Disclaimer: Neon Genesis Evangelion belongs to Studio Gainax and all affiliates and Hideki Anno. The only thing I own are the original characters and the situations presented herein.
Author's Notes: This chapter is going to be concluding the fight between Eva Unit-01 and the transformed Fourth Angel Shamshel. The title of the chapter clues in that Angel number five will be showing up, but there's a twist to its arrival that I hope everybody gets a kick out of! Now, unto "End of the Fourth, Arrival of The Fifth!"
Touji Suzuhara was in a surprisingly good mood. No, it would be more accurate to say that he was in a great mood. He had ducked a hay-maker aimed at Unit-01's head and a low snap kick that followed, both of which were so badly telegraphed, he saw them coming from a mile away. He had made the huge construct roll backwards and hop to a standing position, only to have the Fourth Angel snap a high kick from the her right leg at Unit-01's huge head, but he thankfully managed a block the kick with the Eva's right arm. Touji growled as he made the Eva force the leg away hard, sending the Angel into a slight spin just before he swung Unit-01's left leg as far back as it could suffer before delivering a thunderous – and rather comical and very literal – boot to the Angel's now humanoid ass. It flew through the air, bounced off the ground, hit one of the weapon buildings hard enough to snap it clean from its foundations, and finally skidded along the ground on its face before flopping to a halt, only to have the aforementioned weapons building crash-land on it.
The NERV staff – and any civilian lookie-lou's – cringed as the weapons building blew sky-high almost immediately after landing squarely on the Fourth Angel. A bright white particle beam pierced through the wreckage and flames and shot off into the afternoon sky. The Angel crawled out of the wreckage, its body a tapestry of injuries, from horrid burns to shattered bones and flesh torn and blown apart.
As Shamshel shakily tried to get to her feet, a broken leg and missing arm regenerating, she tried to shake out the overly loud musical group practising inside her skull. Unit-01 quickly jogged up to her during her moment of weakness and whipped its hand down and grabbed one of her slim ankles before whipping her off the ground and spinning the now thoroughly dizzy and hurting Angel around in circles like it was on some kind of crazed kids ride. Unit-01 came to a screeching halt and slammed the Angel into the ground as hard as it could, over and over again, the new pilot laughing like someone experiencing a psychotic episode.
"YEE-HAHAHAHAHAHA! YOU LIKE THAT, BITCH?! YOU LIKE THAT?! THAT WAS FOR IKARI! AND THIS", a powerful double handed slam into the ground, "IS FOR MY LITTLE SISTER!"
Touji ranted and roared, delivering savage double handed overhead smashes, shoulder checks, football tackles, boots to the mid-section when the Angel was down, straight forward slaps across the face, the occasional bout of comical spanking, and a wrestling suplex from the top of a weapons building. Touji's coup de grace made every single person watching the fight pale in abject terror. He hauled the Angel into a kneeling position and then proceeded to bludgeon its now ruined face...with Unit-01's groin!
No one watching the fight knew for certain if they were still observing a battle for humanity, a beyond over-the-top pay-per-view event...or the birth of a hyper-violent rapist. The Command staff had thought their new pilot had undergone some kind of intense and spontaneous psychological break, while the extra occupants of the Entry Plug had differing thoughts. Kensuke Aida was silently praising his jock friend for the remarkably imaginative use of the male anatomy as a weapon, while the Tatopoulos sisters had vividly differing ideas; Alexandra half expected the violent idiot to leap out of his chair and rape her and her sister while Ambrosia...well, she was excited, lets put it that way.
Touji honestly didn't care how people saw him after this little rampage, as long as he got to get some payback for his little sister and Ikari. He was going to make this over-grown space monster wish it had never been born!
He was going over how to finish it off in his head when he suddenly felt a painful tingling sensation right in the middle of his head. Warnings lights began flashing lurid red and the command centre staff went crazy.
"No, no, no! Not again!"
