Disclaimer: Yay! Three chapters and no binge-drinking!
...Well, where did you think our creativity came from?
We don't own the rights to Eva or any of the countless series we spoof. This is fanfiction, and by necessity, we are hardly even in the same story, especially seeing as the Evas defeated the 7th Angel on the first outing, and it didn't split into pieces. At least we didn't state that it did. This is probably your last taste of proper brevity in this series; I hope you appreciated it.
Neon Genesis Goonvangelion
Book 1: The Overdue Re-Write
Chapter 4: Being of Sound Mind and Body / Where are the keys?
It was a dark and stormy night.
Hey, at least we didn't start the series with that line.
And anyway, it was a dark and stormy night.
"This isn't any steppe dry-land wussy rain back home. These drops are big as gophers!" John said in annoyance.
Some say that the weather is a great omen of things to come.
"Isn't the simile 'cats and dogs'?" Andy offered.
A night such as this could signify a coming disaster...
Jared put on a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a horrible... well, to call it a British accent is punishable by death. Let's just say he talked weirder than usual. "Japan is an island, we're right next to the Pacific Ocean. This is an entirely differently climate than back home." Jared blinked, then took off the non-prescription glasses.
A night such as this could signify the dawn of a new hope, tread upon with trepidation.
(Yes. Trepidation. Yes I own a thesaurus. A recent acquisition, purchased new. Call me a nerd, and witness me look up a trenchant riposte to your crude grasp at an inferior insult. - Ed.)
John sighed and rubbed his temples, tired of both his friend's lunacy and the constant bickering of the creators. "I am fully aware of the meteorological differences between Kennewick, Washington 1999 and Tokyo-3, Japan 2015."
Or it could just mean that it's raining and no one wants to go outside.
Jared posed, katakana reading 'MO-MEN-TUM' appearing briefly on his face. "Well!! Who's up for some anime?"
* * *
Misato was in her office when the NERV agents tasked with observing the Americans called in to report that the trio had barricaded themselves inside their apartment.
"I know that," Misato said, sighing heavily. "I live next door. They haven't been outside in a week, but I haven't heard anything from inside."
"They were soundproofing the place before we lost contact with our bugs. We suspect they're alive from the vibrations detected from your apartment."
Misato scowled, but said nothing.
"And, well, several large boxes were delivered to their apartment. A television and some stereo equipment, and cases of unmarked tapes. We've tracked them back to an anonymous duplicating service that doesn't keep records."
Great, she thought. A bunch of gun-crazy porn addicts. "Look, you guys are the alleged experts here. What now?"
"The only phone in the apartment was last reported to be flying out of the window when we first tried to contact them. The front door is barricaded. We tried rappelling through the windows, but those have been block off as well. I would like permission to use a shape charge on your wall to make a temporary entry point.
Useless. "Out of the question. Are they broadcasting anything, any transmissions via computer or such?"
"No ma'am. They just came in one day with a bunch of supplies and after they got the tapes, haven't left since."
"And we have no idea what's on the tapes," she mused aloud. "Well, if you get any response from them, I want to be the first one to know."
"Yes Ma'am."
Misato sighed as she put away her phone.
An amused chuckle cut into the silence from the faux blond in the guest chair. "You sound like you miss them."
Misato shrugged in the general direction of the doctor. "Well, the blond kid did manage to get Asuka off my back for a while."
Ritsuko chuckled a little at the memory. "I don't think even Shinji has gotten her that mad before."
"Things just seem a lot more quiet around here now that they've locked themselves in. I don't know if it's culture shock, jet lag, or what. They've closed all outside communication... I just don't know what to do." She didn't add commentary on how useless NERV security was being.
Ritsuko didn't miss a beat as she replied, "Look on the bright side, from what we've seen of them, they've probably attacked each other with one survivor feeding off his companions' remains until the mortal wound he suffered from the conflict finally takes its toll and he dies too. We'll have three dead bodies that don't exist, and we can take a non-trip to the incinerator, not fire it up, and forget about nothing in particular."
"The blond kid really made an impression on you didn't he?" Said Misato, deadpan.
"Not just that one..." Ritsuko muttered.
"I hope they come out soon. We have the language classes all setup for them."
"Not to mention the Americans have completed the new Evas to their... specifications." Ritsuko said, a thick glaze of distaste encrusting her words.
Misato arched an eyebrow. "How did they get to have a say in Evas they shouldn't even know about?"
"The American Way," Ritsuko intoned quietly, as if fearing the words would summon Them.
"They bribed you?"
"Trickery and deceit."
Misato nodded in agreement. "I'm not surprised, they know a lot about a lot here and they also spew a bunch of bullshit. I wouldn't be shocked if one of them claimed that there was a room full of Rei Ayanami's downstairs." She laughed at her own joke. Ritsuko chuckled. Once. "But seriously," the Major continued, "How long are they going to stay in there?
