Previously on
The Crisis of Infinite Shinjis
Shinji Ikari, pilot of Mobile Suit Evangelion Unit 1 awoke to a living nightmare. His world was invaded, its people put to the sword, and the skies set aflame by an army of darkness led by... himself.
Outgunned, outnumber, and trapped aboard the hellish Astartes Battle Barge Shikinami, the flagship of the Crimson Vengeance, the Legiones Astartes Second Legion led by the Primarch Iquarius and his sinister allies, Shinji was forced to flee when his suit's onboard computer triggered an experimental hyperspace jump drive that carried him out of his native universe...
...and into a hostile realm dominated by monstrous aliens that overran the world and destroyed Nerv. Again forced to flee, he jumped without first supplying a destination and found himself in the strange, otherworldly realm of the Yellow Aliens and their Great Atrium that houses Yggdrasil, the World Tree. The Aliens charged Shinji with a vital mission: Gather an army of heroes and defeat The Adversary, the alternate version of himself who started the war and now threatens to unravel all of space and time in his mad quest to achieve his sinister ends, whatever they may be.
Meanwhile, Emmett Brown and Marty McFly found their universe thrown into chaos as a terrifying event in their future began cascading backwards through time, threatening to consume them as the entire multiverse begins to skew towards a single disaster- Third Impact.
Asuka, a native of Iron Shinji's universe, was unable to escape and fell into the sinister clutches of the Primarch, whose mad goal requires him to collect Asukas from across the multiverse... and he has a particular interest in her.
We turn now, briefly, to another world, that went another way, where Shinji and Asuka and Rei did not champion their planet against the unknowable might of the Angels, but turned to more earthly pursuits... only for the otherworldly to find them anyway.
Asuka plucked her cigarette from her lips and breathed out a long streamer of smoke, leaning back in her chair. She had a very nice chair, much nicer than the one she'd been stuck with when this entire enterprise started. Her office still didn't have any walls, but the waist-level partitions that surrounded her desk had a certain charm all their own. She took a peculiar pleasure in pretending she couldn't see or hear Hikari when she was in her office. At least, she usually did. She sat up as Hikari chased a confidently striding visitor in a sharp tweed suit through the lobby-slash-garage of their little establishment.
"Doctor Soryu!" she called, clutching a clipboard to her chest. "He insisted, I-"
Asuka waved her off, and gestured for her guest to enter. He took a seat, appraising her as she appraised him. She hadn't changed out of her coveralls yet. She was used to the smell of the slime on her shoulder, and barely noticed it. She got up and offered her guest a short bow, then gestured with a pack of cigarettes in her hand. He waved her off.
She could tell this guy was trouble. He was wearing gloves in July, for one thing. White gloves, like he was some kind of military man, or maybe someone's butler. No tie, though, which struck her as odd. He had a neatly trimmed beard lining his jaw but no moustache, and he wore his sunglasses indoors. He handed her a card, and she took it without reading it, or taking her feet off her desk.
He looked at her blankly, presumably expecting her to take note of who he was.
"Gendo Ikari. Environmental Protection Agency."
"Ikari?" Asuka said, blowing another streamer of smoke into the air.
He ignored her. "I represent the Tokyo-3 office of the Agency, the Third Branch. I'd like to know what it is you do here."
She shrugged. "Watch television."
He stared at her flatly. She sighed. Bureaucrats.
"My team and I are professional paranormal eliminators."
"What is that, exactly?"
"We track, capture, and contain paranormal entities."
"I see," he said, a skeptical edge tinging his voice. "What do these activities entail?"
"We shoot 'em with these laser things, stick them in boxes, and put them in a bigger box downstairs."
"What sort of box?"
She sighed. "It's all very complicated. There's lasers. It's a custom containment system for paranormal energy designed by my colleagues and myself."
She stubbed out her cigarette. "Mostly myself."
"I see," said Gendo, looking at the slime trail across her shoulder. "I've heard some disturbing reports."
"Such as?"
"From your neighbors. Unexplained noises, smells, substances," he stared at her uniform hard now. "I'm here to assess any potential harm your activities may represent to the environment."
Asuka snorted. "Our activities? Have you looked outside? I haven't seen the moon in my entire life."
Gendo's eyes narrowed. "I'd like to see your equipment. My understanding is that you're drawing a considerable amount of electrical power."
"I don't think that would be a good idea," said Asuka. "There's a lot of science, it's all very complicated."
He leaned forward, his chair creaking. "Listen to me very carefully, Doctor. I am not a man to be trifled with. I will see your equipment. Today."
Asuka sighed. "I'm afraid that's impossible."
"Why not?"
She smirked a little harder than she should have. She should have just taken him to the basement, there was nothing he would make anything out of anyway. Once she started, though, she could never stop, no matter how many times it got her in hot water.
"You didn't say the magic word."
"And what is the magic word?"
"Please," said Asuka, her voice thick with mock surprise.
Gendo surged to his feet. "If you don't take me to inspect your operation, I'll come back with a court order."
She was up almost before he finished speaking. "You go get a court order. I'll sue your ass for wrongful prosecution. While I'm at it, I'll sue your ass for bad parenting. Shinji cries at night, you know."
He looked at her incredulously. "How do you know that?"
She smirked. "You should go now."
He stomped out of her office, kicking the little swinging door out of the way. "This isn't over, Soryu. I'll be back."
She watched him go, folding her arms under her chest. Hikari swept behind him, looking over her shoulder until he walked out through the open garage door at the front of the firehouse. She looked at Asuka in a panic.
"You shouldn't have done that!" she said in a hush, hugging herself.
Hikari had a problem with authority figures.
Asuka shook her head. "Relax. I'm going to go make sure the stooges don't burn the building down."
She pulled out her key, opened the door, and danced down the old metal stairs into the basement. The containment system, which looked like nothing so much as an ominous circuit breaker panel of remarkable size embedded into the wall, was humming along just fine. Her colleagues, though, looked less than fine. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs.
Rei was stuffing a pastry in her mouth. She took a large bite, chewed it wetly, and swallowed, her red eyes settled on Asuka. She was used to her colleague's albinism, her red eyes and platinum blonde hair. Her weird behavior was a perpetual trial. Shinji was sitting on a crate, staring into the floor. He looked up at her and his eyes betrayed him. She could tell when there was something spooking him. Other than the spooks, that was. She sighed.
"Well?"
Toji gave her a little nod, glancing at Rei.
"Tell her about the Twinkie."
Asuka blinked her eyes open, and immediately pressed them closed. She recognized the haze of anesthetic, dulling her senses and filling her mouth with cotton. The last thing she remembered was being dragged out of a cage full of mostly identical duplicates of herself. She hoped it was a nightmare, but when she opened her eyes, she knew it wasn't. Shinji looked down at her.
"She's awake."
She winced as something enormous moved beside him. A figure in hulking, clanking armor, his companion was bareheaded, his face a mocker of Kensuke Aida, expanded to almost equine proportions. The two made an unlikely pair, Shinji in his white suit and the Kensuke-thing towering over him in white armor that hissed and shivered as it moved wit him, like a living thing. A spidery contraption reached over his shoulders from where it clung on his back, and he'd removed his gauntlets, one of which was covered in needles, drills, and spinning blades. His bare hands were enormous, as big as her head. Kensuke stared at her through blank lenses sutured right into his skull in place of his glasses.
"I see. Thralls!"
"Wait," a soft voice said.
Asuka cringed as the fanged thing -she didn't want to call it a vampire- sauntered up behind Shinji, draping her arms over his shoulders. She did look different- she was taller than Asuka and her hair was a different shade. She felt a wave of revulsion when she realized she'd mistaken that thing for her Mama. She bit her lip, trembling on the cold table. She didn't bother testing the straps holding her down. All she could do was clench her fists and wiggle her toes, hoping they hadn't cut anything off.
The vampire breathed hard into the white-suited Shinji's ear, tugging at the straps of his white apron. "She's useless to the Primarch. Let me have her."
"She is his," Kensuke boomed, "to do with as he will, witch."
The vampire wasn't intimidated. She stretched to her full height, rising a few inches off the ground without any means of support, and her back popped as she stretched. "Try me, stooge."
"Enough," Shinji said quietly.
He tugged on her hair and she gave a small yelp and retreated to his side. She melded to his side, though he seemed disinterested in her, barely noticing her attention at all.
"I thought we agreed not to play in public," she purred, sliding her arm around his chest.
He pushed her away. "No one is playing, my dear. We are guests here. There will be others for you."
She sniffed at his throat. "I want you."
"Not yet," he said, smirking. "There are some parts of my humanity I'm not quite willing to surrender."
He picked up a tray of surgical instruments and turned, the thing clinging to his side keeping pace with him, whispering his ear. He ran his hand down her back, and Asuka turned away, pressing her eyes tightly closed, and shuddered.
"Disgusting," Kensuke mused, slipping his heavy gloves back on.
Two hunched men in plain purple robes sidled up to the table and undid her straps. Neither of them met her gaze, as they kept their faces hidden within deep cowls, only their chins visible. She thought of pushing them out of the way and making a run for it, but she glanced at the lethal, hulking way Kensuke moved and the weapon he had, a gigantic pistol clipped to his waist, and thought better of it. She turned out to be too weak to do much more than stand and shuffle along the floor, the robed men tightly gripping her arms.
She looked around the room, and immediately wished she hadn't.
