Disclaimer sung to the tune of "Row, row, row your Boat":

No, no, we don't own
Any anime
Don't sue us, don't sue us, don't sue us, don't sue us
Or we'll run away
Stanky SI Part 11! Or,
"Why ME, oh Lord? Why ME?" said the reader

A week later, things had cleared up to an extent. Both authors' wounds had finally healed, and life had settled into a comfortable routine. Shinji had single-handedly taken care of yet another Angel attack… without his Eva. He had gnawed it to death. Shinji had been in a really, really, bad mood, said Ritsuko.

One day in class, Worldmage finally decided to talk to The Dane about one of the many things that were bothering him. He opened their private chat channel.

/You know, we're in this class as student teachers/ he typed.

/So/ This was The Dane's standard response to his friend's troubles.

/So, I'm worried still about being asked to teach. The old coot doesn't seem to know what a curriculum is, so how can we present any material without boring the class, getting a bad report, or both/

/Does it matter whether we get any teacher certificates or not? It seems like either we go home, or the Third Impact destroys all existence as we know it./

/You have a point. But I'd rather be an optimist and assume that we get home safely, and a teacher's certificate could really help. Especially if I visit Japan and need a day job./

/You know that the date on the paper would be fourteen years in the future, right? Man, just have fun. Get some students sloshed, then make fun of them. That's what I did./

/You did WHAT/

/I got Shin-boy drunk during lunch break. Since the Ritsuko experiment backfired on me other than distracting her from Dennis, I wanted to have some fun. Shinji's always a good chump, so I got him completely smashed with the help of my magic bag. Then I introduced him to the fanfiction database you accessed to help us try to navigate our interactions with Gendo and the other NERV employees. Last I checked, he was daydreaming and reading WAFF./

Worldmage was about to type a scathing response when Shinji spoke up from his desk. Although the sensei did not cease to lecture the window, the rest of the class turned to stare.

"Hey, listen to this lemon-flavored me x Asuka WAFF I found online," Shinji mumbled happily. " If only real life was like this: 'The moon light shone on Asuka's porcelain white skin and reflected off of the her sweat. Witch Shinji licked off of her, he like her taste so much. She—'"

He looked up. Even in his disoriented state, Shinji was capable of noticing the deadly silence coming from most of the class, the ominous growling from Asuka's desk, and the pitiful whimpering from Worldmage's.

"It's so BAD," the neurotic author moaned. "Oh God, save me from the bad writing! Her skin's not white, they made spelling errors and grammatical errors, and…"

He was ignored. Everybody, even the teacher by now, was watching with dread as Asuka slowly stood. With painfully deliberate actions, she shut down her (shiny new) laptop and closed the lid. She stalked over to Shinji. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him for a moment of awful silence, while he stared back up in drunken terror.

One hand lashed out and caught him by the collar. The hapless Unit-01 pilot was hauled bodily into the air by his shirtfront. Asuka held his face about a centimeter from hers, and fixed his eye with a steely glare that would have frightened Angels away.

"That does it," she snarled. "I can't take all this goddamn sexual innuendo anymore, and I figure if you're taken care of, then EVERYBODY" —here she glared at Touji, Kensuke, and The Dane in turn— "will shut the hell up."

She dragged Shinji out of his desk into the aisle. "You and me; we're going outside. And we're going to have a few words. And then you'll sober up, because even a wimp like you deserves a fighting chance. And then we're going to have hot animal sex 'like they do on the Discovery Channel.' And if you don't give me as many orgasms as I want, I'll kick your teeth in. AM I UNDERSTOOD?"

Shinji nodded dumbly. With an exasperated snort, Asuka threw him over her shoulder and stalked out of the room, down the hallway, and out of sight.

Nobody moved or spoke, or even dared to breathe loudly, for seven minutes. Then the stillness was finally broken by the soft thud of sensei's body as it hit the floor.

He had apparently taken advantage of the silence to fall asleep.

The Dane turned to Worldmage. "Can I—"

"No." The American stared stonily at his laptop screen.

"Why not?"

"Because this is NOT a lemon. Our rating is high enough because of all the violence and stuff, not to mention your atrocious language."

"So why the fuck not just go a little further?"

