Asuka was lost in thought and smiling. Everyone else was carefully keeping their distance. Except Shinji who, besides having the desk behind her and little chance of escape, actually had an idea why she was smiling. He was even partially right.
She was paying no attention to today's lecture on Second Impact history that was supposed to be a statistics lesson. The former was provably wrong for anyone who's ventured outside Japan and the latter she could teach in her sleep. Which she might have to if there was a test on what they were supposed to be learning. Statistics at this level was vastly simpler than Kanji so she'd definitely get the better deal out of studying with Shinji.
That thinking anything about baka-Shinji was an improvement on the droning teacher wasn't saying much, but planning out a training program was actually a challenge. Even if she still wasn't quite sure how she'd gotten into this, and even less sure how she felt about it, there was no way she was backing down now.
Officially it had to be a training program, one that could at least pass the low bar of Misato's inspection. A communications training program that contained one person she could barely talk to and one who spoke in riddles half the time.
Unofficially it was getting the other two people involved to have a date that wasn't a total disaster and would allow Rei to ask Shinji for a kiss without hopefully invoking Asuka's one and only disastrous kiss or Shinji's mother. Neither of which she was going to think about right now, or perhaps ever again. And she had to do this while still unsure of what her own feelings were about the whole mess or the people involved.
'Oh no' would have been the polite Japanese translation of what Asuka thought at this point, what she actually thought involved a great deal many more German swearwords. None of which diminished her smile.
The training part she had some thoughts for already.
Obviously she was going to have to take baka-Shinji shopping, his wardrobe was barely more adequate than Rei's had been before she got involved. Certainly if she was going to be seen somewhere other than school with him he'd have to look better. Perhaps not too much better, she didn't want anyone thinking it was an actual date, at least with her. A range of something other than white shirts and black pants was probably a good idea anyway.
The hardest part was going to be practising with them. Even under the guise of training, what she was actually going to have to do was have a dry-run with each of them. Obviously not a real date, she wasn't dating anyone, certainly not baka-Shinji, but if it was going to be adequate training she'd have to plan as if at least part of it actually was one. Which meant she'd have to work out somehow to make baka-Shinji talk to her and how to get Rei to answer in sentences that weren't single words or entire verbal essays.
She couldn't let them screw this up. If they got hurt, she wouldn't be able to sleep at night. That wasn't metaphorical. If nothing else she'd learned exactly what she needed for a good night's sleep.
Which she'd finally had.
As Hikari has messed up her first date, maybe she could help sort out the one she needed to arrange in compensation.