The table she'd been on wasn't the only one. There were dozens of them, and most were much, much larger, sized for the giants in powered armor. She saw things floating in great tubes filled with preservative fluids, organs and tissues turned strangely pale from lack of blood. The place had a sepulchral air despite the white walls and polished floors and smelled of cleaning fluids and blood and the icy tang of steel. It was a hospital, she knew, but one no patient was meant to ever leave. Her stomach heaved, and she had to struggle to contain her bile until she was outside.
The hallway wasn't much better. The air was chill and stank of vile smells and putrescence, and she heard something whispering to her as she walked. She thought she saw a face on the wall from the corner of her eye, until she turned to it and saw only smooth unblemished curves. The corridor was wide enough for a dozen people to walk comfortably abreast, and taller still. A strange darkness clung between the heavy struts that segmented the walls, comming to points like the roof of a cathedral, and she had a terrible feeling of being watched, that something was waiting to pounce when she let down her guard.
The journey was not a long one. The thralls pushed her down a corridor and through a heavy door. If, somehow, she managed to get out of the cage, she'd never get past it. She saw that the cell she'd been kept in with the others wasn't the only one. A forest of Asuka stared at her as she walked past, their blue eyes fixed on her like strange flowers. She saw one, different from the others, with red eyes and pale skin, her hair gossamer gold, and a shiver ran down her spine. The golden-haired Asuka's left leg ended in a stump at the knee, the skin folded over in a ragged scar.
One thrall turned to the other. "See to the Master. I will attend this one."
A chill ran down her spine. They didn't do anything to her, were they going to kill her instead? The thrall to her left let go and turned to scurry off, bowing even lower as he passed through the bulkhead, near the heavy door. The thrall clutching her arm led her near the cell, but stopped first.
"Listen to me very carefully," he whispered. "I'm going to help you escape."
She looked at him, but said nothing. He bowed his head so she could see nothing under his cowl.
"What do I do?" she whispered.
"Nothing, yet. When the time is right, I will provide you with what you need. Wait and do not draw attention to yourself."
She nodded. "Why are you helping me? Who are you?"
He turned his head. She saw a lock of hair; he was ancient by the color of it. She looked around. Maybe he wasn't.
"No one can know that we have spoken," he whispered, and urged her into the cell. The Old Asuka was asleep, cradling one of her wounded dopplegangers in her arms.
"Who are you?" Asuka repeated.
The thrall slid the door closed.
"I am Alpharius."
"Coordinates locked," said the computer in a female monotone, "Initiating jump."
Shinji was not getting used to this. The first thing he felt was a sort of lifting, as if his body was being pulled up sharply, the sort of jolt that makes it feel like you've left something important, like your internal organs, behind. The second thing he felt was a sudden disconnection as the synchronization left him during the actual process of the jump, a safety system the aliens must have added when they repaired his suit. The world snapped back into existence as he landed hard, stumbling around as he fought to regain his balance in the bulky suit while synchronizing with it at the same time. He ended up coming to a stop with leaves crunching under his boots.
"Status?"
"Jump successful. Spatial distortion drive spinning down. All systems nominal."
He flicked through the system's various screens anyway, just to be sure. He moved his arm; the aliens had even fixed up the grinding in his elbow. The air read clean enough for him to open his helmet, and so he did. The visor lifted and the jaw dropped, and cool air rushed over his face, tangy with the smell of drying leaves and an autumn chill. He stood for a moment drinking it in. He hadn't felt a cool breeze on his face in years, not since the conference in Berlin, the night Asuka had…
He stopped thinking about that and started walking. Downed foliage crunched under his feet. The trees around him were half bare, the leaves turned vibrant colors here, others curled into tiny brown fists there. He took a good look around, scanning the horizon for any movement. The aliens hadn't said anything about this place other than it was dangerous, which didn't help him much. The chronometer spun wildly until it settled on seven in the evening, and it must have just gone dark. A low mist clung to the ground that set him on edge.
"Computer, any movement?"
"Negative. There appears to be some sort of settlement ahead."
Shinji decided to walk it- no sense flying in and getting himself shot up by some sort of defense system. He willed the helmet to clang shut, too. It would probably be best to break it to whoever lived her gently. He trudged along the leafy road, and was confronted by a high wall that rose out of the mist ahead. It stretched on in either direction, three times as high as a man, made of whatever was to hand- car panels, random scraps of metal, diamond plate, cinder blocks. The top was lined with sharpened spines of rebar, pointing out, and from the dangled various odds and ends, cloves of garlic looped in strings and crosses and holy icons. Something about it made him edgy.
Built into a concrete blockhouse was a heavy gate, big enough for a large car to drive through. The gate itself was made of two welded together sections of scrap metal, overlapping. He walked up to it, passing under part of the blockhouse, and tapped his gauntlet on the doors. There was a hollow metal boom, and he waited. The only sound was the distant rustle of leaves swirled by dust devils. He was about to turn around.
"Proximity alert."
The sudden chime of the computer made him jump out of his skull, and he turned around, swinging his gauntlets to bring his emitters to bear on whatever was sneaking up on him, but saw nothing. Holding his arms wide, he turned in a slow circle. Intermittent blips appeared on his HUD, and he swung around to find them, only to confront empty air.
From nowhere, a streaking shape slammed into his side and bowled him over. He rolled with it, awkwardly stomping back on to his feet, and swung his arms around, but whatever it was had already disappeared. He flicked his gaze to the damage readout. He was still showing a green board, but the hit had rung his bell, and he couldn't get a fix on how fast the thing had been moving. He turned around, and hanging from the underside of roof over his head, a small figure watched him with crimson eyes that were too bright for mere reflection.
His throat seized up. He lowered his weapons out of reflex as Rei dropped down, turning in the air, and landed in a perfect dismount, her arm thrown out behind her. She stood up. Her hair was snow white, a perfect match to her skin, and despite the chill she wore only a leather vest and tight breeches, and was barefoot. She walked towards him slowly, putting one foot in front of the other, with a dancer's grace. He tried to remain non-threatening, and willed his helmet open.
"Rei," he said, "Listen to me, I-"
She rushed him so fast he barely had time to react. She hit him with astonishing force, knocking him off his feet, and pinned him to the ground. He tried to close his helmet but she wedged her hands between the visor and chin plate and held them open, the servos grinding until he relented. Her expression blank, she leaned close and sniffed at him.
"You're not dead."
"No," he said, trying to smile. "I'm sure not. How about you?"
"Close enough," she said softly, and stood up. "Don't move."
She pursed her lips to whistle and made a strange trilling sound, almost like a bird call. Shinji looked up, towards the gate, as it slid open, pulled by a grinding motor. He took a breath as he watched himself walk out. The other Shinji was shuffling on a bad knee held in place by a metal brace strapped around his leg. He was in better shape, too, his chest broader, his shoulders bigger, his jaw a little more angular and covered in stubble. He had some kind of a metal glove on his right hand, and a long gun stuck in a scabbard strapped to his back.
He was also carrying a chainsaw.
"What the hell is that?"
"No idea," Rei said softly, kneeling on Shinji, ready to grab his helmet again. "Should we kill it?"
"Does it talk?"
"Yes!" Shinji shouted, "I'm not an it!"
Rei wedged her hands back in to hold his helmet open while his counterpart drew the gun over his shoulder, a shortened double barreled shotgun, and swung it around to point it at authority at his face. The twin barrels looked enormous, and Shinji licked his lips.
"This is weird," said Rei.
"If you say it's weird, it's weird. Who the hell are you?"
Shinji shrugged, his armor twitching. As this made the man pointing the gun at his face tense up, Shinji immediately regretted it. He considered raising his AT-Field and flinging them both off.
"I'm Shinji Ikari."
"Funny, I thought I was Shinji Ikari."
"Hear me out," said Shinji. "I'm an alternate version of you, from a parallel universe."
The shotgun swung up, and he leaned it on his shoulder. "Let him go."
Rei stood up. Shinji awkwardly got up, keeping his helmet open. The Hunter watched him the entire time, his blue eyes fixed and hard. Something about him was unnerving, like something was missing from him.
"What is this place?" said Shinji.
"Home," said the Hunter. "Tokyo-3. The last fortress of mankind. There's about a hundred of us left."
"We should close the gate," said Rei, advancing towards it.
The Hunter turned and Shinji followed, looking around as he passed through it. The other Shinji pushed a lever over, and an electric motor turned a chain, grinding the gate closed. When it clanged shut, Rei picked up a very heavy looking car axle and dropped it into a set of heavy hooks welded to the back of the gate, barring it. She clapped her hands together and wiped the grease away on her pants.
"Why are you staring at me?"
"I haven't seen you in years," Shinji said, absently. "You know, 'I'm from a parallel universe' is a pretty weird line. Why did you believe me so fast?"
The hunter shrugged, and holstered his weapon. "Trust me. That's not the weirdest thing I've ever heard."
"Okay," Shinji said, nervously. "What happened here?"
"You mean lately, or do you want my life story?"
"Both."
The hunter sighed. "Twenty years ago, a cult called the Society of the Soul, used the Necronomicon-"
"The what?"
"An ancient book of spells," said Rei. "Bound in human flesh and inked in blood, it is an ancient Sumerian magical text, containing demon resurrection passages, curses, and invocations. It was never meant for the land of the living."
The Hunter gave her a look. "Right. Anyway, they used the book to resurrect this thing called Lilith, the Queen of the Vampires, locked under the Antarctic ice."
"On the Plateau of Leng," Rei added, helpfully.
The Hunter gave her yet another look. "I'm telling the story. Lilith escaped, turned the group that brought her out of the ice, and traveled with her children to Argentina. The world was swept by vampirism in a matter of years. By the time anyone knew what we were fighting, it was already too late. They can't be stopped, they can't be killed, all we can do is build walls and hide from them."
