OMG! A tragic saga!
Teenaged Lauren is an avid reader of fanfiction. She comes to rue the day when she decided to write her own... A sarcastic and utterly unfulfilling piece of writing. How would you act, if you were taken to the world of Evangelion?
shinji was waiting for the person his daddy had sent for him. he looked at the card she'd given him. it was a picture of a pretty woman. he couldn't see her anywere.
a monster blew up a plain and it fell on his head..
Mistao turnd up then.
"Oh no! look, shinji is died. Now we don't have a pilot for eva."
Just then she saw a girl.she was very pretty and had long blond hair.
Should the character's hair be blond? Maybe it should be brown, like her own… but brown was such a boring colour. Lauren frowned at the screen. She wanted a realistic character, and a realistic plot. But at the same time, she wanted a likable character, and people at her school tended to like pretty people with long, golden-blond hair, so her readers should, shouldn't they?
Deep down, she didn't think giving her character beauty and blond hair wasn't the best way to make her likable. She remembered a harsh comment that a previous fic of hers about a beautiful stranger with luxuriant blond hair had gotten. The words Mary-Sue sprung to mind. She deleted that sentence.
She just couldn't decide how to make her character good. She couldn't decide on a name, or distinguishing features, or anything. She just knew that her story would be about a new Eva pilot, selected in desperation after the tragic and very convenient death of Ikari Shinji.
There are many universes; each based running parallel to the others, having started from the same concept. More and more are made as different possibilities create different outcomes. Sometimes, events are altered by outside forces.
One universe has just split into two. In the former, events run according to plan
In the second, a key player has just died, disrupting the timeline that was set out for it by ancient prophesies.
SEELE was not happy. Some unforeseen force had meddled, and now the plans had run awry. Ikari had been counting his son as insurance from the start, and there was no other plausible back-up. Ikari had had confidence that his son would be able to synchronise with the Eva without training (with good reason) and there was no other for whom this was true. The girl Ayanami was too badly damaged to fight the Angel, and the German girl was too far off to be called in. This was an emergency.
A powerful entity looked for the source of this strange disturbance in the flow of events. It found that things had been manipulated. It found that someone had wanted Ikari Shinji dead.
It looked deeper, examining a tableau. A strangely… unfinished… persona, with no discernable features was near the scene of the incident, tied to an individual outside the entity's jurisdiction. A purple-haired female in a car had swerved to avoid the falling debris, and had damaged her car.
The scene was frozen, like it had been paused there. There was a vague sense of what would be, to the entity's eyes. The two females – for the unformed-person was distinctly feminine - would converge on the incident.
Something had to be done to start events again. The entity considered. The not-yet-person was connected to another female, one outside of this world. Maybe this person would start the scenario, if she was brought here. Maybe she was who the being was meant to become…
The entity focused on the link, and pulled.
Lauren wondered what had just happened. She must have just woken up, because she couldn't think why she was here or what she'd just been doing. She couldn't remember where here was.
She had woken with a start, and she'd heard something. She heard something else, now. A woman's voice, sounding just as upset as she was, but angry and upset rather than confused.
She ran around a corner towards the voice, and stopped in horrified shock.
The mangled body of Ikari Shinji lay in front of her, amongst the wreckage of an aeroplane of some sort. The woman crouched beside him was obviously Misato.
She looked up, suppressed panic evident on her face.
Lauren couldn't move. She recognised this scene, very well. She had written it earlier today. But she knew she wasn't that great a writer, or even an at all good writer. She would never be able to write something as realistic as this, or even be able to picture, to conceive of the look on Misato's face or the awful – real – look of the dead body of Ikari Shinji.
It was simply too vivid for her, too graphic for her to even wonder if it was a dream.
She noticed Misato looking at her, but couldn't think. Her brain seemed to have disengaged from the present, to have been knocked out of sync with her eyes and nose and all her senses. She wouldn't have written of the heat emanating from the wreck of the aircraft, or the fact one of Shinji's hands was still over his head in a pathetic attempt to protect him, and the limp fingers were slipping down, as the processes in the body shut down and muscles went slack and he looked broken, and entirely too real for a fictional person. And –
"Daijoubu?"
The fact that Katsuragi Misato was talking to her, and in Japanese, and this was actually happening and it was her fault hit her with that, and she started to cry.
Misato moved over to the child, who looked about the same age as Ikari's son. The girl was clearly in shock, and she wasn't even sure if she could hear her, or understand. On the plus side, she looked unhurt. Still, the fragile, shell-shocked look on her face brought out her protective instincts in full force.
She was very aware of the battle in the distance, and of the fact that Shinji, poor kid, was needed at base. There were no other pilots, dammit! Ayanami was in no state to be conscious, let alone given the responsibility to hold the Angel off.
Then the planes started to move away, and she realised what the UN's emergency countermeasures were. She dragged the girl (who was hunched up and crying, not resisting Misato at all, but not moving of her own accord) into the car, painfully aware that the thin roof wouldn't hold up if a building collapsed on them. She shifted her hold to the back of the girl's neck, pushing her down into an approximation of the foetal position, and ducked down herself.