* * *
Two weeks later, after her usual morning routine, Misato led her charges out of the apartment, on their way to another boring day of tests, morale-sucking drills, and hours of brooding. At least the drills were better than going out against an Angel.
After shutting the front door to her apartment and checking the electronic lock, she glanced at apartment 724. Behind her, Shinji was already punching the elevator button while Asuka was warming up her screeching harpy yell by a flinging a few backhanded compliments at him.
Then the door to apartment 724 slid open with a loud and obvious fake 'whoosh.' Fog, also blatantly artificial, billowed out of the dark portal, illuminated by a broken light to create a strange strobe effect. Shinji had taken a few steps towards the door as it opened, but halted a few feet behind Misato, slowly chanting a mantra under his breath. "I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away. I mustn't run away."
Asuka shifted her stance, both groin kick and murderous glare readied.
Misato was about to storm into the apartment and ask questions when Jared erupted from the abyss like a shot from a cannon.
He was wearing a pair of black dress slacks and a light blue button-up shirt, complete with an eye-bleeding yellow-and-black tie. The tennis shoes make the Young Engineer's outfit. John and Andy actually walk out of the apartment. John is wearing similar black slacks, but eschewed the dress shirt for a simple black polo with the NERV logo over the breast. Leather dress shoes are another nod to style. Andy and style haven't been on talking terms since bell bottoms came back, so he was outfitted in khaki sorts and a huge, garish Hawaiin shirt.
Jared blinked under the full brunt of the terrible, terrible light, looked around, and noticed the neighbors, his gaze turning upon them like a cursed wind.
Misato's English was as rusty as it had been a week ago, but apprehension was gnawing at her nerves. "'Good... good morning, guys."
Jared's reply was in flawless Japanese. "Konichiwa, Misato-san. And what a splendid morning it is, the sun is shining, the birds are singing, Asuka is looking particularly delicious..."
"rrrrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHAAAAAAAAA!!!" The redhead charged.
As Jared lead Asuka for a few laps around the floor, John gripped to himself in English, "And he promised he's behave." Then, to Misato in Japanese of exceptional quality, "Good morning, Misato-san. I trust that things haven't gotten too out of control during our absence."
"Depends on who you ask..." Misato replied, stunned by the sudden linguistic abilities of the Americans, and to their oddly different appearances.
Andy then bludgeoned into the conversation with usual subtly. "KONNYANYACHIWA!!" Then switched to his raspy Prophecy of Doom voice. "The seven sons of god shall unite over cheese, the Destroyer shall come as one, FEAR THE WRATH OF JAAAAMES!!!"
In passing, Jared shouted at the taller American. "You rang?"
Misato fought to keep one hand off of her sidearm, and lost. "Ummm... John, explanation please?"
Despite the unfamiliar language, John slipped easily into a lecturing voice. "Once upon a time, for reasons we still do not pretend to understand, Jared acquired this little fascination with assassins. From this he developed a character known as James Rahn."
Misato's foot began rapping against the concrete. "Is this going anywhere?"
"Eventually," John said. Returning to lecturing mode, "James Rahn is not the kind of guy you'd want to meet in a dark alley. Actually, he's not the kind of guy you'd want to meet at all--unless you were trying to kill him, but that... is another story. Any way, this 'James"'character started to get a little strange. We kept tinkering with him, like a couple of teenagers tinkering with a car stereo." He pauses to relish the look of disgust and horror on Misato's face, then forces himself to continue. "He started getting stronger, more powerful... and we got careless. And then... there was the cheese." Silent, John hangs his head in remembered shame.
Misato waited. And waited. And waited. "...This isn't going any where, is it?"
John shook himself, like a man suddenly awakened from a deep nightmare. "James is just... just something we don't want to think about. Anything 'James' is just evil distilled, concentrated into it's purest form... added to a cigarette... with no filter..."
"That's great and all, but I was asking about how you three know Japanese and were you got the clothes."
"Oh. Well, we have our ways." John adjusted his glasses.
Misato noticed that while his jiggling of the lenses caused the glare on them to briefly get worse, it did not fade completely even when he removed his hand. She wondered what color his eyes would be if he took the things off.
No answer came from the young man.
"Uh, okay. Have you guys had breakfast yet?"
John looked at her blankly. Or rather, his head pointed at her and his face looked blank. Andy looked at her blankly. Jared finally finished his chase with a panting Asuka and stopped to stare at Misato (bastard wasn't even winded) until Asuka caught her breath and tackled him.
The staring intensified. Jared put Asuka into an arm-bar with one hand to observe with mild interest.
John spoke slowly, as if this was one Japanse word he had never heard before, "Break... fast?"
