Author's Note: Second Impact knocked the planet off its previous axis. The 'error' here is not an error.
Shinji Ikari Goes to New York
Chapter Four - The Path
He had a good view of the park from up here, which was probably why Asuka had chosen it. A landscape of stone needles stretched out to the south, surmounted by the chaotic loops and whorls of the Lady.
Lights were coming on. The same harsh halogens from the courtyard outside the Visitor's Center, robbing the world of some of its waning sunset tint.
A horn blared out somewhere in the park, and that scratchy, failing voice came on again, to announce that the Greater Manhattan Memorial Authority was closing in fifteen minutes.
The Path of Conquest. That was what the letter had called this. Shinji had no idea why that name had been chosen, but him and Asuka had done things like this before. Scavenger hunts. The ticking clock felt appropriate. Calculated.
The Path required viewing the Southern Cross in the sky at twilight, but with the halogens up and the city quickly becoming a glowing wall to the East, Shinji was fairly certain he wouldn't be able to see much of anything to the south, even when the last bits of sunset had ebbed away.
He sat back on his haunches and re-read the letter. "Seek the light of the Southern Cross, as the sun shines its last."
He looked into the sky, and even its deepest parts were only a flat black sheet. Mankind had wrapped itself in a thick cloak of light pollution to guard against a leering and infinite void.
"Tricky," he muttered in Japanese. But he already had a way around it. A preexisting knack.
He pulled the travel pack from where it was leaning against a set of markers and laid it out on the path. He reclined below it, using it as a pillow, and covered his face in his hands, and closed his eyes. He waited a moment, a minute, five minutes, letting his eyes strain against the dark. Then he opened his eyes and carefully, carefully opened his hands, blocking out as much of the surrounding light as he could.
Up there at the top of things, he could make out three faint points of light, a fragment of Messier 45. He watched for a while as more of it faded into view, until a grouping of five stars twinkled overhead, only barely visible as flecks of something amongst blinding black nothing. Shinji twisted his head, locking his neck in a way that aligned with the two brightest stars, and got up. Turned, one hand extended, moving through where other familiar but unseen constellations would be, working his way down to the Pleiades, and down past that. He raised a thumb, placing it at the spot where the Crux would currently be. The finger drifted, dragging a few degrees forward through time, from sunset into twilight.
He walked down to the marker, making minor adjustments all the while to stay oriented on that Southern Cross vector. Positioned behind the marker, his finger was covering a salience in the retaining wall that ran from the city proper down to the park. Beyond that there seemed to be a copse of trees. Not too far past that would be the shoreline.
There was no time to question this. Night was closing in. The sun was little more than an afterimage fading over the Jersey Delta. He pulled on the travel pack and made for the salience.
As he passed beneath one of the Lady's slender green loops, a voice on the speakers announced that the park was closed. So, he started to run.
Things got weird. The salience wasn't properly lit, and it was hard to keep track of the dim shape at the edge of the halogen's eye-bleaching reach. Even harder to navigate the winding, chaotic paths now that he was off the hill and on relatively flat terrain.
The wrong turn was inevitable. He followed a small capillary path that headed toward the salience but dead-ended prematurely in a circular cul-de-sac. He could just make out the gap in the markers, perhaps a dozen meters away, where another path continued on towards his destination.
Muttering about crazy Americans under his breath, Shinji turned back and found a pair of large figures approaching him, already halfway up the path he had taken. Harsh halogen illuminated pale bearded faces and wide frames wrapped in puffy dark jackets. The two men were so wide, in fact, they had to advance up the narrow path in single file.
Crazies or rangers, it didn't matter. Shinji lifted the travel pack over his head and pushed into the tightly packed markers, making directly towards the salience.
Yggdrasil living had left him whipcord thin, and so long as he kept his eyes down and paid attention to where he was going, he was able to move through the obstacle field at better-than walking speed.
He made it to the correct path in no time, crossed it, and pushed right back into the dense knot of markers, unwilling to risk a switchback further down the path. People were shouting behind him. He didn't look back, just kept his eyes down, slipping this way and that, sliding through narrow gaps less than half a meter across, taking arching steps where some additional height was required to be able to squeeze through two or more canted markers. And all while doing this he was calculating, focusing, working to align himself on the Southern Cross vector as the essential parts of that calculation came into view.
The salience was no longer that. He could see it's previously hidden side now. The markers didn't run all the way up to the retaining wall, and several figures were waiting for him there. One of them had a bullhorn, and was shouting through it. He started towards them, then veered southward, toward the copse of trees that had been covered by the salience. The bullhorn continued on, possibly to distract him from the muffled cursing coming from behind him, from the men that had gone into the markers after him. They sounded closer than Shinji would have figured possible, especially considering how big they had seemed to be, but then again, they'd had plenty of time to learn how to navigate this cramped, chaotic space.
Someone close by was trying to talk to him, but he was at the copse now, dodging trees and ignoring the sting of branches whipping across his face and tugging at the travel pack. He seemed to be approaching another dead end, a wall of markers and tree trunks with no obvious gaps. But there, at knee height and just to the left, a low gap occupied by neither marker nor tree!
Shinji lowered himself down and backed into the gap, pulling at the trunk that formed one side of the opening to make enough space for the travel pack. A hand, pale and hairy, snatched at the pack as he pulled it through, seizing the metal frame. The unseen man was strong, but Shinji had both feet planted on either side of the opening. He lashed out with his left hand, striking the man's hand with a closed fist, then closing on it like a spring loaded trap, nails gouging into yielding skin. There was a lot of shouting going on. Another figure was advancing up the path Shinji had taken. Shinji released the hand and hauled back on the travel bag, pulling the hand's owner into view.
The man fell between two markers, yelling in frustration as he came to a stop midway to the ground, his body wedged in place. Shinji leaned forward to awkwardly punch the man's wrist once, twice, and the travel pack finally came free. He pulled it roughly through the too-narrow gap and backed away through a mass of branches reaching into the space he was moving through.
More and more shouting. A lot of shapes moving around at the gap. Shinji turned away and focused on moving forward. The long pathway took several turns, worming deeper into the copse. After about five minutes, the light was completely gone. After another five minutes, he couldn't hear the shouting any more, or anything else apart from himself moving through the cramped space.
He kept moving, moving. Working blind, weaving around trees and markers. The brush closed in, tighter and tighter, until he ran into a cloud of stickers and thorns he had to duck beneath, and which he quickly discovered formed the roof of an even narrower space that he could barely crawl through on his belly. He pulled back and, not seeing any other way, pulled the travel pack onto his back.
He pushed into the narrower space, finding thorns and stickers to either side as well as above. He crawled forward, and the pack crushed him down, down.
He crawled. This went on for a dozen minutes. Two dozen. Past that, he slipped into a mechanical fugue, he was reduced to a machine that crawled forward, and paused every so often to gather its knees up to to chest, flexing spine in a way that relieved the crushing, flattening weight of its burden.
Finally, one probing hand reached forward and landed not on dry leaves, but dirt. A brief, cautious exploration suggested he had reached the mouth of the tunnel.
Shinji pulled himself forward, pushed himself clear. He shrugged off the pack and stood, a little amazed that he could still do that.
He was standing on a footpath, just barely visible. It was a hard turn to the left, to the east, back toward the retaining wall. He pulled up the travel pack with a low grunt, and started forward.