And another little slice of life chapter.
Touji threw down his controller in frustration. "Dammit, Kaworu, stop killing me before I even manage to get my damn bearings!"
"My apologies," he said, blinking and making a note to give all the Lilim a little more of a head start, since their reflexes couldn't be measured in nanoseconds.
Asuka snorted. "Ignore him, he's just being a whining loser." Look at Shinji, he wasn't complaining when she killed him, it was just making him toughen up and come after her harder. Well, it was good to aim high, even if the two times he'd taken her down were clearly flukes.
"Touji, you can't ask someone to play less than their best," Hikari agreed. "What do you think, Kensuke?"
It took Kensuke several seconds to respond, his attention occupied trying to pilot the flying vehicle. He finally answered when Shinji landed on top of it & threw him out of it, whereupon he was quickly dispatched by an impatient Hikari's energy blade. While this game was an entirely unrealistic simulation of warfare between multiple planetary races, it did seem fun for the Lilim and that very unrealism meant that Kaworu wasn't really bothered by it. "I need to stick to finding good sniping positions…" Right, Hikari'd asked him something. "Touji, you've been playing this game with Hikari longer than I have. It's not like letting a new player get used to the controls." Not that Kaworu or Rei had needed any time at all.
"Here," Misato said, passing Kaworu a beer. "It's more fun to play with a handicap, anyway."
Kaworu took it like the compliment it was, popping open the tab and grimacing at the taste. The willing ingestion of poison even when it was no longer necessary was so very planetary human. He was almost glad Shinji wasn't doing well enough at this game for Misato to insist on passing him beer the way she had Asuka and now Kaworu.
Asuka's mild intoxication appeared to have sharpened her killer instinct, but since this 'Halo' – ironic, that they were playing a game with a name associated with angels – allowed her an easy channel for it, she was almost becoming more friendly under the influence instead of it causing her inner anger to lash out at her fellow players verbally.
Of course, Asuka's German ancestors had evolved more of a resistance to this poison than the others present, due to Europe's lack of tea. Before they'd become aware of bacteria, it was unsafe for Lilim to drink fresh water. Boiling it first and infusing it with the tea plant's antibacterial chemicals had rendered it safe for Shinji's ancestors, while Asuka's had relied on cow's milk, thereby developing a tolerance for lactose (which normally mammals became intolerant of after a certain age, to force them to stop drinking mother's milk) & alcoholic beverages, since alcohol also killed germs.
According to Misato, the alcohol content of her Yebisu was less than that of the beer once considered a soft drink and served to children in Germany, which was why she was quite blasé about serving it to Asuka. Kaworu she was watching as he drank, he noted, wondering if part of the point of this was to gauge his tolerance.
Not to mention that tests showed that driving while drunk was effectively the same as driving while sleep-deprived, so this might provide useful data on how effective an Eva pilot he would be if woken in the middle of the night or forced to remain on duty for a long period.
"Are you sure you don't want to play, Rei?" Shinji asked, frowning at the controls of his current craft.
Both he and Kaworu could feel his sister's hesitation, although she didn't allow the dilemma to slow her movements. It wasn't that she didn't want to play Halo with her brother on the system Hikari'd brought over, it was that this 'DDR' training mechanism was, although equally unrelated to real combat, very fun. "That's fine," Shinji answered absently. "I'll play that with you in a bit." Once he got his number of Asuka-kills up to a fourth of her Shinji-kills. Fortunately Asuka was being reasonable about their relative skill levels and was being honest when she said that would impress her.
Shinji's growing desire to impress Asuka and Asuka's hope that Shinji would succeed in impressing her was pleasing to both Kaworu and Rei, since it meant the courtship was progressing smoothly. It also was doing wonders for Shinji's self-esteem, as well as Asuka's emotional stability, since earning the respect of someone Shinji respected? Not to mention Asuka's own desire to be courted by males worthy of her own respect, since if only weaklings found her desirable that said unpleasant things about what the males she respected (Kaji) truly thought of her and her hard-earned capabilities. Currently, instead of trying to make it clear to Shinji that he was beneath her, it was Asuka's subconscious desire to force Shinji to improve, since the more worthy a mate he was, the more superior and desirable a mate she clearly was. That was why Asuka had taken it on her own initiative to follow Misato's advice and drag Shinji to the firing range with her.
In hindsight Kaworu regretted not training Shinji with Lilim firearms since the Eva project made use of them, but Shinji's awareness of what angelic weaponry was capable of was almost more useful, since Rei was already a very skilled sniper. It had allowed him to guard her effectively against Ramiel's return fire during that operation.
"Don't worry about it: it would be weird if I was that good a shot, and this is a game anyway," Shinji answered him. He and Kaworu were on the same team, so they were using this as practice with shared situational awareness, both of them contributing to a single mental model of the battlefield and everyone's position on it. That was a such basic tactic in ordinary planetary human warfare that normally information warfare, defending and attacking their own and the enemy's tactical control networks was developed long before the phalanx. Fortunately, since Misato was playing instead of observing she would be too busy to notice that Kaworu was reacting to what Shinji saw and vice versa. If Rei were to join them while Shinji was still acting as their eyes in the sky… The Asuka-Misato-Hikari combination was already devastatingly effective, however, and all three of them would notice if relative noobs suddenly gained that significant an advantage.
