When I finally got off that submarine I was a changed girl. The days of crying next to my bed ended and turned into days of working my mind into what had to happen next. I couldn't fix what was done but it could get back at the ones who did it and although that path wasn't going to be easy there was really no where else to go for me but up from the gutter. If you have nothing left, there's nothing to lose and that's what I felt by the time we reached landfall.
Our journey took a bit over a week until we arrived at…wherever we ended up, as I still didn't know and the others, not sure how much to trust me, didn't quite fill me in yet. Wherever it was it was underground, because as I debarked the boat along with Chairman Keel and his entourage it was deep inside of the earth, in what looked like a cave of some sort but reinforced with steel and concrete docks and scaffolding. It was dark inside, lit only by LED lights in various places. The air smelt like smoke or maybe sulfur, and there was felt like a hot wind from one direction of the cave.
"Where is this place?" I asked Dr Kirov while we disembarked, still trying to get the lay of everything and a bit frustrated at being kept in the dark.
"We are underneath a mountain range," he replied, "the hot air is from a volcano that we're close by, and that provides power to the base," My eyes went up in surprise, as a volcanic mountain range could be nearly anywhere in the world.
The group of us moved down the steel dock and towards an elevator bank. The Chairman, busy with other men who met him at the docks, spoke to me briefly while he motioned to a middle-aged woman wearing a uniform standing next to us.
"This is Ms. Krupp," he introduced, "she will be seeing to your welfare as you live here with us."
"Where are we?" I asked him directly.
"SEELE-2," he replied, "this is our secret base, our redoubt for us to rebuild and to strike back." To the woman he said, "please see to it Pilot Forrestal has suitable quarters and everything else required for her training." The woman sternly nodded and saluted the chairman.
"Thank you, Grandfather," I told him.
"No need. Just be ready when the time comes." With that he turned and led the way to the elevator banks with the group of men who followed and talked with him. I was left with Mrs. Krupp on the docks. Krupp, who was nearly as short as I was with sort of badly cropped reddish hair and a somber expression, sized me up as I waited for what would happen next. She took a firm hold of my upper arm and pinched it a bit, I winced at her as I protested, "Ouch, that hurts!"
"You are weak," she declared. "Months of being in a hospital bed has done that to you. We will get you back in shape." Krupp proceeded then to lead me to the elevators that would then take us to the fortress above.
After a long elevator ride we got out and then walked our way around the complex. Looking around me, I could see that this place was all hollowed out of a mountain, and surrounded with steel and concrete all around me. Parts of the fortress were spacious, and there was one atrium we passed by that received sunlight from the outside and was well-lit because of it. In there you could see above and I counted at least eight or nine levels. Soldiers and technicians in uniforms were all around.
From the atrium we walked further an into another spacious, darker area. When my eyes adjusted to the dimmer light I saw giant white figures that stood out against the darkness. There were several of them, up against two walls and cordoned off in giant steel cages. This was where SEELE kept their own Evangelions.
"Are these the Mass Production series that the Chairman spoke about?" I asked Krupp. She nodded, and pointed into the distance. "Yes. Two are survivors from the first round." These two EVAs were as massive as Unit 04 was. Colored a milky white, the had large heads with enormous mouths but no eyes, and were rippled with muscles all over their bodies. Both of the largest ones were kept waist-deep in a pool of liquid which I figured was LCL or at least a version of it, and most importantly they were moving as if they were alive, restless enough with energy that they had to be bound with giant steel chains and plates. They seemed scary and I was glad we were walking some distance away from them.
Next to the two largest ones were several others, all of whom looked like the first two but were not as large or as complete. One was big as them but had no arms, another two weren't as muscular but were thin and listless, and not moving at all. Another looked like it was only half-sized. "What about these?" I asked Krupp.
"Second phase of production," she told me. "To achieve our goal we will need to build many more."
We continued walking into the mountain fortress and I noticed that I was becoming quite tired, as it seemed like we went on forever. I felt humiliated that I had to stop and catch my breath several times along our way, I always thought of myself as an athlete and here I was being out-paced by an old woman. I shook it off as I saw Krupp's irritated expression and strove to make it the rest of the way to wherever we were going without stopping.
