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The assembled NERV personnel looked up nervously into the air. The lights remained on and steady, and the circulation ducts started hissing with filtered air once again, but something wasn't right. No one had ever had to reboot the MAGI supercomputers before, so no one could predict what would happen, but as each second passed and the three megaprocessing units slowly revved up to speed, it was apparent that subroutines no engineer had ever heard of were starting to run themselves.

" 'Gaf's room purge complete,'" one engineer shouted over the growing unsettled murmurs and whispers. "'Black Egg Room Completely Open'! Lieutenant Hyuuga, what is all this?"

"A minute! Give me a minute!" Makoto scanned the screens on his workstations furiously, his fingers a rapid blur on the keyboards.

Adjacent to him in another seat, Aoi Sajiyou searched through over several hundred million lines of coding. "I'm going to dive into protocols 2505 through 9107; that's where this whole mess started... no! Access denied! What the hell is this 'Black Egg' protocol?"

Two more women burst into the operators' bridge, both clad in khaki jumpsuits. Shinji Ikari stared at them as they wheezed, fighting to catch their breath.

"Sub-lieutenant operators Kaede Ichigo and Satsuki Oi, reporting for duty!" the younger-looking girl with short brown hair gasped. "How may we be of service, sirs?"

"I'm not the commanding officer!" Makoto said without even looking up. Lines of text glowed as they scrolled across his glasses lenses. "Shit! Another rejection! Is this from Ritsuko's work? Or her mother's? Or, ....," he trailed off with a quick look at Shinji Ikari.

"Are you guys equipped for this work?" Makoto spared a second to regard the pair. He recognized the brunette; she was often seen with Maya whenever she wasn't with him and Aoba, or with Ritsuko. He'd never met the blonde, though. In his head, he started appraising her abilities.

"They're both operators, like me. I'm the head operator for Melchior; they work on Balthasar and Caspar," Aoi said quickly, then turned to face the two girls while still typing. "Grab a station! Quick! Whatever is going on, we have to head it off," she said.

Makoto pointed to the blonde, and then gestured to his own seat. "You! Take over for me. I'm going to the Commander's console and see if I can access something from there." Satsuki nodded and plopped into her seat as quickly as Makoto left it.

Shinji pointed upwards, towards the darkened holographic screens. "Something's happening," he said.

As one, the four operators' heads lifted at the same time their jaws dropped. A blinking red cursor paced across the sky, leaving a trail of harsh-glowing red words:

THROUGH THE RITUAL OF THE HOLY ASSUMPTION, HE BUILT A WORLD. IT EXISTS IN A SPACE SEPARATE FROM THE WORLD OF OUR LORD. MORE ACCURATELY, IT IS WITHIN, YET WITHOUT, THE LORD'S WORLD. UNLIKE THE WORLD OF OUR LORD, IT IS A WORLD IN EXTREME FLUX. ANYONE SWALLOWED UP BY THAT WORLD WILL LIVE THERE FOR ETERNITY, UNDYING. THEY WILL HAUNT THAT REALM AS A SPIRIT. HOW CAN OUR LORD FORGIVE SUCH AN ABOMINATION...?

Shinji clutched at Misato's silver cross around his neck, terrified.

"I...I don't get it," Makoto stammered. "Is it scripture? What the hell is this nonsense? Has anyone gotten a fix on the source of the subprotocols yet?"

"I've got the screens coming up soon," Kaede said, scanning her workstation monitors. "Give me another minute, two max!"

Aoi swallowed hard, and said, "It's not finished yet." The cursor typed out one more line, and then stopped but continued blinking in place:

THE CREATION AND RESURRECTION OF ALL OF YOU IS THE SAME AS THAT OF ONE PERSON.

EVERYONE WILL TASTE DEATH, THEN TO US YOU WILL BE ULTIMATELY RETURNED.

Voices erupted from the survivors. "Revelations? It IS the end of the world!" Shinji heard. Others screamed, while few pleaded futilely for order, but nearly all tried to push their way out of the Terminal Dogma. Slowly, Shinji stepped backwards until he hit a wall, and slowly slid down and huddled into himself tightly.

Kaede whipped her head around to Makoto. "Monitors online in three... two... one! Satellite feeds are working!"

Suddenly, the words blinked out and were immediately replaced by over a hundred video panels, floating in mid-air. Several of them were completely black, whereas a dozen more only showed static. Others more depicted scenes of ruin and destruction around the world: nuclear meltdowns had wiped out many major cities; typhon-driven waves crashed against already-battered shorelines; bodies and large lakes of orange LCL dotted many of the satellite feeds. Nothing moved, except for that which was buffetted by hurricane-class winds.

"Is that the rest of the world?" Shinji asked. "Do you think we'll ever find more like us? Survivors?"

No one answered him, although everyone in the room was already wondering the same thing.

"My god." Dropping his hands to his sides, Makoto Hyuga's brow furrowed as he stared at one particular screen. "Kaede-san, would you please mind switching to the enlarged view of screen 59? And Aoi, run a spectral analysis of that area, please."

"Running spectral analysis," the blonde confirmed.

The screen blinked once more, wiping away the other screens to reveal one massive screen. Despite the early morning light, the sky was the color of a deep purple-green welt, and winds whipped debris and soil away past the camera. Deep in the background, massive vague shadows stalked and stumbled like a pack of beasts on the horizon, purposeful yet inscrutable. .

"Where is that shooting from? What location?" Aoi demanded. "Those can't be--" Her sentence was interrupted by a high-pitch beep from deep within Melchior's hardware shell. "Analysis?"

Nerv operator Kaede Ichigo swallowed hard as all the blood drained from her face. "It's shooting from the South China Sea, along Tottori Prefecture. Japan's western coast," she replied. "And Caspar confirms it as pattern blue."

"Balthasar confirms, pattern blue," Satsuki seconded.

Makoto and Shinji looked expectantly at Aoi's blood-drained face, but they already knew the answer. "Pattern blue, confirmed by Melchior," she said. "Multiple Angel sightings, confirmed."