Creation began on 08-16-23
Creation ended on 12-05-23
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Repercussions of the Omni-Omni Fruit: Reflections
A/N: Trying to recruit a crew has to start with trying to recruit one person in any way within reasonability and morality.
As Shinji and Maya walked around the streets of the city on Yebisu Island, the latter woman noticed how the former boy seemed to be walking down memory lane on account of how the skyscrapers were all reminiscent of this Tokyo-3 place he had once lived in. They passed a building that had been a detailed reminder of how he used to live with an alternate version of this woman they were looking for.
"What's the name of the fruit she ingested by accident?" Shinji asks her; the woman's file only stated that she ate a Devil Fruit, but no identification on the type or name of said fruit, something that Maya probably knew a little on.
"Something called the Pen-Pen Fruit," she answers. "Supposedly, it's either a Zoan-type Devil Fruit or a Paramecia-type Devil Fruit."
Because of the Omni-Omni Fruit, Shinji had come to know about the three types of Devil Fruit that existed: Zoan, Logia and Paramecia. Each fruit possessed unique abilities that were bestowed upon the people that ate them, but these abilities varied from one person to the next. The common type was the considerable Paramecia-type Devil Fruit, as it bestowed a number of people a variety of abilities that were considered superhuman or supernatural in nature, with Zoan and Logia being less common. From ingesting even just one of these different classes of Devil Fruit, one could obtain abilities that were beyond regular people, but they all came at the cost of being unable to move in salty water, such as the ocean. And as far as science has been able to determine, any one person that consumes a Devil Fruit is incapable of consuming another Devil Fruit for any reason, whether it was for scientific purposes or simple desires for more power; this and the debunked myth that actual devils inhabit the fruit and the people that ingest them. This prohibited any Devil Fruit Users from trying to ingest more than one in their lives.
While the Zoan-type could enable one to become either an animal of some kind or a hybrid between human and animal, the Paramecia-type would just give abilities that were not fully explored and unknown to most, if not all, meaning that, even if they should encounter Misato Katsuragi, they wouldn't know what her abilities were unless she used them.
"Are you sure you still want to find her?" Maya asks Shinji.
"Yes," he answers, looking at a clothing shop that displayed a mannequin dressed in an outfit that actually resembled the one he saw the Misato from his original universe in the day they met. "It's crazy, I know, but still…I want to meet her, to talk to her. She doesn't know me…but I want to know her."
Shinji then raises his left arm up to pull up a wrist sleeve that covered a digital clock-like timer he made to foreshadow his fate (A/N: Think of the digital clocks used in In Time): His ten-year death sentence as a result of the Omni-Omni Fruit. Why he put it there, it was just a subtle reminder that he was on a clock, all day, every day. Covering it up again, he hoped that he could recruit these people he was looking for in a short amount of time, like a year or less. Not thinking about it didn't make it any less real to him.
"It sucks, I know," he heard Maya say to him. "You can do whatever you want…but it comes at a price you don't want to pay."
"Why research a fruit that carries a death sentence?" He asks.
"We were hoping to create an artificial version that would give a future holder all the positives of the Omni-Omni Fruit without the negatives. Of course, now that goal is on hold, but we're hoping you find the Demi-Demi Medallion."
"Whatever happened to the beliefs of there being no such thing as a painless lesson or no success without sacrifice?"
"We operate under the belief that only one life should be lost in the pursuit of success. That one life was your predecessor. None of us can afford to see another victim of the Omni-Omni Fruit. It's not a pretty picture, dying when your time is up."
Shinji nods his head in understanding and they continue on down the street.
-x-
NERV was officially in a situation where they needed to adjust or would have trouble against the next Angel. Their list of potential pilot candidates within Tokyo-3 was down to zero; not a single individual was willing to join the agency. All they had were the First and Second Children and Units-00 and 02, with Unit-01 being rebuilt at a steady pace. Not even Kensuke Aida, the military otaku, felt his usual compulsion to want to pilot an Eva like before after he found out that Shinji was gone; it was assumed that reality finally caught up with him and he realized that what Shinji and the others did was truly dangerous and how any mistake made could mean life or death…and it resulted in death for his friend.
