Crrot—Hah! Ye scum! Thae ye shoul nae review an yea read, thae is a cruel t'ing indeed. Bald? No. Hair? Maybe. I'll take it into consideration. But first, there is this!

Gopu—Many thanks.

A Reviewer—There is also something elusive we like to call 'plot'. It may be here, it may not.

Angel of Twins—but then they would like, be not-torturable! Nope, no cellular phones. Just jewels in the ears to contact each other.

RichardRahl—I think it's the stereotypical 'southern belle' accent. Damned if I know what it actually is though. And yes, I do think it is the same one as the Rooster. If you're talking Loony Toons, of course.

yeth—of course. We all make mistakes some times. And my thanks for the praise. Fast? That's dependant on how you view 'fast'. If I were a planet, fast would be eons longer than for a mayfly. That was strangely deep, and I didn't intend it to be.

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Ocean Red

Chapter Eighteen: Lunatics! All of you!

A Neon Genesis Evangelion Fanfiction

By CrimsonNoble

There was a slow shadow creeping across the floor. It looked rather like an overturned laundry basket on legs. This was quite possibly because it was, in fact, an upside down laundry basket with someone inside it.

Badly stifled snickering squeezed out from the weave of the basket as it approached. Squeaking followed as it reached its destination, and then a hiss. It wasn't just one hiss; the sound was repeated many times.

The basket slid over to the bed, where the purple-haired woman resided. It giggled, and then there was a snip, followed by a long ripping sound. The basket giggled some more, and the hand that held the metal implement retracted, and it snuck away to finish the job. It hit the rice-paper wall near the door several times before sliding through. There was but one thing left to do now…

The arm pushed open the door to the water closet, and the basket entered. More snips followed, and then it squirmed out again quite a bit later.

Several times it hit the wall before making its way into the room Shinji Ikari had appropriated. It vanished into the darkness within the doorway.

Then there was a loud, furious screech as the occupant of the basket ran into something hard and sharp.

Madness surrounded Kashi as he exited the car. Reporters, though only a small part of the crowd, somehow made up most of the clamor. In accordance with his Standard Operating Procedure, he ignored them as best he was able. It was not a hard thing to do; he was far more interested in what was inside the house.

He waited as the other man exited the vehicle. In contrast to Kashi's matte black suit, the escort was garbed in white and khaki, shirt and trousers respectively. The escort's job was not actually to guide Kashi, nor to protect him. That would void the purpose of Kashi's presence.

Obediently, Kashi extended his wrists, holding them close together. The officer cuffed him carefully, doing his best to avoid offending his charge. This was an easy job, and not one he wanted to lose. Three pairs of manacles went on, all of them fairly loose. Strictly speaking, they were supposed to be tighter. It was the dangerously impatient look Kashi directed at the escort.

Even after Kashi was fully bound, he remained motionless, closing his eyes to center himself. He remained still for long minutes, impressively imitating a corpse. In short order, he could no longer hear the reporter's thunderous din.

In the long, indeterminable hours when he was not working, he had wondered, even marveled at the nigh-prescient ability of the press to be ready at a crime scene before the police arrived. He had gone so far as to wonder if they caused the crimes. But then, they had done so at the twenty-thirteen to twenty-fourteen spree, and he knew like no one else that those crimes were uninfluenced.

His eyes peeled open, and he slowly began to move. Haltingly at first, retracing his steps several times. As always, he perfectly retraced the movements of the death that had visited. The side of the house, to the door. Something had been done to the lock—he didn't quite know what. The door opened for him, and he frowned. There was something he couldn't quite grasp; the intent was usually immediately obvious. Here…

Here it escaped him. It was not a mere contract, though it was certainly that too.

The confusion passed out of his mind as he peered into the kitchen, and saw the pure, undisturbed result of the deaths.

He broke from the path, falling to his knees before the door, breath stuck in his throat. Blood soaked the room: arcing over the walls, dried stains on the floor.

"God," he whispered. His eyes were wide as he slowly bent forward, pressing his forehead to the tile reverentially.

That was how, when his escort eventually entered to look for him, he was found.

"Can you not see it?" Kashi demanded harshly. "How can you not see this? How can you not wonder at this? How can you deny the beauty?"

Martin Kimmon—absurdly a Japanese-Irish American, transferred to the military police of the Japanese Strategic Self Defense Force in twenty-fourteen for undisclosed reasons—merely lifted an eyebrow. "Right Kashi, just tell me what happened here."

Kashi turned a look of zealot rage upon him. "How can you not see it?"

Kimmon started to lean against the wall, to find Kashi's hands wrapped around his hand, tugging sharply. "Don't do that!" The enraptured man snarled.

