RichardRahl—plain ol' red and arial will be fine. Morphium is morphine, the German spelling of it in theory. Not quite sure it's right. I'm confused about reviews vanishing too. OO

Jonathan Shim—Ah. Well then, please accept my apologies.

SOMEBODY—Not only do you suck at following directions, you're a moron. I said your screen. 'Tard.

A/N: hm. Dunno. School's out next week. Joy.

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Ocean Red

Chapter 14: Hell no! I Am Coming Back!

A Neon Genesis Evangelion Fanfiction

By CrimsonNoble

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The first thing the boy noticed when he woke was that he was no longer on a tiled floor. The second thing he noticed was that he wasn't a bed either.

This seemed like a fairly ominous beginning to the day. Further confirmation of this could be drawn from the fact that when he moved his arm to push himself upright, he found that leaves crunched under his hand.

He ran his left hand through his hair, and then untied the bandanna blocking his vision.

"Awwww… shit."

He was, as he had nearly expected, not in the Survival Room. On the other hand, he had no idea where the hell he was, so he expected it balanced out. After all, you didn't need to be in a room to be forced to survive, did you?

He cranked his wrist, and then, for the first time he realized that he wasn't in his school uniform, nor his stalking suit. He was in his full gearsuit, as evidenced by the electricity pulsing through the enhancing equipment.

The realization brought him some measure of comfort, though he knew it also meant that apart from the integral weapons in the suit, he was unarmed. A state that was distinctly uncomfortable, perhaps even verging on irritating. He ran one hand over his shoulder, looking for the power switch, and failing to find it. Evidently, the suit was of a more advanced kind than he was used to.

That or his mentor had made some modifications to it. Either way the man was an asshole. If it was a modded version, being unable to shut the accelerators off would rapidly lead to him being burned to death as the generator produced more and more heat. If it was a new version, then it probably had all sorts of random-ass bugs in it that would prove irritating, if not fatal. That and a new one would have the absurdly insensitive factory defaults for how to activate the subsystems. And, of course, he'd have no idea how to actually use it.

Except, of course, for the most basic functions, like augmentation. That was something that was always active, so it really didn't need any commands. And, naturally, the thing was bulletproof. Or was supposed to be. He doubted it would stand up to the Eva's pallet rifle, after all. Then again, an Eva's pallet rifle would break most things anyway. Aside from, annoyingly enough, Angels. What good was a weapon that didn't do what it was designed to?

Unless, of course, NERV intended to initiate a war against humans.

A shiver that turned into a violent spasm as the accelerators in the suit automatically amplified the movement raced down his back. It wasn't fear; he knew that if a war like that actually did break out he might actually die. Though he found it unlikely, it was a possibility. It was more of anticipation.

For several minutes he sat still, wondering where on earth he was. That the sun was moving east to west was a good sign, unless he'd gotten his directions mixed up. In which case, for all he knew the sun could be going south to north. That did seem like something the Ancient One would do.

Of course, there was the question of how he'd do it, but Shinji didn't bother worrying about that. If the man wanted it done, it got done.

'Dachi reached behind himself more carefully than he might have done ordinarily, trying to find the power generator. It was always useful to know which of his organs would die first. Of course, it would only be a second or two before his heart exploded, but morbid fascination was a great motivator. The one thing he mourned was the fact that he would never get to recreate Kat-lady's face.

And that thought was enough that he shoved himself violently upward.

Forgetting, of course, about the accelerators, and therefore being flung upward a bit more than he intended, about four and a half feet higher than he intended, at a rough estimate.

He broke his fall with his face, standing on it for a moment, before floomphing down to lie on his stomach, his eyes shut tightly and his nose looking somewhat awkwardly squashed.

It took him several minutes to become accustomed to the accelerators, during which numerous failures (including Nodachi hitting himself hard enough to bruise his side and quite nearly break his knuckles) occurred, and left him more or less in no shape to travel anywhere. Any doctor would have immediately consigned him to rehab, had they seen him.

Of course, Shinji didn't give a damn and thusly started walking, though on occasion he underestimated the accelerators, and ended up doing a sort of spastic dance, unprepared for the suddenly far greater than anticipated motion, in a vaguely eastern direction. Or at least, what he assumed was east. On occasion, in the midst of one of his long, loping steps, he'd drive himself face-first into the dirt, skid for a bit, curse some, and then get up and continue.

All in all, he was probably walking north.

--

A yelp resounded through the apartment as Misato answered the phone. It managed to, impressively, mix terror, shock, abject utter despair, and at the same time implied suicidal tendencies. The Miko fell tremulously from her hand, she had just reached her favorite part (page three hundred nine), though she wouldn't admit that to anyone. Well, anyone present, at least.

