It was still dawn in Nevada when we finally arrived, the skies were covered in a cloudy overcast as the giant transport aircraft carrying me and Unit 04 descended towards our drop point. Just before landing Olivia again gave me a rundown of what I'd be doing once I hit the ground.

"You'll be disembarked at the old airport," she said. "I want you to patrol the row of hotels down the main boulevard of the city and try to find our bad guy. Once he shows up, neutralize him with your Pallet Gun and then finish him off with the Lance of Longinus that we've equipped you with." The Pallet Gun I was very familiar with, as we trained with them often back at NERV-2. But the Lance was new to me: the weapon that NERV used against other EVAs, one that was capable of breaking completely through an AT Field. I had seen one used before, when "evil boy" Kaworu in Unit 06 had used one to disable Unit 01 on that horrible day in the GeoFront. One of those Lances was now strapped onto Unit 04's back as we flew towards the target area.

"Remember that you can't fully defeat the Harpy until you use the Lance, and you have to penetrate all the way to the core of the unit," Olivia reminded me. "Do your best to try and knock it out first, and then kill it quickly before it can regenerate. If you need backup," she also informed me, "the Japanese unit is coming, but still over an hour away."

"Shouldn't we wait until they get here?" I asked Olivia, not wanting to go into combat unless we had a definite advantage, as I'd rather go two-on-one than one-on-one with any enemy.

"The concern is that this Mass Production unit might try and fly away first, and then we lose our chance to get them. If you can engage him within its hiding place there in Vegas it will save everyone a lot of trouble."

"Worse case," Olivia added, "if he's too much trouble for you back off and we can drop an N2 on him and that ought to slow him down a bit. But let's try to corral him for now on our own while we've got surprise on our side" I was hoping Olivia was right about that, as I was beginning to feel less and less confident about what we were doing.

Our aircraft finally arrived over the abandoned city of Las Vegas, flying us low and slow over the ground so that the EVA could be launched without needed a parachute to land. We dropped about a thousand feet off the ground and then landed on our feet on one of the large runways of the old airport next to the city. Once safely down I quickly bounded the EVA to the nearest cover I could get to, a large golden-colored hotel tower across the major boulevard just a few hundred yards in front of us.

I quickly checked my weapons before doing anything else. The Pallet gun was status-ready, cradled in the EVA's hands with the safety off. I also had two Prog Knives in either shoulder pylon in case I needed them for close-in fights, Then there was the Lance of Longinus itself, which was firmly attached to a strap on Unit 04's backside. It was important to use the Lance at the right time, so if I encountered the Harpy I'd need to work on damaging it enough with the Pallet Gun and whatever else I had to keep it from fighting back or escaping before I could finish it off with the Lance. This wasn't going to be easy, but I hoped that all of that earlier training would click in when I needed it.

I hid behind the golden hotel tower and peered towards the rest of the city. Las Vegas, when it was still a bustling, thriving metropolis, consisted of a million people serving another million guests and most of those guests lived in a four-mile-long string of hotels that went down a single boulevard named, appropriately enough, "Las Vegas Boulevard." Several of the hotel buildings were gigantic, dwarfing even the Evangelion, and in their heyday had held tens of thousands of people inside at once. Now the city was empty of people and these abandoned hotels, many of them with fancy appearances designed to make them look like make believe places or far away destinations, stood silently collecting dust and providing homes to the local wildlife.

Our task was to try and find this one Mass Production unit and The Strip, as the large boulevard was nicknamed, was thought to be the best place to hide a one hundred and twenty-foot-tall monster. I couldn't agree more, as it was easy to see how a Harpy could find a hiding place among a dozen or so giant hotels in sight. To me this was all playing out like one gigantic game of Hide and Go Seek. Well, I said to myself under my breath, "Come out, come out, wherever you are."

With my Pallet Gun at the ready I slowly made my way down the boulevard, moving from South to North. Next to the golden hotel was one that looked like Egyptian ruins, with a giant sphynx in front and a black pyramid made of glass behind it, although much of the glass was now broken up. I slowly moved towards the sphynx, carefully checking my scanners to see if anything was around me. But there was no movement. I kept moving up the street.

