Creation began on 10-02-21

Creation ended on 10-02-21

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Welcome to your Escape: Sleepless Nights

A/N: This is what the Clover Team does when its members can't sleep after a bad match.

Nico was stranded in the desert terrain, her body aglow and wrapped in a skintight suit that reached up to her neck, blending in with the night.

Stomp! She looked behind herself and saw that white behemoth without a face that wrecked her Zoid team.

"Aah!" She gasped, running down the rocky ground as she tried to get away from it.

She wasn't sure how long she had run, but she came across an abandoned city and hid in between two buildings; she had tried to hide under a freeway, but she was too big for some reason.

"Grrr!" The Eva had growled, sounding close by.

A white hand came from around the corner and surprised Nico, followed by another hand…and then a head without a face and an ugly mouth. The Eva had found her and reached out to grab her by her neck!

"No!" She cried.

GASP! Nico awoke in her room, panting as she calmed down, taking in her surroundings.

That's twice now, she thought as she got up out of her bed.

Unlike other children her age, mostly children from Earth, that had a passion for dolls and stuffed animals or cowboys and princesses, Nico had spent her life within the world of Zoids, and her room represented such a passion with pictures and blueprints of Zoids from the past. There were posters and blueprints of Shield Ligers, Command Wolves, Pteras, even the fabled and infamous Death Saurer of old. On a mantle area were custom models of the Gustav, Gojulas and Raynos. As she stepped out of her room, the Zoid team manager was wearing an oversized shirt with a pair of therapod-based Organoids, one gray, the other black, facing each other.

"Huh?" She reacted when she saw the door to the simulation chamber halfway open. "Someone's using the simulator?"

"Yeah, Geisha," she turned to her left inside the room and saw Drake, Valerie and Shinji, all of them in their clothes that served as their PJs and looking like they had seen better nights. "Did you just wake up?"

"Two minutes ago," she told Drake, going to the chair by the console and sat down. "What are y'all doing up this late?"

"We couldn't sleep, either," Shinji stated, holding a canned coffee in his right hand.

CRASH! The simulator fell to the floor and released its simulated smoke as the cockpit opened; Geisha had crashed and burned.

"Okay, who's next?" She asked, seeing Nico above. "Hey, Nico?"

"Me," went Drake as he got up; Geisha had gotten up first, followed by Drake, then Shinji and Valerie. "Lower the level to at least seventy percent, please."

"Yeah."

He climbed into the cockpit and grabbed the handles, yawning as he felt the drowsiness creeping up on him again.

"So, what makes it so you four are finding it hard to sleep?" Nico asked them as she lowered the level of difficulty to seventy percent for Drake, as he requested.

"That lousy Eva," revealed Shinji to her. "It didn't bother us at first, but now it is. Did you wake up because of it?"

"Now, what makes you think that?"

"I saw you get up the previous night when I got up," Valerie told her. "You went to use the simulator while I went to get a drink of water."

Nico sighs and responds, "Okay, when I can't sleep, like right now, I find the use of the simulator to be stimulating…and I don't have to think about whatever nightmares I had woken up from."

"What was in your nightmare?" Geisha asked her.

"I'm in the desert, and the Eva shows up," she explains. "I run until I'm in a city…and I can't hide under any overpasses and hid in between two high-rises where it finds me again. I can't really explain why I had to do that instead of the usual places that can be hidden in."

"Is it night out in your dream?" Valerie asks her.

"Yeah, how'd you know about that?"

"I asked her when she described the terrain in hers," Shinji reveals. "It looks like we're five for five here."

If this was true, then it meant they all had the same sort of dream.

"Nighttime, a desert and a city," Nico utters. "What else is the same?"

"Is your body the size of the Zoid you most associate with and naked?" Geisha questioned, surprising the little girl.

"What? How'd you know that… Wait, no, I'm not naked in the dream. I'm… Were you naked?"

"I wasn't naked in mine," said Shinji. "Is that a rule or requirement?"

"All I know is that I was wearing a skintight suit that made me feel exposed, but I was aglow. How about you, Shinji?"

"I was the size of Liger Rogue, but all I had on were pants…and my chest was just…bare. Geisha, what about you?"

"Crazy, but, yes, I was the size of my Storm Sworder and, yes, wearing a skinsuit that made me feel unclothed, but mine didn't highlight any of my…features."

"That means her chest and leg areas!" They heard Drake over the intercom.

"I told you that in confidence, Drake!" Geisha yelled.

"That's interesting," went Valerie, and she cracked her neck to the left.

"Well, what about you, Valerie?" Nico asked her. "Were you the size of your baby in your crazy dream in the desert and city?"

"Yeah," she reveals. "I dreamt of stranger nightmares after a defeat, being the size of my Geno Saurer, and I was also wearing a skinsuit like y'all did, but it didn't hide anything you'd see on me right now."

Shinji sighs and turns his head away from the older woman.

"Why would a skinsuit not cover up…" Geisha went.

"Because when it comes to me and my sexuality, I just own up to it," Valerie explains. "I am a woman after all."

"True that," Shinji admitted; Drake and Geisha had been teaching him a new way to talk to and about people, as the constant use of what they referred to as the old way of speech became stale after a long time, while still reliable, just not so much.

"Basically," they heard Drake again, "we're all messed up because of that ill-mannered defeat we got that doesn't count because we didn't fight anyone!"

Nico sighed and raised her right hand onto a nozzle on the console and slowly raised the level of difficulty to seventy-five percent.

"I won't tell if you won't," she told the others.

Shinji crushed his empty can and expressed his intention to go grab another from the kitchen.

"I'll come with you," Valerie told him. "At this rate, I have to go to the bathroom after five or six coffee cans."

As the two left, Drake, in the simulator, expressed his inability to face the enemy Zoids in his simulated G-Rex.

To be continued…

A/N: I was meaning to get this written down, but I didn't know where to set it after I wrote the Eva Team chapter. If any of you were able to take notice before, this chapter was inspired by an episode of gen:LOCK, quite a good series that needs another season. See ya next chapter.