Kaworu was somewhat unhappy with his own shooting ability: Although SEELE had him practice in simulations, those simulations weren't the same as the reality and Lunar gravity meant real firing range practice would have caused him to develop entirely the wrong ideas about the movement of the projectiles. Of course, his targeting & piloting algorithms being designed to model multiple object velocities in space and a variety of atmospheres under a variety of conditions such as gravity and solar wind, his 'very unhappy' was Asuka's, 'how dare you be better than me,' and he had been forced to avoid the firing range at NERV while she was there in order to avoid her developing a rivalry with him and trying to spark one between him and Shinji so that she felt Shinji was adequately courting her.
Fortunately, Asuka had no fondness for early mornings and he'd taken to heading there before dawn.
Unfortunately, Kaji had taken to haunting the firing range at the time Kaworu was there, and that was definitely odd. Kaworu didn't need the ability he'd developed to read even shielded Lilim emotional radiation to know how unpleasant Kaji found it to be awake and dressed at that hour. Being their once was coincidence, but three times in a row? After Misato had followed Kaworu to observe his report to SEELE?
Tabris' worries about what Misato and the male whom it was clear would be one of her primary mates if it weren't for Lilim being the way they were suspected about him were interrupted when he recognized what Kensuke was humming under his breath.
Very under his breath, practically a subvocalization and definitely not something a Lilim could have heard, but Tabris was too pleased both by his recognition of the song and Kensuke's interest in music to notice a little detail like that. "Allons, enfants de la patrie," the glory of war has arrived!
Such a very bloodthirsty song for the national anthem of a country associated with cowardice.
Asuka joined in, of course, her untrained voice and particular relish of the violence providing an interesting contrast to his own take on it, focusing more on it as music & the defense of freedom and brotherhood. Even though Shinji didn't speak French, music was still an effective enough means of emotional communication that Kaworu could hear him inwardly almost laughing at how well this conveyed the difference between Tabris and Asuka.
Shinji was also made happy by Asuka's clear visceral pleasure at the idea of slaughtering those who dared attempt to harm her mates and children, which caught Rei's attention as well. Then there was Asuka's smile of vicious 'Oh, it is on' delight when Shinji took advantage of her divided attention to get in another kill. A delight that was only heightened because she'd bet Shinji a kiss if he managed to kill her enough times. Either way she won.
A produce of selective breeding herself, Asuka was more aware of the mechanics of all this than most Lilim. She certainly wasn't going to put herself through nine months of discomfort in order to inflict an inferior's genetics on her offspring, and when Asuka was an Eva pilot, one of those entrusted with defending the world, she had very few equals. Kaji was extremely intelligent and skilled, even if he didn't have the information it took to avoid SEELE noticing him when he was starting out, but it still took the advantage of more years in which to hone those skills for him to attract Asuka's attention. That was probably one of the reasons planetary males were slower to mature as a general rule, although Tabris couldn't really be sure, not being one.
He wondered how many other angels had involved themselves in the affairs of a single planetary human child to this degree, however. Perhaps he was something of a specialist in their (deviant, sadly) psychology compared to most of his kind, although they were still quite odd.
Well, that was part of what made them cute enough all angels wanted a planet full of them to look after, although Tabris had tucked small Shinji in at night (pulling the covers up with his teeth and pressing them in tight around him with his paws) instead of arranging a nice fertile biosphere with soft grasses and soft-furred animals for bedding.
Since she was also linked in to his musings Rei sent him a mental image of Asuka and Shinji together in a bed full of kittens tagged with a question, although it took Tabris a moment to deduce her meaning. Then he decided not to explain that he'd meant soft-furred animals for them to kill, since Rei equated kittens with human babies and the deaths of 'their' planetary humans was extremely distressing to any angel, much less such a young one. Instead he sent "I think they would have to worry about crushing the kittens in that case."
"Ah, while mating." Rei inwardly nodded, although her eyes remained focused on the display screen of her game.
"I don't need my sister thinking about me and Asuka having sex!" Shinji objected. "Tabby," you meanie, "why'd you have to recruit her?!"
"Shinji, it's only natural for family to wish for your happiness, especially when you and Rei have genes in common. Your reproductive success is her reproductive success," since it meant genes that were also hers would continue to be a part of the tree of life. "I know it's odd by Lilim standards, well, by planetary human standards in general to think of it quite this way, but you'll have to forgive us our foibles." He enfolded Shinji in a mental hug while picking off Misato as she moved in for the kill on Kensuke.
"At least take the conversation private: you're distracting me!"
Since that would obviously not help his odds of mating with Asuka anytime soon, even if actual babies would have to wait until the two of them were no longer on the front lines of a war, the two of them obeyed.