Impressions
Shinji's mag-lev train never arrived in Station. It would take weeks of careful manipulation to cover up its disappearance, and the disappearance of those fifty-nine people aboard it, but it would be done.
Far better that the train be swallowed up in a secret by-lane before arriving. The things still aboard it would have delighted in slaughtering everyone on the loading docks, running amok for hours before at last being gunned down. They had come by certain means that Shinji now denied them. The shoggoth that had flowed in the darkness with such speed had returned to the void, its body pumped full of white phosphorus that smoldered in its collapsed, bag-like corpse.
The Deep Ones now barked at each other and ate at the human corpses in the first two segments. In their limited, bestial understanding, they knew that the train would eventually reach a destination, one where there was more food.
In fact, when the train did stop, it arrived at the Under Station, a secret NERV staging area that, among other things, had excellent containment facilities.
When the train halted, the guns started speaking. Shinji decided it best to stay where he was. When the door to segment four was cut open and a man wearing a complicated mask emerged from the dust and gun-smoke, the young man simply let his gun fall from limp fingers, and bracingly rose.
"Are you Shinji Ikari?" The man spoke in rehearsed Nipponese.
Shinji nodded.
-
The Under Station was immense, easily a fourth as large as some of the smaller shelters. The man that had addressed Shinji earlier was steering him by shoulder away from the other three train segments, where maimed bacchanalian (that's frog-like) creatures were being caged. At the sight of that, Shinji stopped. More memories of the fall of the First Shelter flooded his mind. These creatures, they had sung and danced and played their arcane instruments in celebration. Here they were scattered across the cold metal landing, bleeding and incomplete.
Shinji shrugged off the man's guiding hand and, before anyone could stop him, was on top of one of the so-called Deep Ones, smashing its clawed hands beneath his heels, breaking its jagged maw apart with a club he suddenly found in his hand. The frog-thing screamed a toneless note that was really more of a bark, and was silenced as Shinji's doughy human hands slammed into and ruptured both of its eyes.
The creature, crippled from the waist down before this attack, slumped down against the floor, clearly dead. Shinji let the club drop to the ground and turned, not wanting to see the other living Deep Ones, not wanting to feel that dark temptation again.
"Where is my father?" He asked.
-
Misato Katsuragi was not having a good day. The Second Child not making landfall on schedule, and now this mess with the Third. Things were not coming together nicely - could the Enemy be aware of NERV's plans?
The Lieutenant surveyed the scene from a balcony overlooking the Under Station, and saw that, at least here, all was good. It filled her with glowing satisfaction to see them crippled and broken. She wished it were her place to suggest the tortures that were called "psychological tests" on paper, which these loathsome sub-human shits would be subjected to.
A man in containment gear approached and saluted. "Preliminary de-contamination procedure completed. Request permission to attempt evacuation of Third Child?" Misato nodded, and returned the salute. Many people here were honestly happy to see the Children. They knew how important they were, what their role in the future would hopefully be. Amongst the scene of slaughter, with the hope for tomorrow filling her, Misato almost teared up. Almost. It was still a real shitty day.
On the platform the soldier that had addressed her was opening the last segment. Damage to it appeared superficial. They had found that corpse of a shoggoth in the luggage segment, beneath the ventilation duct that connected to the last segment. It was altogether reasonable that everyone in the fourth segment had fought the star-spawn off without incident.
A boy emerged from the last segment, apparently oblivious to the soldier that had come to retrieve him. His white button up shirt was splashed with blood, his pants likewise darkened. The details of his face were indiscernible from Misato's position. The soldier was guiding him… and then the young man grabbed the soldier's tazer-prod and full-body tackled a Deep One.
Every goddamn person in the room stopped what they were doing, except those trying to persuade the monsters into cages. Even the ever-present hum of the air circulation system seemed muted as the young man beat the monster, the wet thump of fists and that bone to metal crunch filling the spacious area. The young man was oddly quiet the whole time, in contrast to the creature, that was making all kinds of wet sounds.
The young man finished it, and killed the Deep One with his bare hands. He stood and turned, palm to arm blackened with gore, and asked the soldier a quiet question.
In addition to her duties as Lieutenant of NERV, Katsuragi was the primary liaison to the Children, knowing Nipponese, Teutonic and English. The language barrier was yet another problem they faced in the salvation of mankind. Honestly, she had been expecting children, people that needed protecting. But after watching the Third Child systematically destroy a creature more then capable of killing a full-grown man, all Misato could think was "Hardcore!"
