Oh My God, It Has Returned! AIEEE! (by Zenithfleet)
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Chapter 14
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It was a grim day for the inner cadre of Seele. The thirteen black monoliths hovered in solemn silence. Unspoken thoughts of plans ruined, and plans now never to be born, filled the vast and empty room.
Finally SEELE 05 said accusingly, "It was all 02's fault."
It is worth noting at this point that a rather obscure yet surprisingly accurate definition of a living creature is that one will, when faced with a problem, immediately try to a) fight it, b) run away from it, c) have sex with it or d) all three at once. An INTELLIGENT creature, on the other hand, will of course also do these things, but only after e) finding someone to blame.
It is also worth noting that the empirical evidence provided by the existence of SEELE stretches this definition of an intelligent creature to several lightyears past breaking point.
"How dare you!" 02 screeched furiously. "You lousy long-haired larrikin layabout!"
"I know you are, but what am I?" taunted 05.
02 spluttered as he tried to come up with a more insulting alliteration.
"What are you jabbering about, 05, he just told you what you are," pointed out 07.
"Gentlemen, please," Keel interjected wearily. "No-one is to blame. Events simply did not occur as we had anticipated."
"Oh, no, we really wanted to have the red-headed hellcat do a number on the MISATO program," muttered 06.
"We did?" asked a surprised 07.
"06, please refrain from saying... er... what you said... in the presence of this council," Keel said.
"I mean, I'm sure Asuka wasn't supposed to be able to pilot Numero Uno..." mused 07.
"Eh? What did I say?" demanded 06. "Misato? I know just saying that name does disturbing things to 08, but..." His statement was promptly backed up by 08 himself, who by the sound of it was doing something X-rated with a balloon. Well, something inflatable, anyway.
"...and that business with the lesbian EVAs, I'm pretty sure 08 was only allowed to help with the programming if he promised not to fool around with that 'Sexual Preferences' neural synapse Ritsuko had deactivated, so..."
"No," Keel said awkwardly, "the... other one..."
"Lina Inverse Unpublished Quotes Time! Is That A World-Destroying Demon In Your Pocket Or Are You Just Glad To See Me?" 11 said gleefully, managing to derail several trains of thought and send them screaming into the metaphorical gully.
"Huh?" Keel asked as his personal psychic locomotive hurtled into a river and exploded. "Who the Sandalphon is Lina Reverse?"
"Oh... teenage girl, bad taste in clothes, bit of a self-styled magician," 03 explained. "You know, dragons out of hats, badly animated fireballs, can-disappear-things-but-can't-make-them-reappear, that sort of thing."
"...and Ritsuko only had that function left in because Maya was threatening to give her a big hug at the time..."
"07, do you even understand what irony means?" wondered 06, irritated.
"Yeah, but that's my wife's job," 07 replied cheerfully.
"Uh-huh," 06 said gloomily. "Thought so."
"She always puts steam creases in my shirts, anyway."
08 had stopped whatever citrus-fruit activity he was doing, and sounded now as if he had something on his mind. Of course, it wasn't hard to guess what. "So... this Lina girl... is she, by any chance, technically speaking... hot?"
"Well..." 03 seemed a bit embarrassed. "Um..."
"Well what?" 08 demanded impatiently. "Is she, or is she not, a babe? Does she light up your proverbial night?"
03 was uncharacteristically hesitant. "Erm, well, it's kind of delicate... ah..."
"What's wrong? Is she a freak or something? Is she lacking in young feline mammal attributes?" 08 wanted to know.
There was a pause while the others translated this terrible dubbing (and the author waited hopefully to see if anyone else actually got the joke).
Then 13 interjected helpfully, "Look, kiddo, it's like this. For starters, she actually has the indecency to go around fully clothed - "
"What, a fully clothed heroine? You're yanking my entry plug's plug chain," 08 said disbelievingly. "There's no such thing."
13 sighed. "Well, the problem is, see, she's got a small chest."
There was a horror-stricken silence.