Shinji looked at Rei.
"I am a half vampire, a dhampir. I was created when our mother was bitten while in labor with me."
"I see," said Shinji. "That's… that sucks."
"Yes," said Rei.
"It was our hope that by killing the Queen, Rei would be able to take her place, and stop the rest of the vampires from wiping us out."
Shinji looked around. "I'm going to guess that didn't work."
The Hunter gave him a hard look. "No. As it turned out, it wasn't Rei that landed the killing blow."
Shinji balked. "Then who was it?"
"Asuka," Shinji said softly, "and it was my fault, what she became. We were in Lilith's stronghold. Rei was down, I was dying, and Asuka was surrounded and outmatched. She drank the blood of a vampire, hoping she would retain control of herself while she turned." The Hunter's voice became very tight. "She did, for a while. She begged me to kill her, but I wouldn't listen. Day by day she lost control, going from begging me to destroy her to flailing and trying to break out from where we had her chained up. When she fully turned, she had killed the Queen and became the Queen herself. We barely survived. She turned Hikari and Mari-"
"Who?"
The Hunter gave him a quizzical look. "Mari Makinami. You don't know her?"
Shinji shrugged.
"Huh," said the Hunter. "She turned them, killed others. Toji, Ritsuko."
"Misato?"
"Who?" said the Hunter.
Shinji looked away. "It doesn't matter. What happened after that?"
"We've been trying to survive," said the Hunter. "Asuka is smarter, faster than Lilith was, more vicious. They were taking a dozen people a night. I don't even know how they got past the walls. The garlic always stopped them before, the crosses. Then, it stopped."
"What do you mean?'
He shrugged. "We've been outside the walls a dozen times. Usually we at least run into a few suckheads, that's what we call the ones that have gone feral, they look like big rats. Nothing. No raiding parties, either. It's like the vampires have just disappeared off the face of the Earth."
Shinji swallowed. "I think I know why I'm here. I know where they went, and I need you to come with me."
Sleep was difficult. Asuka would huddle with the others for warmth. Somehow, the dank, musty interior of the cell was feverishly hot, and yet she would quickly find herself shivering. She ended up crawling to the rear of the cell, resting her head on Old Asuka's lap. Sleep came fitfully, and she would suddenly awake, a half-heard whisper alien chant filtering into her ears. Her peers slept better, or else they were simply too tired to be restless. She ended up raising her head to discover that the lights had been shut off- she had no idea what time it was, or how long she'd been there.
A figure stood at the front of the cell. Asuka slowly got up, disentangling herself from the sleep-heavy limbs of her comrades. She stumbled to the bars, hesitating to touch them for fear they were electrified, or some other horror. She thought she recognized the same thrall from earlier by his sharp chin, but in his deep cowl, there was no way to be sure.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"I am Alpharius."
"What do you want?"
He touched a panel at the side of her cell, tapping a key code, and the door unlocked with a soft click. Alpharius urged it open, careful to make no sound, and raised a single finger to his thin lips in a gesture of silence. Asuka nodded and followed him through the dark, wanting to ask why me, but keeping quiet. She felt a sick pang of quiet as the door slid shut. Alpharius seemed to sense her unease, and shook his heat slightly, barely nudging his cowl. Asuka frowned.
She followed him in another direction, into narrower, smaller corridors that ran alongside the main one. It was darker here, and the scents and strange sounds closer. She felt a curious itching between her shoulder blades, as if she were being observed. She shrugged her arms and hugged herself, glancing this way and that. Alpharius walked on unerringly, his footsteps utterly silent. She started to lose track of the twists and turns. Sometimes, her companion picked up his pace, while others, he would stop without warning and wait, as if expecting something to pass. She saw junctions and adjoining corridors, but Alpharius seemed to know the way without even really looking.
They came upon another thrall, standing at the junction of another set of corridors, and Alpharius approached him. The thrall inclined his head slightly to her, keeping his face hidden, and his hands obscured inside the sleeves of his robe.
"I will take you from here. It is best if no one individual knows the entire route."
Asuka blinked. "Who are you?"
"I am Alpharius."
"I thought he was Alpharius."
"It is most curious. I am also Alpharius."
Asuka looked from Alpharius to Alpharius. It beat the cell. She hoped it would, anyway. "Where are we going?"
"I don't know," the new Alpharius said as she began following him.
"Who does?"
"Alpharius does," said Alpharius.
In total, there was maybe another hour of seemingly random turns, and two more changes of the guard, as it were, all of them identifying themselves by the same name. She thought they'd crossed over the same path a few times, but changed the route. She was beginning to suspect they didn't want her knowing how she got wherever it was she was going, either. Finally, Alpharius stopped at a small hatch.
"It is this way. You must now travel alone."
"Why?"
"I can't say," said Alpharius.
Asuka's eyes narowed as he undid the hatch, exposing a narrow corridor that was more properly called a tunnel, but still tall enough to stand, just barely. She edged inside and held her breath as the hatch closed behind her. Asuka froze, listening for sounds, but heard only a faint dripping, and smelled a deep, mechanical tang in the air that made her snuffle and try to force it back out. She began pacing down the hall in the darkness, stopping to touch the wall once in a while and make sure it was still there. She walked for what felt like forever, until her legs burned, following a lazy curve that took her a half an hour to notice. The roof dropped down, and she crouched, then got down on her hands and knees, working her way along.
Eventually, she saw a faint light, and moved hurriedly towards it. It resolved into a kind of grate, a fine metal mesh that admitted a tiny bit of light. She moved to it and sat down just behind it, peering through the mesh, and froze. A wave of raw terror surged through her. It was him. The Primarch.
Even on his knees, he was enormous. He was engaged in some kind of prayer, it seemed, whispering silently to a bier in front of him where another Asuka rested, bathed in a golden light, splayed out on a soft white cushion, her hands folded on her chest. She didn't look dead, but she didn't look alive, either. Asuka was sure she wasn't breathing, but she didn't look naturally still, either. It was like she was frozen.
She strained to listen, praying the immense being in the room wouldn't notice her. She was able to make out her own name, and the word please, over and over and over again, becoming almost a drone. She held her breath and waited. Her head drooped, and she nearly fell asleep before the Primarch rose to his feet, his movements bizarrely smooth and graceful for a giant. He dwarfed the girl on the bier, who would have come up to his waist if she stood. She looked young and fragile, like a flower frozen in liquid nitrogen, liable to shatter at any instant and be gone forever. The Primarch stared at her for a moment more, then stomped off, sweeping his wolf cloak behind him. He ducked under the bulkhead in a curiously human motion and the heavy doors slid shut behind him.
She looked through the grate. It was either go in, or go back. She probed at it with her hands, her heart leaping into her throat when it pushed out slightly, and emitted a squeal that would wake the dead. When she heard no reaction outside, she pushed it enough to wriggle out from under it and landed, freezing and covered in oil, on the cold floor. It clanged shut behind her, and she winced. The huge room was dark, lit only from above.
Asuka looked up. She'd never seen so many stars in her life. The sky outside the too-thin dome was too bright with them, like someone had gathered up a whole galaxy and spilled it on a black canvas. She took a few steps forward and looked at herself, lying on the bier. Recognizing her fourteen year old self made her stomach lurch. What was he doing to her? Was this the one the Old Asuka said he was trying to fix, or another prisoner?
There was some kind of a panel on the side of her bier. There was nothing separating her from the air. Asuka considered sticking her hand in the golden light, but hesitated, drawing back from it. She touched the panel and held her breath. It surprised her. It was like flicking off a lamp. The other Asuka was suddenly bathed in the same twilight as the rest of the room.
An alarm thundered in her ears, and Asuka whirled. She could hear thundering footfalls coming towards the door, and turned around in a panic. The other Asuka's chest rose and fell, rose and fell, just barely noticeable. She didn't seem to be able to move. Asuka moved to her side, ready to scoop her up and try to make a run for it with her. She didn't think the armored giants could fit down that shaft.
The other Asuka's eye flicked open. It was blue, blur so brilliant it put the summer sky to shame. Asuka felt a sudden wave of intense cold, and colors flickered in her vision, but not in her sight, whirling around her head. She felt the sudden invasion flare into her like a jet of hot gas, and trying to hold it back was like holding back the ocean- it slipped between the fingers of her mental defense like cold water even as the mass of the wave bowled her off her feet. She lost all sense of herself, all sense of time, all sense of having a body. She was rendered down to a discrete point, to an observer in space, and a tiny voice whispered to her.
+Do you see+
It was like falling backwards, the surging panic at the first hint of toppling backwards from a high seat, drawn into infinity. Somewhere, her heart was thundering in her chest, yet at the same time, she was standing on the flying bridge of a ship, somewhere she'd never seen before. Over the Rainbow. Who would give an aircraft carrier such a silly name? The world spread out underneath her, a gleaming blue infinity rolling in time with the deck of the ship. Vessels spread in all directions, dragging wakes behind them like imperfections on the face of a jewel. She watched the helicopter thumping in from the East and ran down the metal stairs, her polished patent leather shoes clicking loudly as she took them two at a time.
Anticipation. She'd been waiting to see him for weeks, having heard so many stories. She wanted to size herself up against the Third Child, to see if all the rumors and whispers were true. She didn't even know what he looked like- his file was a blank, like Ayanami's, with only some vital statistics and a set of synch test scores, all of them absurdly high, higher than hers. The thought of it pained her. She would put him in his place. She knew it.