The three bridge bunnies instrumentation could now detect an Angel psychic intrusion into a pilots mind; the Fourth Angel was now trying to connect with Touji's mind. To the command staff's horror, it was more than that. This connection wasn't meant to confuse Touji, nor was it an outright attack; the Fourth Angel was trying to take control of him!
"The pilot's psychograph and a foreign pattern are beginning to overlay! His ego has begun to distort!"
"God dammit!" Misato cursed loudly as the well-progressing round 2 started to take a turn for the worse. As she began trying to think of a way to put a kibosh on the Angel's attack, Dr. Gannon came on-line, with a look of triumph on his distorted visage.
"Oh no, you don't, ye trollop! Activating psychic defensive array...NOW!" He slammed his hands on the keyboards of his workstation and streams upon streams of computer code and mathematical formula's began racing across the main viewer.
Touji's face was contorted in pain, he was snarling and growling as the Angel whipered sweet poison in his ear, trying to convince him to see things from her point of view. His race was dangerous, divided amongst themselves to such a degree, they were going to destroy themselves any way. All she wanted was to find her Father, whose voice her kin had detected within Nerv headquarters. When her kin had retrieved Him, mankind would be swiftly, painlessly, instantaneously swept away. Not one single person would realize their lives had ended, and all the souls of man would be gathered in one place, merged into a harmonious, glorious whole within her Father's being; there would be no more misunderstanding, no more misconception, no more hatred, no more fear, no more want or need.
Everyone would simply BE.
As Touji felt himself honestly thinking about what the Angel had said, he felt himself suddenly free of the pain, but also being strangely drawn forward. Not pulled out of the control chair, or the Eva being pulled toward the Angel, but his mind was pulled toward the Angel's mind. He realized something else; while he no longer felt any kind of pain, he realized that the Angel was wailing in agony.
"NNNNNNNYYYYYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH! WHAT IS GOING ON?!"
The Angel's voice, where once was deep and sultry, now has escalated into a piercing shriek. Touji hadn't really noticed because he was now inside the Angel's psyche, looking around at its vast and complex memories, and at one group of memories in particular. The memories were of either sitting, or lying down, in a deep stone pit, the rock glazed with ice and tufts of snow. Touji could see in the memory a huge crane slowly swinging out over the pit, and a wicked-looking blood red twin-forked lance suspended from the cranes lift cables. The lance was angled down.
The crane began swinging back the other way, toward the viewer of the memories, and Touji was shocked to realize that these memories did not belong to the Fourth Angel, but to something else, something so radically more powerful, there simply was no comparison. In those memories, Touji felt the presence of the Fourth, and a large group of others, all bound and obedient to what Touji dubbed the "Big Boss". The lance speed toward the Big Boss Angel, and he could just make out a shadowy figure in the cab of the crane pull on a lever. The lance was released and flew straight and true, skewering the Angel's Seed of Life, what the Nerv staff called the S2 organ. Adam awoke with rage and pain and fright, and in his rage and pain and fright and righteous indignation, has vaporized Antarctica and killed half the human race!
"Oh God", Touji mumbled to himself as Eva Unit-01 fell to one knee, "We started this war! Mankind! WE did!"
"Pilot Suzuhara, what the Hell are you talking about?!" Misato yelled at him. She really didn't like where he was going with this "We-did-it" garbage, but she wasn't about to let s new pilot begin throwing out wild theories and crazy ideas, not on her watch! Unfortunately, she wasn't about to get any support because Touji yelled right back at her.
"SHUT THE FUCK UP, LADY! I AM IN THIS THINGS HEAD! ITS DAD'S MEMORIES ARE IN HERE TOO! ALL THESE THINGS ARE CONNECTED! LIKE THEY'RE ALL ON SOME CRAZY MAGIC WI-FI, I DON'T KNOW! THESE THINGS, THESE PEOPLE SAW A HUMAN KILL THEIR DAD, FOR CHRIST SAKE! THEY HAD NO IDEA THAT HUMANS WEREN'T CONNECTED IN THE SAME WAY AS THEM...THEY THINK WE'RE ALL IN ON IT!"
