I need to stop doing things like watching Puchi/Petit Evangelion that make me write filler and put this on hold until the dratted third movie comes out and I can get to the actual plot.
"So, what do you think?" Kaji casually asked the range instructor.
The man whistled, long and considering. "Haven't seen anyone before who's almost as good as the Little Miss."
"Rei Ayanami?" the agent guessed.
A nod. "Can't kidnap him, force him into ski bootcamp and drag him to the Winter Olympics either. Moon's nobody's territory." So what country could he compete for, when he didn't have any records beyond his origin and didn't have citizenship anywhere. Running a hand through salt-and-pepper hair, he gave Kaji another considering look before adding, "That and he's definitely modified. Not that it's illegal up there." But was Kaji going to give him, or the Little Miss, a hard time because of it?
"Really? How can you tell?"
"It's obvious, and it would be obvious to the Olympic committee too," 'Anji' said as Kaworu finished off another set of targets.
Since he didn't volunteer any more information than that, Kaji had to give him a nudge. "Is it the eyes or something? They've both got those red ones."
The man snorted. "No idea what that's about, but that wouldn't have anything important to do with it." Was it some prejudice or internal law that was making them label the genetically modified children with red eyes, like they were monsters? "The eye is as good as a part of the brain. Oh, there's some stuff that you could do fiddling with the lenses, but you're still talking a lot of rods and cones that detect photons with specific frequencies. Oh, women can have better color vision than men if they end up seeing two colors of red, and that's genetic, but what does the real work is what's behind the eyes. What we actually 'see' is basically just a three-d animation our brains put on for us. I like to tell the trainees that their video card's smarter than they are."
Human beings had a big blind spot directly where they were looking: inescapable because of the necessity of having an optic nerv hook-up. The brain was just so good at compensating for it in the generated image the conscious mind actually perceived that it was very hard for even a professional to demonstrate that blind spot to someone else. "Why we won't have anyone saying anything about the Little Miss. Not her fault if she's a little weird, with someone messing around with her brain. Good to see her learning how to smile, though." Looked like just slow development, not her frontal lobes getting too messed up. "He's better about that than she is, but he's not as good a shot."
"Oh?" Kaji asked casually. "Seems pretty incredible to me." Oh, he might miss the first couple times he fired a weapon, but that was figuring out what he needed to compensate for. After that?
"It would be hard to demonstrate it to you, but he's thinking too much, the wrong way. You can see it in his eyes. When you're training a sniper, you have to keep in mind that there's one part of you that's good at how to shoot, and another that's good at if to shoot. It's important to make sure that both parts are doing their jobs, but also to make sure they're not trying to do each other's jobs. Ever notice that in a game, the more important a kick or throw is, the more likely it is to get screwed up?"
"I thought that was just Murphey." Or just that Kaji was noticing it more when there were seconds on the clock than the rest of the game.
"No. It's because when they get stressed, they start going through all the steps, trying to do it with their conscious mind like a rookie instead of just letting their bodies do it like normal. The thinking gets in the way of the doing. Snipers, though…"
"So what's his weakness?" Kaji asked. "The one that makes Ayanami better than him?"
"The Little Miss hasn't figured out that sometimes she shouldn't obey orders yet. It'll screw up her aim when she does until she works it out, but right now there's nothing getting in the way when she shoots. He thinks about it too much. Every time he fires, he's thinking about what he's really doing, even when it's a target that doesn't look anything like a person. Acts like an old soul, too, so he'd have grown out of it by now if he was going to. Whether or not that's a weakness when he still shoots better than the rest of us is up to you."
"Hey, you're the one who said 'Too much,'" Kaji pointed out.
"That depends which side of the gun you're on. For his sake, he's letting it bother him too much. For everyone else's?" The man shrugged, and went about his work without saying anything else.
Hikari, Touji and Kensuke stared as the contents of the shoeboxes tumbled out onto the grass.
It was Touji that finally said what him and Kensuke were both thinking. "Damn, man. Your cat is a player."
Shinji scratched the back of his head sheepishly. "The black one's adopted?"
Thump.
Thump-thump.
Thump.
"Eee!"
It was the piercing whistle blast that finally woke Jun and Steve. "Nobody goes anywhere near the water until all of you are wearing swimsuits and floaty wings!"
There was a chorus of sad "Mew?" "Nyan? and other sounds.
"Don't mew me! Do you want to swim or not?" a female voice barked like she'd gotten an A in Drill Sergeant. "Anyone who goes in the waves without getting dressed first will have a time out if I have to make Rei sit on you!"
"Wark!" Splash.
"Mrew?"
"The penguin doesn't count!" Another blast of the whistle. "Boys first, since there are less of you. Girls, what did I say about being human without having clothes on! Change, now!"
When the two adults managed to get changed, they found a small sea of blue and grey heads, distinguishable from each other only by different colors of one-piece swimsuits and swim trunks on the beach in front of the house. Shinji, a larger blue-haired girl and a redhead in a pale yellow dress and a sunhat were riding herd on them, or attempting to. Shinji was busy blowing up the floaty wings with a hand pump while the blue-haired one grabbed kids out of the squirming, running, babbling and digging herd in order to make them hold still to have floaty wings jammed onto their arms, while the other girl surveyed the area with a commanding and disapproving look, arms folded and skirt blowing in the wind.
Beyond them, a penguin was squawrking loudly as it tried and failed to run away from a wave three times taller than it was.
A blue wave.
Another whistle blast. "No chasing the penguin! If he loses one feather off his hide, Misato'll take it out of yours!"