"You mean... she's... realistically proportioned?" gasped 05 in shocked disbelief.
"Oh my God," murmured 06, "that's horrible. It's just so, so..." He was lost for words, and settled for "... ick."
"Let us remember her in our prayers," Keel said solemnly. "And now - "
"I vote we raise some money to buy her a new animator," 02 suggested. "This sort of obscenity just cannot be allowed."
"Poor girl must be living in hell," 07 commented sympathetically.
"...and if we can just - THERE'S THAT WORD AGAIN!" Keel thundered. "How many times do I have to tell you not to say the 'H' word!"
"Oh, that word," 06 said as the penny finally dropped (and 09 scrabbled around on the floor for it). "But why can't we say h - ?"
"HECK!" Keel yelled, aghast. "Say 'heck'! If you keep referring to that... that place, who knows what sort of fiendish demons you might summon!"
"But Keel," 06 pointed out reasonably, "all that Judeo-Christian mythology stuff is just for decoration, right? You don't really believe in h - "
"Heck," corrected Keel hurriedly.
"Right, um, heck... and demons and stuff, do you? You don't actually think they're real?"
"Well, no," Keel admitted.
"Marvel At The Stunning Lack Of Colour In Crystania's Opening Scene!" 11 rambled on happily.
"So, what's the problem?" 06 demanded.
"Well... I'm not sure THEY know they're not real," Keel muttered.
"Buggrit, I'll get me two trowels of old boots for this and no mistake, see if I don't," 09 said in satisfaction.
"Boots are nice," 11 commented agreeably. "Want a trombone?"
"So, anyway, what's the new plan?" 03 asked, always a little unsettled when Keel stopped shouting at people.
"The plan. Right." Keel seemed to pull himself together. "Right. The plan is simple."
"Oh, goody," 06 muttered.
"First," Keel continued determinedly, "we will send him to NERV HQ..."
As he explained his nefarious plot, the author suddenly realized that he'd better not give away everything, just on the off-chance someone happened to be actually reading this, and hurriedly cast around for something else to write about. Failing to come up with any particularly inspiring ideas, he reluctantly decided to focus on the soft-walls conversation currently occurring between 11 and 09.
"Mmm, buggrem trombones, gimme lotsandlotsa shrimp," 09 said gruffly.
11 digested this for a moment, then said brightly, "I knew a shrimp once. We went on the rollercoaster together."
"Sezoo? Damn millennial shrimp, buggrem all," 09 retorted.
"Pity he couldn't reach the safety bar," 11 went on, a little sadly. "I TOLD him not to go on the one with the triple loop, but would he listen?"
"Haha, buggrdat, Kaoru'll make mincemeat outa 'em."
The author blinked and then glared accusingly at 09.
"Er, buggrem, buggrit," 09 said hastily. "Sunbered, nutsbebrown, petticoatsup, trousersdown, buggrit."
With a narrow glance at the suspiciously nonchalant monolith, the author, hoping no-one had noticed, jumped back to the slightly more coherent conversation of the others.
"As for the Evangelions themselves, there are now sixty-four under construction," said 03.
"Good, that's - what?" said Keel.
03 managed to look embarrassed. "Well, yes, there were SUPPOSED to be nine, but the episode scriptwriters stuffed up and forgot one, and then the construction plans got stuck in the photocopier..."
"Oh, so THAT'S why you started that 'Help! The Future Of Mankind Needs Your Small Change!' charity fundraiser," commented 06. "Good budgeting, that man."
"Warning," said 11 in a rather robotic feminine voice, "incoming Totoro. Warning, incoming Totoro."
"Very well," said Keel, "meeting adjourned. And someone grab that penny off of 09 and stick it in the fundraising box. We need that sixty-first S2 unit."
"Warning, Totoro corrupted. Warning, Totoro gleek roar arrrgh squish toot," pronounced 11 gravely, and giggled.
"CENSORED", said 03.