The NERV Tactical Commander kept a straight face, even as she tried to reason with the morons like they were misbehaving preschoolers. "You know, stuff you eat in the morning?"
Andy was completely mystified by the concept. "Morn... ing?"
"After you wake up?" Misato prompted.
John's contorted as if remembering a great pain, like being stoned to death by angry villagers. "Sunlight? Waking?"
The two standing Americans exchanged a 'she doesn't need the details' glance.
"We had our Dew, we'll be fine." John said cordially, resuming his role as the spokesman.
Jared nodded sagely, and let of go Asuka, who promptly put him into an arm-bar.
Sunlight? What are they, vampires? The sunlight didn't seem to be bothering them now. Then again... she sighed. They were still standing there as if they gone totally crazy in the last two minutes. "Now what?" Misato asked.
The tall one gestured to the elevator that Shinji was holding open. "Let's go."
Asuka shrieked and jumped to her feet, tugging the front of her dress down. "PERVERT! YOU DID THAT DELIBERATELY!!!"
Wearing two black eyes, Jared smiles through his split lip in a disturbing fashion. "No... well, yes. Come back down here and I'll finish the job."
Asuka—although livid—backed away quickly.
John looked his fr—err, associate, and put some steel into his voice. "We're leaving."
Jared was on his feet before Misato, ruffled hair combed perfectly, black eyes hidden under dark shades, lip un-split, and one hand adjusting his freshly pressed tie. She blinked, eyes unable to report that he'd even traversed the space between the ground and standing before her.
Jared finished adjusting the tie. "Then let's get moving."
* * *
Down in the garage level, Misato led the troops to her car, oblivious to the fact that the blue coupe couldn't possibly contain one of the Americans—not without the liberal application of a bone saw, anyway—much less all three in addition to Shinji, Asuka, and herself. The foreigners, however, had spent the springtime of their youths riding in old pickups without seat belts, their respective fathers' arms serving as a 'restraint system' under hard breaking. And while fearless, they weren't stu... okay, they were stupid, but they weren't suicidal, and they were certainly in no mood to play 'clown car' with Misato behind the wheel.
To say nothing of the arguments about who would be sitting on whose lap.
As the Major unlocked her door, the light went on. The comically old-fashioned one over her forehead, not the one in the car; which was burnt out. "Oh wait, my car is a little small for everyone, who wants to walk?"
Shinji and Asuka had their hands in the air, talking rapidly over one another, gushing virtue upon the act of using their legs in the manner god intended, when all three Japanese realized the Americans were nowhere to be seen.
Large tennis shoe, dress shoe, and flip-flop prints were visible, following dust trails leading out of the garage—one through a broken car window, curiously enough—to the empty sidewalk.
The NERV pilots hung their heads low, bangs covering their shadowed eyes as they prepared to tempt fate again, and buckled themselves into Misato's Renault Alpina.
* * *
"WHERE THE HELL WERE YOU BAKAS!"
The scream nearly bowled over said bakas, who weathered the sonic assault with expressions of frank curiosity.
"There is a perfectly rational and reasonable explanation for this," John said to the fuming doctor who had just threatened their hearing.
Three hours had passed since Misato arrived, got lost, and finally found her way to the assigned meeting room with the pilots in tow.
"This had better be good!" Misato cut in.
"John, fire away," Jared said as if he were trustworthy enough to make a decision, any decision. Ever.
Three hours the three hot babes and one spineless wimp waited while NERV security forces tore Tokyo-3 apart, finding not a trace of the Americans.
"Jared, we aren't packing," John replied, ignoring the steaming-mad doctor.
Bets had been made about whether the Goons (as they had been dubbed at some point) continued to exist at all. Some believed they were evil trickster gods deposited here as punishment for flipping up some cosmic skirts they should have known better than to flip.
John ignored the impatient glare from Jared and launched into a Lecture. "While we can now, due to our extensive ummm... 'training,' speak Japanese fluently, we have yet to actually master reading the Kanji. So stupid here—" He gestured to Jared. "—got on the wrong bus."
Oh yeah, Andy wasn't with them.
Jared invoked his Classic Catch Phrase here. "THIS IS NOT MY FAULT!!!"
Misato, curious now that John was almost making sense, pressed for details. "Okay, where did you go?"
"Well, first we found ourselves outside Osaka, then we got on the train and went through this tunnel and ended up in a place that must have been Kyoto."
He paused, and for a moment the cicadas added their two cents.
"What my esteemed and confused associate is trying to say is, we got a teensy bit lost—" Jared started.
"A teensy bit lost?!" John snapped. "We wandered over half the damn country!"
Jared shrugged. "Teensy, like I said. It's a small country." And like that, all present were exposed to the horror of Jared's singing voice. "It's a small country after all..." The second verse died with a gurgle as he caught the look John was directing at him. Swallowing tentatively, "What?"