Wait, this never happened. I came by plane while Unit Two was transported from the Berlin facility by train, we-
She steadied herself as she marched across the deck, putting her shoulders back, wondering, as the wind whipped, what motivated her to wear a damned skirt. She looked off to her left and saw Kaji sauntering towards the arriving chopper, his face an even mask, fixed in a false grin. She felt something radiating him, like the feeling of phantom hairs from a strong static electric charge. She focused on him and he stumbled a step, glancing at her, and winced. Images of the previous night floated in her mind, the way he'd taken her by the shoulders and shoved her out of his quarters.
Wait, I wouldn't do that, I didn't-
She lost all concentration as the rear door of the chopper swung down and clanged on the deck. Kensuke ran out, dragging Toji behind him, camera in hand. Misato followed them with an exasperated look on her face. Following behind her was him. Shinji. He walked down the ramp with his held high, commanding. When his blue eyes swept over her and fixed on her face, she stumbled to a stop in her tracks, and her knees buckled. He blinked, and the movement seemed too human, unreal, out of place.
She wasn't sure what she was expecting. He was beautiful. Like a statue brought to life, some artist's vision of the perfect figure. He stood head and shoulders over Misato and seemed twice as wide, his broad chest and boulder shoulders straining under a Nerv uniform jacket. He walked as if he was floating, instantly used to the rolling of the deck even as Toji and Kensuke struggled to adjust, and even Misato stumbled a little. Only when he drew near did she realize exactly how big he was; his perfect proportions made it hard to notice.
"You're Asuka," he said.
Her jaw dropped and she nodded, vaguely.
A sudden gust of wind rolled across the deck, feathering in her ears, whipping her hair around her face. Toji's
How do I know his name
hat pulled free of his head and rolled across the deck, and her skirt lifted, surging up around her hips. She pushed back down at it. Toji started to move for the had, until Shinji put his hand on Toji's shoulder and gestured with his fingertips. The hat glued itself to the deck, pushed down as if an invisible hand rested on it, and something grabbed her skirt and smoothed it down around her legs until the wind passed, fluttering back into a gentle sea breeze. Toji scooped up his hat and put it on his head.
"Hi," he said awkwardly.
Asuka shook her head. She tried to summon he usual bellicose bravado, but she ignored the boy completely, focusing on Shinji. He was intent at her, towering over her. She had to crane her neck up to look into his eyes.
+Can you hear me+
"Yes?" she blinked, and realized everyone was staring at her.
She'd heard his voice in her head.
+Yes+
A thin smiled curled his lips. Misato glanced at them, as if trying to piece together some puzzle.
The world melted. She was sitting at a table in the officer's mess. Her hands were still shaking, so she gripped the edge of the table hard, folding the immaculate white tablecloth under her thumbs. Shinji sat at the head of the table, solely because there was no room for him elsewhere. Kaji looked small and weak next to him, like a child sitting at a table beside a man. He kept glancing at Shinji, a faint twinge of fear dancing in his eyes. Asuka could taste it, could feel it, like something bubbling in the air, a faint rotten tang. Shinji noticed it too, slowing as he took a bite of steak, holding the fork in his left hand, in the Continental fashion. She hadn't expected him to be so cultured.
"So," Kaji said, breaking the tension. "I understand you live with Katsuragi."
"Yes," said Shinji.
"So tell me, is she sti-"
The room went cold. The temperature dropped five degrees. Everyone was utterly silent as Kaji sat up from his seat, tossed his utensils on the table, and murmured some excuse before backing away, flicking glances over his shoulder at Shinji. He broke into a run halfway to the door.
+What did you do+ she sent, biting her lip in concentration.
+I find that one tiresome.+
She stood up, barely having touched her food. "I want to show Shinji my Eva."
"Your Eva," Misato said in a knowing tone.
Asuka's eyes narrowed.
Just like that, they were on the cargo ship, standing under the flapping tarp. The sea breeze made it sound like constant, distant thunder over their heads. Unit Two lay sprawled on its belly, half submerged in a pool of cool LCL that circulated around it with a soft murmuring sound. Shinji stood with his hands on the railing, gazing into the eyes of the giant in silence.
+Do you hear her+
Asuka blinked. She still wasn't used to that. She stood beside him.
"How do you do that?"
He stood up and turned to face her. "The same way you do."
"I don't know how!" she shouted, her fingers curling into fists. "What are you?"
He looked at her for a while and gave her that soft smile again. His eyes twitched and she saw his right hand curl into a fist. She felt something, like invisible hands around her waist, and when she looked down, the fabric of her dress was smoothed there, as if something was touching her. She lifted gently to the air, raised by some invisible force until her toes broke contact with the deck. She raised up to look at him eye to eye.
"I don't know," he whispered.
Everything changed again. They were in the plug. It was cramped. She was sitting on his lap. They were being buffeted by the pounding water and the sheer force of the angel, a titan that dwarfed Unit Two and probably the aircraft carrier, too. Raw terror surged through her. They were in the water, and Unit Two would sink like a stone, entombing them in the deep. She was going to die.
+No+
Alarms sounded everywhere around her. The synchronization was failing.
+You don't need that. Sing to her.+
She didn't know what he meant, only that he sat up and put his arms around her, cradling her head with his hand. The fear melted out of her, flowing out through her toes and vanishing into the aether. His hands were huge and so strong, like he could crush her without a thought, but soft. She felt something else, something deep in the Eva she'd never noticed before, hidden from her somehow.
"Momma?"
The scene changed once again. She was weeping bitterly, her hands pressed into her eyes, clawing at her own face. She still had her plugsuit on. She was curled up in the corner of the showers, the hot water running over her, scalding and steaming. She wanted it to go hotter, wanted it to kill her, to wash her away. She was useless, useless. In her first real engagement, she'd lasted two minutes, and Shinji had killed the twin angel by himself. Unit One just raised its hand and the beast came apart, shredded by some invisible force. Rei was standing in the corner, watching her quizzically.
Shinji stepped into the showers, still in his plugsuit. He looked at Rei.
"Leave."
The strange girl complied, glancing sidelong at him as she left. Shinji walked over to her and sat down. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes, and all of the valves closed at once, spinning down until they clanged shut and the flow of water suddenly cut off. Asuka made a chuffing sound of anger, trying to force words from her dry throat, but none would come.
He was smaller. He was only as tall as she was. How did he do that?
It didn't matter. He picked her up and put her on his lap, as easily as if she weight nothing at all. How did he make himself smaller? Why would he do that? She sat up as his hand rested on her cheek. She could feel him through his hand, feel his thoughts. Could he do the same?
"I need you."
Of course he could.
She leaned on him. He was warm.
So was she. She was burning hot. The world was a crushing tomb, plunging in around her. She heard the Eva grinding, felt the heat rising. Someone was screaming in her ear about the coolant lines breaking. She grabbed the butterfly yoke and pulled it back hard, trying to regain control, to somehow dig herself out of the magma, but it was no use. She was sinking.
She heard a tiny cracking sound, and felt herself moving. The Eva was rising, groaning as something pulled it from above. She went limp, too tired, too fatigued to move. Heat stroke. Breathing was hard, like the LCL was turning solid in her lungs. She was going to die anyway. The sensation of movement increased and she felt herself fuzzing in and out of consciousness.
This isn't me! My suit is-
She blinked awake. They were surrounded by wreckage, Shinji cradling her in his arms. He'd torn Unit Two's back apart and ripped away the D-Type suit, unfurled it with his mind like strips of paper. There was a thin coating of frost all over him, and her breath blew out cold, turning to mist in the air. He curled himself around her as if he was afraid she would vanish.
"Today," he said, "it ends today."
She was standing with him in Gendo Ikari's office. She was leaning on a crutch. She'd been hurt somehow, her leg an angry map of pain that refused to respond to her will, and there was a patch over her eye, sucking the depth out of the world. Ikari sat at his desk, as calm and collected as ever. Shinji towered over her, his head nearly scraping the ceiling. Misato stood behind him, glancing about nervously.
"You tried to kill her."
"It was necessary," said Gendo.
"So is this," said Shinji.
He closed his fist. Gendo's desk came apart in gleaming black shards. Asuka closed her eyes. She only saw a bare moment of what happened to the man himself, but she never wanted to see that again.
When she opened them, she was in Unit Two again, in the middle of a furious attack. She recognized the enemy at once. The fourteenth angel.
Oh God, oh God, not again-
Unit One strode across the battlefield, wreathed in pyschic flame. In its chest, its core burned like a miniature sun. Wings of flame, glittering in a thousand colors like shattered diamonds, splayed out behind his back, and a ring of light formed over his head. He had discarded his umbilical, as he no longer required it. The Eva's feet weren't touching the ground. A sword of flames formed in his fist, and he set upon the angel.
The battle was brief, and it was brutal.
It was the aftermath that concerned her. They met in the locker room, as they had several times before. When he came to her, he somehow reduced his own size, made himself like her, but perfect. Every night was a nigh she never wanted to end, but it always did. She opened her eyes and gazed into hell.
Wings, wings of light and a chorus of voices, a thousand and one. She raised her psychic defenses as they'd practiced, and the angel shattered them with the barest effort, laying her bare. A lifetime pain flowed through her in a continuous loop, her every second expanded into fourteen years of mental anguish. She saw many things, she saw her mother, she saw the half-remembered glimpse of Gendo Ikari's face separating from his head, she saw when Rei tried to stop Shinji and Shinji wept as he unmade her. She heard a distant drumbeat and realized it was her heart, pounding and pounding until it could keep the beat no more.