"I-I'm sorry? What?!" Misato couldn't believe what he just said, and all the other staff started to rapidly whisper about the implications whether imagined or not. Touji went on.
"The Angel's...they had a single leader, their parent, and he guided the rest through this mind link, whatever ya wanna call it. He called the shots for everybody, when and where things got done, what things got done, practically every single bit of their lives was like some kind of computer program that the First Angel wrote up and hit the 'enter' key to. Without him, they're all going nuts! They don't know how to operate on their own! Their trying to find their dad so he can fix them!
"He was found under the ice of what we used to call Antarctica. Somewhere along the line, somebody hopped into a crane and used it to drive a huge lance through its chest, through something these things know as the 'fruit of life', which I think is that weird red thing in the chest. Anyway, their pop woke up pissed off and freakin' out. He blew up, but not because he wanted to; without his core he couldn't control his own power which went completely ape-shit haywire. He couldn't regulate, evaporate, whatever the hell you call it, but he lost it and couldn't get it back. What happened next...well, everybody else knows what happened next, so I'm not gonna bother sayin' it".
Commander Ikari sat back in his chair as the new pilot finished relaying what he was experiencing. Ikari understood that the jig was, as they say, up if Suzuhara could identify him in the bizarre visions he was seeing. What he had not mentioned, and Ikari guessed it would only be a matter of time before he did, was whether or not he could clearly see who had been operating the crane. Now, even if he could accurately describe the Commander in these accessed memories, it wouldn't mean immediate ejection from his position, but it would cause a great many questions to arise that would not only arouse suspicion in his staff, but if word got out, the Seele Council would be alerted to a gross breach of secrecy.
No matter how circumspect the evidence may be, no matter how deniable, any breach of secrecy in regards to what really kicked off Second Impact no matter how small would bring the wrath of the Old Men down upon not only Ikari's head, but the head of every single person who staffed NERV. There would be no distinction, no exceptions; everybody would suffer and suffer terribly. He decided to try a different tactic. He knew that getting rid of Suzuhara was no longer an option, since he was able to pilot an Evangelion without any kind of training. The answer was simple: bribery!
He already knew what he could offer the boy in turn for his future silence, but that offer was only valid if he lived through this confrontation. What everybody else had forgotten was that the Angel was still alive and now it was back on its feet, but what drew the Commander's attention was the rapt focus it was showing to Unit-01 along with a look of utter dumbfounded shock. It facial expression was surprisingly readable, and what the Commander was most shocked by was how open an expression it was.
It's expression could only be described as someone who had just experienced a life-changing epiphany and had no idea what to do with it.
Shamshel saw into her opponents mind and reeled. Her kin had believed that humanity as a whole had plotted against Father, and now they saw, each and every one of them, that in fact most of humanity were in the dark about the integral truths about what happened almost two decades ago. Through her adversary's mind she saw images of life, love of family, loss of a beloved parent, and many other things she had difficulty putting into context. She quickly realized though that perhaps she should try using a human context, but how did one change their point of view? The answer was surprisingly simple, but the execution of getting the answers was not going to be easy, and possibly very unpleasant.
She was just about to begin when a powerful presence appeared in her minds eye and slammed her to her knees. She had felt this power only once before, and that was long before this planet had animal life! Zereul, greatest of Father's children, her most powerful Brother, had awoken early and was addressing her. It was not Zereul himself that she feared, for how could one fear their own kin? She feared his rebuke, which she assuredly expected.
What she received was...different.
"ARE YOU WELL, SISTER?"
"I-I am w-well, Brother. What wakens you now?"
"THIS PLAN OF YOURS. ARE YOU CERTAIN?"
Shamshel was greatly surprised by Zereul's response, but also was she emboldened by it. If he did not reject it, then she could move forward, and do something unprecedented for her kind: create something new. Zereul's presence relaxed in her mind, but still was there great tension. He would allow Shamshel to proceed with her plan, as ludicrous as it seemed, but he was absolutely not comfortable with it. Shamshel felt a small release of tension in Zereul's powerful psyche, a metaphysical shrug of the shoulders and a small, calming sigh.
