the Post Impact Restoration Office, he lived a dreary life in the filing section, transferring pieces of paper from point A to B, and generally making the world a tidier place by making certain parts of it more cluttered than the rest. It was a dreary, excitement free existence, and Kaneda never wanted for more. He was content to live a quiet unassuming life working from nine till five in a quiet job away from the public (he couldn't stand false or scripted politeness) He was currently taking a relatively heavy, but not overly so, stack of papers and accounts two floors down to Insurance. He was however slightly pre-occupied and felt a little dizzy, an unfortunate side affect of the medication the doctor had prescribed for his epilepsy. For about two years he'd been having short three, two second black-outs at random intervals. This had of course prompted eighteen months of prodding, poking, prescriptions, prognoses and CAT scans. Kaneda was simply thankful his mother was living back in Hokkaido, the amount of coddling he'd have received didn't bear thinking about.

Sumire Nakajo on the other hand, was not a patient woman, and as a result she was rarely a polite one either. Born to a rich family, she worked as part of the telephone operators of the PIRO insurance division not through choice, but rather through a civil order as a result of crashing a rather expensive sports car into one of the many converted PIRO office buildings in the Geo-front. It was quite unfair she remarked, for a start the car had been more damaged than the building. The work was also quite demeaning, the constant politeness to idiots over a phone line who should know better. It simply infuriated her, and her infuriation made the remaining two months of her Community service go all the more slower. She was, she perhaps unconsciously realized, a selfish spoiled child, as perhaps was the fate of all overprotected and doted single children of well to parents, but she nevertheless treated her job and current existence with contempt and fire. Her annoyance was currently a simmering flame, as she walked up the steps to filing to retrieve the files she had requested some time ago but the idiots had failed to deliver. Her trace amount of patience had expired and she'd taken to the stairs to obtain the items she needed for herself.

It was at this critical moment as Kaneda and Sumire shared the same stairway that without warning, just like the every other time before it, Kaneda had an epileptic black-out.

His body folded over and he collapsed down the white marble stairs, his body pin wheeling like a marionette that had had it's strings cut. As he did so the papers he was carrying flew from his hand and into the air and floated like large white blossoms as their type faced format spun delicately to the ground.

As his body made suppressed thuds as it tumbled down the stairs, Sumire continued to walk upward not paying much attention to the person who was making more noise than usual as they descended, when however, a piece of printed A4 paper landed on her foot (the handout she'd asked for half an hour ago incidentally) she did stop to look at it, and wonder what it thought it was doing there.

It was only when Kaneda broke his arm with a loud reverberating CRACK in the silent stairway that she looked up and saw the falling office worker tumbling gently and yet inevitably towards her.

There was, it would occur to her later that night, something very disturbing at just how quiet the whole event was, if it weren't for the muffled thuds of Kaneda's body hitting the hard white steps, the whole incident would be completely silent.

It was her belief that the sound of someone falling down the stairs should be a lot louder.

That was when Kaneda's body rolled into her with a level of force that took her by surprise and pushed her down the stairs as well. As she fell backwards, flailing at the hand rail that was within arms reach mere moments ago, it occurred to her that if the stairs are solid then the sound they make is much more muffled than hollow steps. This information wasn't nearly as useful as it thought it was, as she skidded backwards her nails painfully scratching at the wooden railings as she slid down the stairs on her well toned behind. She fell over two stairs like this before she felt herself tip over, her attempts to slow herself down failed and her head painfully hit the cold floor, it was an unpleasant sharp, yet dull dizzying thudding blow. It happened once more before her shapely legs wedged themselves between the wall and the floor and acted as a brake on her natural momentum. She still fell over another step before eventually stopping.

Kaneda, his kinetic energy largely transferred to Sumire via the laws of physics gently rolled to a stop five steps above her.

Groggily, Sumire picked herself up as a few errant pieces of paper continued to fall like autumn leaves and assessed the damage.

One pounding headache, possibly the sign of impending brain trauma.

One ruined set of regulation panty-hose (and good riddance too! She gleefully thought.)

A pair of grazed legs caused by their impromptu use as emergency brakes (and who knows what manner of germs and such like lived on the walls!)

One all encompassing bruise for a body.

Sumire was fairly sure she could make a lawsuit out of this, at the very least, all she needed was an overenthusiastic doctors report and her Civil Order was as soon as gone.

It was then that Kaneda came out of his black out.

There was the taste of blood in his mouth and his eyesight was unfocused, his body refused to move, and considering the amount of pain he was in right now, he didn't want to argue, and his arm felt really odd, he languidly rolled his head to the side, ignoring as best he could the fireworks that set off behind his eyes he saw that his arm was sticking at an impossible angle.

"Ouch." Was all he said before he passed out from the pain.

When Sumire turned round at that single statement and saw the state that he was in, even though she was loathe to admit it, all financial thinking left her head. The first thought that ran though her head was the memory of a store mannequin that she'd pushed down some stairs to see what would happen. It's cheap plastic frame had split and shattered, and by the time it had reached the bottom it was broken. Broken, that was the adjective that came to mind when she saw his body, broken and battered.

She stared in what she would later deny was abject horror at the shattered and unconscious body for a couple of seconds before pulling out her mobile phone, which had miraculously survived the fall and called for a doctor.