"See? That's just what I'm talking about." Worldmage turned angrily to The Dane. "Do you realize, if somebody actually reads or watches this godforsaken fic or manga or anime or whatever it is, then we might get suggestions from the audience about how to get out? So we don't want to scare away any audience members, or make them ashamed of responding. You know what percent of readers bothers to review lemons. Two percent, statistically. Approximately. For us, that would be less than one reader!"

"Fuck off. You're trying to spoil my fun."

It was at this point that Hikari beat them both into bloody pulps with the help of Touji, the element of surprise, and a very large mallet. Thomas would have become upset, had he been there to see.

---

However, Thomas was busy confronting Ritsuko in the bowels of NERV. He had teamed up with Kaji and Misato, and together they were forcing Project E's head scientist to explain some of the organization's shadier secrets. Rei was there too, for reasons nobody fully understood. But she was quiet, so they ignored her. Even though she was once again naked.

"All right, Akagi," Thomas snapped, "what's with all this shit?"

"I think it ought to be obvious," she replied testily. "These are the bowels of NERV. What do you think is supposed to be in bowels, hmm?"

There was a pained silence.

Kaji finally broke the tension with a slightly embarrassed chuckle. "Right. I think what our colleague-in-exile meant was, 'what secrets are you trying to keep from us?' We have evidence that at night, you've been doing strange things involving Tetsuo-kun's kneecaps."

"Yeah," added Misato. "For a while, I thought that you were getting some action without telling me. As it turns out, when you come on to that Dane, he turns away and blows stuff up, but…." She trailed off as the other four turned to stare at her.

"That was so wrong, I'm not even going to make a lewd comment about it," muttered Kaji. He turned back to Ritsuko. "So, tell us what you're doing."

"What were we talking about?"

"Project KNEE. We want to know about Project KNEE."

"Fine." With a defeated sigh, the scientist turned and led the others up into the spleen of NERV. Instead of riding one of the building's usual sliding-clicker elevators, they took the stairs. Finally, she led them into small, round room with a large tube of reinforced glass from floor to ceiling. The room was dark except for an eerie red glow that didn't quite illuminate anything.

"Excuse me." Kaji pulled the red construction paper off of the light fixtures, which brightened the room considerably. Ritsuko blinked in the sudden relative brilliance.

"Whoa," she remarked. "I knew I forgot some part of the cleanup after our last Halloween party. Thanks." Then she pushed a button on a remote control in her pocket. Slowly, a giant tank filled with swirling amber liquid sank down from the ceiling. Rei watched impassively; the three adults stared with a mixture of horror and fascination.

"My God, woman," muttered Thomas. "This is hideous."

Kaji disagreed. "I don't know, I think it's kind of kinky. Kind of puts me in the mood, you know? Maybe I can get it on with both Ritsuko and Misato; that'd be cool."

Misato was too busy being shocked to slap him. "What— what is this?" she gasped.

"You all know," said Ritsuko, "about the bowels of NERV. You also know about Rei, who is its secret heart. This is the spleen of NERV, and the key to the future of our funding."

"This is the Shameless Plug System."

The entire tank was full of living, disembodied kneecaps.

"Shameless Plug?" asked Misato, staring.

"Yes. We have discovered that the bodies of fanfic authors, especially sarcastic ones who like to MST, are infused even on a genetic level with the need to advertise something, anything. If they like a product or a fic, they'll tend to mention it in their own writing and urge others to partake as well. Lacking that, they'll go to great lengths to advertise themselves. I grew these kneecaps from The Dane's material, and that yellow liquid is ramen-soup broth I synthesized and distilled from Worldmage's bloodstream. This," she indicated the glass tube, "is part of a gigantic, three-story bong that we use to keep the kneecaps sedated; at some future time we will unleash them upon the world to bring in the funding we need to maintain the Geofront."

Rei interrupted. "Too much exposition. This is supposed to be a humor-fic, which requires fast-moving dialogue and plotlines."

Misato shifted her stare from the tube to Rei without missing a beat, or even blinking. Ritsuko explained. "She's a bit jealous. Her big thing is the Dummy Plug system, which is designed to make Shinji feel like a 'baka.' She becomes very upset when the spotlight is on any of my other projects."

Thomas broke into the conversation again, glaring suspiciously at the scientist. "I don't believe that that's all you use that… glass thing for. It just doesn't make sense."