"I am certain, Brother Zereul. I am certain". Shamshel was perfectly confident that her plan would work. In structure, Her plan was laughably simple; the execution was what was going to be the death of her. Hopefully, not in the literal sense. She straightened her posture and began walking toward the mighty Evangelion Unit-01. She has a pensive look on her face and she had a right to be pensive. She was about to do something either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid!
She held her hands out, raised as though in surrender and slowly stepped toward the cybernetic behemoth. She knew that appearances could be deceiving, and her appearance right now probably had the human controlling the construct in front of her in a particularly paranoid state. He probably thought she was going to attack; while she realized that an assault was no longer a viable option, she had to at least fake it. She put out a psychic call to her children to break off their attacks and form up on her and strike her opponent. She also gave her children another set of instructions; tasks to perform on their way to her, and those minor tasks were, in a way, more important than her children's soon-to-be-attempted rescue.
As Touji kept trying to figure out what the Angel was trying to pull now, Unit-01 was hit from several directions at once by high-speed particle beams. He snarled as he felt the pain of the intense beams and looked around and say the multitude of little Angels bouncing around firing randomly at him. To say he was upset would be a gross understatement: pissed off like a rabid dog would be more appropriate.
"Alright. That is so fucking it! I have had it with all this alien weirdness and shenanigans! You want to pull some kind of lame-ass back-stab you ginormous bitch?! Fine! Try this!" Touji had skimmed the weapons array list and found what he wanted. He knew that the AT-Breakers weren't loaded, but what Shinji's bosses had neglected to tell him was that there were reload stations placed around Tokyo-3. Touji had found one and had hooked up the equipment, and was now loading a full load of the fantastic ordnance into Unit-01's launchers!
Shamshel hadn't notice him doing it because at the time her face had been forcefully introduced to the Evangelion's...anatomy and smashed into the ground like a hammer. She was just about to command her offspring to double their assault when Unit-01 raised its arms and opened the panels covering the launchers. Shamshel would have smirked and made a comment about he boys intelligence, that the weapons had no ammunition, but those same launchers roared with fire as a barrage of AT-Breakers missiles fired from them! Shamshel squawked in surprised and leaped backwards firing particle beams at the missiles, her children doing the same. They intercepted all the missiles; all but one.
It flew over Shamshel's shoulder, startling her to end, and turned around and streaked back toward her before she even realized what had happened. She caught sight of the missile in the last instant, throwing up her AT-Field, completely forgetting these weapons destructive power was actually augmented by the AT-Field itself. It missile hit her field near the ground, smashing through it like a freight train would a pane of fine crystal, entirely obliterating her bottom half and sending what was left of her flying through the air back toward unit-01 which had reared back its huge left fist.
Shamshel's eyes widened as a very long blade shot out from above the hand, gleaming like a mirror. Just before she slammed into the mighty bio-mech, its blade equipped arm shot out like a rocket perfectly skewering her core like it was a piece of kabob meat, exploding out her back. Just before her core darkened and her head slumped forward in death, Shamshel had one last thought about her day.
"Well...that last part sucked!"
Evangelion Unit-01 lowered its arm and allowed the now dead Angel to slide off its arm blade and hit the group with a monstrous wet smack. It whipped its arm out to fling off the dark purple blood and retracted the weapon.
Inside the Entry plug, one Touji Suzuhara crossed his arms and smirked with obvious smugness, "Oh yes ladies!", he rumbled, "I'm just that damn good!"
"Got to say, chief, you did good!"
"Thanks Shinji, I...Shinji?!"
Indeed it had been Shinji, he was smiling and even patted Touji on the back like a proud Father congratulating his son. "Now", he began, "What do you say to picking up whats left of the bitch for NERV's egg-heads to study and get the hell back to base for some well deserved party time?"
