Chapter 8. "R.I.P. Fregg."

The next morning, when they met up with the Ikaris for the walk to school, Asuka was perfectly calm and composed. She greeted Rei with perfect friendliness, and Shinji with perfect civility. Everything was totally, perfectly normal like always.

"Are you well, Soryu? Your face is red."

"I'm fine!" Asuka trilled brightly. "Everything's fine!"

She sailed past Rei with a perfect smile for the other girl's bemused expression.

"Asuka—" Shinji began hesitantly. Asuka couldn't meet his eye – no, she refused to.

"Come on, let's get moving! Can't be late!"

Behind her, Rei changed target. "Nagisa? Does Soryu perhaps have a fever?"

"She is physically sound," Kaworu reported, but then betrayed her: "Emotionally she has been perturbed since a conversation with Shinji yesterday."

"Shinji?" (Asuka could picture Rei's expression – limited outward change, but a jarring intensity and weight to her gaze.) "What did you say to Soryu to cause this?"

"Uh – nothing!"

"What."

"Um … just … it's private, okay? She – we—"

"Is it to do with romantic matters?"

Asuka tripped. "Ow!"

"Soryu?"

"Asuka?"

Her palms stung where she'd put them out to break her fall. Her knees stung where they'd hit the concrete of the footpath. Her pride stung worse than both combined. "Shut up," she whispered, too quiet for anyone to even hear. What is wrong with me?

Then Shinji was at her side, carefully taking her wrists to inspect the damage. "Hey, you all right?"

"I'm fine. Stupid crack in the paving. Infrastructure in this cheap town is a joke."

"It is," Shinji agreed. He poured water from his drink bottle over her hands to rinse away the dirt and grit, then dabbed the grazes gently with antibacterial wipes from his first-aid kit.

"I'm not clumsy," Asuka stated.

"Everyone stumbles now and then," Shinji said supportively.

"They do?" Kaworu asked, and Shinji shushed him. Asuka felt a bit better.

Rei had hung back while Shinji looked after Asuka, watching intently. For her, Shinji in caretaker-mode was the default standard, so when he smiled and said, "There. Good to go," Rei nodded in satisfaction: her brother had discharged his duty successfully.

Asuka got to her feet without support – she had some dignity left, damn it – and accepted her satchel from Shinji. "Thanks," she muttered. I guess you're not completely intolerable.

The ridiculous incident had, weirdly, ended up calming Asuka down, and she managed to relax as they walked to school. There was no reason to get weirded out by whatever latest nonsense known fool Shinji Ikari was spouting, after all. No reason for anything to change in their group dynamic.

Luckily when they got to school there was a distraction anyway – the local network was down, so no computers or phones could get onto the school server. Every screen showed the same error message: an image of the school mascot – a three-leaf clover named Maggie – bowing apologetically over a scrolling banner that just repeated '11/17-11/17-11/17' endlessly.

"I wouldn't even care," admitted Misato, as she took class attendance (or rather, 'supervised' Hikari writing everyone's names on an actual sheet of paper with an actual pen), "except that we have a national standard test and today's the last day to submit it to the Department of Education."

"Is that because you put it off until the last minute to avoid the extra work?" Asuka sneered, and Misato scowled.

"Watch that disrespectful tone, little Kaiser."

Kaworu piped up, "Is there anything we can do to help?"

Misato smiled at him. "Thanks Kaworu, nothing much from our end. Dear Ritsuko's busting her butt already."

"Ritsuko?"

"Akagi, the school H.B.I.T. – I mean, boss. My bestie since college."

Kaworu nodded. "Well, should we check on her and see if she needs any support?"

"You're such a sweetheart," said Misato, patting his head and messing up his overgrown-electroshock hair even further. "I guess this is where all the good manners went in your gene pool." She smirked at Asuka, who growled.

"What kind of thing is that for a teacher to say?"

Misato winced. "Uh, probably not great, right. Um, I'll let you design a question on the next literature assignment, as apology."

Shameless corruption, thought Asuka. "The three-point question."

"One-point."

"Two."

"Done." Misato wrote a note to herself directly on her desk.

"And for the record," Asuka continued, "Kaworu's from the abyssal trench in our gene pool where all the freaky things hang out."

"Beware of venom and sharp teeth," he responded pleasantly.

"Just for that, Asuka," said Misato, and got to her feet, "you can come with us."

Asuka groaned. "Unfair!"