Kimmon stumbled, unprepared for the inappropriate action, crashing into Kashi's chest. The smaller man almost collided with the table, before regaining his balance, the other's hands gripping his biceps with bruising force.

A moment later, Kimmon was upright without aid, though still gripping the smaller man's arms. "Don't ever do that," he said.

Kashi nodded obediently, though the zealotry still existed in his actions.

"What happened here?"

"The woman was reading in the chair. She was subdued quickly—rag to the mouth, I think. Then she was taped to the chair. You can feel the adhesive. Knocked around a bit, not enough to cause physical damage. A few slaps here and there.

"Someone left the room. The woman soiled herself when he came back, and she was bound to the table. More tape. Her fingernails were torn off; you can see the smaller pools around the table legs. Her clothes were cut off. Her fingers were broken, bone by bone. Then her hands. The skin didn't break, until the master cut her hands open. Scalpel. The bones were removed, and then her hands had the blood cut off somehow so she didn't bleed to death.

"The master started carving things into her skin, starting above the eyebrows, finishing at the feet. There was something on the blade, probably a weak acid so it hurt more. Needles were used to make patterns in her skin. They had ink on them. Mostly in her head. Her chest and abdomen were cut open, very carefully. Just enough to reveal the muscle—the tissue wasn't damaged. Then the master cut into her abdomen, pulled out her reproductive organs. Cut them apart. Probably force fed her some of them." By now his voice was faint, ecstatic.

"Her ears were cut off. Her lips and eyelids as well. Her legs were dissected, very precisely. The arteries were not cut. The bones in her legs were pulled out. That took some time. She didn't die of blood loss, she wasn't bleeding all that much. Don't ask me why.

"Her ribcage was opened. The bones weren't broken, they were cut. Then her ribs were removed. She was still alive.

"The master took out her right lung. Then half her liver. Then a kidney. Then they took her teeth, after breaking them. Her nose was removed.

"Then the master stole her eyes."

Shinji tilted his head to better look in the window. His eyes glittered, agreeing with the ever-so-wide contented smile decorating his face. He was, at the moment, taking time to enjoy the havoc within the apartment, standing on the balcony railing as he was.

For the first innumerable time in the last three hours, the railing groaned beneath his not insignificant weight. In response, the boy rested more of his weight on the sill of the window. The chaos within was wonderful, simply wonderful.

"Joy to the world," he sang horrifically off-key, "Chaos reigns. Let us receive the flame…" and so on.

More screeching anger emanated from within the building. Shinji sang louder.

Something struck the window he was staring through, and he laughed and sang.

Somewhere in New Jersey a small child lashed out in the throes of a nightmare.

Nodachi lovingly caressed the scissors thrust in his belt. Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

He'd done the dirty bits first, and as he was sneaking—rather incompetently—out, the basket had fallen on his head. That was when he had achieved the most brilliant idea he'd ever had.

Next it had been to Kat-lady's, which had taken quite a long time. Who knew a woman could have that much?

Then to the German whore's room, which had taken, if anything, longer. What sort of demons inhabited these mortals that they had so many…?

The rail groaned again, for the second unnumbered time. This time, however, the boy missed it, and consequently approximately four seconds later he was sent tumbling down the side of the apartment building as it gave way.

In a free fall, a body accelerates at nine-point-eight zero meters per second squared. This is, of course, assuming no air resistance, and thus bodies fall at slightly different speeds, depending on surface area, mass, and initial velocity.

Three seconds later, at the approximate speed of twenty nine and four-tenths meters per second, Nodachi hit the concrete of the sidewalk.

There was a moment in which passing pedestrians did nothing, attempting to reconcile to the fact that yes, a relatively young person had fallen more than forty two meters off of the building.

Then there was panic.

A moment later Nodachi curled up, snoring loudly, the only sign of his fall two of his arm hairs floating away on the wind.

The pandemonium paused, making sure he was actually alive. Upon confirmation of the fact, the pandemonium resumed, though now for different reasons.

And above, the shrieking of two females who have just found their collective wardrobe filleted continued.

The world was mad, Shuriken had decided.

Of course, if the world wasn't mostly crazy it probably wouldn't have survived very long. Death was, after all, something completely mad. Without death, the world would have turned into some sort of orgy of frenzied breeding. The mere prospect of a world where she couldn't kill anything turned the nerves in her back numb with terror.

Immortality was a nice idea and all, but much like Hong Kong, it was a nice place to visit, not live.

She had her immortality already, and was quite frankly becoming annoyed with it. Who could be interested in that kind of ultimate sanity?

Certainly not her.

She looked down at the commotion of the physical education class from her perch on the roof of the school.