Finally we got to what looked like an upper deck of the fortress, with an alleyway that was filled with rows of hatches. There were two uniformed guards standing next to the corridor waiting for us.
"You will be directed to your room," Krupp told me before I could ask anything, "get rested and ready. Tomorrow your training will begin." Exhausted from the long journey by foot I just nodded at her and then one of the guards, someone who looked middle-aged with graying hair and dark eyes on a stern face, led be down the hallway nearly towards the end.
The guard opened up the hatch and showed me inside to a bedroom that seemed only slightly larger than the one on the submarine. Just the basics, all done in metal and concrete with adjoining bathroom that was thankfully much larger than the broom closet-sized one I had on the submarine. There was a bag on the table and a binder, plus blankets on the bed.
"If you need anything," the guard told me, "please just let me know and I'll take care of it." Unlike all of the other people at SEELE I'd interacted with, the guard's English was as perfect as anyone from America.
"Thank you," I told him.
"Don't mention it. You should get some rest." He then closed the hatch door, leaving me alone in the room. After he closed the door I thought to myself that the guard seemed familiar, but I couldn't place it and wrote it off to that he spoke good English.
I took some time to examine my new surroundings and they weren't remotely warm but it was more comfortable than the sub. The duffel bag on the table had clothes for a few days, including only basic things like t-shirts, athletic shorts, and things plus a track suit. There was another pair of blue jeans and a sweater, but nothing particularly fancy in the bag. No uniform either, I noticed. On the floor next to the table was another pair of running shoes.
From the bag contents I could only guess that I could look forward to a lot of physical training. That was fine with me. I was weak the way I was now and I didn't want to be weak.
Next to the bag was a binder and I opened it up. Inside the binder were papers and photos that were reports of what had happened with my Evangelion unit, and filling in the details of everything that the Chairman had told me on the submarine. I saw pictures of the other EVAs, the ones in Tokyo-3 that the enemy used, and I saw Unit 04 intermingled with them. That didn't make me feel good at all.
Continuing to flip through the binder, I saw a report on the destruction of Second Branch and read it. The report coldly detailed how my Evangelion was able to induce the black hole that swallowed up everyone inside. Everyone and everything was gone but she had survived, along with the current pilot.
I kept paging through the book and saw photos at the end, as they had placed in several pages of pictures taken all around Second Branch at the end of the binder. These were all places that I knew, various departments of the laboratories or engineering, or even of R&R. In the photos were all different employees of NERV-2, many of whom I knew personally. People who were now all gone, leaving families and grief behind.
I turned the page again and saw a photo of my father. It wasn't a recent one, as his hair had become much more grey in the last couple of years, but it was him. He always made an effort to look good and there he was in a white linen suit and tie, his beard neatly trimmed with a goatee like he preferred. He wasn't smiling but I could see his eyes and knew how familiar they were. Dad wasn't really a warm person, but I loved him just the same. I swallowed back the grief and traced my fingers on the photo where his face was. If only he knew what would happen, maybe it could all have been different.
Forcing myself to turn the page I got to the very end. There was one more photo of two teenaged boys, each of them wearing plugsuits. The boy on the left I knew well: it was Vance. Wearing his black and red livery, he looked tall and strong with a confident smile. Standing on the right was another boy, nearly as tall as he was, with messed up blonde hair and eyes that had my same eye color. He looked friendly, a small smile in the photo, and he was dressed in an orange plug suit that matched my own color pattern. The boy who called himself Patrick. The imposter.
Why had he done it? Why go to so much trouble to kill so many people? The chairman said that the renegades were very good at manipulating the pilot children, and this boy was part of the web but I knew there was more to it than that. Dad always said we had enemies, was he one of them? What was really going on?
From seeing Vance together with the kid that would kill him later, I couldn't hold back and started crying as I saw the photo, and I broke down and plunged my head right on the photo, sobbing as I did so. I wanted to just fix everything that I could but I knew that I couldn't. They were all gone. But I wanted to know why.
Finally getting myself motivated enough to clean up and change, and for the moment at least glad to have a decent shower, I knocked out in the little bed not knowing what tomorrow would bring and drifted fast and far asleep. It was then when the dreams started coming.
