Shinigami chuckled as he leaned back on the couch of his new apartment, two doors down from the Major who had gotten stuck into showing him around the base after his arrival.

His encounter with his father ended up as a joke, in full gear there was no way in hell anyone outside of the project would know who he was. Though it was fun to mess with the bearded bastards head a bit.

The conversation with Mitchel was enlightening, and had the nice touch of promoting him and giving him a lot more authority than he'd thought he'd end up with. Hell, with the exception of Janus, the other two pilots were better organized and had better training than he did. Of the four he was considered to be the geek after he graduated over and over with more degrees than anyone he knew of that was anywhere near his age. Most of that, of course, was because of Alexander Lucas who had taught him darn near everything he knew in the various science fields the man had dabbled in over his life. A fourteen year old with five bachelors degrees in various sciences and he'd only had to go the the actual college a handfull of times to get things required for the courses he didn't get out of with tests.

Of course, Michael had a few degrees as well, though most of those were given mainly as a way to keep the maniac away from anything even semi-dangerous. Though his english degree was intriguing, but his hobby of writing partially covered that. And as for the novels, anything that could send a group of Rangers running for the toilets was not something he really wanted to read in the first place.

His mind turned to the twins, the ones who would be partnered with Gabriel and Raphael, military brats to the core. Their parents were a pair of retired special forces commandos from the Deltas. A pair that gave agressive and tenacious a new meaning as they plowed head first through any challenge thrown at them. Andrea and Segei were people who had been military bound all their lives, Andrea being the silent, stealthy sniper with a tendancy to seem to vanish into thin air, and Sergei having the tendancy to cause an explosive reaction with traps and bombs and the capability to hack into pretty much any system he got his hands anywhere near. And the Pentagon hadn't noticed until Mitchel caught him physically pulling it off. Though both of them could cause a serious amount of damage with handguns, a very scary trait when it always felt that neither of them ever missed a target in the entire time he'd known the two.

It was kind of funny how the four horsemen were the closest group of unusual people most people had thought of in Vegas, where they all "officially" lived. Of course, living in Area 51 was unusual to say the least.

But then there was the darkside of the memories, a friend from when he was younger, one of the people involved with several of the projects at the base, a man who was, in fact, the cousin of Andrea and Sergei, had been changed by one of the tests and had gone insane.

A grimace crossed his features as he leaned back in his chair even farther, while memories of the first awakening of Azrael, and the nightmarish fires of destruction that signified the first fight he'd ever ended up in, and the first time he'd taken a human life.

It was something that had forever been burned into his mind as the lost biomechanoid had gone on a rampage before him as he was looking at the partially reconstructed one that the man he considered to be a real father to him had worked on and climbed in.

The activation was painful in his head as the modified salvage began to regenerate as the enitiy came online for the first time, the interlink AI becomming aware of itself as his latent empathic gifts had been forcibly awakened.

No, it was better not to focus on that time and instead focus on what was still to come.

He sniffed the air as something reached his nose and he darted for the kitchen, "Damn it!

And for the only god knows what number of times, he wondered how it was possible to have that many degrees and still be able to screw up cooking anything more complex than toast, and even then it normally came out in a state that was barely suitable for human consumption.

A dark figure smiled in the rain as he watched the facility before him.

It hadn't been hard for him to find them, the changes to himself since the incident were to great for him not to sense the one inside.

He knew it was not yet time to interfere, but he could watch and plan, the so called Angels made him laugh, they were not angels, but most of them were the last of something else that had the blood of Angels, and then there were two souls whos destinies had yet to be decided at this stage of the game with access to some of the same powers.

Yes, the time was not yet the right one to act, but if he was to have any hope of the redemption he so desired, the time was comming soon.

Azrael was slightly confused, and had been since his battle with the Angel. After the battle, he'd been getting an odd echo within his systems, almost like that of another presence.

The resonance of his self-diagnostic systems felt odd as well, and the presence also had an odd human feel close to that of Shinji.

His attention was temporarily diverted to the launch bay he was situated in to assure that the noise he'd just heard was not the nosy one in the lab coat.

Gendo was getting annoyed with SEELE, they were making this all out to be his own fault. It wasn't like he had any idea that the US Military had somehow built their own EVA units, and ones that seemed to out do anything they had for themselves. Hell, from what he did see, their tech outclassed what anyone should have been capable of pulling off.

And from what he'd heard that went even more out the box when he had discovered that the damn thing ran off of a Zero Point Generator of some sort that worked as a combination power plant and generator.

The whole thing seemed to be to much, and the General responsible had given it to much, but that could be his natural paranoia coming through.

And with the death of his own shortlived plans for instrumentality, well, he was still hoping that he could find a way to get Yui back.

Another thought crossed his mind with an evil grin, he could use Rei to get some of the answers about this Shinigami.

Review Responses

Innortal: Thanks, I'm trying to keep going with this, but I'm trying to untangle the web of plots I have ideas for that intertwine later on that I hope make this more interesting. And I am trying to write more of it, my mind just keeps on jumping to parts of the plot I can't put in at this point of it because the background that will support them doesn't yet exist. Like I keep getting ideas about involving War in the Highschool Shinji and them go to in the series (Shinji isn't a student in this one, he's way past HS stuff at the moment and will have more problems when War (and eventually the other two) make it to Tokyo-3.

sleepy kitty: From what I remembered War rode on a white horse, but his personal symbol will be two crossed swords with the unit patch above it like shinji's is above a pair of scythes. Plague has a helix in the position, and not sure about Famine. But according to my research, the 4 Horsemen have other things connected to them, in medieval and prior times, War would often cause Famine as the armies ate pretty much everything which brought plague with all the bodies, and then a lot of deaths...

pyramidgirl89: Yeah, that is part of the reason why it is funny, later on it ought to be a good laugh at Gendos expense when he realizes just who Shinigami is.

Yo: Here is some more of this one

Firehedgehog: Not sure if that laugh is a good one or a bad one, but I'll assume it's a good one for the moment.

AN: Yep, here is the next section of this, a bit more building on storylines to set things up, I'm planning on the next chapter actually getting to the next angel battle. And yes, this Shinji is an awful cook...