Shinji shivered in the darkness of Nerv headquarters' empty corridors. The day was just beginning outside, he knew, but within the GeoFront and without power, the place only seemed like a tomb. Still, he had to admit, the damage from the battle that took place was less than he'd thought.

Debris still littered some of the hallways, while some corridors and rooms were completely sealed off by walls of rough, hardened plastic the color of red mud; Shinji idly wondered whether or not they'd ever get the Bakelite chipped away. Nerv used it in the invasion to block off corridors and to halt any attempts by Marduke to remove Evangelion unit-01, but now the hardened rivers of Bakelite just added a claustrophobic feel to the place. He was at least thankful that they'd removed the corpses of those that were killed pre-Impact-- probably to reduce the risk of diseases that'd break out, Shinji figured-- even though telltale blood streaks had dried into the once-shiny floors.

"You know where we're going, don't you?" Makoto asked suddenly. His voice startled Shinji, but soon faded amidst the echoes of their footsteps.

Shinji looked around them and realized that, despite the seemingly labyrinthine path, he recognized where they were, and where they were going-- upwards. "We're heading to the announcement room, aren't we? To the bridge, I mean."

The Nerv technician nodded, smiling, and stopped before a metal doorway riddled with bullet holes and propped open by a rock. "Good, Shinji-- it took us a bit longer to reorient ourselves in the darkness. And actually, we're already here. After you," he offered with a wave of his hand.

Even with his mind preoccupied with thoughts of Asuka, Shinji entered the room with a look of wonder on his face; he'd never been allowed up here before. They were about four stories high in a huge, cavernous room with high vaulted ceilings and metal-paneled walls. Wide, tilted consoles, normally abuzz and glowing with thousands of applications all running at the same time, sat silent and dormant in a semicircle formation that looked over the holographic field display suspended before them in the air. All around even here, bullet shell casings and holes were abundant. On another platform much higher and behind him was another perch-- the commander's post. Where Commanders Fuyutski and his father oversaw missions.

"This is where we were, when the... Third Impact happened," Makoto said, rolling out his chair and sitting on it. He pointed under his desk with an embarrassed smile. "I was right over here. And Aoba was there, and Maya was there," he added, pointing at each of the consoles.

Shinji looked at him sideways. "And the others?"

Makoto clasped his hands and frowned slightly. "When we woke up, we were covered in LCL and completely naked, our uniforms underneath us or nearby. Shigeru was the last to be knocked unconscious, and he claimed he saw things. Well, we all did, actually, but that's not important. It was probably hysteria that drove us to it. That, or the stress.

"But we all agreed that we saw each other spontaneously transform into liquid state," he continued. "Into LCL, in fact.

"Commander Fuyutski had come down here--with us-- in the final moments. We salvaged as much of him as we could in a bucket, till we figure out what to do," he said, dropping his head in his lap.

Makoto continued, "Misato was found, dead, at one of the cage elevators. Her clothes were beside her body, which means that she'd transmogrified into LCL along with everyone else, but we couldn't explain why she was dead, except for a single bullet found among her clothes."

Something nagged at Shinji's brain. Wouldn't that mean she was still alive until the Third Impact? He wanted to ask, but didn't dare. He didn't want to explain how she sacrificed her life for his during the attack, how she got shot trying to get him back into Eva unit-01. "I'm such a coward," he said to himself, touching the silver cross she'd given him, underneath his shirt.

Makoto looked up at Shinji again, and this time his face was contorted with confusion and madness. "We discovered and blasted open the Terminal Dogma, and found Professor Akagi's clothes floating in that pool.... We got the measurements and readouts when that... white thing... rose from the Terminal Dogma, but we couldn't understand it. What on earth did they have down there?"

Shinji frowned. He saw everything down there, when he followed Misato and her boyfriend, Kaji-- or were they something else?-- down into the bowels of Nerv headquarters, where only a handful of people ever tread before. Even now, he could barely grasp what he saw, let alone comprehend it. "What about my father?" he asked, hoping to change the subject.

Aoba bit his lip, hesitating to say anything. "Your father-- I mean, the Commander-- was found running in the hallways just two days ago, Shinji. I'm afraid he's gone quite mad."

"What?"

The older man stood and walked over to Shinji, holding him by the shoulders. "This is hard to say, but you must understand. The Commander's been touched by madness, Shinji-kun. He's been shouting and calling for your mother ever since we found him, and wouldn't stop, so we locked him in his office. As for his condition, well.... We have no idea what happened to him."