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Chapter 15
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Rei awoke to nothingness. There was no light, no sound. The empty blackness was strangely peaceful. After a time, though, she thought she could hear a distant, discordant chiming. It grew in volume, disturbing the serenity of the darkness, until flickers of red light passed across her vision and she found herself sitting in an old-fashioned railway carriage, bathed in sombre tones of amber light. Rei did not think to question the oddity of her surroundings, it seemed natural that the train would exist and that she would be within it.
Directly opposite her, silhouetted beneath the dying blaze of the setting sun, was a small figure that looked strangely like a childish version of herself - the way she had once been, and yet had never been - a doll-faced reflection of her inner thoughts. It had a face that could only be described as angelic, although not by a person who'd spent any time at all in Tokyo-3 during the last few months. Rei wondered if this was some kind of manifestation of her inner goodness and purity.
"About bloody time you got here," the Chibi-Rei said, pleasantly.
Rei blinked.
"Had to rush, did you?" the sweetly smiling visage asked. "Forgot to get dressed, sort of thing?"
Rei glanced down at herself and realised that she was, indeed, rather deficient in the clothing department. The golden light outlined the contours of her naked body, casting dappled patterns over her long slender legs, her curvaceous hips, her firm...
Er, sorry, got a bit caught up in the artistic beauty of the moment there. And poetic, let's not forget poetic. Yes. Right. On we go then.
Rei looked up at the childish puppet-figure seated across from her and said softly, "What do you want?"
"Speak up," the Chibi-Rei said irritably. "Damn clones, always mumbling and whispering..."
"I said," Rei repeated, with an effort raising her voice to somewhere just below pin-dropping-four-miles-away level, "what do you want?"
The Chibi-Rei looked amused. "What do I want?" it repeated, smirking. "Why, I want what you want, of course. I am you, after all."
Rei considered this statement, wondering if talking to yourself was a sign of mental illness, and then decided that if that were so, every anime character in existence was certifiable for rubber-hammer status. (Actually, she was right. Talking to yourself is not a sign of madness. It's interrupting yourself that worries people. Yes Ellen, I'm looking at YOU miss. But I digress.)
Before she could say anything, the child added, "And you can shut up about all that 'self-that-observes-itself' nonsense. I'm not her. She was boring as hell, actually. I kicked her off the Train of Thought about five neural stations back."
Rei was silent for a while. She noticed that outside the window, another train was slowly moving up alongside hers, although it didn't appear to be connected to any rails or, for that matter, any ground. It looked exactly like the train that conveniently turns up just in time to block the mad old woman's line of fire in 'Wings of Something Unpronounceable Starting with H'. Inside the other carriage, she could just make out the form of Shinji Ikari, who seemed to be arguing with a childish version of himself. The Chibi-Shinji kept holding up big black pieces of cardboard with jagged white lines drawn on them, for some reason. Maybe they were discussing abstract art or something, she thought.
Her diminutive twin turned to see what she was staring at, and sniggered. "Idiot. Watch this." It opened the window and yelled, "Hey, Ikari! Check out this luscious bit of skin here!"
Shinji glanced out the window and into Rei's carriage, and his face went crimson. Rei felt faint colour rise in her own cheeks as the boy stared at her.
It was a safe bet that Shinji was also feeling something rise, but let's not go into that right now.
The Chibi-Rei grinned at her. "Sicko," it said, conversationally. "What kind of guy suffers a chronic case of thermal expansion at the sight of a clone of his MUM?"
Trying to ignore Shinji, Rei returned her attention to the little figure before her and asked quietly, "Then... what are you? My conscience?..."
The Chibi-Rei giggled charmingly. "That pious bitch? See for yourself." It pointed innocently down the aisle, to where a teenage-Rei, wearing a black nun's habit, was sprawled awkwardly on the carpeted floor with a large cross-shaped indentation on her forehead.
"Clobbered her with her own crucifix," the Chibi-Rei explained, happily.
Inside the other train, the Chibi-Shinji was waving a piece of card frantically in front of the mesmerized older boy's face, to no avail.