In her dream-hell Shinji found her, a towering giant of light, the spirit freed from the flesh. He was a god, his soul so bright she feared it would burn her own away. He seized the angel in his psychic grasp and taught it a thousand litanies of pain. All his cruelty, all his malice, flowed back into the distant creature and tore it apart from the inside, its final moments a world-ripping scream of pure anguish.
Beneath it, somewhere distant in a sea of colors without name, a tiny, hoarse voice whispered, he will be mine in the end.
It was their last battle. They were beset by enemies from every direction. Toji fought valiantly in his Unit Three, warring at her side. Hikari brought Unit Four with them. Asuka screamed as she grappled with the white giants, the Mass Production series that outnumbered them by more than two to one. Shinji was occupied, fighting something that called itself Tabris, along with a horde of soldiers in Self Defense Force uniforms. Everything became a jumble. She tore the enemies apart in her bare hands. They surrounded Hikari, cutting her legs out from under her. The yellow Eva went down, and four of them surrounded her and raised and lowered their swords, and Hikari's strangled scream became a gurgle of pain and then nothing. Toji went berserk, raging at them.
She last saw Unit Three with the heads of two of the Mass Production units impaled on its shoulder pylons. After that, there was only pain, pain in her belly and in her eye, lancing, growing stronger by the instant. She felt fire in her arm, felt the flesh peel from from her bone. They were killing her. She blacked out, and floated in an infinite sea of darkness, alone with distant laughter like thunder before a storm.
She woke up and remembered once more, Shinji squatting amid the wreckage, holding her tiny, broken body in his huge arms. Another stood before him, a giant of light and gold. The last words she remembered rang in her mind like clanging bells.
"Can you fix her?"
A tiny voice, her own voice, whispered to her.
+Save him.+
Then, it was over.
"It's a volcano," said the Hunter.
"Yes. Yes it is," said Shinji.
"You can see why I would be nervous about this."
It was an active volcano, to boot, recently erupted according to his suit's onboard computer. The overlay suggested it had erupted only a few years ago, at the maximum. It didn't stand out much from the surrounding environment, except for the new growth of trees where they'd burned after the eruption and the solidified flow of magma down one side. The most striking feature was the obviously alien spacecraft jutting from its side, three huge thrusters yawning open. Shinji, the Hunter, and Rei walked up the mountain path towards it, between the trees.
Shinji stopped. Parked up the path from where the trio stood was an old Army jeep, but everything about it was off. The heat signatures didn't line up with a proper engine compartment, and it had some sort of exotic weapon on a pintle mount above the back seat. He edged closer to it, motioning for the others to stay put. His counterpart reached over his shoulder and took hold of the stock of his shotgun.
Approaching with his helmet open, he tapped on the hood with his gauntlet.
"Hey!" a voice from the radio shouted, "What's the big idea?"
Shinji took a step back, his arms out. "You're not a car."
The vehicle made a sound, a rapid five-note burst of synthesized noise, and unfolded. Panels slid back, the engine compartment dipped forward, and a pair of arms unfolded from the sides and planted themselves in the earth, steadying the being as it stood to its full height, the last few sections clamping into place. Twice again as tall as Shinji, the machine knelt down to speak with him, its face a configuration of shifting metal panels.
"Nice suit."
"I'm looking for the Autobots."
"You found 'em."
The weapon, now mounted on the robot's shoulder, swung around and aimed at him. "I just need to know why you're lookin'."
Shinji shrugged, the armor grinding with the movement. "Yellow aliens sent me to save the universe."
"Oh," said the Jeep. "Okay, then. I'm Hound. Follow me."
He motioned to the others, and they followed. The machine walked before them, each step hammering the ground. Shinji looked around nervously, glancing back at his companions. Rei was indifferent as usual, while the other Shinji, the Hunter, nervously scanned the treeline. Whether it was from paranoia or mere habit, he didn't know. The path wound gently up too the foot of the mountain where the ship was embedded, looming far overhead, built on an utterly inhuman scale. Whether someone inside saw their approach or Hound send some invisible signal, there was a great grinding sound and a ramp slowly scissored down until it came to rest on the earth and threw out a tiny puff of dust around its edges. Golden light bathed the inside of the ship.
Shinji put one foot on the ramp, then the other, and started walking slowly upwards. The interior of the ship was vast, the ceiling far above. He stumbled a little as he saw more of these Autobots moving around inside. One, mostly red with what looked like the barrel of an optical instrument of some kind slung over his shoulder, stood up from work on some sort of circuit board to watch them pass. There were others- a horned giant with windshield for a chest, a small, yellow one with curved, sweeping body panels that looked like parts of a Volkswagen, a big one with a cannon sticking out of his chest. They turned from their work and gathered around, watching Shinji and his companions in silence.
Shinji coughed. "My name is Shinji Ikari. I'm here to talk to you about the Decepticons."
The assorted robots drew back. Some looked up, while others bowed their heads in reverence. Shinji swallowed. The leader was taller than the others, gleaming glass in his chest and the grille of a truck beneath it. He projected an air of authority and power that instantly made Shinji nervous, until he took a booming step closer and knelt, resting a huge arm over one knee.
"I am Optimus Prime, leader of the Autobots."
"The Decepticons have disappeared," said Shinji.
The machines all looked at one another.
"I know where they are. We're putting a team together." He looked over his shoulder at his companions. "I probably have a lot of explaining to do."
"I'm listening."
Shinji laid it all out- what happened on his world, the appearance of 'Megatron' on the alien ship. The mention of that one's name drew hushed noises from the Autobots. He expected them to communicate via radio signal or something, but they whispered to one another just the same. Prime nodded as Shinji went along, nodding but asking no questions. When Shinji finished, he turned and said "Perceptor."
The one with the big optic on his shoulder stepped forward, knelt, and projected some sort of beam of light at Shinji. He flinched, but felt nothing. No alarms went off in his suit. When the beam went out, Perceptor turned to Prime.
"I believe he is telling the truth, Optimus. I am detecting several indicators of inter-dimensional travel, such as-"
"Enough a' that," another one said, stepping forward. His voice was a heavy drawl. "Let's go find 'em and kick their butts back where they belong."
"Easy, Ironhide," said Prime. He turned back to Shinji. "You have plans to gather other allies? We're not prepared to face a force like this alone."
"Yeah, actually. I have a whole list."
Asuka's eyes fluttered open. She was sitting in a chair. A very plush chair. Given what had happened to her over the last day -few days?- she immediately suspected some sort of trap or horrible torture was about to fall on her. She wasn't bound or chained down, and could stand up freely. She noticed two things immediately. One, her clothes had been changed. She was wearing an all too familiar yellow sun dress, an old favorite of hers before she'd outgrown it, although this one was cut to fit her. Two, there was a heavy metal collar around her neck. She traced her fingers over it, finding it covered with sharp studs and strange, alien runes carved into the metal. Just tracing them with her finger made her feel sick. The collar was big- it hung from her neck, and she should have been able to just pick it up and gently work it free, but when she tried, it suddenly became heavy, refusing to budge.
"What is this?" she said quietly.
She looked around the room. It reminded her of the captain's cabin from a pirate ship out of some cheesy movie, but completely in earnest. The floor was covered in plush carpeting and the walls were paneled in an unfamiliar wood like burlwood, the dark brown figured with darker spots that reminded her of screaming faces. She didn't want to look at it. From the looks of things, she was in some kind of library or study, complete with an wide black desk. Tracing her fingers over the surface, she felt curious cracks in it, as if it had been broken apart and took back together.
She gasped. It was Ikari's desk. It had to be. There was a picture frame sitting on one corner, propped up by a little stand. It was so ordinary it was absurd, a simple piece of everyday existence trapped in the center of all this madness. She picked it up. The picture, faded, worn, and with a tear along one corner, was a photograph of Misato on a beach. She bent towards the camera, arching her back so that her chest bulged against the top of her swimsuit. A drawn arrow pointed at her cleavage for emphasis.
She hastily put the picture down. A shadow fell over her. It was him.
She recognized him from her vision. He was just a little taller than her, and his face was unmarked, but it was the Primarch, dressed in a tight black bodysuit with a simple purple surplice layered over it. His arms were folded behind his back, and his eyes focused on her, hard.
"What do you want?"
"I'd like you to join me for dinner."
Asuka considered that for a moment. "Go to hell."
That was a mistake. He stormed across the room and grabbed her by the arm, clamping down with a vice gripe that was just a hair short of painful, and dragged her nearly off her feet. He pushed through a door into a much larger room, dominated by a long, low table. There were no chairs. He shoved her to the foot of the table and she fell on her backside. Food was laid out before them. Sausages and fried eggs and that soup Shinji always made when they lived with Misato. It was everything he used to cook for her that she liked.
She turned her nose up. It was hard. She was so hungry, she had to press her lips closed or risk drooling down her chin. She folded her arms over her chest and turned away from him as he sat down on the far end.
"You'll give in eventually."
She pushed her eyes closed, but the scent of the food, she couldn't escape. She whimpered, then broke down, surging at the table. She ignored her plate and her utensils, grabbing a sausage in her hand. Each bite was a burst of joy, making her quiver with relief. She ate it in three bites, then began shoveling scrambled eggs into her mouth with her bare hands, in between big gulps of soup, pausing to chew the chunks of tofu. The Primarch watched her in silence. She ate everything within reach, until she was almost painfully full.
"You can still go to hell. I know what you did."
Seated in the lotus position, he put his hands on his knees and looked at her flatly. "What I did?"
"You killed Rei. You turned Toji into that thing. You scrambled your Asuka's brains until she was your little doll. I felt it. You did all that and then she begged me to save you."
