Nerv: Dry Cleaning and Takeout
NOTE: All places more specific than the city name is a product of the author's imagination, and are not affiliated with any existing real world places/agencies. References to real-life positions and events are also of a fictitious nature.
Stage III: Of Fish and Childhood Dreams
"You'll never be anyone!"
"You'll die in poverty, no good to anybody!"
"We're ashamed of you, Gendo."
"How could you do this to your family?"
"Woof, woof"
Gendo started, his seat belt digging into his stomach. He was on a spacious Boeing 747, with Yui sleeping on his arm and an engine right outside his window, blocking both the view and making the devil's own noise, even through the metal wall of the plane. He undid his seatbelt and wrapped his arm around Yui. He would not regret her, he vowed. No matter how much the dream haunted him, he would never renounce what he did. On the day he walked out, they had called him on his cell phone, decrying his very existence. Even the dog was loud enough to hear through the handset at home. The phone's plan had been summarily terminated after his grandmother delivered her two cents.
Gendo lowered the tray, disengaged from his wife, and laid his hands across each other over the table. He lowered his face behind his hands and, ignoring the smell of farts etched into the seats in front, smiled. He always found it easier to smile in his "pose." He would fly…he would fly over the rainbow, to a place far, far away, to the magical candy kingdom where all his dreams could come true. Toffees and marsh-mellows danced before his eyes, daring him to bite—
A loud fart from a…sumptuous gentleman ahead ruined Gendo's enjoyment of his imaginary marsh-mellow, and also brought to mind that there was no magical candy kingdom. He was flying to the United States of America, a land of freedom, opportunity, and ridiculously crappy healthcare. He plunged his face into his hands dejectedly. Will he never be rid of his troubles? He only had to run away, after all, but he was running out of places to run to.
"Note to self: find better way to run away from problems in life."
He opened a letter he had received from the Detroit 2nd District Board of Small Business Management. It was a permit to open a dry cleaning and takeout store in a neighborhood of average means and quality. With it, he could begin making sushi again. He leaned back blissfully and glanced at Yui's still beautiful face, fairly fawning over her. A discreet cough from Rei told him that he was being overtly affectionate, and that he should be considerate of the other passengers aboard. That girl acted so very matronly, making sure that he toed the line. Without much more thought, he folded up the letter and went to sleep.
Meanwhile:
Detroit, 2nd District Board of Small Business Management
The small 2nd District's Board was quite diverse for the small size of its charge. That is, it benefitted the small new-world yakuza group known as the Seele Group, and their affiliated fast-food chain, Angels Fast Food. Kiel Lorenz, the chairman, sat comfortably smoking a cigar while the rest of the group assembled into the meeting room. There was really nothing to talk of today. A few small restaurants folded and sold to Angels at a minimal price, their names kept original for the sake of keeping up an air of competition. For Kiel, the world was perfect. There was a new man coming in, too, one Gendo Ikari. Through his restaurant world connections, Kiel had heard of this man. He was from a family of prestigious chefs but fell from grace over a woman. Kiel smirked. Jailbait and troublesome women these days have expanded their operational parameters. By now, the group was fully assembled.
"This council shall now commence its meeting," he boomed. His Board was administrated with its own peculiar mannerisms, unique to itself. It made him feel like someone ruling the world from the shadows, perhaps as a hidden UN special council playing nations like puppets. As he had expected, the meeting was a boring repeat of the hundreds of others he had attended. At its conclusion, he could not but mourn lost time.
As he exited the office building, he ran into a young man bouncing a football in his hands.
"Kaworu," Kiel said. "What's the matter?"
"None at all, father," the silver-haired boy replied, red albino eyes doing a brief search of his father's face. "I understand that we will be having new neighbors soon?"
"Yes," Kiel said.
"Fresh meat for the game, are they not?" Kaworu asked pointedly.
"For the game…" Kiel smirked. "Indeed, son. They will soon know what it is like to lose the game at the hands of Councilman Kiel Lorenz."
Kaworu nodded without further comment. Father and son went their separate ways, Kiel to oversee the renovation of another restaurant and Kaworu off to some back alleys, where he spent his spare time hanging out with the rough and uncouth of the city's youth to satisfy his curiosity.
A flash of yellow alerted him to the presence of a tall, curvaceous girl walking down the street in a modest summer dress the color of a ripened pear. Her waist-length red-gold hair billowed out behind her.
"Good morning, Ms. Soryu," Kaworu called. She glanced at him contemptuously.
"What, off to hang with your homies again?" she said mockingly. Accepting the sarcasm with grace, Kaworu bowed, a little comically.
"Do you still not accept my side-dish hobby, Asuka?" he asked with similar mocking pleasantness.
"Are you stupid?" she demanded. "You're hanging out with a bunch of…potheads!"
"Crack-heads, not potheads," he corrected. "They abstain from marijuana; apparently cocaine is a more acceptable drug."
"Is that supposed to make it better?"
"Is there a problem, Asuka?"
With an upturned nose, she marched down the street, deeming him utterly incurable and almost as bad as his friends. Bemusedly, he sauntered the other way. The daughter of a police officer dead in the line of duty, she had a natural tendency to despise the likes of him, but it seems that her relationship with former Lt. Kyoko Zeppelin was highly strained, which by extension meant that she had an inclination to flaunt the law. If it was any other case, Kaworu thought, he would be in jail already. That would not be good; his hands were not good at holding on tightly to a bar of soap.
XXXXX
Of all the denizens of Detroit, the pigeon was by far the wisest and most all-knowing, more so than the scampering, land-bound squirrel, the slinking rat, the garden snake, the myriads of insect life and the occasional stray cat. Humans were not even in the competition to begin with. And it was one such winged Socrates that first laid eyes upon the Boy. The sagely fowl ruffled its flight feathers in excited agitation, for through generations of hatchlings, there has been a prophecy passed down, from father to eldest chick, of that Chosen of the two-legged monkeys who will one day rise up and begin a Golden Age for all Pigeon-kind (Although it was supposed to be a very local phenomena). It stated that one day, after many years of famine, a boy with hair the color of charred charcoal (which always implied thrown-out BBQ scraps) will appear beneath the ancestral telephone pole, reading a book tucked within a larger book, the innermost of which will be spotted with rituals of fertility and love and beautiful women, and the outermost with the arcane art of numbers and Xs and Ys learned by all hatchlings of the two-legged monkeys. He will come and defeat the Evil One, who is covering all his leftovers and carting them off in large trucks to some unknown place beyond the reach of the city's scavenging folks. It was in this excitement that the old bird flapped to the Boy, crying for the great Chosen to stop, to take notice of His humble Servant. A car, apparently, did not think it appropriate, and the old pigeon was sent down to the dirt from whence he came, having at last laid eyes on the Savior.
End Stage III
A.N.: W…what the fuck did I just write…?