"So, what now?" Kaji asks Misato as they walk down the hallway of the base.
"What now?" Misato responds, not really wanting to answer him. "There's nothing to do. All we have is who we have the next time an Angel shows up."
"It was a risk we all knew could happen, Katsuragi."
"Yeah, and he paid for it with his life!" Misato yells at him, then sighs as she stands against a wall behind her. "We should've found another way to handle that Angel. The Eva didn't matter like he did. What's so special about Unit-01 that his life was considered a secondary concern?"
"I've been asking myself that question ever since I met him on the ship."
The loss of Shinji was really starting to sink in for some of them. It didn't seem to really affect Gendo that his son was gone, but everyone else was wondering what was going to happen as more time passed and they let the reality sink in. There was no way that any of them could pretend that this wasn't happening when the fact that someone wasn't there any longer was not going to show up and pretend that they were gone, like it was some prank or a game they were playing. There was a difference between a harmless joke…and a cruel act of senseless violence.
"If that was the last Angel, I'd likely resign and walk away," Misato tells Kaji.
"Honestly, I wish that Angel was the last one," he responds.
-x-
While it seemed like the city on Yebisu was peaceful, Shinji didn't feel any ease being in its park setting. Its uncanny resemblance to Tokyo-3 and his own memories of how any moment could turn the city into a battlefield created a mental conflict within his perception. Even as he and Maya sat on a bench overlooking the lake, the two were wondering where else to look for the Katsuragi woman they were looking for; they had exhausted the list of places that she used to frequent, but half of those places were either closed down for renovations or had been abandoned due to foreclosures or damages caused by vandalism.
"What else is there to go on about her?" Shinji asks Maya, his hands under his head as he looked out at the lake.
"Nothing," she answers him. "After she ate the Pen-Pen Fruit, she was estranged from her family. Her parents disowned her for eating the fruit and her boyfriend of seven years was forced to cut off ties with her."
"That's awful. So, she has nobody?"
"There was a sister, Miyuki, but she was killed shortly after Misato ate the Devil Fruit."
"That's really awful."
"Yes, it is."
But Shinji was hoping that once they found Misato and tried to persuade her to join his in-progress pirate crew, she wouldn't have to hide from people, anymore. She could be part of something bigger than herself and do something exciting. That and the fact that part of him was hoping to appeal to her would-be sense of greed, which was just wrong because he was after a medallion that would eliminate his negative predicament. But still, appealing to people's sense of greed was just wrong of him; trying to recruit people that were counterparts to people he had either seen or spoken to before he ended up here.
The Pen-Pen Fruit, he thought as he got up and walked over to the barrier that separated the people from the lake. I hear that name and I'm thinking about a penguin that was adapted to a warm climate.
Looking at the water, he imagined seeing the penguin swimming around in the lake.
"Having second thoughts on looking for her?" Maya asks him.
"No," he responds, "just reevaluating why I'm looking for her. I'm hoping that honesty will be the better way to go about trying to convince her to join up."
"Yeah. Honesty will go a long way."
"Still, I don't care about the treasure. I just want the medallion that may be a part of it. I can worry about lacking wealth after I have stability. A decade of life and not a day more is not a decade worth living. What can one do with ten years, knowing that they were going to die?"
"Nothing much if you don't have an open mind…and nothing spectacular if you don't have a creative vision."
"Yeah."
Suddenly, Shinji noticed a black and white bird swimming around in the lake. For real, not just a figment of his imagination, and it looked exactly like the type of bird he had seen many times since coming to Tokyo-3. He tapped Maya's left shoulder and pointed to the bird in the water.
"Is that real?" He asks her. "Is that really there? Am I not seeing things?"
"Oh, it's real," she answers him, "and it's unusual."
"Why?"
"Because it shouldn't be here. A penguin of any variety in a warm environment is a hazard for the creature. They can't survive for long."