The blast tossed the car into a wall. They were chucked around, and Misato heard crunches from the impact that sounded rather like several important bits of machinery breaking. She added car damage to the list of things that had gone wrong today.
Scowling, she picked herself up. At least the car had landed upright. Starting to tape up the bits of the car that were falling off with the duct tape that lived in the car for these very situations, she debated what to do now. She should get back to HQ, to report what had happened to Ikari Shinji. But she didn't relish the prospect of telling Commander Ikari of his son's death, and she didn't want to even think about what they'd do if an N2 bomb had failed and they had no chance of using the Eva Units.
And this girl. She was still crouched under the passenger seat, and Misato didn't want to turn her out onto the streets in the middle of this chaos. But she didn't have time to drag her to a shelter…
The car was as fixed as it was going to get, and she still hadn't reached a decision. She didn't have any more time to sit around debating what to do, either. She'd head to NERV HQ, and leave the girl somewhere en route. She could hardly just leave her here.
The car engine starting brought Lauren back to her senses a bit, and she shifted into the passenger seat. Misato glanced over, and repeated her earlier question: 'daijoubu?'
Lauren spoke only the Japanese gleaned from subtitled anime, and she wasn't sure how she'd reply to that in her own language. Was she OK? She wasn't hurt beyond the bruises from being thrown around in the car by the explosion, but she wouldn't describe her current mental state as OK. She gave a kind of half shrug, aware that she looked a state and that spoke for itself.
She looked out of the car, at the strange cityscape in front of her. Was Misato taking her to NERV? She'd planned to write about her character being an Eva pilot, but somehow that seemed a lot worse an idea now it could conceivably happen to her. The distant figure of the angel looked very big, and much more dangerous than it had in her memory of the anime. Misato was watching the road now, or, more accurately, the distant figure of the Angel, and Lauren couldn't think of anything she could say to the woman that'd make sense.
She could think of plenty of questions, but they were questions about why this was happening. Is this a dream? A… story? Is this what I wanted to happen to my character? Is this on the internet somewhere, or being written by someone somewhere else?
No answers were forthcoming, and she sat looking out at the monster-Angel as it repaired itself. It was truly monstrous, humanoid but malformed, so it looked like its black flesh had been clumsily stretched and moulded. It moved with an almost awkward gait, as if it had been made on the wrong scale and had to stop and think about everything. But when it was destroying the planes that swooped around it, it moved with a fluency it otherwise lacked.
She couldn't help but notice it was heading in the same direction Misato was.
The girl seemed to have pulled herself together, Misato noticed as they drove onto the car train. Car trains were not a fast method of transport, and she had time to study the stray she'd picked up. Said individual was still blotchy-faced from crying, but the panicked, not-quite-there look was gone, replaced by uncertainty.
The girl didn't look Japanese, she noticed, and wondered if that was the reason for the blank looks her attempts at communication had received. A fluffy wealth of brown hair was held back from her face by a head-band, and she wore glasses. She had a round face, and the kind of thick eyebrows that have clearly never seen a pair of tweezers in their life. This was not someone who made attempts at fashion.
Misato asked if she spoke Japanese.
The girl shook her head, then held finger and thumb a short distance apart in the universal sign for 'a little'.
Great. Misato thought. Not only am I taking a stranger to a top-secret restricted zone, I'm taking a foreigner. Maybe this wasn't a great idea. But if she's not from Toyko-3 and doesn't speak our language, she really would be stuck. I guess that's why she didn't get to a shelter. Couldn't she have followed other people?
The girl spoke, slightly unsteadily.
"Do you know English? Francais? Tieng Việt?... Italiano?"
Misato never had learned more English 'hello' and 'fuck off' (which were, in her opinion, the two most useful pieces of vocab in any language, other than 'can I get a beer?'), but her dad's sister had lived in France, and she had spent many holidays of her childhood there. She tried to recall some of it.
« Je parler une peu. Je m'appelle Katsuragi Misato » She said haltingly.
"Je m'appelle Lauren. Où va-t-on?" Misato tried to translate that. The girl was called Lauren, but she'd said the last bit too fast for Misato's out-of-practice language skills.
Lauren soon realized that Misato didn't speak much more French than she did Japanese. Faltering questions and answers in various languages later, they gave up, and both returned their attentions to the place they were passing through. The Geofront. It was truly astounding; an expanse of land completely hidden under the city-fortress. The recessed buildings stowed under the city gave the impression that the city itself was upside-down, and Lauren thought of Escher paintings.
Then the train structure shook with the blast of an explosion.
The girl – Lauren – had grown more and more agitated as they approached NERV central. The explosions from the Angel battle had gone from distant noise to impacts that shook and juddered the cable-car-like train with the force of a small earthquake. The tracks held, but Lauren looked vaguely ill, and panicked again. She would swear in English every time the track shook.