Rei frowned at the cheerfully smiling girl-child, and stood up. More light fell revealingly across her, and the motion caused parts of her anatomy to move in a highly interesting fashion. In the other carriage, Shinji fell off his chair.
She started to move towards the supine Rei, but her childish twin said dismissively, "Don't bother. She ain't gonna be waking up."
With a hard look at the Chibi-Rei, she sat back down. "What are you?" she asked again.
The Chibi-Rei shrugged. "I'm the best part of you," it said, brightly. "The most important bit. The part that makes you have to change the sheets."
Rei thought about this. "You're my bladder?"
"No!" the doll-child snapped. "Jeez, maybe it wasn't a good idea to shove Smart Rei into the coal boiler after all... I'm your libido, of course."
"My... libido?" repeated Rei, now intrigued despite herself.
"Well, aren't we quick on the uptake today?" the Chibi-Rei sneered. "Why do you think you're suspiciously short on clothes at the moment? But you never wanted to pay me any attention before, did you? Oh no, too distant and alone for that, aren't you. Never even took a peek at Asuka in the shower stall. Misato could have kept her beer chilled if she left it on your lap. It's a wonder the inside of the entry plug didn't ice over." It paused in its ranting for a second, then continued, "But I've fixed things now, oh yes. You lot were all so busy contemplating the basic purposelessness of flowers and how red isn't your favourite colour, you never noticed that I was taking over."
Rei said, "Taking over? You mean..." Her gaze slid to the comatose Conscience Rei. Then her brow furrowed as she replayed the Chibi-Rei's words to herself. Finally, she said slowly, "...Asuka?"
"Oh, great, you really have no idea, do you?" the little girl who was apparently her sex drive muttered. It looked up at her and said irritably, "Let me spell it out for you: You. Bat. For. The. Other. Team. Get it?"
Rei shook her head no.
The Chibi-Rei's glower would have made the Fourteenth Angel mess its pants, if it had had any. "What'll it take to get through to you? You're warm for the female form. You're a dedicated member of the Garden Hose Appreciation Society." When Rei still looked blank, it rolled its eyes and said, "Need a hint? It starts with 'L' and ends with 'wow, that was fantastic'. Wakaru?"
"No," Rei said.
The Chibi-Rei groaned and said, "Fine. You're a dyke. Okay? And I'm not talking about rivers here."
Rei said, "Oh." She pondered her libido's words for a while. "But... but I want to become one with Ikari..."
"No you don't," snapped the Chibi-Rei. "That was just Maternal Rei confusing you. Until I choked her to death with her own Tickle Me Gendo. The fact is, my dear naïve self, that's how you are and that's how you're gonna stay. So deal with it."
Rei abruptly remembered the events of the last few hours. She hadn't been quite herself, and she knew it had something to do with the way Captain Katsuragi always acted whenever she'd been drinking a lot, i.e., all the time. But she also recalled feeling and doing things she would never have done normally. Apart from the fact that 'things she would never normally do' basically encompassed the entire range of human activity with the possible exception of breathing, Rei did remember feeling a strange sort of attraction towards Asuka...
"You've got the hots for her," the Chibi-Rei said, gleefully. "And it's my job to make sure you realize that."
In the other carriage, Shinji dragged himself back onto his chair. Ignoring the Chibi-Shinji, who was busily smacking him over the head with a rolled-up piece of cardboard, he glanced out the window at Rei again. His eyes shot out of their sockets as he beheld what had been tasty fan-service and was now pure hentai. Then he swayed and fainted again.
Rei closed her legs hastily.
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Chapter 16
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The faint hiss of the air conditioners greeted Rei as she slowly emerged from the depths of slumber. She found herself lying on something soft, and staring up at what was quite possibly the most boring ceiling in all of Japan.
Her head throbbed painfully. She wondered if this was the phenomenon known as a 'hangover', and if so, what she should do about it. Perhaps she should ask Major Katsuragi. Or perhaps not, she reflected, since although Misato could have written an extremely large and thorough thesis on the subject, her usual solution to a hangover was to drink a lot. Somehow Rei felt that there was a flaw in this method.