Shinji then raised his left up…and it caused the water around the penguin to bubble and rise up to form a sphere with the penguin inside it, unable to get out. He brought the sphere to where they stood and condensed it to no bigger than the actual animal within it. The penguin was a dead ringer to Pen-Pen, and it made Shinji crack a smile at the bird.
"Hello," he greeted it.
Flash! He found himself standing in the middle of a street in the city, looking down a manhole, seeing a woman identical to Misato climbing out, dressed in a halter and short-shorts, revealing that her back had a large scar in the form of claw marks.
"He took my familiar," he hears her say, sounding desperate. "I need my familiar! I can't live without him!"
Flash! He was back in front of the sphere of water holding the penguin, and he gasps.
"What's wrong?" Maya asks him.
"I think I know where she is," he explains. "This penguin…is connected to her."
"How?"
"It's gotta be the Pen-Pen Fruit. It must be a Paramecia-type; instead of being able to turn into an animal or control animals…"
"It gives her the ability to summon a creature in the shape of an animal and use it as an extension of herself?"
"Maybe."
-x-
Pop! A manhole covering in the streets of the city flipped over onto the ground…and a young woman with purple hair climbed out of the sewer.
"He took my familiar!" She says as she stands up. "I need my familiar! I can't live without him!"
People saw her, but she wasn't concerned about being seen or spoken about. She saw the young man that caught her familiar…and she was upset about it; she was cursed because of that damned fruit she was condemned for eating, and that creature that would follow her for the rest of her life was her only window to the world she could no longer be a part. If anything happened to it, she would make him pay dearly for it.
-x-
Each Devil Fruit had a name, but because they lacked details on the variety of abilities that they granted whoever ate them, all Shinji had to go on with each of the people he was looking for were the names of the fruit they ate that alienated them from the rest of society.
Misato Katsuragi ate the Pen-Pen Fruit.
Toji Suzuhara had consumed the Göremu-Göremu Fruit.
Hikari Horaki took the Kurīn-Kurīn Fruit.
Kensuke Aida obtained the Kamera-Kamera Fruit.
Asuka Langley Soryu acquired the Wut-Wut Fruit.
Rei Ayanami received the Byōki-Byōki Fruit.
Based solely on what he could suspect, Shinji believed that the fruit Misato ate and was shunned because of gave her the ability to summon a penguin and she could see and hear through it, further confirming that it was an extension of herself. And if this was the case, this also meant that she could probably track any that took the bird and was likely on the move to find him. He removed the gallons of water to free the bird's head, and it squawked angrily at him.
"I just want to know one thing, please," he spoke to it. "Can you understand me?"
The penguin stopped squawking and looked at him the way a creature capable of intelligence would…and nodded that it could understand him, which surprised Maya.
"Are you Katsuragi, Misato?" He asked, and the penguin nodded that it wasn't. "Are you connected to Katsuragi, Misato?"
The penguin nodded that it was.
"Is she coming for you right now?"
Again, the penguin nodded in the positive.
"I just want to talk to her. After which, I'll let you go."
The penguin tilted its head to the right.
"I'm not a cop or a criminal mastermind here. I'm just a guy that has no idea what he's doing trying to chase after reflections of other people."
-x-
Misato stopped in the middle of the street after hearing through her familiar what this man had said. He was looking for reflections of other people? That made no sense at all. Why would he look for people based off their reflections?
"I'll explain everything when I see her," she hears him say to her familiar. "I can only hope that she'll hear me out. If she knows where I am right now through her connection to you, then let her know that I will not harm either of you."
Who are you? She wondered as she resumed her run to the park by the lake. What do you want?
-x-
It was a series of downfalls for NERV. Not that Gendo really cared; nothing happened the way it was supposed to with the Twelfth Angel. The Eva was supposed to break free from the Angel, revealing its power again, but it didn't. The N² bombs were deployed and the Angel was defeated, but at the cost of the Third Child, and Unit-01 wasn't likely to respond to the First Child once fully repaired, meaning its core would have to be rewritten to accommodate a new pilot. As much as it disgusted him, he needed the boy alive to pilot the Eva; no matter how much it destroyed his son's mind and heart, he needed him alive just enough to achieve his goals.