"Well…" Ritsuko fidgeted.

Suddenly, Gendo's slurred voice wafted up from the floor below the spot penetrated by the tube. "Riiiiiii-tchaaaaan…." He was clearly not his usual self.

"Shit," muttered the scientist. She turned and made for the door.

The voice continued. "Oh, Ritsu, do you still have the rest of the stuff you raided from Tetsuo's stash? Fusu— Fuyutsku— Fuusuki— Kozo wants another head loaded into the booo-ooong… and I want some head too—can you help me?" There was the sound of poorly suppressed snickering.

"Excuse me," snapped Ritsuko to the others. "I feel the need to go bite something." She hurried out of the room and down the stairs.

Kaji clutched his stomach. "I think I'm going to throw up." He grabbed Misato. "Not that I'm not still horny," he said slyly, and together they moved off into a dark corner and became intimate—for a brief moment, until she socked him in the gut and stormed out of the room.

"Honestly, men are such perverts," she huffed.

Thomas shook his head violently. It killed 9,873,452 brain cells, but he felt a lot better after doing it. Then he left the Geofront as quickly as possible.

Rei went downstairs, to discover that Ritsuko had given in to one of Gendo's evil demands. With nothing better to do, everybody's favorite clone pulled out a pad of paper and a pencil (from Ritsuko's lab coat, of course) and took notes, with an occasional speculative glance at the bong.

---

When Thomas got home, he found his two charges slumped over the kitchen table. Worldmage was discussing irrelevant things very seriously, and The Dane was drinking. Beer. Heavily. Even for him, he was drinking a lot.

Worldmage was griping as usual. "I don't like this. We have our magic and other powers operating at full capacity despite this being a magic-poor world, and we even have new powers due to the effects of living in an anime-universe. On the other hand, our author powers still aren't working. Stuff is getting weird. My sense of humor is less effective. As if I had one to begin with. I no longer like the taste of beef. Now my sentences are short. Like this one. Too short. Damn."

"I don't see what that has to do with anything."

"Don't you understand? This is the NGE universe! When stuff gets all weird and secrets are revealed, that means it's close to the end! People are going to die or be severely mangled or at least turn into goo! And then we have Third Impact to deal with!"

Thomas spoke up. "What is that?"

Worldmage jumped, turned, and stared at the Danish protector. "Well," he said at last, "it used to just be the end of the world as we know it, and I felt fine about that. But now, due to an unfortunate coincidence of synchronicity—"

"Meaning it's all his fault," translated The Dane to Thomas.

"—As I was saying, due to a sad mishap, 3I looks like it will destroy all possible worlds of anime, fiction, and reality itself. A dimensional-nexus transfluctuationary rift will tear apart the fabric of all worlds in a cataclysmic, uh, a cataclysmic… thing. Bugger all."

"A cataclysmic buggerall?"

"No! I can't think of an appropriate word for it to be a cataclysmic example of."

Worldmage pulled out a thesaurus. The Norsemen shrugged and turned away. Thomas asked The Dane, "Does this have something to do with NERV's 'Project E?' Can you give me the details on that?"

"Yes and no. There's a lot of debate, and if I say something definitively, part of our readership may become upset."

Thomas blinked in complete and utter confusion. The Dane continued. "And furthermore, I'm too piss-drunk to care. I'm going to go get a big drink of water so I'm not hung over tomorrow, and then I'm going to sleep."

"But it's only seventeen-hundred hours!"

"I ate already." The Dane left.

Thomas turned back to Worldmage, but he was scribbling in a small notebook, mumbling to himself. "'A cataclysmic Armageddon'—no, an apocalypse—'of destruction'? 'A veritable Ragnarok of ultimate annihilation'? No…"

Maya knocked timidly at the door, then slipped off her shoes and tiptoed inside. "Um, excuse me," she asked Thomas. "Kaji said that there was going to be an orgy here with him, Misato, and my sempai. Do you know what room it's in?"

She was very startled when he dove out the window and fled, yelling about "stupid Americans and crazy Japanese." She leaned out, and smiled as she watched him run. "He's a very shy boy," she murmured, "but he's got a cute butt. Maybe we should invite him to join in next time."