I reached an intersection surrounded by more giant hotels. To my left was one that looked like a medieval castle, while to my right there was a gigantic green hotel with a lion posed in front. Further to my left was a hotel that had a scale-model of old New York city on the front, with the remains of what looked like a roller-coaster wrapped around it. People rode roller coasters around these things? What the heck kind of a place was this? I decided to moved towards the New York hotel, keeping my Pallet Gun at the ready as I searched around the buildings.

"See anything, Unit 04?" came Olivia's voice over the audio.

"Negative, control," I replied back.

"Keep moving down the street. That thing's hiding somewhere."

There wasn't anything at the New York place so I turned my attention to the green hotel and again searched through it, peeking around buildings looking for anything that might have been hiding. Again there was nothing, and after a couple of minutes I swung around and looked at the other hotels. There was a white tower facing the one with the lion with the name 'Tropicana' still visible on it's front, and next I checked that building. No movement, and nothing on sensors. It was when I turned towards the castle that I felt something around that was moving. Maybe it was just too quiet, but then…

"Erin!" Olivia shouted, "Behind you!"

I quickly pivoted around to face a massive white monster with two arms, no eyes and massive teeth. It was as if he had come out of thin air. Had he been hiding in one of the hotels and I missed him? Instinctively I brought up my Pallet gun to fire but he swung down on it with a Lance of his own and cut the gun into pieces, then he brought it up again for another thrust. Panicked, I flipped myself backwards and bounded towards the New York hotel, trying to get up and over it so I could take cover.

The Harpy didn't quit at that, and came down on the hotel itself with its lance, which had now changed shaped into a two-edged sword. He didn't mark me however and I darted around the backside of the hotels, lined up with a large elevated highway. As the Harpy searched for where I was hidden, I tried sneaking around to a new spot, searching around concrete rubble and ruins for somewhere that I could stay out of sight and regroup.

I found another big hotel to hide behind about a half-mile north and tried to keep the Harpy in sight while I got back to my controller. "Olivia?" I called out.

"Erin, are you alright?"

"So far, but he got my gun."

"We'll drop a replacement. It will be within three thousand meters north-east of your position."

"Okay,"

Using a digital map display I saw where I was relative to where they'd be dropping the rifle. I'd have to go past another large hotel, one that was built to look like a giant Greek temple, and then cross the boulevard again and I'd probably be spotted by You Know Who. Above me an aircraft soared, and then I saw a white parachute drop out of it.

"Erin, they did the drop," Olvia called out. "We'll distract him while you go over there and pick up the Pallet Gun. We've only got the one spare, so don't lose this one!" she warned.

"Roger," I replied. My heart raced as I waited for the next move, still not feeling myself confident or safe in the current situation. One wrong turn and that guy would…

I felt the EVA shake as something tugged at our right side. Turning around I saw the Harpy with his sword high in the air. He had again found us! Without thinking I gave him a side kick that pushed him back into a building, and then darted out from behind the hotel I was hiding and towards the other side of the boulevard.

The Harpy tried to follow me but then ran into a barrage of explosions, as military aircraft that had accompanied us on the sorte to Nevada were now making attacks on the unit. None of the bombs dropped by those bombers would actually do anything harmful to it, of course, but they still made great distractions against the enemy EVA as it turned to face aircraft flying at close range. I continued my evasion across the street and went looking for the weapon that was dropped, finding the Pallet gun in it's drop casing resting on top of a giant parking garage.