She rolled her head to the side, and realised that she was lying on a hospital bed, her body covered only by a thin linen sheet that was unfortunately not quite thin enough for any descriptions of a limey nature, so there. Across from her was the familiar, sleeping form of Shinji Ikari, who appeared to have some sort of complicated medical machine strapped to his hips. It seemed to be administering some sort of coolant. Presumably it was helping to cure his debilitating case of thermal, er, constriction.
Wincing slightly, she sat up. The bedsheet fell away from her upper body, and it was fortunate that Shinji was unconscious or he might have had a relapse. Distant puzzlement was evident in Reis red eyes. The headache was already fading, but she felt a bit... strange...
Something caught her eye, and she turned to see her reflection in a large mirror. It was built into the wall of the ward for absolutely no good reason other than to give patients fatal heart attacks when they saw how disfigured they were, thus saving the nurses the trouble of having to look after them any more. Considering the usual mortality and injury rate of citizens living in Tokyo-3, this technique was quite possibly the only thing keeping hospital beds available.
Rei, however, was in no way disfigured. In fact she was extensively figured. And, for the first time, she noticed this. Neurons deep in her brain that had hitherto been slacking off were yelled at and shoved into alert attention. For the first time, Rei realised that she was pretty. Quite pretty, in fact. Damn gorgeous, actually. And she was feeling something else. Other neurons were wiring connections to parts of her body that had better hope they were already alert because they were about to get a tough workout - although not for a couple of paragraphs yet, so calm down, people. Slowly, she slid the sheet off the bed completely.
Somewhere in the quiet, serene control cockpit of her mind, the Chibi-Rei grinned wickedly and pushed the big lever marked 'LIBIDO' as far as it would go.
In the bed nearby, Shinji opened his eyes.
Rei saw him awaken in the mirror but she ignored him, too preoccupied with these strange, wonderful new thoughts and feelings flowing through her. Her gaze slipped from her reflection to the table beside her bed, where lay a neatly arranged collection of medical implements, most of them having handles which were long and slender, and a few with potentially buzzing bits.
Her eyes wandered back to the mirror. The image of Rei reclining on the bed would have made Michelangelo bite through his paintbrush.
She looked at the table again. The words 'long' and 'slender' suddenly seemed to be much more important and interesting words than they normally were. The concept of buzzing bits struck her as enormously significant.
Shinji glanced across, saw her, and in the absence of a paintbrush, involuntarily substituted his tongue.
Ignoring the muffled screams behind her, Rei paused thoughtfully, wondering why her mental processes seemed to be taking place about a metre further down her body than usual.
The machine attached to Shinji's nether regions began to beep ominously.
Rei shrugged and reached over to the table.
What followed was a beautiful, evocative, spiritually uplifting and exceedingly graphic piece of descriptive writing which Magi Melchior had the nerve to edit out, the bastard.
About two hours later, Rei finally collapsed, exhausted, on the bed. Dazedly, through the warm afterglow, she wondered if there was a towel somewhere nearby, although a mop might have been more useful. An ice pack or twelve wouldn't have gone astray, either. She was aching in places she hadn't known existed, but had been quite pleased to discover (and rediscover several times, with considerable enthusiasm).
It was around this time that the nurses, having finally heard the emergency sirens, rushed in, fought their way through the clouds of superheated steam surrounding Shinji's bed, and just barely managed to shut off the coolant machine before it did something violent and probably permanent to the boy's manhood. Shinji himself had passed out a short while earlier with a nosebleed so severe he could have made an instant fortune had any blood bank representatives been there to witness it.
Rei, unnoticed, stood up and padded softly out of the room, looking for the showers.
Inside her brain, the Chibi-Rei jumped up and down, yelling exultantly "I am the greatest!"
By the shores of what had once been a high-tech cityscape, and was now a big hole in the ground with water in it, one of the few surviving entrances to the Geo-Front stood squat and uncompromising in the afternoon sunlight.