'Dachi hadn't been to school in a few days. For that she would hurt him, when she finally found him. The Ancient One had mentioned something about Nerv dunderheads taking him away, lead by that triple-ish agent. And something about a shotgun.

It was time for Nodachi to get over that strangest of phobias of his. One day soon she was going to shoot him with one a few times.

"Hey!"

She turned slowly, rolling against the rusting rail in a distinctly feline manner. Shigeru and Peter, she thought their names were. The one with the camera, which was trained at the pool where the girls were swimming at the moment—she wasn't certain this was conscious—and recording, had spoken.

Shuriken regarded him with the same sort of curiosity she looked at the Irish with. When they were drunk, at least.

Of course, there had been that most entertaining of priests, almost as fanatical sober as the Ancient One himself. What was his name? Heinkel or something, wasn't it?

The boy in glasses looked far less certain of himself now that he had caught her attention. His eyes kept flicking to her face for short instants, and then away. Most mysterious, she thought. Close on the heels of that came 'gutless salmon.'

The other one, in the tracksuit—stupid choice of clothes, far too much loose material, she could have killed him with just that—looked faintly ill. Too, he kept glancing at the corner of the rooftop, then away as fast as possible. Strange indeed.

"Ja?"

He looked confused. No, she disagreed quickly, just uncomprehending. In a sort of "What the fuck just happened, mate?" sort of way.

Shuriken waited patiently. Which meant that she was only beginning to twitch violently and reach for her mostly concealed weapons.

He started to stutter rampantly, which under Shuriken's curious gaze rapidly degenerated into mindless rambling.

Sometime between his speculation on why people couldn't trust eggplants—Purple! How are people supposed to trust purple plants?—and his muttering about people who had sex with dolphins, Shuriken stopped listening.

Track-suit boy Peter looked vaguely disturbed, she thought with no great amount of interest.

"And you are here why?" She interrupted several minutes later.

Shigeru-camera-boy stopped babbling. He looked rather confused. "Here?"

Peter answered for him. "Are you really the Shuriken?"

Her eyes went wide, and she whipped the loops of wire out of the lining in her sleeves, draping them around the boy's necks in a distinctly less than smooth motion.

"How," she asked, voice creaking oddly, "do you know that name?"

"Kensuke," she heard Shigeru, "hacked into the JSSDF computers," Shigeru waved frantically, trying both to get free of the loop around his neck and stop his companion from giving the girl more cause to tighten the wire his companion apparently hadn't noticed, "and ran across this super-classified thing called Havok, and found pictures of you and Ikari in it."

Shuriken thought, not particularly long or hard, before deciding that it really didn't matter to her, but if the Ancient One found out that she had let someone who had managed to hack the Japanese Strategic Self Defense Force's mainframe, he wouldn't let her hurt anyone for weeks again. At the thought a mournful tear trickled down her cheek, remembering how Nodachi had come back drenched in so much wonderful blood just to annoy her.

She tightened the loops, and in short order the boys passed out.

Then she started to drag them back to the Ancient One.

Who was, at about that time, dragging the somewhat less than aware Nodachi to the apartment, whilst ignoring the enraged shouts of the less-than-clothed women.

Nodachi snored.

Shuriken stared.

Then she started laughing. Nodachi. Snoring. It… wasn't something that happened. Nodachi didn't snore. Snoring was reserved for other people. People who… were not Nodachi. Nodachi was a freak, such was true. But Nodachi didn't snore.

He stopped snoring, and the world was right again. As right as it ever was, at least.

Shuriken proceeded to pounce upon the boy, blowing the wind out of his lungs and waking him up rudely.

"You snored!"

'Dachi sputtered. Then he hacked. Then he grabbed Shuri's hair and slammed her head into his.

There was a strange crack as their unnaturally thick skulls met with an impact of the approximate force of two Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles meeting in midair, though the results were markedly different. Instead of the more traditional explosion, there was a puff of blue dust as some of the gel Shuriken liberally pasted into her eyebrows was shaken loose.

The dust proceeded to blow into Shinji's eyes, where it turned his corneas a strange shade of indigo.

He yelped as it stung angrily, not unlike a swarm of ired insects. Within the strangely unfocused world that was all Shuriken could see, she missed the fist that struck the side of her skull.

She rolled off the bed, head hanging strangely at an angle.

Nodachi kicked her.

She twitched.

He kicked her again, and she twitched more violently.

He sniggered pleasantly, and proceeded to kick her more.

Not even God knew how long he would have proceeded to continue, had there not been a groan of faint surprise. He looked at the source curiously, snaking his head around the corner of the door to see the two captives.

He cackled madly as he turned back to Shuriken.

"Makoto and Sam, aren't they?"

End Chapter

Pat's Kensuke and Touji on the head.

"Don't worry. Someone knows your names. Somewhere."