On that night I remember the first vision I had. I was on a sunny beach and looking out on the ocean. The images were a bit blurry and I couldn't hear much, but I that's when I first saw her.
Standing on the sands of the beach just where the ocean waves came in, she looked out onto the ocean. Her hair was an unusual shade of blue, and her skin quite pale. I looked like either she was naked or wore a while swimsuit I couldn't quite tell, but the girl just silently looked out into the distant ocean. I remember that it was unusually peaceful, but that image would stay with me for the days and weeks ahead.
Krupp was as good as her word. Starting the following morning I was woken up early and then told to dress for physical training. After a breakfast consisting of canned meat and something liquid I couldn't identify but that tasted quite fowl, I was brought to a weight room where Krupp and large, muscular German guy named Hotchkiss promptly had me doing weights and running on a treadmill for nearly the entire day. It was horribly painful and neither of my new coaches were particularly forgiving, but I was out of shape and I knew it, and I accepted the pain as the price for my recovery.
That went on for several days, basically a pattern of wake up, eat, exercise, eat, exercise, eat, exercise, shower, and sleep, and not much time for anything else. Neither of my coaches spoke to me of anything else other than what I had to do that given day, and much of it was working to restore any type of muscle tone I had as well as firm my body and get my cardio back to something normal. There wasn't anything delicate about this, no balance beam or uneven bars to swing on. Those days were gone for me.
After just three days of this I was completely exhausted, and dreaded getting up in the morning. My body ached all over, I could barely breathe and I wondered if we were high up in the mountain enough for the oxygen to be lower, or that maybe the air supply here had issues, it felt so difficult at times. I had terrible thoughts in the few moments that I had alone in my room, mostly about how one day I'd just go limp and then they'd just throw my useless body off the mountain. I thought it couldn't get much worse. But I was wrong, as the nightmares came that evening.
It started out in a dark room. I was lost and trying to find my way in a room that was pitch black. Suddenly there was a bright light and I saw what looked like a giant fish tank, with what looked like ugly fish swimming inside. But inside the tank the water wasn't blue, it was orange.
Standing in front was the blue-haired girl that I recognized from the earlier dream, where she was standing in front of the ocean. Here she was closer, and I could see her more clearly, including features of her face. Her eyes were unusual, maybe red or amber colored, and her skin was quite pale. She wore a white blouse and plaid skirt and was trying to say something but I couldn't hear it.
I noticed the ugly fish swimming in the tank were sort of just drifting and I tried to get a closer look at what they were, but then I saw something else inside of the tank. It was a person's head, a head with short-cropped hair that looked like the girl that was standing in front. I felt my throat gag on seeing that and then noticed that swimming all around weren't "ugly fish," they were body parts! Arms, legs, torsos, pieces of bodies of this same girl all swirling around together, and there must have been hundreds of parts. I wanted to throw up.
The vision was strong enough to actually get me awake, and I felt the bile coming through my throat. Feeling terrible and panicked I raced to the bathroom and vomited into the toilet. There wasn't much that came out, and the heaves were just icky painful.
Now completely exhausted, I drank some water and then tried to go back to sleep again, hoping that at least the rest of the night would be more peaceful. It wasn't.
The second nightmare took place while I was in the entry plug. I was in some sort of battle and I could hear voices around me, both girls and boys, and no one I immediately recognized. The screen was in combat mode and there were combat alarms all around, it was frantic as I desperately tried to shoot the EVA's gun against far-away enemies.
My gun jammed and then I felt myself climb up a building trying to do…something I just wasn't sure. I could feel the EVA jump off the building I just climbed and then something very bright flashed in front of my video display. The whole entry plug shook for a few seconds. Then there was the burning.
Inside of the entry plug it got very, very hot, hotter than I'd ever felt before. I felt trapped and couldn't get out, and then I could sense the LCL literally boiling against the skin of my face. But the boiling became a scratching and itching, and then it was a burning.
I screamed loud in agony, it was like the skin on my face was literally burning off. I brought my hands to my face to try to stop it but I couldn't. I could only hear my own screaming voice along with someone else's. I kept screaming and screaming and then suddenly the noises stopped.