The look on his face, a brief flicker, was like a dozen emotions at once.
"You have no idea. No idea," he said very softly, his voice edged with malice. "I did what I had to do. She was full of pain. I took it away, and gave her what she wanted. I didn't want to kill Rei. I had to. She would have ruined everything. She was too powerful. She was only a xenos abomination, in any case. She deserved to die."
"Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?"
"I haven't slept in years," he said grimly. "Toji and Kensuke were blessed. There were so few left. To become an Astartes is a great honor-"
"Honor?" Asuka snapped, "Toji is a frothing lunatic and Kensuke has been taking lessons from Mengele. What the hell are you doing down there?"
"Saving you."
"Saving me? You're five minutes away from cutting me up for spare parts."
He sighed. "Your temporary disabling of the stasis field has been problematic. From what Kensuke tells me, her body can no longer be saved. Fortunately, we have a whole one, with the required potentialities. It will only be a matter of improving it."
Asuka felt the blood drain from her face. "W-what?"
"Why, you, of course. You're a psyker. Didn't you know that?"
She touched the collar at her neck. It felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. "I-I don't-"
"You will be changed. Improved. Perfected. You will become like me, free from disease or physical defect, the feeble powers of your mind expanded. Then, I will reach out and capture her soul, and transfer it into you."
She was shaking. "What happens to me?"
"You may still exist in some form, as part of her. You seemed able to briefly commingle your soul with hers. Were you simply another human, I doubt-"
Asuka screamed, grabbed a knife from the table, and leapt. She ran around it, knife held high. Shinji moved so fast she could barely see him, his hand clamping around her wrist. He lifted her bodily from the ground, her toes scraping the carpet. Gingerly, he turned the knife out of her hand and tossed it on the table.
"So much like her," he mused.
Asuka screamed incoherently and spat at him.
"Amusingly, I cannot use my own gifts to stop or influence you while you wear that," he said, eyeing the collar. "The effect works both ways, both preventing you from accessing your own latent power while denying you to mine."
He lowered her enough that her feet settled on the floor. "Of course, I could simply remove it, and turn you into a vegetable. In all likelihood the process would still succeed."
He let go, and her hand fell to her side. "Very good. I don't know how you escaped, only that you required help. I cannot risk returning you to the cells. Rest assured, those who gave you aid will find themselves short a head. Toji rather favors that. You will remain here."
Asuka felt a tiny spark of hope.
"There are no vents, crawlspaces, tunnels, or means of escape. Two of my Berserkers stand guard at the door at all times. You will remain here."
He turned to leave. "Dinner will be served in a few hours. You will find a change of clothes in the trunks in my study. An evening gown tonight, I think."
He stood at the door, and changed. He doubled in size, as if he'd been crouching and stood up, and adjusted himself. The doors spread open, and the two metal monsters outside, clad in some purple and green mockery of Unit One, knelt as he passed, resting massive weapons on their shoulders, poleaxes with chainsaws for blades. The door closed and left Asuka trapped inside, an immense cold sinking into her bones.
"Hey, where do these stairs go?" said Shinji.
Asuka looked up the scorched steps, only visible now through a break in the wall of Misato Katsuragi's apartment. Where the refrigerator once stood, as a matter of fact. She looked around at the rest of her team and sighed.
"They go up. You first, Shinji."
Shinji looked around nervously. Toji shrugged, and Rei just stared blankly. Rei always just stared blankly. Shinji started up the stairs, grunting. They'd already walked up eighteen flights, and every step was a trudging agony. Asuka brought up the rear, her proton stick held tightly in her hand. Something about this was making her nervous. She looked up at the coal black sky as a peel of thunder from unseen lightning rolled over the roof of the building.
It was probably that.
Shinji edged up onto the roof, the others piling up behind him, just in time to see the two creatures writhing on plinths near the edge of the roof. Lightning forked out of the sky and struck the grand pair of temple doors carved into the stone facade, followed by a peel of thunder that almost rolled them back down the stairs. It struck the prostrate forms of Misato Katusragi and Makoto Hyuga, scything through their bodies. Shinji rushed forward, and Asuka grabbed his proton pack and yanked him back.
There was a flash of light, and they were gone. In their place stood a pair of creatures. Lean and lanky with narrow waists and broad shoulders, they turned to face Asuka and her team with strange, bird-mask like faces, then hunched and darted forward, towards the opening doors. Asuka pushed forward and the others followed her up onto the roof. The doors stood wide open, leading into a strange space, where luminous mists swirled and distant thunder rumbled. Floating in the center was a giant temple made of crystal, linked to the roof by a wide set of gleaming white stairs.
"That isn't in the plans," said Asuka.
"It is an inter-dimensional gate," said Rei.
"Shoot it," said Asuka.
The four stepped up, leveled their proton sticks, and fired. Four beams of spiraling energy shot out into the void, playing over the surface of the temple. The twin creatures, seated on great blocks of crystal, looked on in sublime indifference.
Asuka shut off her beam. The others followed. "Welp, I'm out of ideas. What now, Rei?"
Before she could answer, a pair of doors in the inner temple swung open, and something emerged. It looked vaguely human, with pale skin that glittered in the twilight of the gate, and silvery hair that sat in a wild mop on its head. It wore a skin-tight suit of some strange silken material, and walked on high heeled shoes.
"Is that a dude, or a chick?" said Toji.
"It's whatever it wants to be," said Rei.
Asuka nodded. "Okay. Get her, Rei."
Rei looked at her. "Excuse me?"
Asuka shrugged.
Rei stepped forward, holding her stick in a neutral position. She looked up at the apparition and said, "Hello?"
The being fixed its crimson-eyed gaze on her. "What?"
Rei turned around and shrugged. "By the authority vested in me by the city of Tokyo-3, I hereby order you to return to your universe of origin, or the nearest convenient parallel dimension."
Asuka pinched the bridge of her nose. "Good job, Rei. That's just great. Rei Ayanami, everybody."
The creature took two steps down the stairs, and cocked its head. "Are you a god?"
Rei looked over shoulder. "Not that I know of."
"Then, die."
Shinji, the idiot, grabbed Asuka. The creature drew back and turned around sharply, thrusting its arms out. Energy crackled over its body and rushed out in a wave, sweeping over the rooftop. Rei was lifted up from her feet and thrown back and hit Toji bowling them both over. Asuka held on to Shinji for dear life, but lost her footing and dragged her down with him. She reached out, her gloved hand slipping over the surface, but found no purchase. Shinji managed to hook his arm around the base of one of the stone tables and pulled her back from the edge through main strength as Toji pinned his leg against a stone block and looped his arms around Rei's waist.
The energy wave subsided. Asuka sat up. Toji blushed furiously as Rei leaned on him and they got to their feet together. Asuka took Shinji's hand and shakily got to her feet, a surge of terror flowing through her when she realized her proximity to the edge. The creature stared at them, radiating raw contempt.
"Rei," Toji gasped, "If someone asks you if you are a god, you say yes."
"Okay," Asuka snapped, "I've had enough of this. Let's show this prehistoric bitch how we do things downtown."
They lined up, twisting the proton sticks to maximum.
"Roast her!" Shinji cried.
The beams hit the creature and passed through it. There was a momentary whisper of shock on its face, and then it simple vanished, leaving tiny swirls of smoke where its feet had been moments before. Asuka shut off her pack, and threw her stick over her shoulder.
"That wasn't so bad."
The concrete under their feet began to shake. Asuka stumbled, and Shinji again grabbed her to keep her on her feet. She looked up, just in time to shove him out of the way as an angry stone face cracked loose from the facade and tumbled earthwards, slamming onto the roof and rolling over the edge.
"I hope that doesn't hit the car." Toji shouted.
Light flashed over the roof.
"BEHOLD, LILIM, TABRIS IS UPON YOU. CHOOSE THE FORM OF THE DESTRUCTOR."
"Wait," said Asuka, "What?"
"CHOOSE OR PERISH."
"This is bad," said Rei.
"Really," said Toji.
"Whoa, whoa, I get it," said Asuka, stepping back from the others. "Whatever we think of. If we think of a Hideaki Anno, Hideaki Anno will appear and destroy us. Clear your heads."
She closed her eyes, and cleared her mind, focusing blankly on nothing, wondering how long she could keep it up. She found herself trying to keep Mister Peanut from popping into her mind for some reason. She scrubbed her hands through her hair, focusing on her internal blankness.
"THE DESTRUCTOR IS CHOSEN."
"Hey!" Asuka shouted up at the flashing light, "Nobody choosed anything!"
She turned to the others. "Rei, did you choose anything?"
Rei shook her head.
"Toji, did you choose anything?"
Toji shrugged.
She turned to Shinji. He sheepishly backed away, staring at his feet. She grabbed his collard.
"What did you do, idiot?"
"It was an accident. It just popped in there."
A titanic sound rolled through the air, making them all duck.
WARK!
"You gotta be kidding me," said Toji.
They rushed to the roof. Taking bounding steps through the city was an eighty foot tall, pink, marshmallow penguin. Wearing a chef's toque.
"It's the adventures of Monsieur Pen-Pen," said Shinji. "I used to watch it when I was a kid. I tried to think of something so gentle, so-"
Pen-Pen reared up, swung its marshmallow flipper, and smashed it through the side of a building. It threw its head back and roared.
"Great job," said Asuka "Okay, Rei, Shinji's gone bye-bye. You have anything for me?"
"I'm sorry. I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought."
"Let's shoot it," said Toji.
"Okay," said Asuka.