Once the Angels were defeated, he wouldn't have cared what became of the Third Child. But fate intervened and caused a downward spiral by having the boy killed ahead of schedule. He would need to find a solution if Unit-01 didn't respond to the First Child or the Dummy System. A solution that worked in his favor.
Useless brat, he thought as he sat in his office. He dies and throws everything off. Or just as worse, he ends up in another dimension, out of our reach.
He couldn't discredit Dr. Akagi's theory that the Twelfth Angel possessed a connection to a different dimension due to possessing a Dirac Sea inside its AT-Field where Unit-01 was held up until it was forcibly salvaged. However, as they were not in the business of studying alternate universes, any attempt to locate and reacquire the Third Child would be for naught. And NERV was already on a tight schedule to see to it that all the Angels were defeated. Until an alternative was found, they would have to make do with just two pilots.
-x-
Seeing her step into the park where he waited for her…was like seeing a ghost. It was a surprise for Shinji to feel some ease at seeing Misato, but had to remind himself that she wasn't the one he knew. And he never expected to see her armed with a pocketknife before, suspecting that she had it for her own protection against him or anyone that came after her. He slowly approached her with the semicircle of water that held her penguin familiar, but he stopped three feet in front of her so as to not invade her personal space.
"Hello," he greeted her. "It is nice to meet you face-to-face."
Keeping her knife at her right side, Misato found his tone uneasy, but during the entire time she was on the move to reclaim what was hers, she didn't get the feeling of dread from him. It was like he didn't invoke a sense of danger to anyone. The entire time she saw and heard through her familiar, there wasn't a single hint of danger for her to get in.
"Are we being watched from a distance?" She had to ask him.
"I doubt so," he responds. "I'm not here to catch you or hand you over to some authority figures. I just wanted to ask you if you'd be willing to hear me out on a goal I have."
"What kind of goal?"
"I understand that you ate something called a Devil Fruit not too long ago…and was stigmatized for doing so, even though you didn't know what it was."
"Just bad luck all around."
"Yeah. Bad luck."
"What is your goal?"
"Just two days ago, I ate a piece of fruit that was similar to a Devil Fruit…and I didn't know what it was until after I bit into it. It granted me power beyond my beliefs, but at a terrible price."
"Anyone that eats a Devil Fruit can't move in ocean water; that's a common repercussion they each carry in exchange for the power they give."
"Except what I ate wasn't really a Devil Fruit, so ocean water doesn't affect me. Even if it could, I can't swim worth a damn."
"Not a Devil Fruit?"
"The Omni-Omni Fruit," went Maya to her. "It's nothing like a Devil Fruit because it doesn't give a weakness to ocean water. It will kill whoever consumes it within ten years, resulting in a horrible, agonizing death."
"You're dying?" Misato asks Shinji.
"Not yet. I still have nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days."
"That sounds like a lot of time to do whatever you want with your life."
"Except I don't want ten years to live just to die horribly. There's this item that can prevent me from dying before my time is up, but it's part of the fabled treasure that a lot of people were looking for."
"The One Piece."
"Yes. My goal is to find the treasure…just to obtain the artifact that will save me from a horrible death. I'm trying to put together a crew of my own to help me find the treasure…and you're the first person I wanted to try and recruit because…you look and sound like someone from my past. Everyone I'm looking for resemble people from my past, so I'm…a stranger in a strange world looking for reflections of people I used to know…that I don't know here."
A stranger in a strange world? Misato wonders as she has her confusion towards his choice of words. Who are you?
Maya came over and brought up her hands.
"With your permission," she says, "I will show you his memories to prove what he says is the truth and nothing but the truth."
Misato sighs and offers her right hand. When Maya touched it and Shinji's left hand, the purple-haired woman saw flashes of memory that all seemed to be from the boy's point of view, and she saw a woman that resembled her to an uncanny degree, with a penguin identical to her familiar. There was a city identical to Yebisu City, albeit several buildings seemed more like empty storage containers, some people the boy's age that were distant, and a man that was, lack of a better word, cold towards the boy. She saw his past, his bitterness, his pain, his loneliness, his feelings of being manipulated and used up by other people.