Quickly I grabbed the gun and then scrambled further north, past another row of hotels and then finally getting a hiding place behind one named "Desert Inn" that had the remains of a giant golf course behind it. I looked around the corner of the hotel tower and saw the Harpy, still trying to both knock out the fast-moving aircraft with its arms like it was King Kong while searching for where I was hiding,

If the battle was going on like this, I figured, a direct one-on-one match wasn't the way to win this fight. I thought about calling in the N2 strike like Olivia offered to slow the Harpy down, but for some reason was reluctant to do so. I wasn't sure why, it wasn't like there were people living here anymore in Las Vegas or anything. But I still didn't want to blow up the city if I could help it. Instead I kept looking at the Mass Production unit as it slowly moved closer towards us, wondering if I could come up with any kind of advantage.

Through the video display I studied the Harpy as it approached, nothing something about it that I hadn't seen before. "Olivia?" I asked the controller. "What's that thing sticking out of it's back?"

"What thing?"

"There's this, like, cross-shaped antenna, that's mounted in the spine just behind the shoulders." I had seen Harpies during my time at SEELE, and none of them had that extra addition on them. What was that thing?

There was a short silence from Olivia and then she had an answer. "Not sure but we're picking up signal exchanges coming from it. It might be a communications antenna."

"But it's a dummy plug inside, right? I mean who's controlling it?"

"Could be some way that it's remote controlled, maybe a way to override the dummy plug's berserker tendencies" Olivia said. "it's definitely digital whatever it is."

Digital, I thought. Maybe there was a weakness with this guy after all.

"Erin," called out Olivia. "I don't like this. Pull out and back towards the east while I call for the N2. Then you and the Japanese unit can have another go at him when they get here."

"But you said he might get away!"

"I'm willing to take that risk instead of losing you to it. If he's got a Lance of his own he could kill you."

I saw in the distance that the Harpy was getting closer to my hiding place behind the hotel complex, it would only be a matter of time before he found us. I knew I had do something, and while I was all for running away at that moment the thought of this monster getting away and being able to later on attack a real city with actual people in it was also scary. I had to stop this beast now if I could.

I took my hands off the actuators and then concentrated via my A10s for the entry plug to show me the virtual keyboard. In a second a full QUERTY keyboard was holographically projected with arms reach of the control throne.

That I had activated the keyboard also alerted the EVA controllers. "Erin," Olivia said over the speakers, "What are you doing?"

My fingers hit the keyboard in lightning speed as I worked out a plan. "I'm gonna mess him up a bit," I told her.

Dad had designed Unit 04 around me, and part of that was giving her a capability to fight on an electronic battlefield, not just a physical one. Inside of Unit 04 was a set of memory banks that contained several different types of crack programs. Some were designed to defend against digital attacks by opponents, while others were offensive programs designed to disable or damage anything that was electronic in nature. Unit 04 was special in that way.

As I hid behind the Desert Inn, I worked out a very sloppy but quick program that would use my EVA's own antenna to try and interfere with whatever digital signal was controlling that Harpy, first by breaking into the transmission with my own, and then by using a DDOS, or denial of service attack on it. A DDOS would flood millions of garbage signals into the input of the controller and completely mess up its signal reception, cutting it off from whoever was controlling it.

"Erin," Olivia warned on the audio, "get out of there! He's spotted you!"

"Almost there," I told her. It had taken a few more seconds to try and string this together, harder now as it had been a long while since doing anything like this with the EVA.

"Erin, now!"

I looked up on the display and saw the Harpy perhaps less than an hundred yards away from me. Oh shit, time to go! It again took another swing with the double-edged sword and neatly sliced off the top four floors of the hotel I was hiding behind. I backpedaled, bringing up my Pallet Gun and extending my AT Field in front of me to match the Harpy's own field. As I ran backwards and further north I blasted a few bursts from the gun while trying to find one more thing large enough to get in the way of this beast and give me time to finish the program I was coding.

As the Harpy chased me across the desert cityscape, I concentrated for a second on the EVA. I had to finish this code. it would fix everything if I could do it, but I couldn't fight and type at the same time. Come on, mom, help me to do this, I thought.

Suddenly a thought came to my head. Either a thought or a message, but it said something like this:

"I'll defend you. Just finish what you need to do."