A figure approached it, picking its way amongst the scattered debris on the edge of the lake. It moved with a casual dignity and purpose through the overhanging canyons of broken skyscrapers, and around it the threads of fate seemed to gather like an ominous cloak.
Calmly, unassumingly, the figure made its way up to the forbidding steel gates barring the path into the deep underground. The sun's slanting rays revealed a shock of white hair, a noble face lifting searching eyes to the imposing portal before it.
A hand raised, knocked once, twice.
For a long moment, there was silence. Then a tiny shutter snapped open at around eye level and an annoyed voice shouted, "Go away! We don't want any!"
The shutter slammed closed.
The figure regarded the steel wall with puzzlement. Finally it raised its hand again and knocked more insistently.
The shutter slid open again. "I said, we don't - "
"I am the Fifth Child," said the figure, and waited expectantly.
There was an exasperated sigh. "No, you're the thirty-second, not counting yesterday," the voice retorted irritably. "Geez, don't you kids have anything better to do than fool around up here?"
The stranger was at a loss. "I don't think you understand," he said at last. "I am - "
"Unless you're a security inspector or a hentai salesman, I don't give a flying F-equipment who you are," interrupted the voice. It added, cautiously, "You're not a security inspector, are you?"
"No," Kaoru said. "I am - "
"Oh, good," the voice said, sounding relieved. Then its tone became shifty, confidential. "You're not a hentai salesman, by any chance?"
"No," Kaoru repeated. He frowned thoughtfully. "Although I do have one or two American superhero comic books - "
The shutter slammed shut, and by the sound of it was being hastily boarded up from the other side.
Kaoru leaned closer. "How about this copy of Spiderman - ?"
A welding torch hissed into life beyond the barrier.
Kaoru looked at the wall for a while, and then reluctantly began to walk away. There didn't seem to be anything else to do.
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Chapter 17
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"But the situation has been resolved?" the monitor image of Gendo Ikari said impassively.
Misato nodded. "Yes sir, everything's fine now. We've got Unit 02 back in the EVA cages and we're checking it for remaining traces of the computer virus as we speak."
"Any major casualties?"
"Well, about half of headquarters was wrecked," Misato began, "around fifty NERV personnel were killed or injured, we're still scraping the technicians off the wall up here - " her words were punctuated by a thud as a man was pried free of the glass shards by two maintenance workers with big pliers and hit the floor - "and we lost the beer vending machine - " her voice trembled slightly, then she recovered - "but apart from that..."
"Ah. Business as usual. Good." Ikari pushed his glasses higher up on the bridge of his nose. "However, we can assume that further attacks will be made. Remain on standby alert, and have the pilots prepared for immediate action."
"Do you have any idea where that virus came from, sir?" asked Misato.
"I have certain suspicions," said Ikari darkly. "Very well. I will be returning to headquarters within the hour."
"Yes sir. Thank you, sir," added Misato, more out of habit than anything else. She frowned uncomfortably and bit her lip, obviously trying to work out whether to risk saying something further, then finally began, "Um... sir?"
Ikari paused in the act of reaching over to switch off the video transmission and said, "Yes, Major?"
Misato swayed as if something was fighting to burst out of her, then in a rush she asked, desperately, "Why are you wearing a bra and panties, sir?"
Ikari regarded her silently for a moment. "Business concerns," he said at last. "You know better than to ask questions, Major."
"Oh, is that all?" Misato felt vastly relieved. "One of those improbably complex and twisted conspiracies skulking like malevolent demons in the bowels of NERV, is it, then? Part of a sacrilegious scheme to warp humanity's destiny? Something the minds of maverick women, with a tendency to die extremely slowly and tragically with many lingering last words directed at young depressed boys, are not meant to understand?"
"Indeed." Ikari nodded.
"Ah."
There was no sound for a while.
"Really?" Misato said eventually.
"Yes, Major."
She smiled self-deprecatingly. "Er. I just wondered, you see."
More silence.
