Blood is red, the colour she hated.
Yet both her story and mine are of blood, the ties of blood, the spilling of blood and most of all; the curse of old blood upon the new.
The story begins in the year 2000, yet this is not our beginning merely our prelude. Our Story, or at least mine begins in the year 2015.
I am Shinji Ikari, third child of Evangelion, and this is my story.
Tokyo 3 January 2015
As day's went it wasn't a bad one, blue skies, sun, nice breeze and I had received a letter from him… A letter telling me to drop everything and come here, to Tokyo 3, like he'd never just walked out on me, never turned me into what I am!
…But I'm getting ahead of myself, HE for those of you that have had the fortune of never meeting him was Gendo Ikari, the man who had once called himself my father.
I hated him for abandoning me, for turning me into a monster and leaving me with some uncle I'd never met before, Yet at the time his letter gave me a certain cynical hope, Maybe he did want me after all?
Included with this letter was a picture of one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen: long purple hair, great smile, eyes that sparked with life even through the photo… and a helpful arrow pointing at one HELL of a cleavage.
Had I not been paying so much attention to said cleavage, I might have wondered about just who this woman was and what her relation to my father was.
I (eventually) tore my eyes away form the picture and turned the card over to double check my instructions. I was to be here (The Tokyo 3 municipal rail track) at 3PM exactly for 'ride'
So it was with no small amount of annoyance that I checked my watch and sighed at the 4PM blinking up at me in obnoxiously cheerful red numerals.
"great, the first contact I've had with him for over 5 years and he isn't even on time"
I was in the middle of complaining voraciously to myself when I felt it; a presence where there had been none before, I looked up sharply, nose and tongue already tasting the air, probing for the area for the new arrival. Almost instantly, I detected the scent of the supernatural, (not unlike peppermint) but the strength of the odour was staggering whatever I was detecting was a creature of awesome spiritual or magical power,
"Ikari."
I spun around the instant the voice registered, crouching down into a guard position.
What I saw surprised me; a young girl standing a scant 3 feet away staring fixedly at me. She looked to be about my age and was dressed in what appeared to be a school uniform, normal enough, yet her hair (a pale periwinkle blue) and her eyes… those crimson orbs bore right through me in a way I can hardly describe, cold, probing, yet strangely appealing…
Misato Katsuragi glared angrily at the young man before her, she'd spent the whole morning catching up on her paperwork (recovering from her last hangover) and so had been late in leaving to retrieve him. Having finally found her quarry she did not appreciate him completely ignoring her in favour of staring out into space.
Realising that he wouldn't be responding anytime soon Misato took the time to study the boy before her.
So this was the commanders son? If she hadn't seen it with her own eyes Misato would never have believed it, someone had actually married the bastard king? Still she wouldn't count it against the kid, he was actually kinda cute; fairly tall, sleekly muscled, medium length brown hair and deep brown eyes. Now if he'd only act like he was human instead of an oversized lawn ornament they'd be getting somewhere.
"Hey! I'm talking to you"
"Huh"
I turned at the yell, my internal monologue disrupted to find the woman from the photo standing before me, hands on her hips and tapping her foot impatiently.
This was odd…people could not usually sneak up on me at all; I usually caught their scent long before they reached me, but all my attention had be directed towards the girl (who to my consternation had vanished the moment I had looked away.) and with her vanished the overpowering scent of peppermint, allowing me to discern the woman's.
A lot of people don't know this but you can tell a lot about a person by their scent; where they live, who with, what they eat, where they've been…
Take the major's for example: vanilla, heavily tinged with beer and perfume (At least when I first met her, I can only assume she was trying to make a good impression.) it also contained elements of something I didn't recognise at the time (Pen-pen, but how the hell was I supposed to know what a penguin smelt like?)
"Shinji Ikari?"
"Yes…did you see that girl just now?" My reply was vague, I wasn't really listening, still absorbed by the apparition to care about whatever else was going on.
"What girl?" Misato replied quizzically, everyone was supposed to be in their shelters by now, and she hadn't seen anyone but Shinji when she'd arrived.
"…never mind."
I wasn't really surprised that she hadn't been able to see the girl, judging from the power of the scent the girl was most likely powerful enough to employ astral projection, or at least shield her presence to 'normals'
"…Right, Well I'm Misato, Misato Katsuragi. I'm here to take you to NERV now"
She gestured to the car parked behind her; a blue Renault alpine, electric model from the look of it.
(So I like cars…bite me.)
I wordlessly climbed into the passenger seat and waited until we were well on our way before speaking again.