The young man was pointed in her direction, and suddenly everything she had planned to say to him seemed small and condescending. Better to keep it short and get him to the Commander soon. Then she could ponder how to handle him.
Where is my father? The boy asked her in Nipponese.
He seemed tense and on the verge of exploding, but not with rage or anger. Something else lurked beneath his gray eyes, and suddenly Misato realized what he was asking for. Putting an arm around him, cautious of acting too motherly, she led him towards the sterilization area.
Misato thought she had seen a glimmer of tears in Shinji's eyes when he had spoken to her. Perhaps he was really still a child after all. At the sterile baths, she slowly instructed him on procedure, and then sent him through. Three minutes later she followed, stripping off all her clothes, dumping them in a blind slot, and then getting hit with a high-pressure spray from every direction at once. Business as usual.
Redressing in clothes that smelled heavily of alcohol, she found Shinji waiting for her in the hallway. Much pinker then he had been, now clothed in an engineer's jumpsuit, the young man looked much more alive, but still distinctly off. It was then that Misato noticed his hair, matted wet against his skull, had streaks of white running through it.
-
After the shower Shinji felt much cleaner. Almost refreshed. The jumpsuit fit him well, and he didn't smell like blood anymore. The focus of hate and rage had dissipated, the memories of the First Shelter receeding to some dark corner of his mind. He felt human again. He still wanted very much to see his father, but there were other things, at last.
This shelter, the little of it he had seen, was constructed oddly. Space was in no way economized, nor material. The hallway in which he stood could have easily handled three people abreast; the shelter he had been living in for the last three years could handle only one. From the train dock to the bath, he had covered enough ground to quarter three thousand people easily.
And he had never heard of the Arkham Shelter before the soldiers had come for him. Perhaps it was newly constructed.
His thoughts turned to the young Nipponese woman that had tried to comfort him. She was quite attractive. Seemed friendly. She had treated him like a child, but perhaps for a moment he had been. Shinji had just wanted to get away from those things, and she had provided him an escape. Doubtless she was the Misato Katsuragi mentioned in his short briefing.
He suddenly wondered at her in the shower, disrobed. Then the shadows edged into his mind, and the screams, and he turned his inner eye to more mundane things.
Shinji had just come as close to circumnavigating the globe as anyone in the last thirteen years. From Japan to China, beneath the barren expanse of what the soldier's called "the Middle East," to Spain and Britain, and finally New York. It seemed like an awful lot of resource and expense for just him.
His father had never contacted him after the Fall of the First Shelter. When mother had died, the man had sent a telegram and nothing else. It took Shinji a while to sort out his emotions towards his father, but the Fall had simplified things. If his father took issue with communicating, fine. But this couldn't be a way of apology. Shinji doubted his father had any desire to see him, and could understand why, in a limited way.
These days people could be executed by squandering resources. Only if his father were god himself would he be able to send his son from one edge of human civilization to the other simply to see him. And from what Shinji understood Gendou Ikari was a very important man, but he was not god.
-
As Misato led Shinji to the trans-rail system, she haltingly asked him about the train ride. Was he okay? Did he need to talk to someone about it? The response was quite dark.
It was nothing I have not experienced before.
"You know what those things were?" She asked. "Your psychological report said you were amnesiac after the... the First Shelter incident."
That was true. But not anymore. I remember... a lot now. And at the last, Shinji's voice dropped an octave and seemed to grate, his non-specific answer petering out, like he just couldn't summon the will to talk about it further.
"The men in your car, how did they die?" A soft question with no good answer.
The black thing the… "Shoggoth", he had trouble with the word, but said it carefully, correctly. It came through the wall. The men did not use fire against it. When they were all dead I took a weapon and killed it myself.
And Misato stopped. Turned. "You killed a shoggoth," she lapsed into English. Repeated it in Nipponese.
The boy just nodded, damnably dismissive.
They dislike fire.
Misato's pocket chirruped. She took her eyes off Shinji and removed the phone. "Yes?"
"The Commander has been called into conference, Lieutenant." It was Ritsu, all business during business hours.
"I have his son right here. I'll take him to the bridge until the Commander can meet with him, okay?" Bad timing for a conference, Ikari.
Ritsuko was talking with someone else, then: "Fine. I'm sure the operators can keep him occupied. Try to get him to eat something though, the report I'm reading on the train isn't good. What is his condition?"
All sorts of fucked up, par for the course, Misato thought, but for simplicity's sake replied: "Seems fine. Okay, I'll be up in thirty." Snapping the slim phone shut, she turned to her charge.
"Hungry?"