"Seeing as how there's a Property of the First Child NERV barcode label on the left D-cup."
Ikari made no comment.
"And the panties have Soryu's - Ogle These And Die! scrawled on the front."
"Dismissed, Major," said the commander.
"Yessir."
The screen went blank.
Misato gazed at the empty dark panel for some time. Behind her, the last technician was forcibly extracted from where he had temporarily and violently made friends with the wall, and hit the floor with a very final thud of the sort people make when they're quite soon going to make friends with a body bag.
"Good thing I didn't ask him about the whip, the milk bottle and the Pen Pen mask, then," Misato murmured finally.
There was a quiet hiss as the door opened, or at least there would have been a quiet hiss if the pneumatic mechanisms had not recently have been reduced to the consistency of LCL. Instead there was a sound like someone playing "Hallelujah" backwards with a fistful of knives on a blackboard, and the door juddered to a halt about two-thirds of the way open. Misato turned automatically, expecting to see Ritsuko returning from the EVA cages.
(In fact Ritsuko had been waylaid by a certain youthful devoted female technician, frisked expertly and removed of yet another piece of lacy black underwear. Ritsuko had responded by elbowing the aforementioned technician in the kidneys, clobbering her over the head with a ridiculously large mallet left over from her Ranma 1/2 days, blindfolding her, locking her in a filing cabinet and swallowing the keycard. Unfortunately she had forgotten to get her bra back first, with the result that she was currently being chased around Terminal Dogma by three Section Two off-duty guards carrying buckets of water. Just thought you'd like to know.)
A figure stood in the doorway, but by its height, silence and air of subtle blankness, Misato judged it not to be Ritsuko after all. The blue hair was a bit of a giveaway, too.
"Rei, what are you doing up already?" she asked, concerned. "You're not supposed to be - "
She stopped, her brain arguing loudly against what her eyes were insisting they were seeing. No, you're drunk again, she thought, calmly and reasonably. Or stressed. Or unconscious. Rei is NOT wearing -
- a string bikini top, a bare midriff, a skirt apparently woven out of very short grass strands, knee-high thighboots of the type normally only available to nymphomaniac elves of a particularly specialized genre of... er... low fantasy, a pair of small sparkling diamond earrings and several bottles of First and Best Impact perfume. This was rather added to by the way Rei was standing, which would have qualified as serious sexual harassment in a strip club and incidentally somehow made everything she was wearing look as if it was about to fall off, even the earrings. The overall effect was enough to quietly give the wounded technicians in the control room instant cardiac arrests and make Demi Moore give up and hand in her tassels.
"Bloody hell," said Misato, when her vocal chords had been reconnected to her brain. She decided that this didn't quite express the full complexity of her inner emotions eloquently enough, and after a moment amended her words to "Bloody, bloody hell."
"I am quite fully recovered, Major Katsuragi," said Rei. She walked forwards, although a more appropriate term might be 'slinking'. No-one moving their hips like that could be described as merely walking. If she tried slinking any harder, she would probably dislocate something.
For a brief instant Misato regretted having grown out of her experimenting phase. Then she clamped firmly down on the thought, slammed it in a basement at the bottom of her mind and dropped an N2 mine on it. It wasn't easy, though. The perfume was beginning to make her eyes water.
"You... why are you dressed like that, Rei?" she heard herself say, admirably managing to keep her voice level. On top of everything else she was beginning to feel distinctly off-balance, as if someone had wedged a car jack underneath NERV headquarters and was gradually hoisting it off the ground. It was wrong. Rei did not wear sexy clothes. Rei wearing sexy clothes was like snow on the sun, with the same uneasy feeling that it might flash into flame at any moment.
"Is this a problem, ma'am?" Rei asked with the faintest hint of a frown. She cast a brief glance down at herself. "No-one complained when I took these from the props room. Do you wish me to change them?" Her hands were already reaching to untie the front of the bikini top.
