Creation began on 12-25-20

Creation ended on 12-26-20

Neon Genesis Evangelion

The Paradigm of Tokyo

A/N: Maybe a minor attempt at another crossover, but only time will tell.

It was completely unprecedented and unexpected. Nobody ever saw it coming…and any that did manage to see it coming…were silenced in the most unimaginable way. But the cruelest and most unusual of things to afterward…was the loss of recollection. Some saw it as a blessing, but others saw it as a curse.

Only bits and pieces of events could be recalled, but as a whole, the world was forced to move on without its missing history. What made any sense to most…was that it was fifteen years ago. Fifteen years ago…that everyone everyone…just forgot about everything. And it was fifteen years ago that nearly every major and minor city on the planet…became encased in these large, industrial domes of heavy metal and thick glass.

New York, New York, Chicago, Illinois, Austin, Texas, Tokyo, Japan, San Francisco, California, Reno, Nevada, Shanghai, China, Paris, France, all across the planet could these strange, presumably man-made structures be seen covering the city they were over. And to speak of why they were there was prohibited.

Tokyo, Japan, thought a young boy as he walked down the streets of Shibuya Ward. One of the greatest megacities in the world, also a place of perpetual lost time. When asked to do a paper on what made it such a great place…I was skeptical about it all. It's hard to say what makes Tokyo a great place, except what people can tell you, which isn't much.

Looking to his left and right, the boy could see other people, men and women, just walking up and down the street as they had for the last years of their lives. One of the only things that could've been said about what made the megacity great was its lack of criminal activity. Because of whatever happened fifteen years ago, there was hardly a crime to report, but police cruisers could still be seen patrolling the streets every now and then.

I can't help but question how anything could make the place great, the boy continued to think. Whatever happened to the world was before my time. And I can't ask people what they knew about the past, because they can't recall much of anything, either. It was like people were reborn into a blank slate of a world without much of a manual. There's not even a book that could tell you much about the world back then that hasn't been doctored by someone else, as if to hide something they didn't want the masses to know about.

And that was something that got the boy a less-than-reasonable passing grade. He questioned most of what others had very little to absolutely no sense of reason to question at all. And now, he was being told to see someone that, according to his parents, was considered a specialist in the field of putting people back on the right path.

This is the address, he thought, looking up at a building that was quite old and had this strange sense of not belonging to the city. Probably one of those disciplinarian-types.

He pressed a button on the panel on the wall and waited for a response.

"Who is it?" A male voice asked through the intercom.

"Uh…Ikari, Shinji," the boy answered, identifying himself. "I have an appointment with…"

"Yes, I know who you are. Come right in."

The door opened outward, revealing a short hallway leading to an open elevator.

"Take the elevator to the top floor," the voice instructed him.

Shinji walked inside and towards the elevator. Stepping inside it, he noticed that it only had two buttons: One pointing up and the other pointing down. He pressed the button for up, and the elevator started going up.

"So, you're one of those young minds that can't seem to conform with the new normal that is life under the domes without a single recollection of the past?" The voice asked him through the speakers inside the elevator. "Why is that?"

"I…I can't believe that life under the domes is simply overlooked and unquestioned," Shinji answered him. "This has been the new normal for fifteen years, and there is no person in this nation or another that seems to want to understand what happened or what life was like before any of this. I mean, you can't just go through life and not wonder what happened fifteen years ago. There aren't any books about the domes, when they were built, who was the architect behind their design, why they were built or even who financed their construction. There aren't even any films about the domes. Everything before and after the date that people recorded as the Day of Global Amnesia was a complete blur of going through the motions of trying to rebuild what passes for a life. If everyone could remember what happened and why, or even who, if anyone, caused such a happening, then maybe we could go back to the days where everyone actually lived. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but this life under the domes, going through the days where there's no reason to reflect upon the past…isn't how I see my future, assuming I even live to decide what my future is going to be like."

Ding! The elevator had reached the top floor, and the doors opened, revealing what appeared to be a penthouse.

Shinji walked around the open space that was probably the living room area, seeing several photos of different cities without a dome over them, and a man in his late-twenties or early-thirties, wearing a black suit, and with an unshaven face.

"Back in my younger days," he heard the voice say to him, and he turned around to see the owner of the building.

The man was older, much older, probably in his seventies or eighties, confined to a wheelchair, and his hair and beard had turned gray and receded.

"Uh, are you…Ryoji Kaji?" Shinji asked him.

"I am," the elder responded. "So, you're the latest individual in Japan to question life as it is under the domes that nobody seems to want to question, are you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Come this way, please."