Without questioning it I took my hands off the actuators and focused on the keyboard. But the EVA's gun kept firing and it kept moving further towards the city. I wasn't commanding the EVA now, she was doing this completely on her own! I couldn't take time to figure out what was happening, only that I knew that it was the break I needed, and within a few more seconds I typed the last commands and hit "RETURN." The Harpy was nearly on top of us when the signal was blasted out.

As I scrambled to get my hands back on the actuators and get back control I saw the Harpy on the display. It had suddenly stopped attacking us and then as if panicked took both of its hands and held its head in pain.

The DDOS attack had broken the link between the enemy and whoever was controlling it. Now it was confused and stalled, and now I had a real chance.

"Alright, Erin, whatever you did worked!" Olivia shouted, "Now finish it off!"

I brought up the Pallet Gun and let the EVA have it, squeezing the trigger until the whole clip was empty. The multiple bursts damaged the Harpy with blood-red wounds all over it, but it was still standing and now it was furiously angry. Instead of falling down wounded it instead howled with a low, gurgling sound and then came after me at full speed.

This hadn't quite worked the way I though it would, as cutting off the control signal had instead caused the Harpy to fall back onto its own Dummy Plug for control. Now it was again the vicious, mindlessly ravenous beast that they were known to be, and it ran towards me with it's lance in its hand. I still struggled to figure out what to do next as we bounded towards the next set of hotel towers, this one looking like a circus tent with red and white candy stripes painted all over it.

With the Pallet Gun out of ammo I was running out of options, while the Harpy continued to charge me with it's lance. The weapon had transformed back from a two-edged sword into a skinny pair of twisted red needles and I knew that it intended to plunge those into us. I also knew that our AT Field would be no good in preventing that either.

"Erin," a voice cried out, "Erin! Get the lance."

"The Lance?" I asked.

"Your own Lance, you dummy!" the voice said. The voice was coming into my head but this time I knew who it was.

"Patrick!" The link between the two of us was formed again, as Patrick was now seeing what I was seeing.

"Get it now!"

The Harpy roared as he came close, cocking back its arm in an effort to launch the lance at me. With undue speed I dropped the empty Pallet Gun and grabbed my own lance that was still strapped to my EVA's back. Then with all of my mental strength I launched it towards the Harpy, screaming as I let it fly. Before the Harpy could get his own weapon off my lance sailed through the air and plunged right through his AT Field, making hexagon-shaped waves of energy as it did so. My lance struck the Harpy right in the chest, protruding out like a spike that dangled half-way in.

"I got him!" I shouted.

"Not yet, you don't," Patrick's voice came back into my mind. "Push all the way in! Do it now!"

I heard the Harpy roar in pain but he still wasn't down yet and despite being wounded all over rushed at me at full speed. Within another second he'd be on top of me, and there was only one thing that I could do. Pushing back all of my fear I ran straight towards him, and with my EVA's hands grabbed onto the lance and shoved it further into his chest as we collided.

I heard a crunching sound, and then the entire video display was covered in bright, blood red. I felt the EVA fall backwards towards the ground, and struggled to move. Something was heavy on top of me, something that kept me from going anywhere. Concentrating hard, I continued to try and move and finally managed to budge my way to one side. There were more awful sounds of crunching and pops and snaps and then I managed to finally free myself from the Harpy and stood up on the battlefield.

Just besides me was the body of the Mass Production Unit, with part of the lance protruding out of its back from where I had shoved it in. It was covered in sticky red LCL, with when combined with the milky white of the EVA's own carcass made for a disgusting sight and smell. Oddly all I could think about was a strawberry ice cream sundae, except that it didn't smell like ice cream. It smelled like death.

Catching my breath I heard Olivia's voice over the speaker. "Erin, are you alright?"

"I got him" I said, with more relief than elation.

"Good work," replied Olivia. "That was something else, kiddo."

I fell back on the throne and just looked out the display. In the distance I could see the profiles of the old derelict hotels, now some of which were more ruins of collapsed steel and concrete after the battle. Funny, I thought after winning a battle on my own I'd feel great about it, as finally I had a real and solid accomplishment as an EVA pilot, but that feeling didn't come. It felt more like an emptiness inside of me, of being more tired than I could imagine. Something seemed still elusive, there was something that still needed to be done.