Misato delegated supervision to Hikari – "Anyone who causes trouble for the class rep gets to reorganise all the hardcover encyclopedias in order of least to most mouldy," – and led Asuka and Kaworu over to the next building.

They found Ritsuko Akagi in the main theatre, where most of the student desktop setups either clustered on small-group tables or fanned out in semicircular rows around the central lectern. The H.B.I.T. herself sat in front of the presenting podium, its tower disassembled around her and monitor frozen on Mascot Maggie mid-glitch. She was mumbling distractedly around a cigarette.

"Smoking inside school buildings Ritsy, tut-tut," sang Misato as they started down the stairs toward her.

"Something you've never done in your life, especially not last week in the science wing," Akagi drawled. "Did you bring the noodles?"

"Huh? What noodles?" Misato sashayed over and yoinked the cigarette, took a drag, then popped it back between Akagi's lips.

"An indirect kiss with Kaji," Akagi muttered, "just when my day couldn't get any better." She spoke aloud, "Noodles to sacrifice to the server gods. Mine went out of date."

"You're weird, Ritsu," said Misato. "We're here to offer our humble services in whatever capacity the H.B.I.T. requires."

Akagi stubbed out the cigarette in an ash tray shaped like a pet food bowl. "I require a laundry list of things you could neither identify nor pronounce."

"That's fair," said Misato cheerfully.

Kaworu had wandered over to the secondary workstation at the other side of the stage. He peered at the screen. "What does 'error code 2015-10' mean?"

Akagi's brow furrowed. "Good question." She leafed through a manual on the floor beside her. "Doesn't look like it's in here?"

"Oh, never mind," said Kaworu.

"No, I want to know—"

"—It's changed anyway. It's just zeroes and ones now."

Akagi swore in a language Asuka didn't recognise, probably something from one of her nerdy books (it sounded Finnish?). She scrambled to her feet, grumbling about pins and needles, and over to the monitor Kaworu was reporting on. She frowned. Her lips moved silently.

"Could it be?" Misato stage-whispered in aside to Asuka. "Something even the renowned Ritsuko Akagi doesn't know?"

"I know how to read binary," Akagi snapped. "But what the hell does 'Iruel' mean?"

Asuka was the only one who noticed Kaworu go completely still.

"Oh great, it's changed again. Hm … 'Adam' – that'd be right, a man causing problems."

Misato snickered. "Thought you'd gotten out of that these days."

"Only in some areas." She scuttled back to the main podium.

Asuka sidled up to Kaworu as he took out his phone and opened a web search (mobile data, at least, was still working). "What's going on?" she whispered. "Is it to do with the cryptids?"

"Angels," Kaworu said distractedly, and Asuka felt goosebumps run up her arms. He had typed out 'How to write Tabris in binary'. "They are Angels."

"Angels? Like – Bible angels? Oh, is 'Irriel' the same as 'Tabris'?"

He made a strange noise and stranger face. "Definitely not. But they are relate—associated. ...In the myths."

Akagi had resumed working at the main computer – typing something, waiting, then groaning and typing again. Misato hovered at her shoulder, offering vague encouragement and asking questions that were deeply ignored.

So nobody except Asuka saw Kaworu enter a string of zeroes and ones into the secondary workstation's command line interface, then open local file sharing on his phone and change the device's name to the same sequence.

A moment later the network shone back into life – screens lit up with successful login messages, notifications pinged as contact attempts finally landed. The school day could at last begin.

"Damn it," Misato groaned. "I have to set up that national standard test now."

"But what happened?" Akagi demanded. The question wasn't addressed to anyone else, though – clearly she assumed none of Misato, Asuka, or Kaworu had the technological know-how to answer – and she resumed working at the central podium just as energetically as before. "Wouldn't have to deal with this crap if I just quit and opened that cat cafe..."

Asuka and Kaworu followed Misato from the building back towards their own classroom. Letting their teacher get a little ahead of them, Asuka grabbed Kaworu's phone in his hand and turned the screen towards her.

An image of the school mascot Maggie bounced idly from corner to corner, its colours cycling between red and green. Above its top leaf hovered a halo.

"That's the 'Irriel'?" asked Asuka. "How is it on your phone?"

"The school network was too big, inducing agoraphobic panic," Kaworu said.

Talking to this guy made Asuka's head hurt sometimes. How am I supposed to explain this in a scientific paper abstract, or press release? "But it's … happy now?"

"I believe so. Certainly they are entertaining themselves exploring the contents of my phone's storage." He switched on the microphone. "No changing or sending anything, thank you."