Touji smiled a thousand-watt smile and replied, "Sir, Yessir!" He directed Unit-01 to bend down and pick up the Angels remains and carried under its arm like a duffel bag. As Unit-01 began to walk back toward Nerv headquarters, Ambrosia spoke up and asked, "Excuse me, but what about all the little ones?" That question put everybody on the defensive and Touji directed the Eva to look all around. When he caught sight of one of Shamshel's children, he zoomed in and was surprised. The thing looked like it was either choking or having an epileptic seizure. As he continued to watch, it seemed to rapidly swell then burst like a ripe fruit being smashed with a hammer.
"Well, that was just completely disgusting!" Touji looked for others, and each one he found died in the same horrid way. Touji had actually seen something like this before on an old american sci-fi show Kensuke had convinced him to watch. When the two main guys had killed this "mother" parasite creature, all of her babies died too, freeing everybody they had taken over.
He was just glad NERV wouldn't have to deal with the kid Angels. He felt kind of bad for them, though. Even though they were alien monsters, they had just been born and never really got a chance to be with their mom...kind of like him. As Touji put this sad train of thought to one side and directed the Eva to head back toward the base, He failed to notice several people walking out of an alley in a small group. They walked as though they were dazed or in a trance. Their shirts were also torn. As the Evangelion made its way back to base, the group turned as one and glared at the huge bio-mech with an almost palpable sense of malice directed toward it. Their fury-twisted faces were illuminated by a reddish glow that came from their chests, which quickly subsided.
They said as one, "you will pay", before each went their own way, bloody-red eyes changing back to whatever colour they were before today.
Dr. Akagi was elated with having such a near-pristine sample of Angel physiology to study. She had been wondering where to start when her young protege had noticed something that when she gave voice to it, unnerved the now half-angel woman quite a bit.
"Sempai!", Maya Ibuki had shrieked, "The Angel looks just like you!"
The canned coffee that Ritsuko had been sipping was spat up with such force, it now decorated the bulk-head of the opposite wall. As She sputtered and coughed, Ritsuko Akagi looked more closely at the Angel's face and indeed it did look a lot like her, the obvious physical differences aside. Maya handed her a handkerchief to wipe her mouth of the coffee, and Ritsuko was thinking that maybe bringing food into the examination bay was something that should be prohibited; for hygiene concerns of course, if nothing else.
She began to walk toward the exit and find a rest room where she could properly clean up, but the sound of sizzling flesh and a sickly rotten odour rose to halt her. The smell was so singularly foul, she staggered and threw up. She quickly forced herself to stop throwing up and fought her gag reflex was a passion. She looked to her giant magenta doppelganger and saw that the tissues were beginning to dissolve, some sections even spontaneously combusting. Workers and other personnel jumped and even ran away from the rapidly dissolving Angel corpse due to the huge amount of material that was rapidly spreading throughout the bay. No one wanted to find out if the now liquified Angel remains were corrosive or not. One young worker found out the hard way; she tripped in her own feet and fell face first on the floor when a surge of the sickening mess swamped over her feet and lower legs, which began to rapidly eat away her clothing and quickly started on her flesh.
The young womans terrified screams became screams of agony as her feet and legs began to dissolve into horrid red liquid.
"Quickly!" Dr. Akagi yelled at the other workers, "Get her out of their and throw a strong base on her legs to counteract the acid!" The slight hesitance from the workers drove her to scream "NOW GODDAMMIT! BEFORE SHE LOSES HER LEGS!" The other workers scrambled to get the young woman out of the burning muck and follow the doctors orders. The young woman was doused with a chemical that while being non-toxic to humans could lower pH levels to harmless levels instantly.
The damage had already been done.
Her shoes and socks were simply gone, and her feet had been mostly eaten to the bones, sizzling scraps of meat holding the bones together. An emergency medical team rushed in with a gurney and quickly carted the young woman away. Thankfully she had passed out from the pain. As the emergency medical team spirited the young woman to the NERV's medical facility, Dr. Akgai was alternately venting spleen at the workers for their slow action and making sure no one else wound up like the unfortunate woman. As she strode down the catwalk to the nearest elevator to deliver her report to the Commander, she couldn't shake from her mind that something wasn't right about what just happened. She looked back at the melting remains of the Fourth Angel and wondered why the remains just suddenly decided to break down into acidic goo.
