A solitary theater light stood at stood at the perimeter of a field, casting a wide oval of crisp illumination before it. All it showed was a floor of sand, dull and lusterless. Nothing was there; there was only the sand and the light. The sky was black. Not even sky; the atmosphere was a massive blanket smothering all that the light did not touch. What the light touched was solid; everything outside it didn't exist. It was abstract, swirling around in the gloom in meaningless patterns.
From the light trailed a power cable, running off into the oppressive darkness. As power ran from the cable into the light, an eerie hum permeated the air. It was not loud enough to drown out any other sounds, but it was always there. It was a presence that had made its welcome, and had decided to stay past due.
The girl didn't seem notice the sound, but she paid it no mind if she did. She simply stood in the epicenter of the light, staring at the sand. She was a child of around four years of age, but she could have just as easily been six or seven. There were no clues on her face to suggest her age. The only key to her identity was her size, the pom-pom on her dress, and the blue, close-cut hair that fell around her face. The only thing a viewer could glean from her appearance would be her age and gender.
The girl bent down, still gazing at the sand. She tentatively reached out, brushing the tips of her fingers over the abrasive surface. With the palm of her hand, she pushed the sand on her right into a mound. She did the same on her left, making another mound identical to the first. Using both hands this time, she began to add more sand to the piles. The sand gently crunched beneath her shoes as she shifted positions. Gradually, the piles grew taller and taller until she had two pillars of sand, each nearly a foot in height.
The girl crouched down, picking up a double handful of the dry, crumbly sand. She packed it together, a look of childish concentration clouding her features as she packed the sand into a single slab. Satisfied with her efforts, she placed the rectangle on top of the pillars. As she looked at her work, the rectangle and pillars smoothly melded together, grains flowing into grains.
Before her were the torso and legs of a man. He stood before her, tall and austere as the pebbles from which he was made. The girl crouched again, pushing sand together to make a stepping stool of sorts. She stood upon this, gathering handfuls of sand and giving the tall man arms, and then a head. She hopped off the sand pile, patting her hands against her dress.
The sand golem stared unblinkingly into the distance with its cold, dead eyes. Its ears would not hear. Its nose would not smell. The golem's arms and legs would remain stolid, refusing to move from where they had been created. However, Gendo's lips parted, and he spoke a single word:
"Yui."
An alarm sounded. There was a loud clack. A second stage light whined as it was made to cast a second, eerie beam of illumination over the sandy wasteland. The alarm broke off with a cry, wheedling away into silence. The girl frowned at the golem, its twin shadows facing in parallel directions with her own. The golem's right hand fell and crumbled into grains of sand.
The grains of sand that had given the golem life blew away from it in strands, propelled by a phantom wind. They swirled around the girl and her twin shadows, first in a circle, then bulging out into an elliptical, planetary orbit. An eerie howl filled the air as the sand, rotating faster and faster, nearly blocked out all light.
Everything halted.
The grains hung motionless in the air, locked in their swirling orbit obedient to the girl at its epicenter. The girl blinked, her crimson red eyes flashing. The movement of her eyelids distorted the silence. She took several steps forward, leaving child-sized foot indentations in the sand. The girl reached out her fingertips for the motionless grains.
Eyelids once again snicked shut over crimson eyes. Everything had changed. Well, not quite everything; the girl was still in sand, dual shadows cast at obtuse angles around her. She had aged. She towered above the height of her former self. Her clothing had changed from the pale red dress to a white and green schoolgirl's uniform. The world around her was no longer a plane of sand. There were walls now. She was in a sandbox.
Most notably, there was somebody with her.
He was small, only four years old. His red shirt and dark blue shorts were not yet covered in sand, but would likely become so if he continued to play in the sand. Shinji was intent upon doing so, getting down on his knees and scooping together great piles of sand with his arms. His single shadow stretched out away from him, at odds with the teenage girl's dual silhouettes.
The blue-haired girl watched Shinji with a glimmer of interest in her eyes. As he scooped sand into a pile, she was reminded of the golem from not long ago. It had become omnipresent, swirling around, enclosing her, and then solidifying and trapping her within this wooden sandbox prison.
Shinji continued to work, placing overflowing handfuls of sand on top of one another, forming the pile at first into a dome, and then into a pyramid as it grew larger and larger. It gradually began to look like the enormous tip of a chisel, with four perfectly smooth, slanted sides with a sharp tip pointing up towards the heavens. Shinji patted the walls into place once again and stepped back, sitting on his haunches to examine his work.
The girl's crimson eyes bored into the pyramid as if she could somehow stare into the middle of its sandy depths. It looked so, so familiar… but she was unable to place it. It was at the center of the sandbox, the center of what was, for now, the only world she knew or could reside in.
There was a crunch. Shinji had sunk one of his white shoes into the pyramid, a look of anger plastered over his childish features. He gave several more stomps into the sandy walls before stepping back again. The girl stepped tentatively forward, and placed a hand on the boy's shoulder.