John hands wished desperately for some lumber to grasp and demonstrate some laws of motion on Jared's cranium. "And to top all this off, we lost Andy."
"Excuse me? 'Lost' him? He's not exactly a set of car keys, now is he?"
"Well, he... uh... I got nothin'." Jared put in.
"He got lost when he was... independent of us," John offered.
"Meaning you got separated." Misato surmised.
"Yeah, that's what I said."
Jared mumbled something under his breath.
"RED ALERT!" Ritsuko shrieked. "Call up the JSDF, they will want to know about this. You two!" She jabbed a finger at the Goons, one of which was unconscious on the floor. John looked innocent, except for the broken and slightly bloody two-by-four in his hands and the large, slowly bleeding lump on Jared's head. "Err... Genoni, grab your friend and follow the nice gentlemen wearing body armor—"
In a swirl of cherry blossom petals, a group of gruff military types in flack jackets faded in around the Goons in an escort formation.
"—and follow me. We've got to get him back."
"That will be a bit of a challenge," said John, hidden by the huge soldiers.
"Explain." Ritsuko demanded.
Lecture Mode was re-engaged. "Stupid here," He indicated Jared. "Came up with the bright idea to stop at the airport we were passing by to ask for directions. He figured that since it was an international airport, somebody would help us with the sign problem. At the very least, I think he was planning to get a book on kanji translations. Not that it would have helped if it was written primarily in kanji. Oh why didn't he just ask for directions... But our intrepid leader became suddenly distracted, to use to the word lightly."
Misato considered strippers, prostitutes, and shiny things, but in a flash of insight, the terrible truth struck her dumb. "Manga."
"Yeah," John said.
Of all the... "But he can't read it."
John's look screamed 'are you a clueless idiot?'
This day just kept getting better. "Where the hell were you when this happened?!"
"I had nothing for breakfast but coffee and Mountain Dew and unlike a civilized country, your bathrooms forsook universally accepted symbols for some distorted star and a box with legs. And mysteries of why females travel in groups aside, what the hell are angry mob paraphenalia doing there?"
Ritsuko snorted, trying to contain her laughter. Misato kept her mirth to a nasty smirk. "So, Andy's at the airport?"
"Not anymore," John said.
"Tell us where you last saw him." Misato ordered.
"Well, there was an F-type military transport on the tarmac at the time. Andy has an interest in military-grade hardware. It's not inconceivable that the building shaking roar was an unscheduled take-off."
"Oh shit," Ritsuko said, eyes widdening.
"That too," John said idly.
Misato wondered briefly where he learned to fly. There'd been no word at all about a crashed transport... "So, assuming he's running around in an F-type, and he's been gone for three hours, where would he be right now?"
John answered before Ritsuko's panicking brain could do the necessary calculation. "Thirty-five thousand feet and descending at a perpendicular angle to the city I would venture."
"WHAT?!" Misato yelled.
Irritatingly, John slipped into Lecture Mode again. "You recall the incident with Unit-02? Andy has always favored the flashy entrance, preferably with as many pyrotechnics as possible. I would suggest you issue a general alarm and lower the buildings."
Ritsuko began screaming. "SCRAMBLE REI!! SHOOT HIM DOWN!! DO SOMETHING!! BRACE FOR IMPACT!!"
Well, that was new. Misato wondered, not for the first time, if her friend had any sleep the night before. "Are you done panicking, Rit-chan? We have 22 layers of armor above us. Sure, he'll take out five, ten, twenty, um..." She counted on her fingers for a moment. The armor could take an N2 bomb, but F-type transports... "Oh... Oh my."
And the lone present and conscious American wasn't helping. "Yep, with Andy at the helm, your Eva transport has become a sixty-thousand pound shape charge. Accelerating due to gravity well past Mach 2. Not to mention the N2 reactor powering the sucker. Armored nose--"
"WE GET THE FUCKING POINT!!!" Misato yelled, finding her words echoed perfectly by Ritsuko.
Then Jared sat up. No groaning, half-mumbled threats, or rolling around and clutching his head like a normal person. He just sat right up as if playing possum.
He wasn't... he couldn't... could he? Misato cut that line of thought short.
"Did I miss anything?" Jared asked.
"Telling them about Andy." John's voice out from behind the decidedly nervous armored soldiers.
Jared smiled disarmingly. "Andy? He couldn't hit the ground if he tripped. What's the problem?"
John sighed. "I was about to tell them that. By now Andy has completely botched his crash making a perfect 3-point landing on the airfield."
Jared didn't bat an eyelid. "So business as usual?"
John nodded, though no-one could see him, not that it mattered in the least what he did, because Ritsuko finally started screaming obscenities at them. Misato grumbled and ordered the soldiers to take the Goons to a back room and introduce them to a pipe wrench, leaving the room herself with the pilots in tow.