"No! I can't! I won't! You can't make me!" If it weren't for her choice of words, anyone present could have been forgiven for mistaking her for a three-year old, for the inflection and tone of her voice matched completely. The German peeking in from the kitchen decided that interrupting would have been a bad idea, and so ducked back out, trying to ignore the desperate denials and pleading that were rapidly approaching "noise pollution" level.

The hysterics that followed soon after were rather more difficult to ignore. She solved the problem by shoving a random CD into the unit and dialing the volume up to the point where it obscured all sound from the other room. Of course, when she realized that she had committed the sacrilege of sending the blues rampaging around at almost a full one hundred nineteen decibels, she immediately hit the eject button.

Whereupon she discovered that her 'guardian' had taken the sound level as a challenge and her wails had risen to compete, she shoved another random Compact Disc into the player, to discover that it was (somewhat mercifully) Century Child, and had somehow been set to Beauty of the Beast. Nevertheless this was far better than blasting the blues (not even her music! She'd accidentally packed it from her step-mother's stash. Honest!) at near-deafening levels.

Misato, on the other hand, was forced to wail louder, to get over the volume of the music, into the telephone. On the other side of the line, it was reasonable to assume that the sub-commander of NERV was going deafer than he had been.

He said something impossible to understand beneath the cacophony of noise, and the line went dead.

When the sirens arrived, investigating multiple reports of 'disturbance of the peace' (from as far as ten blocks away), they too were indecipherable.

When the police entered the apartment, they found the purple-haired Major still screaming into the phone, and the music still blasting from beyond the closed rice-paper door.

Oh, was the collective thought. Just some NERV morons. Move along then, nothing to see here.

And they really had to escape, to save their hearing. One particularly daring one attempted to try and draw his gun, to find himself accosted by Section Two agents, who promptly disarmed him, made citations, threw him out, and then set back to watch, safely protected by their layers of earplugs, earmuffs, fuzzy hats, and helmets. And it was still uncomfortably loud.

This continued for quite a long time. When it was over, brave people discovered a passed out Misato (how she had managed this, in view of the sensory overload was questionable), an entertainment system that had apparently overheated so badly that it had actually melted some of the circuits (it had been going for a long time), and Asuka, who looked as if she couldn't hear them (and somewhat as if there had been blood rolling down from her ears. But only a little. Her eardrums hadn't been completely busted).

--

Shinji sighed exasperatedly. He'd been walking (though perhaps 'fumbling' would have been a more accurate word) in, what he hoped, was the same direction for a long time. If it was, the Ancient One had certainly found a damn empty place to drop him. Of course, he had fallen. Many times. That had slowed him down. Of course, the accelerators had sped him up when they weren't throwing him on his face. Altogether, he wasn't quite sure whether or not he'd moved faster than he would have with the suit off.

Damn the man! While the suit definitely had hellishly good heat sinks, and hadn't warmed up yet, that merely meant that when it did, it would be even hotter than the old version. And that was going to be… uncomfortable.

He tripped, and went skidding for a good four feet, ploughing the fertile dirt.

" 'S times like this," he pronounced as he carefully forced himself up, "that I wish I could just stab him in the face."

"Who would you like to stab in the face?"

The inquisitive voice was, fortunately, attached to an inquisitive face. 'Dachi would not have put it past the man to manage to conjure up with a voice that just traveled around the area, inserting peanut gallery comments.

So, instead of blasting into attack mode (or stab them in the face mode. There wasn't much of a difference), Nodachi yelped and jumped backward. Of course, this led to him flying a good ten feet before he slammed into the dirt, and scrambled backward into a rock, which he promptly spider-crawled up and over. A half instant later, he poked his head out over the rock, and tried to look inconspicuous.

He wasn't succeeding very well. The black gearsuit had a tendency to make him look quite out of place.

The man who had surprised him was not what he had expected. He was the perfect image-template of someone so utterly normal looking that the most descriptive thing Shinji could think of was that he was nondescript. Of course, this was Shinji, so his thoughts were probably more along the lines of "not-so-special-looking-but-still-damn-freaky."

Which, naturally, he wouldn't admit. He was supposed to be the creepy one.

"The boss-man." He responded. "So, where am I?"

The nondescript man nodded. "Good thing I stopped you. You see that?"

Nodachi followed the man's hand. "Not so much."

The man smiled, slightly yellow white teeth filling the space between his lips. "Exactly. That's pretty much where the real radiation from that thing going boom starts. Somewhere around there anyway. Never could tell."

Obviously, he had not been going east. South, perhaps. Maybe west.

"Ah. Where's Tee-Three?"

This drew a blink from the man. "Tokyo Three?"

Shinji rolled his eyes. "No, you think?"

The man, ever tolerant, nodded. "Is in that," he pointed vaguely off through what he had termed the irradiated area, "direction."

"Ah. Thank you." Whereupon Nodachi leapt forward, gripped the man's head between his hands, and twisted violently.

Then he left.