"Is it really okay to let them use their fields to block out the UV?" Shinji wondered.
"If you want to try to get them to hold still long enough to let the sunscreen sink in, be my guest. Idiot. We can't even wait until they're tired: verdammt S2 perpetual-motion-machines."
"Perhaps if we had blown up the beach balls before our arrival," the other girl said, frowning thoughtfully as she released the current child and fished another one out of the shrieking mass.
"While they still had claws? The Ikari family must have passed on only the very stupid genes." The speaker put her hand up automatically to shade her eyes even though she was wearing the sunhat, surveying her troops without commenting on the ones who had gotten into the bundle of foam noodles and were attempting to bop each other with things about twice as tall as they were. "Almost done, then we can start on the kiddie pool if the penguin hasn't gotten its act together by then. Its ancestors must be ashamed." That it had just gotten slammed into the sand by a little wave like that, sheesh.
"We?" Shinji wondered aloud as he finished the last pair of wings and looked around for an unwinged clone only to finally look down and find one in khaki swim trunks practically standing right on his flip-flops, looking up at him with sad eyes and holding up his bare arms hopefully. "Oh, again? It's not that we don't like you, Ghost, it's that how are we supposed to notice you if you hide all the time?" Shinji asked as he gave the boy a hug and then started putting the wings on, then picked him up. "Come on. Since you were the last to get your wings, you can be the first in the water."
"Ee!" the boy exclaimed happily, smiling widely.
Steve wondered if he was thinking that had gone just as planned because it was a cloned angel. Jun knew it was an evil, manipulative plot because it was a small boy and he'd been a father.
Since the redhead, clearly the German-Japanese Second Child, Asuka Sohryu, didn't object, the herd of already-sandy children stampeded after him into the water, and Ghost was the last one to actually touch the water, since Shinji lowered him down after walking past where the waves were crashing. Ghost didn't seem displeased, since given how high the water was on Shinji, that was probably deep enough for him to wiggle his legs without feeling the bottom. The clone immediately attempted to dive, an effort that was hindered by the floaty wings.
"May I join them?" Rei Ayanami asked Asuka.
"Yeah, sure." Duh. "I'm counting on you to make them keep their wings on and stay inside the blue. If they get too far outside it, it'll be annoying to spot them. But make sure the swimsuits stay on!" Asuka said, shaking her finger at Rei. She didn't trust them one inch, especially since that damn idiot Shinji had let the boys realize that if they took their clothes off, Shinji would panic and run after them, which was always hilarious and then they got grabbed and got to wrestle with Shinji while he tried to force them back into their pants. Misato just threw beer cans at them, which wasn't fun because beer tasted yucky unless it was a little bit in a lot of milk.
"And what are you looking at?" she demanded next of the onlookers. One old man and one salaryman-looking one around Kaji's age. Boring. If she was going to be at the beach, she should at least get hot guys to look at, even if they only had a little rectangular patch of real ocean thanks to some magnetic or something poles Kaworu had dug up in one of the geofront's ancient hidden alien storage closets, for when they wanted to get the LCL out of part of the damn thing in order to simulate some planetary environment. Well, it wasn't like Kaworu was slacking off, when he was the reason they were able to play hooky without anyone catching on, but still.
Beaches were supposed to contain beautiful women, like her, and hot topless men with nice abs. Compared to the pre-Impact episodes of Baywatch and surfing movies, Shinji being the only guy around was pathetic. He wasn't even topless! What a gyp. Although at least he had abs, unlike most of the guys back in Germany who just sit around all the time, and that white shirt he was wearing to protect himself from getting fried was clinging kind of nicely…
Bah.
It wasn't like she was interested in damn-Kaworu,-who-said-he-could-put-his-head-on-her-lap-anyway, but this ratio absolutely sucked and boring old men weren't helping improve the aesthetics of her first real trip to the beach.
She might have considered bringing Touji (with Hikari, of course) and Kensuke because at least Touji was an athlete even if he didn't have two brain cells to rub together, but neither of them could keep their damn mouths shut.
Well, at least the addition of extra slave labor to her outing meant Shinji could stay in the water until he got tired enough to take the shirt off so it wouldn't weigh him down. "Stop watching us like creepy old men and get down here!" she ordered.
The whale and shark-shaped floats weren't going to inflate themselves.
Finally watched Petit/Puchi Eva.
And lo, there was much WTF. I liked the unzipping the white background character concept, and the whole ghost/ninja thing as a play on what xxxHolic and some other series did with not bothering to fill in crowd scenes.
The reason ninja costumes are black is that stagehands wore black costumes in certain plays while moving around things on-set, and the audience learned to tune them out the way the actors ignored them. So, to have someone in black suddenly coming to everyone's attention, appearing out of the background, would be like being attached by the furniture. I'm wondering when someone will do something similar with the white/gray outline crowd scene people in an anime. Until then, Puchi!Kaworu having ninja skills, wearing a ghost costume that isn't quite like all the other generic ones but still gets ignored by Shinji and the other main characters and such is the closest thing to it I've seen.
Since humans react differently to different colors (think what red means vs. what pink does) and twins raised together define themselves by their differences, the kittens will begin to develop distinct personalities.
'The black one's adopted' - Shinji is the single dark-haired human among Kaworu's clone-child & grandchild (Rei's) menagerie. Above that, they're talking about the skiing-and-shooting winter biathalon Olympic event. My family actually did have a rideable shark float for our pool when I was growing up, and there were whale ones - I can definitely see Rei ordering those and Asuka telling her to get some sharks, too.