Later that evening, when the rest of the household (which at the moment consisted of Shinji, Asuka and Dennis, plus the dozen-odd cats that remained) were eating dinner, Thomas returned and asked why The Dane had been in such a strange mood. Asuka explained.

"He opened the closet door," she said. Then she grinned at Shinji, who flashed a weak smile and passed out onto the table.

"OK…" Thomas considered this for a moment, then, "forget I asked."

Dennis suddenly stood up. "I'm bored," he announced. "Do you mind if I stir up some trouble?"

Asuka pulled out a walnut and crushed it in her fist. "Not at all, as long as the trouble doesn't inconvenience me." She smiled sweetly, finished dinner, and left the room with Shinji in tow.

Dennis wiped some sweat from his brow and turned to Thomas. He smiled, and suddenly his mouth was full of too many teeth, each six inches long and wickedly pointed. His horns grew out, blood-red and gnarled, and his eyes glowed like unearthly black-light light-bulbs—the kind that have just been shoved into eye sockets so that they look like they're looking at you. He hissed, "so, mortal, what would you do if I told you that I was heir to a Demon-Lord's power?" Shifting mists suddenly darkened the room; flames licked at the edge of reality.

Thomas considered again. "I think I'd kill you simultaneously in three or four gruesome yet quiet and efficient ways," he said. And so he did.

—

In the den, Worldmage sat bolt upright. "What the HELL was that?"

He rushed into the hall to meet The Dane, who had burst out of his room in a suddenly sober state. "Did you feel that?" he asked.

"Yes," said the sorcerer grimly. "Tremendous power was unleashed: first in fun, then in anger, and finally in death. My books say that it was coming from the dining room."

Worldmage stopped. "Your books chat and tell you stuff? Bloody useful."

The Dane shrugged modestly. "Yeah, they're cool." They paused for a beat, then hurried to the dining room. However, they only thing left to do was cleanup. Of the after-dinner dishes, that is. Thomas had proved to be a very tidy killer.

—

Deep underground, Gendo sat bolt upright at the same time as Worldmage did. "What the HELL was that?" he snapped.

"Mmfh," said Ritsuko. Fuyutsuki looked up dizzily from the floor where he was lying, and snickered loudly.

"It looks like she—" he started.

"No, that's not what I meant," said Gendo quickly, regaining his usual calm. He pushed Ritsuko out of his way and stood up, straightening and doing up his uniform with short, sharp motions. "I don't like this."

I bet you don't like it, said a deep and hideous voice. I'm going to make sure that you don't like it at all, forever and ever, unless you give me my son back. And I KNOW that you have my son here in this forsaken snot-hole of a world. I heard him calling out to me.

Gendo turned to look up at Fuggyu, the demon-lord of the Sixth Abyss, as that dread and terrible being materialized out of the darkness of the gall bladder of NERV. He frowned and looked at Fuyutsuki. "This was not part of the schedule," he said.

Meanwhile, back in the dining room, the authors were conferring over Dennis' remains, which Thomas had packed into one of those little Chinese food take-out boxes.

"Not good." That was Worldmage.

"Nope." And that was the Dane, factually.

"Bad, in fact."

"Yup."

"You summoned him. And it was your protector who did this to him. So, YOU can talk to the damn demon-lord when he gets pulled here by the force of that shockwave."

The Dane was indignant. "Hey, I called upon the demon in the first place to try to get us home, which was more than you've done. And you were thankful for Thomas' protection, if I recall. And furthermore, how can you be against Dennis getting killed? I thought you hated him!"

"Well, yeah. Dammit, if I had known this would happen, I would have killed the freak myself and at least had the pleasure of it. But, um…I really didn't want to tell you this, but…." Worldmage fidgeted. "It's a kind of long story. Shall we sit down?"

"Fine." The Dane sat and folded his arms. Thomas leaned against the wall and folded his as well. Worldmage pulled out a bowl of ramen and cup of tea, and arranged himself in a storytelling posture. He looked like a geek. The truth is, though, he was really a nerd.

"It all began nearly five thousand years ago," he said. "I was a shepherd, and a goat-herd, and a tent-maker in my spare time. One day… I'm not sure exactly when, but I suppose it doesn't matter… I met a wise man of the clan of Aiammah-mentat, who—"

"Skip it and get to the relevant stuff."