Mascot Maggie's eyes grew very big, with very shiny pupils.

"You may look at things, yes," Kaworu answered.

Suddenly a photo of Shinji, of all things, appeared onscreen – a low-light selfie close on his sleepy-smiling face, the collar of a pyjama shirt just visible to one side of the frame and a pillow at the other. It was captioned #goodnight kaworu#.

Asuka squawked and shoved the phone, and Kaworu's hand holding it, away from her.

"Iruel is going through my messages now," Kaworu commented, unruffled. "Shinji sent me that last night."

"I don't need to know that!" Asuka babbled. "I don't need to see that – or anything else you two send each other!"

Kaworu blinked. "You seem very agitated. Why?"

"Why?" Asuka's face was heating again. "B-because it's not for me, it's – it's private."

"Private? I had heard the Japanese are less demonstrative—"

"Intimate. Just – just trust me, okay? Lock your phone, and don't go showing other people stuff Shinji's been sending you late at night."

"I didn't show you, Iruel did—"

"Whatever!" She marched ahead and caught up to Misato, who (glooming over her own problems) had missed the whole conversation.

At least Stupid-Shinji still had his clothes on, she thought, and shuddered.

After school, they went to the Ikaris' house yet again to deposit a cryptid – 'Angel', apparently, which was so weird, even for an already-weird situation.

While Asuka wavered between moving her floor cushion away from Rei's (to show Shinji there was nothing going on there) and leaving it in place (to show him how little she thought of his theory), Rei and Shinji pondered Kaworu's phone – the Iruel had moved on to playing games, easily racking up the highest scores possible – before Rei dug out an old Damagoji.

"Will it fit?" asked Asuka dubiously. "Those things can't have much storage, right?"

"Mum upgraded it," said Shinji. "She also put in some kind of hyper-lithium battery that'll never run down."

"Okay, so you just gotta reset it and delete whatever's on there now."

"There is not a current occupant," said Rei. "Fregg passed on several years ago."

"R.I.P. Fregg," muttered Asuka.

Shinji sighed. "I told you I could take care of it, Rei."

She shook her head. "It did not die of neglect. Mother's hardware improvements triggered a corresponding evolution of its programmatic complexity, and eventually she put Fregg on a computer at her lab. I believe it sequences genomic data now."

Shinji and Asuka exchanged a look. "Yeah, that sounds like Mum," said Shinji, and Asuka nodded. "Very on-brand for Dr Ikari."

Kaworu, apparently satisfied, took the back off the Damagoji's case, and touched the tiny data chip with a stripped wire, its other end plugged into his phone's audio jack.

"—Oh!" said Shinji. "Are those your headphones, Kaworu?"

"Yes."

"You could have used mine," he fretted.

Asuka's eyebrows shot up. Even by Shinji standards, that was generous – he loved his headphones. He's so gone on Kaworu. Completely off the deep end.

She looked at her cousin, kindly reassuring Shinji he would never do such a thing, and refusing the offer – no, plea for permission – to buy new headphones for him, and felt an exasperated smile quirk her mouth. Two's company, I guess.

Of their own accord, her eyes slid over to Rei, inspecting the Damagoji that now showed a low-resolution, chunkily pixellated image of Maggie-Iruel. "I hope you don't defecate as often as Fregg did," she was saying. The faint glow of the screen reflected in her rosy eyes.

A weird wistfulness stole any comment Asuka might have cut in. She's so … she's just … I … I can't...

"Perhaps you are like the others, and do not generate waste at all?"

Asuka shook herself. "That's impossible," she said bluntly. "Everything that's alive consumes energy and generates waste."

"These do not." Rei gestured at the other Angels in the playhouse – some of them wandering around, others chilling in place. "They are the perfect guest-pets."

"'Perfect'," Asuka repeated thoughtfully. "...Kaworu called them Angels."

"Angels," Rei echoed. "Messengers of the divine."

At the bookcase, the Shamshel nuzzled a shelf, maybe scratching an itch on its nose. A dislodged novel fell thunk on its head. -skreeenk!-

"I guess not the kind of angels most people think of," Asuka muttered.

"Not everything that is different or confusing is bad," Rei said.

"No! Of course not," Asuka blurted. She looked at Rei's unique blue hair, rare ruby eyes. She thought about feelings of wistfulness, of tightness at the base of her throat. Of confusion, but maybe not as scary or shameful as she'd thought. She swallowed heavily.

"No. Not bad, actually."

And Rei smiled, and Asuka smiled wobbly back.