And perhaps I was wrong about no more bits for awhile – Priam is being difficult and I keep getting distracted.
This is set quite a lot further in the future than the pieces so far, after Misato has both found out the truth and stopped trying to kill Kaworu. Mostly.
Kaworu reappeared, wincing. "Well, that didn't go as expected."
"What happened?" Shinji asked, concerned.
"This body was created using quite a lot of planetary human DNA, since the equivalent DNA I originally possessed was not suited for survival on this world. I should have figured out that meant the brain's structure was more suited to development as a human… Despite the fact they have external AT fields, they think like planetary humans instead of like angels. I'm afraid that means that they wouldn't be able to handle interstellar travel the way we do, and… Oh dear."
Shinji followed Kaworu's gaze down to see a small ball of fluff in front of Kaworu's feet.
Biting his toes.
More of them popped out of the air, nine in all as Kaworu detached and lifted up the first one to examine it. "They didn't have any awareness of the concept of privacy," he told Shinji as he stroked a finger down the kitten's back in order to pacify it. "And they were starved for intellectual stimulation. They swarmed my mind as soon as I contacted them, and one of them… Yes, one of them immediately went looking for how I got out of where I was trapped by SEELE." Then they recreated those circumstances by creating the body of a cat and sending it to where Shinji was. "In addition to the forms Rei gave hers. SEELE will know they're gone, I'm afraid: they weren't able to maintain two bodies, so the ones in the tank will dissolve into the LCL now that the souls they contained and their AT fields are gone."
Pen Pen waddled into the room, and all eight heads that weren't currently filled with nothing but purr turned to stare at it as soon as the first of them saw it.
It was a moving thing. Those were always fascinating, since they had nothing else to look at in the tank but walls.
They would have attached themselves to Kaworu's toes the way the first had, because the first company and interesting thing they'd had in ages was not allowed to go away, but now there were more interesting things.
And this one was backing up.
They all let out a warning hiss. It had better stop right there, because it was not going to be able to go away and leave them alone. Not anymore.
Pen Pen ran for it.
Of all the things the penguin could have done, that was the worst possible thing.
Both Shinji and Kaworu felt their little minds light up with both bloodyminded possessiveness and joyful glee.
Chase!
Fun!
"Stop them!" Shinji said as he desperately tried to grab for one of them.
"I'm not sure what I can do: despite the adulteration their AT fields are each half as strong as mine, and they already know how to combine them." So Tabris couldn't just fence them in.
"How did SEELE keep them locked up, then?" Shinji demanded as Pen Pen was chased back into the room, ran around them and then back out the door, kittens in fierce pursuit.
"They didn't know how to access hyperspace." Until they'd seen it in Tabris' mind.
"Well, that one isn't running around." Did they have enough hands to pet them all, though?
"For now." As nice as human contact was, the kitten Kaworu held was getting more and more interested in this 'fun' the others were having. The planetary human killer instinct in action.
"Well, we need to do something." Shinji raised his voice to be heard over Pen Pen's distress calls, the kittens' glee and the noise claws and talons made on the floor. "Before…"
"Leave my penguin alone, you hellcats!"
"…Misato gets back from the store," Shinji finished.
That voice grabbed the kittens by the scruff of the neck and shook: it was a Queen voice. A mom voice.
Sad little mewing came from the entryway. There was a mom. It must be placated, or else there would be no nice things. And that would be very bad.
"Kaworu!" Misato roared next. "Teach your clones some manners!"
"I'll try, Miss Misato."
"Don't try, do!" she ordered, but it was already clear her wrath was fading. Damn things had been raised in a tank like Rei's, and Pen Pen seemed fine: she'd put down the groceries to check him over first thing. At least they'd just given him a fright instead of blasting him with lasers or clawing at him: if an angel wanted Pen Pen dead, he'd be dead. "Shinji, come here and get the milk!" Maybe feeding them would calm them down: Rei's always went right to sleep afterwards, according to Asuka, who had moved over there temporarily to help Rei kittensit, since she obviously didn't know anything about how to look after animals. It wasn't that Rei's were naturally any less …kittenlike than Kaworu's, it was that Misato hadn't met them until after Asuka had shown them who was boss, since Rei thought they were just too adorable and couldn't manage to scold them, much less discipline them properly.
"Yes, Misato," Shinji said, hurrying.
"Aaah!" Misato sighed heartily, kicking back. "There's nothing like a cold beer on a hot day," she said, cracking open another can. "Cheers!" she said to the kittens on the table, pouring a little of the beer into each of their saucers of milk.
In Shinji's room, he and Kaworu were unpacking and setting up the carpet tree, scratching post, balls larger than the kittens themselves and other toys they'd bought for the Kaworu clones after figuring out which ones Rei's liked best. Shinji was glumly certain that if the kittens were not satisfied with the available entertainment tomorrow morning, none of them would be getting out of the house. Not unless Shinji tossed Kaworu at them to escape (and if he didn't, Misato certainly would), which was a bad idea since they might break into Kaworu's head again for more information, such as the hyperspace coordinates of Shinji's classroom and Misato's office. If kittens started appearing out of thin air, people would ask questions.
Well, first they'd go aww, but then they'd ask questions.
"What is it?" Shinji asked Kaworu, who had a puzzled expression on his face.
"My clones like Misato more than they like me." And Kaworu was not entirely sure how he felt about that. Rei saw hers as personal children, but angels didn't have children in quite the same way: they couldn't afford to get attached to individuals in their ecosystems that much, not with the grief eventually rendering them unable to do their duty.
"And that bothers you?"
"I think it's that I feel that it should bother me. Misato would be a good parent to them," better than someone with no idea how to act as a role model to planetary humans, "but what if they seek the approval of their genetic source, or feel that my lack of jealousy is hurtful?" He didn't want to injure anyone the way Gendo had Shinji.