Several hours later, the body groaned loudly. It shoved itself upright, gripped its head, and forced it back to the normal position. "Why do they keep doing that? Every time I try to be helpful, they do that!"

--

It was almost two days later (school days, giving cause for the Class Representative's intense ire) when 'Dachi found himself back at his apartment.

He was busy praising god that he hadn't run into anything that required real exertion, and promising that he would kill the asshole who'd set him up like that. Not that said asshole was going to be around to do anything about fulfilling that promise. Or if he was, he'd probably laugh in the boy's face, then beat his head into the ground.

None of which stopped the boy from promising.

The door banged open, allowing the angered teenager entry. If it had been possessed of a modicum of intelligence, the door would have been open before the boy was close enough to touch it. Of course, it was a door, and didn't have intelligence. So it was understandable that it was shut. Or at least, shut until he threw it open.

He was, at least, thankful that he wasn't addicted to morphine again. That would have been evil. Physically, at least. He still felt the burning desire to have more, but that was purely in his head.

The black-clad boy stalked in. Or rather, he tried to stalk in, because the gearsuit kept propelling him further than he had intended it to. It was rapidly becoming frustrating. And he still couldn't find the deactivation switch! He'd looked nearly everywhere on the suit, and it just didn't seem to exist!

It was, suffice to say, more than enough reason to kill his mentor.

In the meantime, however, he needed a shower. A long, hot shower. Preferably without the freakishly evil suit on. Blast it all!

--

The pale man remained seated as he listened to the woman lecture him. Not that he understood what she was saying. It was some foreign language he didn't speak. She looked vaguely Corsican, or maybe Italian. He wasn't very adept at guessing nationality. She was probably Russian.

"What's she speaking?" He asked the girl next to him.

The dreadlocked child shrugged. "American, I think."

"Oh." He waved a dismissing hand. "Stab her then."

Obediently, the girl drew one of her not-so-numerous blades, and stalked forward. "But there is no killing; we are not needing such barbaric tendencies."

A pout spread across the girl's lips, but she obediently stabbed the screaming woman in the thigh. It looked quite painful. Then again, having three inches of steel buried in your leg was bound to be uncomfortable. The blade exiting didn't exactly help the image.

"The femoral artery?"

"I missed. I think."

"Ah. Good then."

And the man stood, walking away. Someone would have to clean the blood off soon. It had been a while since the room had been cleaned, and it looked very dirty. It didn't smell very bad, but it looked terrible.

Yes, that was what he had forgotten. He should have checked to see if she was one of the cleaning people.

Ah, well. What is done is done. She'd been stabbed already.

And Wakizashi exited.

--

Gendo Ikari stood silently in his office, staring out the window at the darkened Geofront. He, being the energy conservative he was, had ordered that there be no lights on when there were less than four hundred people in the Pyramid. That this had happened only eight times pleased him greatly.

He shifted uncomfortably. It was always like this. Silent, and alone. It was a very nice way to be. As compared to surrounded by noisy, irritating delegates. Perhaps he should set his son on them some time? It would be amusing. And productive, unless they were very brave and stupid. It seemed to be almost instinctual to not piss of the man in control of the most destructive power in existence. And anyway, after the Antarctica Pact, no one had any nuclear weapons. In theory, anyway. It was far more likely that everyone had them.

He pushed his glasses up on his nose absently. He, of course, had contacts. But it was more that it was incredibly uncomfortable to not have his vision bordered by the thin, blurry black lines of glasses that kept him wearing the gear.

Besides, he'd always found it more intimidating to stare at someone who's eyes you couldn't see. And intimidation was everything.

Several hours had passed as he stood there, though not all of it was spent staring out the window. It would be hard to notice, but there was a shattered bottle in the trash can, where he had thrown it when he'd emptied it. If one looked really closely, they could see the remnants of a label on it, which he habitually tore off. No one would dare ask what it was, for that would be unkind. And besides that, everyone knew he was an alcoholic.

Of course, it was a 'root beer' bottle, but all anyone ever saw was the 'beer' part of the label.

He shifted again, leaning backward to crack his back. It wasn't a quiet crack either, it sounded like a shotgun blast going off in his skull. Or rather, it sounded like that to him, but to anyone else, it sounded like a very quiet pop.

It wasn't for several hours before one of the janitors poked in. With brown eyes, dark skin, and close cropped hair, he looked the image of a poor beggar. Of course, it was just that he sat around on corners all day, he wasn't a beggar. He did it for fun. You did get paid a lot to clean up after the messes the Evas made.

"Sir?"

"…" The menacing silence held sway over the gloved man.

"Do you need any help?"

"…" It was almost as if there was a crack in his façade. But only almost.

"You stepped in gum? Again?"

"…" It was somehow as if his silence was blushing for him.

"I'll be back. What was it this time?"

More silence.

"Doublemint? I'm going to be needing help…"

END CHAPTER

Mostly pointless humor. Oh well.