"Right…. later I discovered, quite by accident, that doing certain things with a black stone, a piece of copper, and some lamb's blood would summon minor spirits to me. I hadn't read Faust yet at that point. At any rate, I knew enough to bind these spirits in magic circles, and made them teach me more magic in return for their freedom. It was the added help of these outside sources, and my natural enjoyment of things that would bore most people unto death, that led me through Applied Kabbalah with relative ease.

"It wasn't long—only a couple millennia—before I was entering the worlds I had written and discovering the use of author powers and world-specific powers; the former are innate control over something you had a hand in creating, and the latter are the 'laws of physics' of a given world—such as our ability to sweat-drop and SD here."

"And pull ramen out of Hammerspace. I know; I know. Tell me something new."

"Hang on. At any rate, I visited Voron's Sub-Normal realm—"

"Wh—"

"Don't ask. I made the mistake of looking into one of the closets there, and to make a long story short I ended up arousing the wrath of Fuggyu, demon-lord of the Sixth Abyss, by accidentally slaying his brother. Well, not so much 'slaying' as simply causing his death. But to demons, it was the same thing, so his entire extended family tried to kill me. I tried to get away with my life, with some success. After our encounter, he had one son left: the only one too young to send after my blood. Incidentally, that son was named Densen. Also known as Dennis. Furthermore, I somehow managed to banish Fuggyu from the Earth for ten thousand years, and had to do some damage to his holdings in the sixth abyss while esc— leaving. He wants me very, very dead. And he doesn't care who gets in his way."

"So what you're saying is that I almost summoned the one demon-lord you've managed to piss off? Talk about lucky he was away!"

Worldmage put his head in his hands. "He's not the only one angry with me. He's just the one in particular who put those three women on my tail, and had lesser demons possess pan-handlers, and sent that swarm of very angry ferrets after me. He's far stronger than I, so I ran to you for help because as a sorcerer, you ought to know how to handle that stuff."

"I'm good," admitted The Dane. "But a demon-lord is a challenge even for me. And he's here in this world, now that Dennis is dead. Shit. And Gendo's got us right where he wants us, and Third Impact could annihilate all of existence, and we're stuck in a fic, and I haven't scored yet."

"Right."

"So it's time for the big gunfight at the OK Geofront?"

"Close. First, we'll gather all the allies and help we can. Next, you research the extent of our powers that we gain by being magic-users in an anime world, and I'll look for our author powers. If either of us gets into trouble we can't handle on our own—"

"In other words, if you try to walk and chew gum at the same time—"

"—then he calls the other one and heads for the Geofront. That will offer some protection because the Eva units and Gendo will naturally defend it from any threats that would hurt NERV. I estimate that everything will go down about three chapters from now, give or take one."

"Let's hope that parts twelve and thirteen are long ones, then. I want some action; you've been hogging the text with all this dialogue and monologue stuff. And damn it, you turned the action serious again. How am I supposed to co-write a humor-fic with you if you screw it up all the time?" The Dane frowned at Worldmage, who shrugged apologetically and sweat-dropped.

"Sorry."

"Don't you go all Shinji on me, Juboi. Next time you anger a demon-lord and fuck up a spell and lose our author-powers and stick us in a fic that can't even decide what format to use, and where I can't get laid even once by a cute anime girl, do NOT come running to me for help, because it ain't gonna happen!"

"Nice long sentence there."

"It could have been longer."

They stood up and left the room. Thomas was still leaning against the wall. He would stay there for most of the night, trying to figure out what the hell they had been talking about. But he fell asleep before he could, and was consequently in a very bad mood the next morning.

Meanwhile, the pilots' school teacher was sitting in his two-mat study room in the suburbs of Tokyo-3. He pulled a single sheet of white paper out of his briefcase and studied it sadly.

At the top of the page was printed the word CURRICULUM. In the middle of the otherwise blank page, there was one typewritten sentence. Every day, the teacher read this sentence to himself, trying to find something that would give meaning to his existence. As usual, he failed.

It said:

TALK TO WINDOW ABOUT SECOND IMPACT UNTIL STUDENTS FALL ASLEEP

The teacher sighed. "I hate my job."

—

Authors' Notes: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAHAHAHAH! HA! HA! Heh… oy…