The blasts from their proton packs hit the gargantuan ambulatory mass of sugar square in the chest and knocked it back. Flames licked up its side, and it screamed. Asuka killed her beam and snapped her stick back as the others did. The now flaming mass of enraged confection reared up, gazed down at the small structure in front of it, and stomped through its roof, tearing its way towards the building.
"Well," said Asuka. "That was a bust. Any other ideas?"
"Cross the streams," said Rei.
"What?"
"Cross the streams," Shinji said nervously, looking around.
"You said that was bad," said Asuka.
"The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate."
"You made that up."
"Yes, but I can't think of anything else."
Pen-Pen was starting to climb the building. Waves of heat rolled up the side, shattering the windows. Asuka stumbled backward as the giant roared again, shaking the ground under their feet. She turned, setting her jaw, and walked back in front of the gate. The others lined up beside her.
"You guys don't pay me enough for this," said Toji.
Asuka sighed. "If we live, you get a raise. See you on the other side, Rei."
"Doctor Soryu," said Rei.
She looked at Shinji.
She kissed Shinji. "I'd hold hands, but I'm busy."
He nodded, shakily, and fired his beam into the gate. Asuka, Rei, and Toji joined him. Sighing, she swept her beam over to meet his. They met, twisted, and the stick bucked in her hands, trying to yank itself free. The doubled stream met the others and they twisted together, nearly yanking her off her feet. It swept around the inside of the temple. There was a light building up inside, some sort of force rolling them back.
The giant marshmallow penguin peeked up over the edge of the roof. Asuka burst out laughing. The world went white, and the temple exploded. She rolled off her feet, skidding along the surface of the roof as something hot and sticky slathered over her in a wave. She blacked out, the sticky smell of burned sugar in her nostrils.
When she sat up, she was completely covered in fluffy, sugary goop.
"I've had nightmares like this," she groaned, wiping it from her face. "Is anybody else alive?"
Rei sat up. "I am covered in goo."
Toji sat up next to her. "You can skip the raise if you two start wrestling right now."
"Ugh," said Shinji, stumbling out from behind a stone pylon. He was mostly uncovered. "It's in my hair."
"Oh, shut up," Asuka snapped.
Two toasted forms lay in front of the doors. Asuka got up and stumbled over to them, resting her hand on one. They smelled like burned hair.
"That's a shame. She paid us in advance, before she turned into a bird."
A small coughing sound came from within the burned shape, and a tiny patch of the surface flaked off, tumbling into the air and floating away like ash. Asuka blinked as a pale hand reached through the opening and grasped for air. In a panic, Asuka began beating on the burned remains of the creature with the heel of her hand. It slid loose, exposing an entire arm. The others joined her, and they managed to peel enough of it away for Katsuragi, in a skimpy and heavily stained evening dress, to crawl out and sit in a puddle of marshmallow.
The other thing broke open, and Hyuga managed to crawl out on his own, slipping a little in the gunk. Toji grabbed to keep him from blindly stumbling off the edge of the roof, and helped pull the remnant of the creature's arm off his head.
"The super is going to be pissed," said Hyuga.
There was a flash of light, and a black sphere spiraled into being near the edge of the roof. Asuka spun around, whipping marshmallow goop from her hair as she leveled her proton stick at it, wondering if it would still work when wreathed in fluffy sugar. From the sphere emerged a hulking armored figure in purple and green, tromping through the marshmallow muck. It stopped, and its head scissored open. There was a near perfect duplicate of Shinji inside.
"Uh," said Toji.
"Hi," said the Shinji in the armor, "This is going to sound crazy."
"Try me," said Asuka.
Marty stumbled through the Doc's lab, cradling his head in his hands. He sat down and looked around in a stupor, blinking. This was all going to be gone. The lab, his house, his parents, his family, Jennifer. Everything he'd done in 1955 was all for nothing. The Doc was pacing around mumbling to himself.
"This is heavy," Marty said.
The Doc rushed to his big, revolving chalkboard, nearly tripping over some gadget that looked like a cross between a toaster oven and an alarm clock. He turned it over and scraped out a long line across the dusty green, then tapped a single point on the line.
"This is our timeline."
"Right," said Marty.
"You traveled from here," he drew a curving line, "to here, from 1985 to 1955."
"I know, Doc, what-"
"So," said the Doc. "What if, when you arrived at this point in the past, instead of altering the timeline, you spawned a new timeline from that point, skewing into an alternate 1985."
He drew a diagonal line from the point marked 1955, and continued it on to the end of the board.
"You mean we're in another univese?"
"Not us," said Brown, shaking his head. "You. When you left your 1985, you returned to a different one- where I knew the Libyans would attack me, where your father is a successful author."
"Wait," said Marty, "does that mean that the old universe is still there? I just didn't come back, or what?"
"Perhaps," said Brown, tapping his chin. He coughed out the chalk dust. "It may be that the original timeline still exists, and in it, I was killed and you simply vanished, never to return. Or it may be that the changes you made in 1955 caused that timeline to become unstable, and disappear-"
"You mean when the pictures faded out."
Brown wheeled on him. "Exactly. Your actions erased the original universe, and when you arranged for your parents to meet in a different way, under different circumstances, a new universe sprang into being in which you and the DeLorean could continue to exist. When you returned here, the new timeline effectively replaced the old one."
"Great Scott," Marty mumbled.
"I know, this is heavy," said Brown.
"So what the hell is wrong with the future?"
"Something changed it, and something keeps changing it, producing a new timeline each time I traveled forward in the DeLorean."
"What about the papers, though," said Marty, grabbing on off a workbench. "They're still here. Shouldn't they have changed or faded out or something?"
"Unless…" said Brown.
"Unless what, Doc?"
Doc Brown assaulted the chalkboard, drawing a flurry of lines.
"Some theories postulate the existence of infinite parallel universes, all inaccessible to each other. I have a hypothesis."
"Let's hear it," said Marty, thrusting his hands in his pockets. He looked at the board in confusion. "All I see is lines."
"These are timelines, parallel worlds. The reason you were able to survive long enough to create a universe where you still exist is because the universe became a stable loop of causality," he drew a curved line intersecting 1985 and 1955. "The universe wouldn't allow the you and the DeLorean to simply pop into existence in 1955, you have to have a point of origin. The universe stabilized itself by correctively regenerating a new timeline, where your actions had a discrete causality."
Marty stared at him blankly. "English, Doc."
"The reason you traveled from 1955 into this 1985 and not some other one is because of probability. These universes are separated from each other by a wall of improbability. You can't travel from one to the other simply because your appearance is unlikely there."
"So?" said Marty.
"So somewhere out here is a universe where that," he pointed to the papers, "has happened, and it's becoming more and more probable. It's leaking into other worlds, into other realities, and because the probability of that outcome has become so high, every time we collapse the waveform by traveling into the future, the disaster expresses itself as the most likely result."
"Waveform? What the hell are you talking about?"
Doc put the chalk on the board and stepped back. "Schroedinger's cat. It's a thought experiment. You put a cat in a box with a beaker of acid and a radioactive isotope. With the box closed, there's an equal chance that the cat is alive or dead. Which one is it?"
"I don't know," said Marty. "I guess you'd have to-"
"Open it, exactly," said Brown, "but until you do open it, the cat is both alive and dead. When the box is opened, its waveform collapses into an either-or state, and you find a live cat or a dead cat and poison gas."
"I don't get it,"
"The point is, when you open the box, you create two parallel universes, because the outcomes are equally likely. If we took a trip in the time machine to a point after you opened the box, the outcome would be random for us, but it might change."
"I'm getting a headache," said Marty. "If that's true, why isn't every little thing different every time you time travel? There's lots of things that are either-or."
"You would think," said Brown, poking the air with his finger for emphasis. "But every event we experience is part of a complex web of probabilities. This present exists as the future for your 1955 self because it's the most likely outcome of that series of events. The first time I went into the future, the most likely outcome was the one described in that paper, with your son in jail and the world carrying on as normal. The world with the red oceans was always a possible outcome, but a highly unlikely one. It has now become the only outcome."
Marty threw his hands up. "What the hell does that mean."
Brown turned and looked at the board. He plucked a chalk from the tray, and drew curves from the tips of his lines, converging towards a central point.
"The same outcome is becoming more likely in different universes. Ours probably isn't the only one. They converge into a single point that contains every point, somewhere in the eleventh dimension."
Marty stared at the board. "The what dimension?"
"The eleventh dimension," said Brown. He erased his lines, leaving a great white smudge on the board. "Is the highest possible spatial dimension. It encompasses all possible realities."
"Doc, Doc, you're losing me, man. What in the hell are we going to do here?"
"I have no idea," he confessed, dropping the chalk. "We could try to stop the disaster somehow…"
Marty picked up the paper. "Doc, we're talking about a meteor strike in Antarctica. What the hell are we going to do about that?"
Brown pushed a pile of junk off a chair and flopped down in it, rubbing his temples with his fingers. "I don't know. We could warn the government."
"You and me are going to go into a government office," said Marty, "and tell them we traveled into the future and saw that a meteor is going to hit Antarctica. In your time machine. Which is a DeLorean. Come on, Doc, that's crazy."
"There must be something we can do," said Brown. "We must be able to stop it somehow, change something. Even a small change could…"
Brown trailed off. Lights shone through the windows, and there was a snort of a diesel engine outside. He stood up and stormed across his workshop and then outside, his boots crunching on the gravel of the driveway. There was a red cab-over semi tractor sitting outside, along with a dozen other cars- a Porsche, a 240z painted up as a police interceptor, a beaten up old yellow Beetle, all sitting there. Brown looked around nervously. Marty joined him, staring through the windows of the cars.