Shinji was quiet until he finished unwrapping another of the little collars with, 'if lost, please return to…' engraved on it. They couldn't really give them names until they'd been out long enough to have a chance to develop personalities of their own. "I think that it's a good thing that you're worried about it. The important thing is that they know you care, right? And that you're trying to do the right thing. At least that's what I think." He would have preferred hatred to Gendo's indifference, Shinji thought. "You're worried that there will be a gap that can't be crossed between you and them, but isn't there a gap like that between everyone?" Hence the human instrumentality project. "So no, you can't be perfect, but no one can. At least if you're trying, then they'll know that they're not worthless to you."
Concern was there in red eyes, but all Kaworu said was, "Thank you." Because he was thankful.
"Hey, do you think we should try to make sure they spend time with Rei's? Hers have been on the outside longer, and that means only one person needs to babysit." Rei and Kaworu had been alternating days, because Rei's attendance had always been irregular and Kaworu found interacting with Shinji's schoolmates a much more intimidating prospect when trying (and failing) to pass for one of them. Fortunately, 'raised on the moon and trained from birth to be a pilot,' explained a great deal of social cluelessness.
"It's certainly beneficial for planetary humans to interact with those of their own mental age." Kaworu made a note to step up his… redirecting of SEELE operational funds. He was fortunate that Asuka had reminded them that they needed to provide for the future of Rei's kittens. Houses, preschools, education up to graduate school: false identities because without the ability to know each other very easily, Lilin, especially young Lilin, would gang up on the different… Gendo wasn't paying Shinji a salary to begin with, while Rei and Kaworu's both amounted to an allowance. Rei's salary and bank account were both larger because Gendo wanted to spoil 'Yui' and she hadn't had anything to spend it on, unlike Kaworu and his music collection.
Kaworu didn't feel especially guilty about this: many people supported the organization because they believed that SEELE was working for the benefit of humankind. At least this way the money would be of benefit to some humans.
Asuka hadn't become a pilot and a graduate so young without the ability to organize. He really didn't know how he would be managing this if she hadn't taken the situation in hand. Rei was even more ignorant about the things that Lilin life required than he was: he, at least, had the benefit of observing Shinji's childhood.
And monitoring both Moonbase communications & broadcasts in range of Shinji's hometown, although if he hadn't known that although Lilin might be as biologically focused on sex as Angels were on terraforming, both were (normally) capable of pursuing other interests and discounted ninety percent of the pornography, he would have gotten a very distorted idea of the rules regarding sexual advances in Lilin society. In fact, he had to discount almost all of it, because they were now avoiding human contact even more than before Second Impact. Asuka had tried to punch his ear and bruised her hand against his AT field when he put his head on her lap one fine day when they were eating near Kaji's field, which had led to a high-volume lecture on the fact that oddly, cats were permitted more human contact on this planet than humans were.
Well, no wonder the Lilin were so …insane? Maladjusted? Messed up? Angels might be engineered not to need physical contact for the regulation of certain neurochemicals, but the others had driven themselves insane by resisting the pull of mental stasis while unable to reach outside their own minds. The isolation had driven them insane to the point that their one remaining priority was to reach a carrier admin for a full reboot and sanity restore, and unfortunately the AT field mechanics involved meant such a thing was supposed to be very, very illegal within a little over a light-year of a populated system. At least they had still waited in queue instead of all swarming NERV at once.
He hoped that Shinji and Asuka's experiences would provide information on what not to do when trying to raise well-adjusted young. Once the angel attacks were over, the nations of the world had already signed treaties regarding the reduction of EVA combat power.
Rei's had the incomplete programming of a carrier administrator, while his had benefitted from the Tethyan cultural obsession with overengineering. Living in a liquid medium meant that equipment had to be better shielded, that transportation took more energy because of friction and a host of other problems that made large projects and the development of the infrastructure of a technological civilization was a logistical nightmare.
Because of that, they'd been forced not just to measure thrice and cut once, but design every large project, for instance signal cable networks, for several times the estimated demand, because if it was hard to gather the resources to create something, it would be a nightmare to have to do it all over again because of an oversight or inadequate parameter.
Therefore, Kaworu's AT field strength was exactly at the legal limit for anyone but a carrier administrator, who were often responsible for a ship full of scientists & diplomats without physical AT fields and had to be able to defend them in case of uncontacted planets with trigger-happy navies & angel prototypes.
If either Rei or Kaworu's clones, much less both sets of them, decided to take over the world, there would be very little either of them could do about it. The mass-produced clones were less powerful individually, but they had already learned to share thoughts out of pure boredom, which meant they could share power.
Oh, of course a Lilim's mental AT field could kill them if it came to it, but the Lilim had to be able to find the core of their souls first, and sharing overlapping AT fields and thoughts the way both sets did was effective camouflage.
Earth might actually be the first planet in Kaworu's memory archive to be conquered by its own angel prototypes. Unless the rest of the planet caught up to where their psychic capabilities should be quickly, the uneven distribution of power could distort this world and its future even more, even though it seemed like that shouldn't be possible. Not if the poor planet managed to get that far, overcome such difficulties. Oh, planetary humans created with external AT fields weren't rare during the early stages of angel development, but soon enough they realized that while sufficiently developed technology could do just about anything an external AT field could except access hyperspace, there was no gadget or cell phone application that would defend against psychic attack anywhere near as effectively as the light of the soul.
He couldn't leave the poor things, either group of them, to die or be forced to learn violence and hate for Lilinkind, but they, and those who would be produced after them, would be one more obstacle in the in the path of a planet that had been burdened with so many.