You poor…poor man, she thought.
Maya let go of her hand and allowed her a moment to process this.
"And this is why you were looking for me?" She asks Shinji. "Because I look like the woman you knew a little from your past before you ended up here?"
"I suffer from a sense of nostalgia and crave the familiarity of familiar people," he explains. "I know you're not her and we don't know each other…and I can't compare you to her. I'm just chasing reflections, echoes, shadows."
"And your interest in the One Piece is just this artifact that will remove the ten-year death sentence? Why not just take the treasure for yourself and become the next King of the Pirates?"
"Because I don't want the treasure. I don't even want the title. I just want to live a long and happy life. And…if the Omni-Omni Fruit grants me powers to do the impossible…I can probably make it so that you don't suffer the negatives of your Devil Fruit."
Her eyes widened in reaction to his suggestion of removing her drawback of eating the Pen-Pen Fruit. If something like that were possible, she could probably return to the life she once had.
"And what becomes of the fabled treasure once it's found and obtained?" She asks him.
"Divide the spoils between crew members," he answers, "hoard it away, put it in a museum somewhere, whatever you want with it. I don't want it."
Most people would've wanted the treasure to be financially set for life, but Misato found this young man's future pursuit of the treasure to be remarkable. He was after the treasure for just one piece of it, but he wasn't interested in the rest of it and was willing to give it up if it meant living for more than ten years due to a piece of fruit that carried a repercussion. And he was trying to put together a crew to pursuit this goal, too.
"Is everyone you're looking for a Devil Fruit user?"
"Yeah."
"What's the name of your crew?"
"It doesn't have one yet."
"Yeah, you should work on that."
"Not even here a week and I'm still being told what to do."
"Most crews require people to serve different roles aboard a ship."
"Yeah, a captain, a navigator, a cook, a scholar, combatants. I'm basically making this up as I go. Say you joined, what would be your specialty? What do you do?"
"What was that woman that looked like me in your past? Some sort of officer?"
"Yeah. Commanding officer."
"Before I ate the Pen-Pen Fruit, I was studying to be a sniper for the Marines."
"A sniper?"
"I see things better from a distance. Pen-Pen here makes it slightly easier to disable people for me to get around."
Shinji looks at the restrained penguin and cracks a smile.
"I guess a sniper wouldn't be a bad thing at all," he tells her. "So…will you join?"
Misato looks back at the city she lived in from the shadows and sighs. She had never left home before…and she didn't really have a home to go back to. And she was now being recruited by a young man with god-like power and no clue to what he was doing. Oh, the confusion and fear that came with trying to establish a crew.
"Alright," she told him. "I'm in."
Shinji smiles and holds out his right hand.
"Shinji Ikari," he introduced himself to her formally, "holder of the Omni-Omni Fruit."
"Misato Katsuragi," she responded, accepting his hand, "holder of the Pen-Pen Fruit."
"Maya Ibuki," went Maya to the older woman, "holder of the artificial Memo-Memo Fruit."
"Artificial?" Misato questions.
"I gave my ability to move in ocean water to verify memories of the past after meeting Shinji."
"Oh."
Shinji then removed the water restraint on the penguin, releasing it from his hold and Misato praised him for doing so.
"So…Pen-Pen?" He asks, referring to the penguin.
"He follows me everywhere when I let him out," Misato explains. "What can I say? He's like my baby. He's the closest thing I have to family."
"You're wrong."
"What?"
"He's not the closest thing to family. He is family."
"Squawk!" Pen-Pen expressed, and Misato was grateful to hear that claim.
To be continued…
A/N: Okay, this was overdue. There will be a poll for the next chapter, and you will decide what happens. The names of the Devil Fruit for each One Piece incarnation of each character was a small challenge to come up with, but they will relate in some way to the Evangelion universe. What do you think so far?