( Not a lot actually, one of the few character traits Shinji inherited from his father was fastidious attention to workplace cleanliness. As a result the cleaning staff in the Geofront were some of the best and well paid in the country.)

"But our god is in heaven; he does whatever he pleases…"

                        Psalm 115:3

"No mister Bond, I expect you die!"

The film continued it's course for a further few seconds before Kensuke turned it off with his remote and continued it's presentation.

"Of course this level of laser control has eluded us for many years, but now at last I am pleased to announce that, at long last, Mad Scientist Level Laser weaponry is within our grasp!"

"Ahem" said Shinji, the only person in the presentation hall, a mild sweat drop behind his head.

"I don't think you can call it that Aida-kun."

Kensuke looked down at his presentation notes and took out a small felt marker, he crossed out the words "Mad-Scientist" and replaced them with "Infantry grade". His pen made audible scritch schritch noises in the silence of the auditorium.

"Anything specific you want me to keep out?" Kensuke asked.

"Well… If you could gloss over the fact that the penetrations too high and all it does is leave pin sized hole…"

scritch scritch

"And if you could not mention that the batteries only good for two shots…"

scritch

"Or that if the target is even remotely reflective in any way, you lose between 20 to 100% of the damage…"

scritch scritch scritch scritch

"…then that would be fine."

There was an awkward pause that seemed to fill the silence of the room.

"Do you even have anything left Aida-kun?"

Kensuke looked at the ink stained mass in his hands, and the pile of completely discarded cue cards at his feet.

"Ah what the hell, I'll just confuse them with technobabble like we always do…"

Shinji sweat dropped again.

"Shinji, just why are we asking for money on this project anyway if there are so many faults with it?"

"Because were running out of money for the Sephiroth Device, and they won't give us anymore."

"Ah, financial funny business, say no more."

It was a slow day in Section R, with nothing of interest to make any more remarkable than any other day. In the shadows of his cubicle, Kazuya Nobuichi quietly typed away, as the Project Sub leader, it was Kazuya's task to oversee all of Section R's research whilst Shinji wasn't present, a night person by nature he prowled the division in the quiet dead hours of the darkness, checking up on the progress of the people who gave enough of a damn to work as late as he did. Or in the case of Kensuke, due to certain housing mix-ups, actually lived in the basement. There was a Geek reference right there, Kazuya felt.

Kazuya continued to trawl through the computer logs, searching for something, he had his suspicions that Kensuke had been using the Pleiades to hack again, but he knew by now that he wasn't going to find anything. That was Kensukes specialty, you saw him living on a pile of fallout blankets in your basement, you saw him make an absolute fool out of himself trying to pick up women, and then the hilarious mess that occurred when he got drunk when they rejected him, and he made you drop your guard and view him as harmless, and then he went and hacked the UN Central Mainframe. And no matter what you tried, you can never prove anything, because when it came to Cyberspace, Kensuke is a god.

The worrying thing was, Kensuke wasn't even cleared to use the Pleiades system that night, that was why there was no log whatsoever of the system being used, in fact, all of his diagnostics were telling him that the system had spent the entire night processing Data from Sephiroth.

Kazuya viewed Kensuke as a loose cannon, one he couldn't control, no matter what he did, protected by the one man in this project with more authority than him, and Kazuya hated loose cannons.

This wouldn't be too much of problem for Kensuke, except for one critical factor.

Kazuya Nobuichi worked for SEELE2.

"In the rich man's house, the only place you can spit is in his face..."

- Old Proverb

Space Fortress Gilgamesh continued to turn. As it did so, one man sat on a bench outside one of the numerous Monorail terminals, his hands cupped his face and he was hunched over, his elbows resting on his legs, his expression glum. To his left a shrubbery, dutifully tended by a gardener once every two days, to his right a corridor, down which people walked, after a short period, one such person sat down beside him.

"The question occurs to me, along with a vague sense of déjà vu…" Tenshi said evenly, his eyes never leaving their vague spot facing the wall, his hands unmoving from their spot.

"Why am I doing this?"

The person seemed to think about this for a few moments, before arriving at an answer.

"Because when the army sent a fully fledged G-Man stereotype to your door, you ended up getting curious, so you followed the white rabbit, wanting to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes."

Tenshi leaned backwards and cracked the bones in his neck, he looked at his companion, the man was about his height (which is to say, short) with black hair that was smoothed forward into a spiky quiff. His appearance was youthful, and his eyes were blue, he wore a white labcoat and a name tag that identified him as "Ookara".

"And I'm not in wonderland yet…" Tenshi commented.

Ookara leaned back and put his hands behind his head before replying.

"Not by a long shot…"

"Who are you anyway?" Tenshi asked the diminutive scientist.

"Kunio Ookara, chief designer of EVA series 2, I work for you now."

"Oh?"

It would later arise that Tenshi Yamamoto, was the new Sub-Commander of Gilgamesh, another revelation, for a revealing day.

And Gilgamesh continued to turn.

End of Chapter 4

I just saw Kill Bill 2, Yay! But now on topic, what do you think of the new and improved writing style? I've come to the realization that nothings really happening in these chapters, it's all just setting up the scenario. Well, with a little bit of luck I might be able to get this whole thing started off next chapter. I've also got to stop introducing new characters, I think it's been a good two, three episodes without Rei having any lines at all now... And I haven't even discussed the Katsuragi twins since the beginning. Oog, this is going to get very messy.