There I was sitting up in my bed. Not thinking about anything else and still feeling the heat on my skin, I rushed to the bathroom and turned on the faucet with cold water, and then splashed it on my face for several minutes. Then I collapsed to the metal floor, crying as I trembled with fear. I pulled myself back up and looked in the mirror, and saw my face. It was the same as it always was, only just my cheeks and eyes were flushed red from more crying.
A second later the hatch opened and my guard, the one who spoke perfect English, came inside. "Miss," he asked me, "Miss, are you alright?" I just looked at him, still dressed in just a t-shirt and panties, and then suddenly felt faint and I dropped to my knees. He caught me before I made it to the floor as I blacked out.
Several hours later I woke up in what I guessed was yet another hospital bed. Sitting next to me in his motorized wheelchair was Chairman Keel, staring at me until I finally came completely awake.
"Are you alright, Pilot Forrestal," he asked me. Before answering I reflexively felt my face, just to make sure that it was still there. I didn't say anything at first, and Keel waited until I could finally speak a couple of minutes later.
"What happened to you?"
"Just…just some sort of nightmare. About being in the EVA," I told him, "I felt like my face was burning off."
"Really," said Keel. "What else did you see?"
I told the Chairman about the rest of the two nightmares, including the parts about the "fish tank" of bodies and also the EVA being in combat and then the burning. My body shivered as I recalled the whole night, the terrors still fresh in my mind. Keel didn't have any immediate reaction at first, except to say that the experience was "Interesting." He then called Krupp into the hospital room, and the woman promptly reported in.
"Please keep more careful care of Miss Forrestal here, she is very important to us," Keel instructed Krupp, and Krupp immediately nodded in reply. Keel then turned back to me.
"Miss Forrestal, if you have any dreams or nightmares of the sort you just had, please inform Ms. Krupp immediately. It's important that we know."
"Why?" I asked. "They're just dreams, right?"
"It's quite possible that the reason why you fell into a coma earlier might come from some sort of neuropsycho reactions with the EVA," Keel explained, "and knowing how these dreams of yours are laid out are key to making sure that such an instance doesn't repeat again the next time you come into contact with the Evangelion."
"I see."
"Did you have dreams like this before your accident with Unit 04?"
"Not nightmares like this, but I did have these re-occuring dreams about living in the mountains in some log cabin. Those were kind of strange."
Keel's attention was piqued. "Strange? In what way?"
"It felt like I was living inside of some one else's head. Some boy."
"How long was that for?"
"I don't know, I think they went on for months. Was it something to do with the EVA?"
"Perhaps. In any case, the doctors here inform me that you are physically healthy. When these dreams happen again and I suspect that they soon will, please don't forget to notify Krupp here as soon as they occur. Don't wait until the morning."
"Alright," I agreed, somewhat perplexed as to what was going on with me.
The weird dreams stopped for a while after that and once I was able to sleep at night without being anxious things began to slowly improve. While each day of physical training was more strenuous than the last, I could feel that my muscles were transforming from near-atrophy to having at least some kind of strength. Still, the constant activity was hard to endure, as I was subjected to hours on end of weights, treadmill, and other types of exercises, some of which used weight equipment that I bet they took from middle age dungeons.
The pace of training was frantic enough that there wasn't much time to think of anything else, as every day was a blend of eat/exercise/rest(a little)/exercise/sleep, and the power couple of Krupp and Hotchkiss weren't exactly charismatic either. I suppose that was good, as I really didn't want to think about anything else.
Those times that I did were whenever I made it back to my cabin, exhausted. Usually it hit me in the shower, perhaps the only real time I was with myself the whole day, when thoughts went back to the wonderful way things were, when Dad, and Vance and everyone else was alive. Now it was only just me. It was going to be up to me to avenge all of them. I could still feel the tears on my face intermixed with the shower drops, with time it was becoming more numb but it was still painful.
Within two weeks I had regained enough strength to start running up the stairs instead of taking the elevators in the fortress, and that made me feel better. I was strong again and working to get stronger, but still unsure of what path lay ahead as I lived in this still and very cold place.
On one night I dreamed again, but this time it was the return of my boy in the mountains. I saw the forest cabin he lived in and it seemed different than before, it was larger and built up on a mountain ledge. Also, very noticeably there was snow all around, and it was everywhere. It was beautiful! It was the first genuinely nice thing that had happened to me since I had woken up from my coma.