Looking at the display I saw the skyline of overcast clouds and the mountain ridgeline in the distance. Facing north I could see the peaks in the distance, just a few miles away. And I knew that just a few more miles beyond that was…home.

In that moment I made a fateful decision, one that I really hoped I wouldn't regret. I pulled on the actuators and brought the EVA into motion, pointed us north, and then started running.

"Erin? Erin! Where are you going?" Olivia's voice came over the audio.

"I just have to see something," I told her, "I'll be back."

Olivia wasn't stupid. "Erin, don't go," she warned me. "It's not like you knew it before. There's nothing there anymore."

"I still have to see it," I replied. I ran my EVA north and I was already past the dusty remains of the old Vegas downtown below me.

"Erin? Erin! Don't, that's an order," Olivia continued to try and coax me away but I just kept running. I was careful to also run the shut out program to keep Oliva and the others at NERV from shutting down the EVA.

It took me just a few minutes to reach the mountains and I climbed over then with little difficulty. Behind me was Las Vegas the city, which still looked grand and spacious despite it being a ruin, but ahead of me was something else.

You could see it from what was called the Spring Mountains, looking towards the north there was a massive, even ridgeline a thousand feet tall that looked like a wall of sand. It was the crater ridgeline, the result of what had happened at Second Branch, when Dad tried to force the EVA to activate with a captive Patrick inside and the EVA reacted forcefully on her own to protect him.

"Erin," a voice came inside my head. It was again Patrick, the link between us was still bonded.

"Are you going to try to stop me too?" I asked him aloud.

"No," he said. "No, I won't do that. I think you need to see it…to see what happened."

I didn't reply to him but instead made for the crater's edge. I pushed the EVA to climb over the rim and then stand on top, and then I saw the rest of the landscape. The mountain valley that had been my home, Tonopah, Area 51, Groom Lake, NERV-2, or Second Branch, whatever it was called, had disappeared. In its place were miles of desert floor that was perfectly smooth. No mountains or hills, no features even, just flat ground, for miles ahead of me. It was a shocking thing to see, as it was nothing like I remembered at all.

Undaunted, I pushed the EVA to go over the crater's edge and then onto the gentle slopes of the rim, still pushing forward and gaining speed as we got to more even ground. The desert floor went on for miles and in those miles was absolutely nothing. It looked worse than a lunar landscape.

My EVA's display gave me my location and still kept the map coordinates of Second Branch in memory, so I continued towards what would have been the center of the base. It took a few more minutes of running to reach it and I got more nervous as I approached what had once been a city of fifty thousand. Where had they all gone? Was Patrick right in that the base was somehow teleported? Or were they just vaporized into nothingness? There was no life here anymore from what I could see and that made me feel all the worse.

After several more minutes of running we reached Ground Zero, where Unit 04 had once disappeared and then reappeared three months later, and I slowed the EVA to a walk. From the display I could see signs that someone had been here, there were some small sensor units laid out on the desert floor, and the remains of what looked like an aircraft runway set up in the flat desert floor. But there wasn't anything else or anyone else. It was home, but home wasn't here anymore.

Finally I stopped the EVA, and once I did so I kept looking around, turning us a full circle to spot any sign of anything that looked like life, or even just a leftover piece of a building or something to indicate there had once been a city here. But there was nothing that I could see. Nothing at all, and the darkness of the whole thing finally hit me. It really was over, I realized. My home was gone, and my childhood was gone with it.

I told myself I wouldn't cry and tried to stick to it. I would just be brave and stomach this just like I did everything else I had endured, from being kidnapped and lied to, to nearly being raped, to having to go into battle and kill enemies both large and small. But in the back of my mind I kept hoping that maybe all of this was just some nightmare that kept happening, and that by coming home I could at least end it and wake up returning into my own world. But it didn't happen.