As the numerous personnel moved to neutralize to acidity of the quickly decaying Angel corpse, they failed to notice a large lump of tissue slowly melting into the floor and disappear. It fell several meters before freezing in mid-air as if someone had pressed the pause the button on it. An Angel core, about the size of the human heart emerged from it and began to pulse with light. The formless mass of tissue suddenly took on a very distinct form. In seconds the mass had formed into a distinctly feminine humanoid torso. The legs grew faster than the arms and the headless body lightly touched down on the floor on its new feet. It flexed its new toes and began walking as though it had had its new legs all along and knew where it was going. When it arms finished growing, its laced the fingers of its new hands and popped them.
The head was quick to grow almost as fast as the legs; new eyes opened for the first time and a new mouth took its first breath and spat out a gummy mass of used stem-cells. Razor-sharp teeth and tongue grew in an instant. Distinct facial features formed swiftly, leaving a stunningly beautiful feminine face, her head crowned with a wide sweeping bony plate and ruby red hair growing from down to her magenta ankles. The core was now situated just below and between her breasts.
As She continued walking, the reborn Shamshel snickered under her breath. The Lilum were so easy to fool, it was priceless! But now was not the time for gloating. She broke into a hurried jog as she surveyed her new surroundings and recognized them as a maintenance corridor. She began examining signage on the wall to make sure she was heading in the right direction. She first of all needed to find a computer terminal. Her brother Sachiel had been very thorough in his explanation of Lilum technology; she had to giggle though. He was still having trouble understanding the seemingly impossible task of programming the device Lilum call a "VCR". She'd have to ask him about what a VCR was, but that could wait.
She had a plan in mind and now She had completed the hard part. Well, to be honest, She thought the whole 'faking-her-death' thing was the hard part. Since this was her very first time coming up with plans and strategies, she had no true idea of what the 'hard part' really was. She had formed a smaller secondary core from which her soul would reside after her old body was destroyed. It had been a surprisingly feat to accomplish, and She wondered why the rest of her kin had never thought of the idea before.
It didn't matter really.
The knowledge and ability to do so were now a part of the over-mind, so now all her kin possessed this knowledge and ability. If their prime core was destroyed, they could potentially grow another; as long as some preparation was made prior to the original core being destroyed in the first place. She had felt the stirrings of not only Ramiel, but of Gaghiel as well. Where Ramiel boasted that such knowledge, while potentially useful, would not be needed when he fully awoke, Gaghiel on the other hand...she had no idea what he had planned, but he was already putting the knowledge to use on his chosen form, in fact making several cores in addition to his primary. He was, to use a Lilim phrase, "running with it".
She was anxious to see her brothers again, but Shamshel had to focus on the task at hand. She had seen many things within the mind of her opponent when she tried to attack his mind. She had learned many things as well. Whoever the murderer of Father was, they would soon pay for their impudence, but now instead of punishing an entire race for the sins of a few, the Angels could weed out the guilty party and exact a more precise vengeance. What they lacked to do so was information; who was the immediate assailant, was he the only one involved, and if not, who else was involved and who are they?
The Lilim summed it up nicely: Who, What, When, Why, and How. These are the things they needed to know but did not, so Shamshel had taken it upon herself to find those answers. With those answers she oped to create something her kin never would have considered had the Great Change not occurred: Another way.
As she continued to walk down the maintenance corridor she began to change again. Her skin color changed into a more pale pinkish hue that Lilim were known to possess. Her eye color remained unchanged but now only the iris' were red, not the entire eye. Her hair changed from a brilliant magenta to a pale gold, arching bangs over her forehead and the over-all length shortening to about neck length. The bone crest atop her head shrank and retreated beneath the skin of the crown of her head. She passed a reflective surface and stopped in her tracks as she took in her new appearance. She chuckled deeply as examined herself. She knew that not even the woman she was meant to replace would be able to tell them apart.