* * *
An hour later, Ritsuko finally calmed down. Perhaps it was due to some of the opiate John had been drugged with weeks ago, or perhaps she applied some relaxation techniques taught in one of her many, many stress management classes.
Mysteries such as these are stockpiled throughout the universe like unwanted shoes trapped beneath beds.
We may simply never know.
In any case, Andy found the group en route to the Eva cages. His clothes were scorched, his faced covered in soot, but whole and unharmed. Lingering glares from Misato promised that she would rectify that problem soon enough.
Asuka kept no less than four people between herself and The Pervert, and Rei had joined the group, a few steps behind Ritsuko, ignoring John's attempts to engage her in conversation. When the group passed G-Junction, Ritsuko deigned one of the Goons—Jared—to be worthy of answering a pressing question.
"I'm actually curious to know why you three can speak Japanese so well now."
Jared didn't even look in her direction, continuing to jump every third step trying to catch a glimpse of Asuka. "Anime."
"What?"
"Anime," Andy elaborated, then gave John a disgusted look. "Dragonball actually. Z, GT, and the classics."
"All of them?" Asuka said in amazement.
Jared grinned lecherously, as if his face were engineered by a cunning, divine hand in such a way that could not make any other sort of expression. "Of course. I never do anything halfway, come over here, and I'll show you."
In reply, Asuka body-checked Andy into Jared, flattening the pervert against the wall. "Ha!"
Andy brushed the girl off as a grown man would a small, annoying dog, and gave her a very familiar smirk. "That one was free, but you won't use me like that again, puny human."
"Riiiiiight. Anyway, if you three can't read Kanji also, I'll enroll you in Asuka's after-school class. Might as well get four birds with one stone." Ritsuko said, sipping her coffee—which the Goons were beginning to realize was spiked—from a cute neko mug.
"YOU CAN'T!!!" Asuka wailed. When the adults remained silent, she cast a castrating glare at The Pervert. "I won't go then!"
"Then you'll flunk your physics test coming up in a few days.," Ritsuko commented off-hand.
John quit running through his repertoire of pick-up lines in reverse alphabetical order to mumble to himself. "Physics test... physics test... why does that sound familiar?"
The procession came to a halt at that moment, Ritsuko moving up to the large doors blocking their progress. "I was hoping it would never come to this, but—"
"The best laid plans of mice and men are often led astray," John quoted.
Another sip of the spiked coffee. "Riiiiight, well given the length of time that both this and the First Branch have had to prepare the Units for you three, they're pretty much done. I hope you realize what significance this has that—"
"Less yak, more mech!" Andy interrupted at the only volume level he knew; bullhorn.
"Jared, it's your turn to hit him," John said while trying to maneuver closer to Rei.
Jared slapped Andy a few times, but his heart wasn't really in it. "Calm down."
Andy began to foam at the mouth like a Metallica fan. "MECHAAA!"
John gulped down some of Ritsuko's spiked coffee. "This will get uglier the longer you take."
Ritsuko did a double-take, then looked in alarm at her empty hand. John returned the mug with an insincere smile. She swiped her card and pulled out a flashlight as the doors opened.
The room was like a giant, dark freezer. The sound of their footsteps indicated they were on some metal grating, and the deep echo gave testament to the sheer size of the space.
Some ways into the room, Ritsuko abruptly stopped, causing much complaint.
"AHH! PERVERT!"
SMACK!
"Ow! What did you do that for?" Shinji immediately complained.
"JARED!!!" Shouted everyone but Rei and the target.
Ritsuko's indicated a spot on the catwalk with her flashlight. "Andy, stay here. Everyone else follow me."
Jared and John were ditched in much the same manner at different parts of the catwalk. Once the Americans were left in the dark—and they were also put into a room with no light—the group exited the room through another door.
The Goons waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And, demonstrating more patience than most slightly insane sufferers of OCD and ADHD normally do... waited.
Finally, John spoke into the darkness. "If this is a prank I'm going to hurt many people."
Andy's voice rang hauntingly through the Eva cage, caressing the spine with a cold, skeletal hand. "Meeeechaaaaaaa..."
"Andy is starting to scare me, John."
"I'm not worried."
"Why?"
"Meeeechaaaaaaa..."
"He has to go through you before he can get to me."
"...If I knew where you were, I'd hurt you."
"I know."
"Meeeechaaaaaaa..."
"Damn. It's colder than a witch's tit in a brass bra on the shady side of an iceberg in here."
"We're over the bakelite, it's supposed to be cold."
"Meeeechaaaaaaa..."
"CUT THAT OUT!!!" Jared snarled.
"Ummm... Anytime now."