I could see him playing in the snow and this time he had some friends over, there were a couple of other kids I didn't recognize. The images were still a bit blurry so I couldn't make out anyone's face but I could hear playful screams and laughter. There was something else too, some sort of small animal but I couldn't make it out. I was surfing around in the snow, but then suddenly I saw her. She was standing next to me and saying something, and then was playing with the rest of us.
It was the same girl from my earlier nightmare, the one with the fish tank full of body parts. Blue hair, red eyes, and pale white skin. She was in my dream. What the heck was she doing in here? Scared of what I saw I squealed and woke up.
There again I was on my bed. Almost immediately Krupp's voice came through the speaker on my intercom. "Pilot Forrestal?" she asked me. "Are you alright?"
Were they watching me sleep? I turned on the light and replied back "I'm okay, I think."
"Did you have another nightmare?"
"Um, just a dream, not really scary like the others."
"Get dressed, we will come and get you."
I guess I never took dreams seriously much but for some reason these people did, and within a minute the hatch to my room opened up. The older guard, the one who spoke good English, appeared in the doorway.
"Please, Miss Erin, this way."
I followed him towards the end of the hallway and into something that looked like a break room, with just a table and some chairs and a small fridge against the wall. Krupp was already there with a notebook and a tape recorder on the table. "Now Pilot Forrestal," she commanded, "sit down and recall your recent dream in its entirety."
I did as Krupp instructed, and told her everything that I could remember in detail, which wasn't much. I told her that this dream felt like the others I used to have back at Second Branch, when I'd dream I was that boy in the mountains. Krupp seemed keenly interested in the dream and pushed me aggressively for details.
"How many people did you see?"
"Um, maybe three others."
"Children or adults?"
"All kids, I'm pretty sure."
"Can you describe them?"
I scratched my head and tried to give as much of a description as I could. "I couldn't see faces very well, but one was a boy, kind of small with dark hair. One was a girl with really bright, red hair. And then there was this other girl with the blue hair and red eyes, she's the same girl from my nightmare two week ago."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm pretty positive about that, she's hard to forget. Also, there was like this animal kind of thing walking around."
Krupp's eyebrows shot up. "What kind? Like a bird?"
"Sort of like that, only it didn't fly. It was like this really ugly penguin." Krupp then interrupted me and grabbed a phone, and spoke with someone else in German that I couldn't understand. After listening to the other side of the phone she turned back to me.
"I need to know one more thing about your dream."
"What about it?"
"Where were you?"
"I told you, we were in the mountains at the cabin."
"No, which mountain?"
"How would I know?" I protested. "I have no idea where this is. It's just a dream that keeps popping into my head."
"I need to know what your surroundings look like, it's very important."
"Why? It's just a dream, right?"
"Yes, but….but in order to determine a cause to your difficulties with the Evangelion we need to determine where in your subconscious are you being forced to react to stimuli. Perhaps it was a…past memory or something you saw on television or something."
That didn't seem to make any sense to me at all. "I told you, I don't think this place exists. It's just in my head."
"That I doubt, Pilot Forrestal. Please tell me the physical surroundings of where you were. Did you see any landmarks, unusual buildings or the sort like that. Signs, road posts, anything."
"Well, there's no roads, and not even any buildings other than that cabin."
"What about the mountain? Anything unusual about the mountain you were on?" I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, if only to get Miss Krupp here off my back. "There was one big mountain in the background."
"What did it look like? Can you draw a picture?" She shoved over her notebook to me along with a pencil. Trying to recall anything that I could from the fuzziness of the dream, I drew here a very crude picture of the larger mountain that I thought I saw in the distance.
"It was like this," I explained, as I showed her my quickly sketched images of a conical mountain with a crown of white snow. The one thing unusual about the mountain was that it was pretty smooth on all sides, almost perfectly.
Krupp saw the drawing and was immediately shocked. "Was this like Mount Fuji?" she asked me.
"Sort of." In my grogginess from being woken up I wasn't sure of anything that I was doing but it did sort of look like how I thought Fuji was supposed to be, basically a volcano cone capped with snow at the top.