"Miss Katsuragi?"
"Yes Shinji? And it's Misato please."
"Ok…Misato, Do you work for my father?"
It sounded innocent (if depressed) but Misato caught the hint of accusation in his tone, especially in the word 'father'
"Yeah… has he told you anything about his work?"
"Nothing… my teachers kept going on about 'saving humanity' or something like that."
A tense moment passed before Misato murmured
"You sound just like me with my father…"
"Huh"
Unfortunately for Misato my keen ears meant I heard her whisper like she'd shouted it
"yes?"
"You said something just now…"
"No, It must have been you imagination"
I'm sure that most of you are wondering why I have skipped straight to my account of meeting Ritsuko in NERV, well I have several reasons for cutting out my tour of the Geofront 1.given the many retellings of my story you have most likely heard it all before far to many times to really care 2.nothing crucial to the story happened in the intervening time so it would be a rather pointless addition 3.I'm using up enough paper as it is and Asuka will kill me if my biography is larger then hers (must be that strange German mindset of hers…)
NERV, as I quickly found out, richly deserved its reputation as the cursed lovechild of HP lovecraft and a deranged architect, the alleged 'map' that Misato was supposed to be following looked like a cross between a schizophrenics experiment with a Spiro-graph and a circuit diagram. Whilst I find it odd that she could have worked there for any length of time without knowing her way around the place I could certainly sympathise with her.
"Um…haven't we passed this lift three times now Misato"
IT was on our fourth circuit of the same lift and adjacent corridors that we met Dr Ritsuko Akagi, evidently annoyed at having to come and look for us.
"Where have you been Misato? We're on a timetable here you know"
I still cannot work out why she was wearing a swimsuit under her lab-coat, I never saw her in one again and she certainly didn't smell of excess water (yes Asuka, excess water does have a peculiar smell to it and no I'm not explaining it.) if anything she stank of plastic.
"Sorry Ritsuko, we had a little car trouble"
Ritsuko seemed to notice my presence for the first time fixing, me with a piercing, probing stare before asking Misato
"So is this him?"
"Yup, the third child, son of the bastard king himself."
"Well come on then, we've got to get him down to the cage"
I stayed silent as usual, I hardly considered it likely that they'd tell me anything useful that I couldn't find out myself from their scents or gestures.
The lift ride was uneventful, Ritsuko and Misato were talking about something involving 'oni's' and '09's' to tell the truth I wasn't paying all that much attention, to busy wondering about what I was going to say to father I guess.
I mean what was I going to say? 'HI dad, nice to see you again after all these years, feel like telling me why you abandoned me'
The elevator stopped and opened out onto a vast pink lake. I instantly recoiled as the overpowering smell of liquid plastic and disinfectant washed over me, receiving funny looks from both Misato and Ritsuko whilst doing so.
"Are you okay Shinji?"
"F-fine." I managed to gasp out, whatever that pink stuff was it was the nasal equivalent of a power drill to the foot.
After a short dingy ride, we arrived at a set of stairs set into the far wall of the cavernous room. I managed to keep my lunch down long enough to reach the top before my constitution failed me and I was noisily sick over the side of the railing garnering both annoyed look from Ritsuko and a concerned glance from Misato
"Wha-what is that stuff?"
"Bakelite a synthetic plastic used to cool and store the EVA's, odd you're the only person aside from her that's reacted to it like that"
At the time, I didn't have a clue about what Ritsuko meant about 'her' or the thing she called 'EVA'
Our short journey ended in the pitch-black room, although to my enhanced eyes it may as well have been on the streets above the first thing I noticed was the face; huge and demonic, a leering purple leviathan caged beneath earth.
IF my nose wasn't still crying for mercy from the noxious fumes of that Bakelite stuff I'm sure that the whole cage would have been rank with the smell of blood, pain and peppermint.
After a few seconds the lights finally came on (who'd have thought that Dr Akagi was a drama queen?) throwing the leering purple face into relief.
"What is it?" I asked in a purposely-bored tone, if Akagi thought that I'd be impressed or intimated by her little show she was mistaken (to tell the truth it had scared me witless the first time I saw it but I wasn't going to tell her that)
"THAT is the artificial humanoid fighting android EVANGELION, mankind's last and most powerful weapon against the angels."
"That's my father's work?"
"Correct"
I turned and looked up in the direction of the voice. There silhouetted by the light streaming from his observation box stood Gendo Ikari my father.
My second foray into EVA fiction, please review.
Thanks to all those how reviewed Titans lost, the next chapter of that will be up shortly.