I saw something from the display, a small flash of color down on the desert floor. Using the display's magnification I focused on it and determined to at least investigate. Maybe I just wanted to get out of the EVA, but I set her down to a kneeling position and then ejected the entry plug half-way, to allow me to go out the hatch.

The step ladder telescoped downwards and I rode it on the way down, setting foot on the flat surface of the desert below the EVA. Upon walking on the ground I confirmed that it really was just flat, even ground. Strange.

Where I had seen the colors appear from was just a few yards away and I walked over. I didn't want to believe it at first, which is why I got out of the EVA to see this up close, but there was after all of this devastation one actual sign of life: a small cluster of wildflowers had sprouted from a crack in the ground.

Wildflowers. My mother would grow then when I was little, and she always maintained a little garden by our old house. They had washed away in the rainstorm when she went away, but after so long here they were again. They were only a very few flowers, and they were tiny, just inches in length, but they were alive and blooming in bright purple, white, and yellow colors.

I got down on my knees and just watched the flowers, knowing that this wasn't just an accident. Mom had brought me here to this spot. She had done this for a reason, so that I could see this.

In the distance there was another giant aircraft, one that carried a giant figure underneath it. The aircraft flew low and then dropped it's cargo, and another Evangelion dropped to the ground near us, landing with a thud that felt like a small earthquake. The EVA was purple and green in color and I knew from that it was one of the units from Japan, the one called Unit 01. Even so I didn't think much of it and turned my attention back to the wildflowers.

The emotions inside of me couldn't be kept in any longer and tears came from my eyes. I wanted it back, I screamed inside my head, I wanted my old life back, with mom and dad and such a peaceful life of our own in the small house in the desert. The life I had before EVA, before anything else had come and destroyed it.

I knew I shouldn't think such things, that somehow after all of these bad things that good things also came to me. I had met my twin and remembered all of the joy and fun that came from our reunion and our new life together. I had made something of myself even despite the pain I felt inside, whether it was inside the EVA or outside of it, and that I wasn't just a little girl anymore. But I missed my mom. I missed all of those years we could have spent together, and I hadn't really come to terms with it all until now.

Bending over the little flowers, my own tears gave them water. I figured it was the least I could do, having these things survive in such a hostile landscape. I could give them life, I could prolong it. I didn't want to leave them alone, the way I had been left alone.

I heard footsteps coming close to me but I still didn't get up. I just stayed there, knelt over the little garden in the desert, until someone came right up and knelt besides me.

Looking up, I saw her. Rei had been the one to pilot Unit 01, and she had come outside to find me here. Dressed in her white-colored plugsuit, her blue hair blowing with the gentle wind, she looked at me with her bright red eyes and waited.

"I…" I stammered to say, "I…just wanted to come back here." Rei didn't say or do anything in reply, but just watched me and let me talk. "I…I…" I looked up at her and then said with sobs in my voice. "I guess life goes on, doesn't it?"

Rei just nodded her head, and then told me in a gentle, whispering voice. "And so do you."

At that moment I just threw my arms around her and hugged her tight, burying my head on her shoulder and sobbing uncontrollably, for how long I didn't know.

Finally I got some composure back and the two of us got back inside our respective Evangelion units and walked back to Las Vegas. We didn't say anything on the return trip to each other, but I felt like there was now a bond of understanding between us. At my darkest moment inside she had been there for me, and even if she has said little the meaning of her heart was clear. Out of that I've always appreciated what she did then.

Upon reaching Las Vegas I parked Unit 04 back at the airport where I had first landed, and where there were now a half-dozen of other aircraft on the ground. The area had been quickly transformed into a camp with tents and small steel pre-fab buildings, and there were soldiers and technicians all around. I again put the EVA into a kneeling position and soft-ejected the entry plug so that I could get out. On reaching the tarmac I saw that Olivia was close by in a 4x4 vehicle, and that another by now very familiar figure was standing next to her, wearing a green nylon jacket over his khaki suit.