"No! I mean, no, those are fine, Rei, just fine," Misato said hurriedly. She wiped her forehead and wondered why she was freaking out so badly. It wasn't as if she hadn't seen Rei's personal anatomy before. It was a bit hard to avoid, what with all those harmonics scans, heat-pattern analyses, and the girls' locker room camera feeds she kept having to delete from Hyuuga's console. And then there had been the dummy plug room. She'd seen enough of Rei there to last her several lifetimes. There had been something very disturbing about the commanders keeping a bunch of identical fourteen-year-old clones who just happened to be stunning sex goddesses around as spare parts for an autopilot system that did nothing more than yell "HE JUST CALLED YOUR MOTHER A RUSTY CLOCKWORK DECEPTICON!" at the EVA it happened to be inserted in at the time, and in any case had only worked once. Quite apart from Kaji's final message to her, which had included several highly suspicious sentences such as "and get a photo of the orange room, okay? The orange room," which cast certain doubts on his real motives for trying to break into Terminal Dogma.
"Um. I'm, um, glad to see you've recovered quite fine, Rei AND STOP THAT DAMN MUSIC!"
Hyuuga looked hurt, but put down the saxophone anyway.
In the Chamber of SEELE, 03 sighed audibly and commented, "Never send an Angel to do a human's job..."
"He told them about the comic books," said 05, shaking his metaphorical head. "He told them about the comic books, didn't he? I warned him not to tell anyone about the comic books and what does he do? He tells them about the - "
"Yes yes, point taken," said Keel. "It seems we will be unable to infiltrate NERV after all. We may have to - "
"Tilt the mayonnaise to three past sunset, Mr Nemo, and damn the purple things!" said 11, helpfully.
"Would that work?" asked 07, startled.
"Good grief, I think he's progressed to Nadia now," commented 06.
"Myaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" shrieked 11, gleefully.
"No, my mistake," said 06 glumly. "Looks like he's hit the Juraian Boundary again."
Keel resignedly continued, "We may have to take their headquarters by force."
"Juraian Boundary? What's that, then?" asked 02.
"Oh, it's a technical medical progressive state common to the commoner," explained 06. "Symptoms include attraction to trees, a strange desire for aquamarine hair dye and a tendency to break out in chronic lightsabers."
"I have that all the time," said 08 cheerfully. "The bit about the hair, anyway. Or rather, who it's attached to. Mmm, sparks."
"08?" said 03, kindly.
"Shutting up," said 08 promptly.
"Whoa, Keel, slow down," 05 said nervously. "We can't do that until hell freezes over or Manga releases the movies, whichever comes first, remember?"
"I am changing the script," said Keel, and suddenly his voice was as steely as a steak knife commercial.
There was awed silence. Somewhere behind Keel's monolith a faintly audible voice murmured in quivery delight, "Why, Keelee dear, you haven't spoken like that since... ooh, I've gone all tingly..."
Keel said coldly, "What is the status of the EVA series?"
"Buggered," grunted 09, on the basis that no-one ever hurts the adorably gruff bloke.
"Actually, they're... they're finished," said 03.
"What, all of them?" asked 07, disbelievingly.
"Good," said Keel. "Then we shall - "
"What, ALL of them?"
03 contrived to look embarrassed. "Well, we... we had to cut a few corners..." If the monolith had had feet, it would have shuffled them.
"Irrelevant," said Keel, managing to sound quite scarily like Commander Ikari. "Then this is what we shall do..."
He explained.
Afterwards, the general mood was one of agreement.
"Good idea."
"Worth a try."
"Yeah."
"Buggrem."
"Was that a yes?"
"Moooooooooooo!"
"Probably."
---------
(END OF PART FIVE)
Author's rant: More to come (apart from Rei that is, she's quite tired). Watch this space. No, watch it. I said watch it. Don't take your eyes off it. No DON'T - take your eyes off it. I said DON'T. I'm warning you mate. All right you can go now but you'll be back. Uh-huh. You'll see. Yep. Probably. One day. Oh, go away.
And don't dare say anything about that bit with Rei and the slender stuff, you know you loved it.