"Was it to the left or right of the cabin?" she asked me.
"How would I know?"
Krupp practically screamed her response. "Please, it's very important!"
"Um…left, maybe?" Krupp then made a note on her notebook, and then motioned to the door for the guard. She then told me "thank you very much, Pilot Forrestal. You've been of great assistance." I was then hustled out of the door and back to my room, still wondering what the heck was that all about.
From then on the dreams became even more strange. A couple of nights later I saw her again, the little girl with blue hair. We were walking together in some sort of city, and she was wearing a dress of blue and white. It was nighttime and I could see the glare of city lights all around us with the moon high above. It went on like that for a while as we walked around. She didn't say very much, and in fact she didn't talk much at all in these dreams.
The dream moved to some other place that I couldn't identify but it was indoors where ever it was. She stood in front of me and she was close enough to see her clearly this time. Short-cropped blue hair tied back with a big bow, her face made up and with red lipstick that matched her eye color. She looked up at me, her eyes seemed nervous.
I felt myself put my arms at her sides and hold her close, and then I took one hand and touched her face. She touched my hand, and then I kissed her.
Oh, shit.
I woke up right away. Oh God, did that feel weird! I could feel her lips, how soft they were. It was a powerful sensation that left me really confused.
Terrific, I thought to myself, after everything else now I'm turning into a lesbian too. That's what this is all about, there's some sort of weird subconscious thing where the blue-haired girl represents all of my innermost desires. Except that wasn't even true.
There was someone that I wanted to kiss that night, and I remembered his lips well. I tried to recall it, in order to purge out the dream that I just had. I remember how he held me in his arms and how we passionately kissed while sprawled out on the floor of the pilot's ready room back at Second Branch.
Oh God, Vance. Why? Why did you have to go? I need you now! Right now! The memory of his strong face and easy smile came to me and I just wanted him to keep me warm in this cold place, I'd trade anything in the world for it. But it was hopeless. He was gone, dead, and I would never ever hold him in my arms again.
I squeezed my pillow as hard as I could and plunged my head into it, crying yet one more time. This whole thing just sucked so much.
This segment focuses on those funny dreams Erin keeps having, and we get our first real glimpse of a regular EVA cast member. We have a bit more go to at SEELE-2 until we shift gears, so stay tuned.
On a completely different topic if you've been reading any of the Blue Rose stories, you've no doubt realized that there's a rather large number of original characters in the series. For fanfics this is, sadly, controversial as many avid fanfic readers do tend to avoid stories with OCs. Yet in Blue Rose, the use of OCs is integral to the story itself. Why is this?
In earlier comments I've mentioned that I started out writing fanfics as a sort of "training ground" for novel writing, and early on determined that to get proper well-rounded education on creating novels that I needed to not limit myself too tightly to the confines of any one particular story universe. That meant introducing new characters and settings as the story required. Of course, OC's in FanFiction have a generally bad reputation, mostly because many of them either represent "author viewpoint" or what's more commonly known as "self-insert" or they tend to be of the Mary Sue variety and as such many OCs tend to be terrible, enough to where avid FanFic readers swerve to avoid when seeing "OC" within a story description.
So with that I had my work cut out for me early on in formulating Blue Rose. The trick had to be making characters that were A) believable and compatible within the existing EVA universe and B) not so perfect or single-dimensional as to annoy the reader. Having an OC in a relationship with Rei Ayanami certainly was a tall order and a lot of thought and research went into working out who Patrick Forrestal even was well before this got written.
In a later posting I'll get into how I did the specific OC designs in Blue Rose as I think readers would find it interesting, but generally I found it best to set ground rules even before I started plotting, and then tweaked from there. Those rules were:
1) Original characters should have a "profile" that makes them immediately recognizable as distinct from the main EVA cast, both visually and personality-wise.
2) Original characters should be built with personality defects from the beginning, in complete parallel with the pilots and others within EVA. In other words, I started with their weaknesses first, and then built on their strengths.
3) Original characters should be able to "change" within the storyline just as the main EVA cast changes, and that those changes will be both good and bad.
4) Finally, OCs CANNOT steal the show from the main EVA cast without a damn good reason.
More on this with the next chapter.