"Patrick" I shouted as I waived to him. My brother waived back to me and I jogged over to where he was standing, throwing myself against him as soon as I could. He put his arms around me and held me tight. Looking down towards me, he caressed my hair and I looked up and smiled at him.

"So, how did it go?" he asked me.

I nodded, still with my face flush red from crying earlier. "It went alright," I told him, with sniffles still in my voice. "I just had to see it, you know."

"Then it will be alright," he told me, and I hugged him again as he kissed my forehead. After a moment I broke off and stated the obvious. "So, where's the broken leg?"

"Um," he said in a somewhat embarrassed tone, "it was just a sprain. False alarm."

"Yeah, right," Olivia commented from where she was seated in the 4x4. Pointing at Patrick, she said to him "you are a sneaky bastard."

"How do you think I survived this long?" Patrick said in a smart-ass tone.

"Well," I said to him with a chuckle, "thanks for that 'break.' I'm glad I was able to do all of this."

"So did you see Shinji out there?" Patrick asked me. I paused for a second and then realized that he didn't know who piloted Unit 01. "It wasn't him," I told him. Patrick thought for just a moment and then it dawned on him who had come instead. His eyebrows rapidly shot upwards as he looked around to where the purple-colored Unit 01 was standing close by. Blurting out "excuse me!" Patrick made a wild dash for the EVA as Olivia and I watched.

I turned back to Olivia and apologized. "I'm sorry for taking the EVA like that," I told her.

"Don't worry," she said to me with a smirk. "I'm just glad we got this all done. If anyone asks, we're just gonna say this was a precautionary action to make sure the enemy didn't have some sort of surprise at the NERV-2 site, and that's all. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Oh, and I'm really sorry you had to miss your winter dance over this."

I giggled a little, now feeling a lot better. "It's fine. I'll always remember this one for sure."

Glancing back towards where Patrick had run, I saw Rei just drop off the rope ladder to be caught in Patrick's arms as she came down. Overjoyed to see her again after so many months apart, Patrick swung her in the air in excitement. While they were too far away to hear what they said to each other I could make a pretty good guess, as I saw a smile reached her face and watched as the two of them shared several kisses in the distance.

Here is the latest installment, and our next-to-last chapter as Erin finally confronts her past. Originally this story was going to end around chapter 16 or so but decided we needed one more major battle and action before wrapping it up, and that prompted me to extend to 21 chapters. The next chapter is definitely the last one, and while this story was finished behind schedule I feel like it's all the better for it.

If you've actually been to Las Vegas you probably could guess the layout of the battle area where Erin and Unit 04 fought the Harpy, but just in case you were wondering this is the sequence of how it came down:

a) Unit 04 landed at McKernan Airport; b) walked to Mandalay Bay; c) then Luxor, and then to the corner of Tropicana Blvd and Las Vegas Blvd where there's four hotels: Excalibur (the castle), New York New York, MGM Grand (the green one with the lion) and Tropicana. d) When attacked by the Harpy, Unit 04 dove over the remains of NYNY, then walked parallel to Interstate 15 North, along a road called Frank Sinatra Drive that goes behind the hotels on The Strip. e) Unit 04 then hid behind Bellagio, and then hopped over Caesar's Palace and back across LV Blvd to the Flamingo. The spare Pallet gun was landed on the Flamingo's parking structure. f) Unit 04 then evades up the East edge of LV Blvd, going past Imperial Palace to where the Desert Inn is (notable for it's golf course behind the hotel). The Harpy attacked her at Desert Inn, and Unit 04 escaped further North up the strip, eventually ending up at Circus Circus where it stopped and killed the Harpy.

You may wonder what hotel is the Desert Inn but remember this is the Evangelion TV Series timeline so we take Las Vegas as abandoned around 2001, after Second Impact. In this timeline The Desert Inn property was never sold to Steve Wynn, who later demolished it and built the Wynn and Encore hotels in its place.

Please join us for the final chapter, hopefully in February 2018, and we will wrap this all up and provided a last word on how the story was put together.