* * *
Back in the control room, the bridge crew watched the exchange with undisguised cruel amusement.
"Now, Senpai?" Maya asked lazily from her console.
"Not yet, let them sweat a little."
"But it's freezing in there, they can't sweat," Misato argued.
Ritsuko finished off her mug. "Misato, please be quiet, I'm trying to enjoy this fully."
* * *
In the cage, the lights turned on one bank at a time, starting well behind the goons. A symphony orchestra behind a pane of glass began playing Also Sprach Zarathustra. John and Jared alternated between watching the far end of the cage get slowly illuminated and shooting worried looks at Andy, who stood in a pool of foaming saliva, his Hawaiian shirt rent by his own hands turned claws. Then the final bank of lights switched on, casting a sparkle to his maniacal eyes.
As the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey built to its climax the three Evas were slowly revealed... at least the heads. There, neck deep in the lake of containment fluids, three heads mounted sinister-looking grins, the pink liquid concealing monstrous armor-clad bodies.
John's voice rang out in the huge room, majestic and commanding. "From the dawn of the eighties, Man has wished to control giant robots. That dream was manifested in cartoons such as Voltron, Transformers, Go-bots, and innumerable anime. But now, my fellow Americans, this dream has come to a fruition that we have only dreamt about dreamily." He wiped away a single tear. "I am so happy to be here right now. Finally..."
"We..." Jared joined in.
"Have..." Both said hormonously.
"MEEEEEECHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" Andy screeched.
Ritsuko's mug slipped from her hand and shattered. Dogs everywhere began barking. Car alarms start going off in the city. Gendo's shoe untied and he tripped coming out of the restroom. Psychics in the area screamed in horror. Rei blinked. Chairman Keele shut up for a moment.
And the moon, for an instant, appeared to be blood red.
Jared put one foot forward and thrust a fist into the air, while a nearby fan blew his hair back dramatically, and a small American flag from the gift shop hastily tied to the railing behind him flapped limply. "SUIT UP!!!"
"This bodes of forebodingness," said Ritsuko from the control room.
* * *
By the time the goons were outside of the locker room, Andy had recovered from his dementia and decided to voice things he might call thoughts. "Hmm, I wonder, do we get guns with these things?"
"Calm down, Ed," Jared almost said before catching himself, shooting Andy a dirty look, and reminding himself that thinking of that story would only confuse the readers, and so made no more mention of it, even in his interior monologue. Then he remembered that there was something important he had to do right about now.
Ritsuko's voice cackled through a worn intercom speaker at them a moment later. "Jared, why did you knock Andy out?"
"For the sake of humanity."
John scowled, as he now had to help his comrade drag Andy's limp form into the locker room, where Jared slapped him awake. The three then tore into the plastic wrapping containing their plugsuits, laid out on the bench by some thoughtful technician.
For their part, the Americans were glad to have their own, instead of having to borrow some of Shinji's spares. Jared's was completely black, to the point where it was hard for him to figure out how to get in the damn thing. Andy's was black too, but not completely. The chest section that contained the life-monitors and defibrillator was a deep crimson. The entire thing seemed designed by Mad Max, or at least any of the innumerable bikers from those movies. John's seemed normal in comparison, looking more like a heavily modified fighter pilot jumpsuit. Olive green, primarily, but with black markings.
After activating the seals on the suits, they finally noticed Shinji quietly brooding down the bench. John hopped on the bench and balances his way down to the series hero, sitting next to the younger boy.
"Hey, Ace. What's up?"
"Nothing," the pilot mumbled.
John looked to his friends for help, but found Jared stretching and Andy posing in front of one of the mirrors. He sighed to himself. "Come on, Ace. Buck up."
Shinji looked at the goon. "Why are you calling me that?"
"Because you are the Ace, Shiji. You have more than five notches on your belt. You've stopped several Angels from killing the rest of Humanity."
"I've had help though."
"And Rei and Asuka deserve credit with the assist. But this is the guys' locker room, so you're the man. Wasn't it you that said saving the world was a man's job?"
"When did I say that?"
John smiled. "In about six episodes." Under his breath, "I think..." He caught Shinji giving him a look. "But that's not important. You pilot the biggest chick magnet in the world!"
"Evas are chick magnets?"
John resisted the urge to laugh. Here he had been thinking Shinji just wasn't a fan of attention. Was he actually this dense? "Of course they are. How many babes flocked to you when you let it loose that you were a pilot in class?"
Shinji suddenly found a speck of dust on the floor very interesting. "Well..."
"You should be proud of what you do! When you step out to do battle in the name of Humanity, you are the premiere ass-kicker in the entire world! You don't have to worry about running away! You're a man!"
"I am?"
Another smile graced John's features; a mischievous one. "Of course!" He prompted Shinji to stand as he did, and pointed to his own plugsuit. "You have to be a man to wear these tights!"