Eventually, after what seemed like the longest journey Misato had ever been on, they reached the NERV facility. Now to offload the girl before making her report, as Ikari Gendo would probably be somewhere offlimits, and he would probably not appreciate knowing about the girl's presence. Well, that and she wanted to stay out of trouble. She needed her pay to repair the damn car.
Unfortunately, the situation had got bad enough that all non-essential personnel had been evacuated. Misato rendezvoused with Akagi Ritsuko, hoping to explain the situation to someone who could probably be coerced into helping.
Ritsuko was not happy, Misato could tell from the look on her face. She produced a cell phone and began talking very fast, shushing Misato. Misato was shocked to hear her order Ayanami Rei woken up, but she knew equally she couldn't suggest anything more likely to work. Rei wasn't any older than the helpless girl that was following close to her, though. It didn't seem right.
Ritsuko put the phone away.
"Misato, Commander Ikari expects us at the Eva bays. I didn't mention this child to him. She is staying your problem." Misato had been quick to communicate that Lauren didn't understand Japanese, so they could speak freely. The girl was staying close to her, wide eyes looking around the complex.
Misato decided the best thing to do was ask her to wait somewhere out of the way. Her office was between where they were and the Eva bays, so that'd do. Ritsuko didn't like the idea of leaving the interloper in somewhere with so much confidential information, but the Angel had gotten through the Geofront and explosions were now causing structural damage. There was no time.
It took all Lauren's self-control not to run after Misato and beg not to be left alone. The room the two women had left her in was messy, and another explosion shook the building, prompting a yell from the receding figure of the blue-haired officer. Paperwork and pens and mugs fell to the ground. Coffee stained a pile of papers, and Lauren caught the laptop as it fell from what was clearly Misato's desk and placed it carefully on the floor.
She tried to remember what had happened in the anime. Shinji had angsted at his father… he'd got beaten up in Eva-01. He'd… he must have beat the monster in the end. Well shit. She'd heard Ritsuko mention Ayanami on the phone. And shogouki, which she seemed to remember meant Unit 01. There had been something about Rei… she'd been hurt, so she couldn't go out. Or had her Eva been damaged? Oh well. She couldn't do anything about it.
This wasn't how she'd have expected an anime to be. Looking around Misato's office, she could perceive – if she focused - that things lacked detail; each item of furniture had an air of perfection, a lack of texture or flaws. There was no reflection in the spilt coffee on the floor other than the sheen from the lights. Colours were flat when they should had depth. But none of this was noticeable unless you looked for the flaws –or lack thereof. It unsettled Lauren deeply, adding to the girl's almost neurotic fear.
Down in the Eva bays, the bridge crew were growing more and more visibly panicked. The command team was too, albeit less visibly. They had, after all, acted with confidence in telling the UN they could handle the situation, and anything less than a calm composure would lose them face. And cause widespread panic.
Nonetheless, Misato and Ritsuko's appearance on the girders that supported Unit One was a welcome sight even to the outwardly calm Ikari Gendo. He didn't unlock his fingers from their templed pose, but there was a definite urgency to his question:
"Have you got him?"
"There… was an accident. When" Misato gulped "I arrived… He, Shinji…" Goddammit, say it, woman! He's gotta know! She had never felt so intimidated in his presence before.
Ritsuko, bless her, spoke up. Misato recognized the manner her old friend used to give reports that she'd rather not have to say out loud.
"I am terribly sorry, Commander. It is my sincerest regret to inform you that Shinji did not survive the Angel's approach. He was crushed by wreckage from the aerial battle."
There was a terrible silence.
And then Eva broke it.
The machine's eyes blazed, and it thrust against the restraints with an inhuman strength. The screech of metal was drowned out, though, by the terrible howl that emitted from the creature's mouth.
Ikari Gendo's expression was frozen as he watched the Eva's arm tear free of the restraints and cords that anchored it, arc up, and smash through the umbilical bridge. As he watched the two women on the bridge thrown through the air and into the LCL. As white-faced Ritsuko grabbed Misato, who hadn't begun to swim. As the focused determination of the enterprise was lost in one swoop.
In another reality, another layer of the complex map where fates and existences are drawn up…
The author of the story also lacked focused determination.
There was really no plausible way that the situation would improve. For what reason could an unfortunate stranger, even one with a vague knowledge of the plot of Neon Genesis Evangelion – of backstory that would not be known by normal denizens of the canon world, be put in a position where she could save the day?
The only method of defeating the Angels was to break through their AT Field, and this was likely only with the use of an Eva Unit.
There was just no reasonable canon explanation that an outsider would be able to even make said Unit move with no training (bearing in mind the explanation for Ikari Shinji's ability to synchronise with Eva 01 immediately was certainly not applicable here). Furthermore, there was no reason for the outsider to be given a chance to pilot it. A more likely but still not probable last resort in the circumstances would be for Ikari Gendo to pilot the mecha.
And so, writer's block struck the author; and thus the author was contented as the improbability of Eva Self-Insertations ever being plausible was made eminently clear.