"Who's driving?" said Marty.
Marty jumped, and the Doc stumbled backwards, letting out a girlish scream. The semi trailer rumbled forward, bellowed a strange, five-note chord, and unfolded. It thrust a pair of arms out to its sides and its runners folded like knees, and it stood up, towering over them. A head emerged as a series of pieces from the top of the cab. It knelt down, leaning on one knee, every movement a chorus of grinding joints and whining servos.
"Doctor Emmet Brown. My name is Optimus Prime."
The Doc, of course, fainted. Marty struggled to hold him up, managing to lower him to the ground and pull his jacket up behind his head.
"Sorry!"
Marty wheeled. Someone was running up to them in some sort of armored suit. He would have looked huge in it, but for the giant robot standing next to him. His helmet was open and there was a normal human face inside, Japanese by the looks of it, but he spoke perfect English. Marty shook Brown by the shoulders until he sat up, blinked, and promptly fell backwards onto the dirt again.
"Come on, Doc," said Marty, shaking him.
Brown came around again.
"Great Scott."
Marty blinked. It looked like the armor guy was one of a set of triplets. One of them was pretty ragged looking, and he had a gun strapped to his back. There was a girl with him, and her hair was blue, all the way down to the roots. Marty swallowed and helped the Doc onto his feet. The other one was wearing some kind of brown coveralls. He had another guy with him, and two women- a perfect twin of the blue haired lady, but slightly older, her hair a more natural platinum blonde, or so he thought, until he looked at her red eyes and realized she was an albino. The other walked with an arrogant swagger, her blazing red hair poofed up on her head. Marty realized he was staring.
"Let's see you get five gallons of liquid marshmallow out of your hair," she snapped.
"Who the hell are you people?" said Marty. He looked around. "Let me guess. You're from a parallel universe."
"Yes, that's right," said Shinji. "How-"
"How did you get here?" said Brown, rushing to him. "Tell me everything."
"I'm really not sure," said the armored figure. "I didn't invent this thing, I just drive it."
Brown looked disappointed.
"I'm here to ask you to join us. I've been sent by yellow aliens to recruit people to help fight an army of monsters that's going to collapse reality. Or something."
"Aliens?" said Brown.
"I guess. They weren't exactly big on explanations."
Brown looked at Marty. "Let's get the car."
"Good. I have one more stop to make." He looked up at the towering red robot. "I think I'm only going to need you for this one."
Optimus Primal took slow, measured steps through the Predacon base, swinging his arm-mounted launchers to cover corners and corridors. He stopped, scanning for activity. The base had gone dark, and there had been no Predacon activity, anywhere, on the entire planet, for the last eighteen megacycles. He stopped at the door ahead and motioned forward.
"Rattrap," he whispered.
Rattrap edged forward in beast mode, in the form of an immensely oversized, curiously intelligent looking rattus rattus, until he murmured the command word, his bestial shell unfolded, and he stood up. He knelt at the control panel beside the door and extracted a set of highly specific and illegal tools he carried, integrated into his frame. It took him less than a cycle to unlock the door. Without power, the two Maximals had to loudly shove the doors open. Cool air from Megatron's sanctuary rushed through the opening, but no sounds or signals.
Primal walked out into Megatron's command center. Everything was smashed. The r-chamber, computer, even the display screens were destroyed. Rattrap looked around and, in his usual fashion, whistled loudly. Primal gave him a hard look.
"What?" he shrugged. "There's nobody here."
"I know," said Primal. "That's what's bothering me. Where would they have gone?"
Rattrap shrugged. "Rhinox says they're not showing up on any scans."
"It makes no sense," said Primal, touching Megatron's control interface. "Why would they just abandon their base? They can't survive indefinitely outside any more than we can."
"I didn't say it makes any sense," said Rattrap. "We better get out of here. This smells like a trap."
Primal's radio crackled. "Cheetor to Optimus."
"What is it?"
"It's… complicated. You'd better get back here. We have visitors."
Shinji walked through the assembly, stripped out of his armor into his undersuit. He looked around, trying not to gaze into the color-of-blindness sky or the enormous tree rising over their heads and the strange tongues whispered by the creaking of her branches. The formerly empty chamber was alive, bustling with activity.
Doc Brown, the "Ghostbuster" Rei, the Autobot called Perceptor, and the Maximal Rhinox were gathered around a chalkboard, arguing about something that involved a great deal of math. Shinji the Hunter was cleaning his weapon, speaking quietly about something with the Autobots Prowl and Ironhide. A knot of the others were standing around the DeLorean. Shinji moved to the gathering of scientists, listening in on their conversation.
"This theory is preposterous," said Perceptor, pointing at the chalkboard with a finger as big as Brown's torso.
"When all other possibilities are eliminated," said Brown, "whatever remains must be the truth. If we can jump between timelines, we should be able to arrive at any point, but there is a distinct correlation between…"
The older, platinum haired Rei turned to him. "We have a problem."
"What?" said Shinji.
"The jump drive in your suit is not capable of transporting this entire group."
"The Aliens said they had something planned for that," said Shinji.
Rei nodded and turned back to the conversation. Shinji left them alone. He spotted his shotgun-wielding doppleganger. The Hunter gazed across the open space of the Great Atrium at the Ghostbuster Shinji and Asuka, sharing a quiet moment away from the others. They whispered something, their foreheads touching. The Hunter turned away, his Rei slipping her arm around him in a sisterly hug, but he stared at the floor, and the two Autobots went silent.
Shinji approached him. The Hunter excused himself from the machines and joined him, walking across the Atrium.
"I saw her," said Shinji.
"I know," said the Hunter.
"There's others," said Shinji. "They took my Asuka, too."
"Did you… have feelings for her?"
Shinji nodded. "Of course. How could I not? It wasn't what she wanted. I respect her, admire her, even, but it wasn't like that. I was too close to Misato."
"You mentioned her before," said the Hunter. "I wish I'd had a chance to know her. She might not even have existed on my world."
Shinji nodded.
"I was wondering," said the Hunter. "I think I know why they picked us, you and me, first. We've got nothing to lose."
"Don't say that," said Shinji.
The Hunter barked a sharp, sad laugh. "What am I supposed to go back to, a dead world full of walking corpses? My life is over. I've been a dead man ever since that thing got into Asuka. I just haven't had the time to lay down yet."
Shinji looked back over his shoulder. "What were you talking about?"
"War stories."
A hush fell over the vastness of the chamber. The Yellow Aliens simply appeared, arriving in a tight circle around the miniature tree in the crystal dome. Shinji approached them. Optimus and… Optimus joined him, as did Asuka the Ghostbuster and Marty McFly, the others gathering around behind them.
"We have seen to your requirements for transportation," said the first alien.
"We acquired it from the end of its timeline, where it would not be missed."
"We have retrofitted it, improved its function, and adapted it to your specific needs."
"Where is it?" said Shinji.
The Aliens looked up. So did everyone else.
"Well," said Toji the Ghostbuster, scratching his head. "How about that."
The chamber filled with murmurs. There was a ship hovering over their heads. An enormous ship, nearly a mile long, heavy and ponderous. One end was shaped roughly like the wide head of an adder, or less elegantly, like a great shovel. Two long pods were slung under her belly on either side, and the aft sections consisted of five huge engines. It simply appeared in the air, casting now shadow, slowly and silently drifting from side to side.
"What is it?" Shinji said softly.
"The Battlestar Galactica," said the first alien.
"You must board her immediately," said the second alien.
"The enemy is moving," said the third alien.
Behind them, there was a low rumbling sound, and vibrations rumbled through the floor under his feet. The Tree was moaning.
You have been reading
The Crisis of Infinite Shinjis
Chapter Two: The Calm Before the Storm
And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?
The Strategium of the Shikinami.
Iquarius leaned over the great table, maps spread out under his gaze. God-Shinji stood at his side, his arms folded behind his back, ethereal, angelic, somehow out of phase with the world around him. Towering over even the Primarch, Megatron observed, marking the most energy-rich locations on the map. Laserbeak and Ravage had just returned with a wealth of data.
"These Mutants," the Primarch boomed, "may pose a threat to us."
Suzahara stepped forward. "Nothing can stand before the might of the Second Legion."
"Indeed," said the Primarch. "Muster the Great Companies for the assault."
"Which ones, my Lord?"
"All of them."
Suzahara's good eye widened. "As you command."
"Order the tech-magi to prepare my battle plate. I will lead this invasion personally."
The First Captain of the Second Legion bowed, turned, and left, letting the great oaken doors bang closed behind him.
"There is the other matter," said the Primarch, laying out the image the Decepticon Laserbeak had recovered. "They have active Evangelions."
"I will deal with that," said the God-Shinji. "Their weapons will only increase my might."
"Sorcerers," said the Primarch, "Mutants. Xenos. This one may trouble us, this 'von Doom'. Taking this Tokyo-3 will require our combined effort. orbital strikes will precede the assault. We will destroy the Mass Production Series with a lance strike here and direct Berserker squads against the political and military leadership. The resistance will be crippled in the first few hours. They will likely do more damage to each other than to us. It is this that concerns me."
The Primarch tossed a single pict on top of the others, a vanishingly tiny thing, a hammer in low orbit, just outside the atmosphere.
God-Shinji touched the image.
"Whosoever lifts this hammer, if he be worthy…" He smiled, though it did not touch his crimson eyes. "Who could be more worthy than I?"
"Who indeed," said the Primarch, warily.