The child exploded into grains of sand, once again swirling around the girl. The howl was louder this time, anxious to make its presence known. The alarm was back as well, adding its piercing cry to the howl of the sand. The pyramid was flying apart as well, joining the already swirling wall of sand. There was another loud clack as a third light roared into existence, adding a third beam evenly offset from the other two. Three shadows now led from the girl in the sandbox, the ends of each one forming the tips of a triangle. There was a blinding flash.
The world had changed again.
Gone were the wooden walls that had enclosed the girl and the small boy. Once again, everything stretched off infinitely into the distance. The floor she stood upon was no longer sand, but solid rock. A swing set, some monkey bars, and a metal grid that could only have been a jungle gym were scattered throughout the bright circle of illumination the three stage lights had come together to create.
The girl looked down at her body with crimson eyes. Her uniform was gone. Nothing had replaced it. She stood naked on the bright stone, her creamy white skin only a shade more alive than the cold, dead stone. Her naked body cast three long, black shadows into the distance.
The boy was there too. He had grown, much as she had. He wore a strange, skintight bodysuit that bulged out at the chest. He was sitting on the swing set, energetically swinging back and forth. His lively movements were in direct contrast with his lifeless, dead eyes. Once again, only a single shadow was cast forth from his body.
There was a third person among them. She sat, huddled within herself, in the center of the play structures. She was not a child, like the boy had been when he first appeared; she was a girl in her teens, unclothed much as the blue-haired girl was.
Two shadows led forth from her body.
The girl with the crimson eyes frowned. Something wasn't right. She had three shadows. The boy had one. This strange interloper should only have one as well. Her bare foot made a soft slapping noise on the stone as she stepped forward to move this newcomer from her place.
The two shadows from the huddled girl's body stirred, moving about in eerie patterns. Her crimson eyes blinking, the first girl stopped. As she watched, the two shadows took shapes other than the blurred mounds they had been before. One took the form of a doll, rough cloth hair sticking out in spikes from her head. The other took the shape of a tall, towering beast. It stood many times over the height of the doll, with an inhuman head and four glowing-green eyes. Regaining her will, the first girl stepped forward once again. She reached out with a somewhat determined look on her face to grab the second girl's shoulder. Their skin made contact.
The lights flickered, dimming before returning to their earlier brightness. A deep, permeating roar came from somewhere from deep beneath the ground. The blue-haired girl made to remove her hand, but her hand was sticking to the second girl's shoulder. The first girl discovered that upon closer examination, her hand was not just glued but indeed fused with the skin of the girl at the center of the structures.
Asuka's skin bubbled outward like dough and burst. Blood, hot, and wet, splashed over the stone, and the blood was not red but a deep azure. The twin shadows remained, eerily staring down at the rapidly spreading pool of gore.
The creaking of the swing set was gone as well. The girl robotically turned her head and saw that the boy had stopped the repetitive back-and-forth motion of the swing, and was staring intently at her face. Coated in sapphire viscera, the girl stated back at him.
The boy vanished. For a moment, a blurred imprint of him remained, but was quickly swept away. The girl was left alone in the playground. She stared down at her hands, coated in blood along with the rest of her. Something about the blue called to her like nothing else in her world had before.
And then she was not naked, but clad in white. A white bodysuit, much like what the boy had been wearing before he had disappeared. The deep cobalt blood was gone from her body. The girl stared blankly at the suit before she was hit with a flood of images.
A giant test tube, filled with orange.
A room with a wire-frame bed.
A box of bloodied bandages.
Deep brown eyes.
Orange eyeglasses.
A blue and white machine.
A woman with brown, short hair, standing over her.
The girl didn't know who she was, but she knew what she was. The image of herself that she had recalled had brought with it a flood of sensory input and memories that had been forgotten.
Out of nowhere, she remembered something that seemed out of place in her memories. There was a couch. She remembered a chair across from it A girl named Hikari had occupied it. Then there had been the sterile, white walls of a hospital, but there had been nothing outside of it. It couldn't have been the hospital of her youth. It couldn't have been her hospital, because somebody had been in the bed that she had never seen there. Asuka had been in that bed. Toji had been there, too. Then there had been a room with a giant clock, and a woman in front of her that could have only been the Lieutenant Colonel Misato Katsuragi. Shinji had been there too, as had Asuka. The pair had crumbled into paste and dust, before the floor fell out.
This world was not real. None of it had been real. Everything was a construct rotating around one person who could remember everything about their lives except themselves. The self would have ceased to be. They would not know even their own name. The minute they became self-aware, they would break the delicate balance they had with every other living being. They would be locked out of the harmonies, left to independently determine their existence, or to wildly interfere with everybody else's.
One of the lights cut out with a harsh screech, but three shadows remained. The girl remained in the center, a look of utter concentration out of place on her normally expressionless features. There was a harsh retort as the second light blew out, shards of glass screaming across what was visible of the playground. A solitary light remained, growing brighter and brighter by the second. As it reached a peak of incandescence, the girl in the circle finally realized who she was, and spoke it.
"Rei Ayanami."