Shinji followed him down a hall which, to Shinji, at least, seemed longer than the one leading to the elevator downstairs.

"What would you do if you knew more about the missing history of the world?" Ryoji Kaji asked Shinji.

"I would distribute it to the people that want to know and let them decide how they'd use the knowledge," he answered him. "If I knew how to operate a hydroelectric dam, I'd probably work at one, but nobody goes to any of the ones that exist, claiming they're haunted. But I don't want to follow any previous suggestions and go work at a salt mine or a nuclear powerplant…or even puppetry. I just want…to be able to break from the chains of this unfulfilling life."

"You're not the only one that wants to break from the would-be chains of this unconventional society," Ryoji told him, stopping in front of a wall. "There are less than a million men and women across the planet that can't conform to this life. From what they can guess, there were some people that were behind something that happened fifteen years ago, but beyond that, the world governments are keeping the truth hidden from the public. How much would you be willing to bet that not even the Prime Minister of Japan knows anything about why the domes exist or why the people from fifteen years ago lost their memories?"

"Thirty yen?"

"Most people I've asked before would only bet twenty yen."

"I don't have much reason to spend much money when all that really seems to exist in the way of technology is shortrange walkies and cassette players. There used to be talk about something called CD and MP3 players, but I can't access the Internet due to computers being expensive."

"Oh, you'd have to be one of those wealthy elitist or come into some large cash to be able to have access to such technology…or at least have the memories of those that knew how to make and use them."

"Of which I'm none of. I'm just one of those kids from the lower-middle class."

"I like this young man," a female voice uttered as Shinji and Ryoji looked up and saw a woman with purple hair looking down on them. "He has the will to admit what he has and doesn't have."

Shinji looked away when he realized that the woman was wearing a dress, needing to respect the privacy of women.

"Don't bother," Ryoji told Shinji. "Look closer."

Shinji looked up at the woman…and saw that she was hardly much of a woman. She definitely looked like a woman in her late-twenties, but her skin tone was paler than an Asian's…and the texture was wrong. In addition, her eyes, dark brown, lacked that human feel to them.

"No way," he expressed. "An android?"

"Cyborg, really, but in her case, it's blurred. From what her father told me before he died, she was in an accident that left her clinging to life. She has an issue with most men not being able to see her as a person."

"But…if she was in an accident, then she's a person, no matter how much of her body was replaced with mechanical parts," Shinji stated; he had heard that the wealthy elitists also had access to technology that most hospitals could never get, including the use of metal prosthetics. "Ma'am."

"Misato Katsuragi," she introduced herself.

A loud, mechanical sound (A/N: Think the first sound the Leviathan made in The Avengers) went off and Shinji looked at the wall in front of him and Ryoji.

"What was that?" He asked him.

"That was the first time in ten years he ever made a sound to indicate that he…wanted to see someone that just showed up for the first time," Ryoji stated.

"He?"

Ryoji pressed a button on his wheelchair's right handle, and the wall in front of them split open to reveal a burst of light that blinded Shinji.

"Aah!" He gasped, and then the light dimmed to a subtle tone, making it easier for him to see. "What in the name of creation?"

In front of them was the inner workings of what appeared to be a large factory or storehouse, occupied by a large, black robot with oversized arms with these gray or silver things behind them where the elbows would've been.

"What…is this?" He asked Ryoji. "Some kind of robot?"

"That's what he looks like, but nobody that's seen him before I did could tell me much about him," Ryoji explained, "only that he's been waiting for someone. Maybe you're the one he was waiting for."

"Me?"

Tap! Behind them, Misato had jumped off the walkway over the two and landed on the floor.

"Only twelve others have been here before you," she told Shinji, "and he never once made any desire to want to see any of them. He's like most people without a sense of direction, fickle and selective of what is and what should be. Before my father died, he was only able to decipher two things about him."

"You…you keep calling…addressing this thing as if it were a person, but…what is it?"

"A Megadeus called Big O," Ryoji revealed.

"Big…O?"

To be continued…

A/N: I keep taking these gambles by combining different shows with Evangelion and I never know for sure if there's any interest once they get posted. But for the basic summary of this story, Second Impact didn't affect the world the way that SEELE had intended, and everyone was affected with their loss of recollection. Adam's destruction maimed the planet on a psychological scale rather than a physical one, putting technological advancement on a standstill, causing people to forget much of their lives and nobody trying to grasp the reason behind the global pandemonium that happened fifteen years ago. Shinji's just one of those young people born after that loss of memory that questions things others rather keep in the dark…and now he's on a different path that now binds him to a giant that may be the only way he can escape from the standstill of the world he's lost in. What do you think going's to happen later on?