* * *
Misato checked her watch for the forty-second time since the goons left the NERV surveillance grid for the locker room. It only annoyed Matoko, who was impulsively counting the number of times she checked the tiny time piece.
"What's taking them so long?" She finally asked.
Matoko shrugged helplessly, but heard a voice from behind them.
"Rit-chan could always turn on the cameras in the locker room and find out."
And that would be Kaji. Wait, what did he say?
"Cameras?" Misato asked, glancing between Ritsuko and Kaji.
Ritsuko tapped at the keyboard next to Motoko, accessing some protected system that wasn't on his regular boards. Figured. A few seconds later, an auxiliary screen popped up, showing a security camera type view of the locker room. Inside, the four boys had donned their plug suits and formed a chorus line of sorts, singing and dancing. Ritsuko pressed another key and sound joined the picture.
"We're men, manly men, we're men in tights, yes! We romp around the city looking fights! We're men, we're men in tiiii-iiights..." Came out of the speakers.
They… weren't terrible, but Motoko couldn't really tell; they were singing in English. Shinji looked a little reluctant as they went through a coordinated step-kick move.
Misato pulled an aspirin bottle out of somewhere a dry-swallowed a half-dozen pills.
Kaji's voice picked up as he started singing the foreign tune as well. "We maaaaaay look like paaansies. But don't get us wrong or else we'll punch out your lights!"
On the screen, the pilots pantomimed punching. Asuka stuck her head into the room, snorted in disgust, and left.
Ritsuko snatched the bottle from Misato and took her own dose to stave off the impending headache. "Kaji, please quit singing along."
"Strange Americans..." Maya muttered.
Motoko could only stare, and wonder if the world was coming to an end as the quartet started another verse.
Then Ritsuko pulled a small remote out of her ever-present lab coat. With the jab of one button, Genoni went into spasms and fell to the floor, gracefully clipping his head on the bench on the way down. Waddell and Mucha slowly drew to a halt, considered their comrade's twitching form, and wisely decided to follow the implicit order.
* * *
Along the hallway to the Eva cages, John and Andy jogged the whole way while humming the launch music from the original Wing Commander. Jared followed at a walking pace, head hung in shame.
"I can die a happy man," Andy said, finally dropping into the entry plug for Unit-04.
"I don't know about you, but I'm about ready to blow some serious shit up," John said, seated in Unit-05's plug.
"Let's kick the tires and light the fires, gentlemen," Jared chimed in with a smirk from the seat of Unit-03's plug.
All three plugs were inserted into the Evangelions and the Americans quickly went through the startup sequence. Within the viewscreens of the new Evas, video windows opened showing Ritsukko, Misato, Rei, Shinji, Asuka, and two of three Americans.
"Ok, I guess since you guys synched with them, you can pilot them." Ritsuko shrugged.
"YOSH!" John shouted.
Misato also shrugged, every millimeter of the movement followed by Jared's eyes. "I suppose we should get the initial walking tests out of the way."
"Walk, my ass!" Andy profanely cut in. "I want things to go BOOM!!!"
The doctor looked at her broken mug. "I don't think that's a good--"
The Commander spoke up. "Let them go to the firing range if they succeed with the basic movements."
Ritsuko suppressed the urge to boggle, wondering what the hell kind of dirt the goons had on him. She muted her feed to the Americans and quickly spoke to the native pilots. "Remember what I said if things went from worse to horrendous?"
Shinji went with a response that's worn on everyone's nerves by now. "I can't harm another pilot!"
"Fine, load the Dummy plug into Unit-01. Rei, Asuka, you know the plan."
"if the evas so much as growl, rip them to shreds..." Rei quoted the doctor word-for-word.
Asuka ontinued the quote with way too much enthusiasm. "And smash the entry plugs since they were obviously infected by Angels!"
Misato raised an eyebrow, Ritsuko offered her a flat stare. The lady in red finally sighed and gave the order the three were waiting for.
"EVA LAUNCH!"
* * *
Tokyo-3, Surface.
The city was evacuated and a general alarm had been raised. The lowered buildings and silent cicadas framed the tense scene.
With a mighty rush of air and a squeal of metal, three elevator-like boxes burst from the earth. The twelve massive bolts on the roofs locked into place and the _front_ doors slid open. Three Evas stumbled out of their restraints into the daylight. Like newborn calves, their first steps were wobbly, and uncertain, but with further movement, the giants and the humans within became more confident.
The original three Evas surfaced a short time later, positioned to triangulate a lot of firepower on the three Americans, should something go wrong. Or should Ritsuko sneeze, really Asuka was looking for any excuse to put several large holes in the chest area of Unit-03.