Dr. Ritsuko Akagi was in for quite the surprise when she got back to her office later that afternoon.
Ramiel had been waiting to talk to her Sister for some time, and now was an opportune moment. Ramiel, Angel of Thunder, reached out with her powerful mind and found her Sister, Shamshel walking through one of the Lilim Fortress' maintenance tunnels. Shamshel had just arrived at the exit hatch to the maintenance tunnel and was mentally scanning the main corridors of the NERV complex for anyone who would see her. Shamshel felt her sister's presence within her and while glad to feel it, she asked her sister to wait until she had made her way to her intended destination.
Ramiel was surprised, and somewhat disheartened, that her sister would not wish to speak with her, but respected Shamshel's request until the former could accomplish her immediate task of making her way through the NERV facility without raising suspicion or alarm. Shamshel used her considerable mental abilities to make the few passerby's think that all was well and that Ritsuko Akagi was fully clothed. Shamshel still did not understand the requirement of garment, but if She was to infiltrate and understand Lilim kind, then she had no choice to but to follow these strange social guidelines. Sachiel had commented that it was actually quite comfortable when one became accustomed to it.
It took her no more than fifteen minutes of walking the corridors and some elevator travel before Shamshel reached Dr. Akagi's office. She knew the passkey to open the electronic lock thanks to memories she gleaned from the woman whose DNA she had pilfered. Akagi's DNA allowed for a connection to be established between the two females across the psychic plane. While Akagi would one day discover this connection for what it was, she would only have a strange sense of displacement, like she was occupying two different points in space simultaneously, for the immediate future.
Shamshel slipped inside Akagi's office and carefully locked the door again. She exhaled a breath she hadn't known she was holding and slowly began to examine the office around her. The office was fastidiously tidy, not so much as a paper clip out of place. Being connected to the woman gave Shamshel an understanding of office supplies, computers, as so on. What she could not understand was the woman's odd fascination with felines. Yes, they were an attractive animal, but what purpose could be served by owning numerous 'knick-knack's' relating to the animals? Sachiel would now have describe Akagi as a "crazy cat lady", but from what Shamshel had learned, the term usually referred to elderly women who kept whole herds of the furry animals and were not quite right in the head. She had asked Sachiel about how the term applied, but he answered her with "I'd like to pet Akagi's kitty".
When Sachiel clarified what He had meant by that, Shamshel soon wished she had never asked the question in the first place. She shook her head in disgust and simply tried to put the crude comment out of her mind. She was just about to sit down at Akagi's desk when the door opened again. The real Doctor Ritsuko Akagi had just walked in, carrying a brief case in one hand, a cup of coffee in another, and her keys held tightly in her clenched teeth. She had pushed open the door with her foot and closed it the same way. She didn't even know someone else was in the room with her, she was so preoccupied. She had reports on Evangelion Unit-01's incredible transformation to complete and review, she had test results from the Fourth Angel's autopsy to analyze, as well as figure out how to save a young woman's legs from the result of the dunking in the acidic residue the Fourth Angel's corpse dissolved into.
She was just about to set down her coffee and brief case when a voice caught her attention. What grabbed her attention the most was just how familiar it was. She looked over and saw a woman who looked exactly like her sitting at her desk, as naked as the day she was born. The woman said, "Can I be of assistance to you, Sister?" She gracefully stood up and almost seemed to glide from around the desk. The keys slipped from Ritsuko's teeth, but the woman swiftly caught them and gently put them into Ritsuko's blouse pocket. "We must be careful, Sister! We shouldn't want to lose these, now, should we?" The woman mock-admonished.
Ritsuko was just about to open her mouth to either call for help or demand answers from the woman when the intruder suddenly seemed to liquify and proceeded to shoot right into Ritsuko Akagi's mouth and down her throat. As Ritsuko tried to scream, but could only make muffled gurgling noises, she realized she was a dead woman. As her vision began to darken, one last innocuous thought popped into her mind:
"She sounded just like me!"