This would've proven difficult. Per the instructions of the three Americans, each Evangelion was a made-to-order killing machine, capable of dishing out punishment and taking it. Unit-03 was like a sleeker version of Unit-00 but with a skull-like head and long, pointy chin. A layer of AV7 (an experimental transparent descendant of the ALON bulletproof glass) covered the black B-type armor, easily quadrupling the Unit's ability to take a hit and relatively small tungsten protrusions on the knuckles seemed to complement it's hand-to-hand abilities. Most notable about the Eva Jared was piloting, was that the AV7's abnormal refraction and reflective properties rendered the 130' behemoth almost invisible in some places.
Unit-04 was even worse of a target to aim at, not that it was hard to keep track of, as with Unit-03, but simply that it could probably return fire ten-fold if provoked. Andy's mecha was gunmetal gray and sported a double thick B-type chassis. It's shoulder guards, in fact the entire shoulders themselves were larger, the back area was dominated by a mechanical wing system that was currently disabled, thus the wings were folded up. Opposite to the wings in the upper chest was a pair of empty rocket launchers. Empty holsters in the upper thighs that would normally hold machine pistols were a silent image of what this thing could do in combat. And in the wrists, a set of jagged claws not unlike those in the American movie Predator. But that system was disabled as well, for safety's sake.
Unit-05 seemed to be the product of John looking over Jared's and Andy's notes. From a purely external view, Unit-05 was physically similar to Unit-04, but predominantly white with black markings and no wing system. Instead, Unit-05 could afford a larger pair of missile launchers that were built into the tall, thick shoulder guards that usually held a simple prog-knife. The arms and legs of 05 were of special interest as they sported a layer of the AV7 armor, making it a challenge to determine the actual location or direction of the appendages.
And to Asuka's surprise none of the new Units were even plugged in, yet they had been active and walking for well over ten minutes now.
She wanted one.
A few minutes in, Ritsuko's partially amused voice sounded over the comm. "Ok, we're sending up some pallet guns and some targets, just--"
All three Americans instantly assumed emotionless expressions and droned the same line in perfect monotone synchronization, as if they were quoting an anime they'd seen far, far too many times. "Center the target and pull the switch, we know, we know."
"Ooooookay," Ritsuko muttered.
Shinji looked sheepish.
With another rush of air, the armaments locker emerged from the ground as a series of large paper targets sprang up on a nearby mountain. As one, the Arrivals acquired their Pallet rifles and moved into firing position.
The three went through the monotonous procedure of centering targets and pulling triggers, occasionally trying to liven the action with `a little John Woo.' But it just wasn't working. Jared was getting bored, feeling as if his will was being sapped away by the repetitiveness.
Finally, he snapped.
"That's it! I've had enough of this button pushing, paper shredding, nose-picking rhetoric! We wanna do some DAMAGE!!!"
"With these weapons? I hope you have some kind of plan," John said.
A master of maintaining conversation momentum, Jared plowed ahead. "PLAN?! We don't need a plan for this; we're just out here to cause destruction."
Andy assumed a familiar pose, which didn't look half bad on a one hundred and thirty foot tall robot carrying a rifle. "Gentlemen, POWER UP!"
A short, tense silence enshrouded the battlefield, each member of the three-man team-o-destruction contemplating Andy's suggestion. Finally, a consensus was reached, voiced by a single mind.
"It's worth a shot," said Jared
All three Americans shared a nod and dropped their rifles. They each faced their targets and assumed separate peculiar and, to Asuka's mind, very familiar combat stance.
"KAMEHAME-HA!!!" Jared screamed.
"GALLET GUN FIRE!!!" Andy joined in.
"MAZENKU-HA!!!" John finished.
The Units' AT fields condensed into spherical points before being forced outward as a beam. The simple pop-up targets and the mountains behind them were baptized by fire and simply ceased to exist afterwards.
All three Evas stared at their own hands. Ritsuko's jaw hit the console. Misato's bounced off the floor. Kaji went into seizures. Shinji had a heart attack then and there. Rei's eyebrows shot up, her only way to express such surprise and shock. Gendo spit out his coffee. And just before Asuka fainted, it occured to her that if they could learn the spoken Japanese language watching every single Dragonball, Dragonball Z, and Dragonball GT episode and movie; why couldn't they pick up on some of the tricks?
End Chapter 4
A note from the author: Boy, do I have some explaining to do. I got real impatient and made the first post of this episode without making sure I'd removed some notes/formatting issues, but seconds after I post it, I find some weird formatting problems with the second chapter. But now my choice of separators aren't messed up by . So, with a big sigh, I gave the last four chapters a good look-over, and re-uploaded the set so things are prettier. Sorry if you thought I'd slapped chapter 5 up when you blinked, I'll try to be better about this in the future.
Chapter 5, by the way, is coming along nicely.