Ramiel had detected her Sister's success, and was in quite the jubilant mood. Yet she was also melancholy. Her Sister had succeeded with the most integral part of her plan, but now...what did that mean? He Sister was now transformed into something new, something that while still her beloved sister was now something...other.
Ramiel had indeed lost her treasured Sister, in one way, but yet her Sister still remained as she was, yet now truly and irrevocably changed. It was a most discomforting quandary that Ramiel distinctly did not enjoy the taste of. But, as the Lilim say, C'est La Vie: that's life. She began to understand that in real life, there is trial and misstep, frustration and misfortune, injury and aggravation. She had learned something truly spectacular, or so she thought. The bones of her lesson was this: as unfortunate as it sounded, the bad and the good went hand in hand; without the bad, the good would become less substantial, less fulfilling, eventually meaning nothing.
The bad reinforced the good and vice versa.
Two sides of the coin of life.
"How poetic, Sister. I think I like this 'poetry' the Lilim have. Such enjoyably fascinating concepts!"
Ramiel froze as her Brother, Zereul, made his presence known. She had been in the process of taking physical form, but for the 'where' and the 'what', there were distinct changes to the preordained schedule. She was originally to take the form of an octahedron. A geometric shape with eight sides. Now her form was...different to say the least.
Imaginative was most certainly another word for it, if not the most polite.
Her new form was like that of a huge insect; it vaguely reminded Zereul of Shamshel's chosen form. But with eight very long – and heavily armoured – walking legs and a pair of pincer arms, but the pincers themselves had more than one digit on the interior that made the pincers look like they had thumbs. The larger grasping digit was segmented and could curl completely in. The tail section extended into a very long and spike covered appendage that ended in three parallel blades like a trident. Ramiel's face though...very unusual.
It was basically a very stout saurian shaped cranium with heavy armouring atop the head which stretched down to cover the sides of the head like a Lilim helmet with tusks growing from what passed for her cheek bones. What was odd about Ramiel's head structure was that instead of a lower jaw, there were four sinisterly spiked mandibles and a set of tentacle-like tongue in her hideous mouth. Now what was really bizarre was that this same face was duplicated on Ramiel's shoulders, the middle of the her back, with just the top of the head emerging, and a rounded, teeth lined circular maw emerging from each of her knees, beady red eyes blinking from between the long curved fangs of the mouths.
There was something eminently angry about his form and Zereul didn't like it one bit. Not one bit at all.
The two were on the moon, Ramiel's physical form now complete, but Mighty Zereul was a shifting, undulating nebulous cloud of what looked like volatile gases and twinkling lights, with two huge red eyes emerging where his head might form. Right now they were narrowed in concern for his Sister. Ramiel hissed in anger, but not at Zereul, she wasn't suicidal. She hissed at the blue, scarred world below, so far away, but not really.
"I am Ramiel! I am the Thunder of God! You think you know thunders roar, little apes? No. You. Do. Not" She bit off each word as she enunciated it. Crackling red lighting suddenly lanced and slashed across her mirror-like carapace and focused in her pincers, in her mouth, and swirled around her tail blades. It formed huge swirling, rolling balls of Hellish red particle fire that seemed to throb and pulse like rapidly beating heart. Even Great Zereul was taken back a portion.
And not all for a good reason.
Ramiel thought a quote from a Lilim scripture would be appropriate: "Behold! I looked and saw the Devil cast out of Heaven! And He fell...", She paused for a moment before exploding with power and rage, "LIKE LI~~~~~~GHTN~~~~~~~ING!"
The four energy blasts shot toward the Earth like shooting stars gone mad.
Author's Notes: Well everybody! I finally have this done after much procrastination and writer's block! I hope you have enjoyed this chapter as much as I have writing it for you. Until next time when "God's Go Ape-Shit! Or...How I Learned To Channel Bad Drug Trips!" Later!