Creation began on 04-07-25

Creation ended on 04-08-25

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Different from You: Beast Wars

A/N: I know I am not the first to do a crossover like this before, but I do hope this will gather some interest over time because it follows the use of the anime with my own twists and turns. Here we go.

Prehistoric Earth, Beast Wars

As Rhinox was just seconds away from entering the final bits of code needed to establish contact with the temporal probe sent by Cybertron to locate the Maximals on the planet they were stranded on, the Predacon device floated behind him and was aimed at him. Just as he was about to enter the disc needed to finish the job, something happens that was unlike anything that was unexpected…but happened all the same.

Rhinox wasn't attacked by the evil device, for something collides with it and smashes into Megatron, who was just unfortunate enough to be in the way of the unanticipated object that fell from the sky.

"Huh?!" Rhinox gasps, but then continues on with the mission; whatever it was that just prevented his downfall, he would worry about it later. "Contacting now!"

He enters the code and sends the signal.

"Signal sent…and received," the array informs him, and he smiles.

Megatron slowly emerges from the rubble of Tarantulas' device…and looks down at what hit him, laying atop some rocks. Such a life form shouldn't have been here…but was here now, and worse was that there were two of them.

A human male, dressed in a strange suit that conformed to its body, made out of some sort of elastic material with additional metal and plastic composites thrown into its design. A quick scan shows Megatron that the suit was equipped with a basic life support function that was no longer functional, but the human's vitals were far from nonexistent. In its arms was a smaller human, female, with similar features as the male, but wearing clothing comprised of different materials that included wool from local life forms and synthetic materials, holding onto a object that resembled a life form he hadn't seen around so far on this planet.

"Humans?" He questions; because of the time period they were in, this was unusual due to the fact that human beings were still millions of generations underdeveloped, not even at the Stone Age yet.

"Mmm…" The smaller human moans, and the larger one slowly stirs.

"Give it up, Megatron," he hears Rhinox say to him, and turns to see the Maximal pointing his blaster at him. "The signal has been sent and received. In time, they're going to know where we are. You've lost."

Megatron refuses to acknowledge defeat. Not like this. Not when he could do something to give himself a cheap victory. He aims his own blaster at the two humans that have likely robbed him of the right to extend the Beast Wars.

"I'll destroy these organisms," he threatens Rhinox, and the Maximal takes notice of the two humans, surprised by the fact that they were present in a time they shouldn't be, and hesitates from pulling the trigger.

Blast! Megatron is shot at from his side, knocking him back several feet, away from the humans.

Rhinox looks away and sees Cheetor and Tigertron approaching from a distance. There was strength in numbers this time around, and they could protect the humans that were clearly incapacitated and unable to protect themselves. Even Megatron knows this to be true, and can't risk being captured right now.

"This isn't over," he tells Rhinox.

"Oh, yeah?" Rhinox responds. "It will be for you."

Megatron then turns and flees while he still could; so long as the two humans were too close, the Maximals wouldn't risk firing at him. But he knew the Predacons had failed to keep the Maximals from contacting the probe. Soon, Cybertron would know where they are and send reinforcements. Soon, the Beast Wars would take a turn in favor of the Maximals.

Cheetor and Tigertron reach Rhinox and Optimus just as Megatron got out of their weapons' range of hitting him.

"Did we get our signal sent?" Cheetor asks them. "Are we going home?"

"We got the message sent," Optimus answers him. "They're going to find us now."

"We may have," Tigertron states, "a different problem now."

They look down at the two humans that should not have been present but were, and were wondering how and why they were here to begin with.

"But…aren't humans like this extinct?" Cheetor asks; he had once studied the foreign species, learning that, due to their conflicting nature, the human race had been met with an unfortunate end not too long ago.

"The smaller one is barely a toddler while the other is barely grown," Optimus informs, scanning their vitals and seeing that they were both young.

The older human slowly opens his eyes and can barely perceive who any of them were.

"H…he…help…" He utters weakly, raising his right arm up, but drops it back down to his side.

-x-

Upon returning to the Darksyde, Megatron takes out the Golden Disk and searches through it for information regarding humans…but found nothing that indicated there was any proof to their survival after their self-inflicted calamity that rendered Earth in the future a barren wasteland that held no capacity to sustain even microbial life. And yet, the Maximals and Predacons have come across two humans, evolved and clearly from an era where they had advanced technology…and most importantly…alive. He was warned that meddling with time could have repercussions, and this was apparently one of them. Somehow, these two humans had gotten displaced from wherever they were supposed to be…and ended up here in a time they were not supposed to be in.

"A man cannot touch the petal of the nearest flower without influencing the course of the farthest star," he hears a recorded voice say on the disk. "Everything is connected. Every action has many effects."

Upon hearing this, Megatron is convinced that, due to his own actions and the actions taken by the Maximals, long before and after they had arrived on this prehistoric Earth, everything they have done or will do has been affecting everything on a larger scale. This was also a sign that things were bound to get worse for himself because of these two humans.

-x-

"…This is unusual," went Rattrap as they were all looking at the CR Chamber that housed the two humans they brought back to the Axalon. "How did these two end up without any temporal equipment?"

"Based upon a further analysis of the older subject," went Rhinox, "it doesn't seem like either used any temporal equipment to end up here. They were both covered in trace amounts of a fluid substance that didn't appear on Earth until after its decimation."

"Could they have been part of an attempt to flee the planet prior to its devastation?" Dinobot suggests. "Maybe a small band of humans that saw the end coming and tried to escape."

"No, neither one's brains are developed enough to know how to do anything. Here's the older one's memory recording."

While the two humans were in the CR Chamber, the nanobots repairing their bodies from whatever had caused them detrimental damage, Rhinox was accessing their brains for any recollection of their past. What he found in the boy…was nothing short of emotionally detrimental, even for the most hardened of Maximal soldiers. There was some static on the edges, indicative of damage to the holder's recollection; the boy couldn't recall these memories explicitly, but they were there in his subconscious, and this person had been through a trauma none of them would wish on even their worst enemies.

"I want to show him the bright future for all humanity," a female voice belonging to the boy's mother expressed on the day of some experiment.

"You're of no use to me," a cold voice belonging to the boy's father had spoken to his son sometime after his mother's death.

"How do we know they'll pay up for the kid?" A man's voice had asked on the day the boy had been kidnapped on his way to his guardian's home after school.

"If they don't pay up," a woman had expressed while looking at the bound and incapacitated boy, "we don't return him alive. From what I hear, his old man isn't even willing to lift a finger to save his son from being maimed. I'll maim him myself."

The only positive influence this child seemed to have in his past was after he had, albeit involuntarily, inadvertently, and because of one his previous captors, spawned a child of his own that became his salvation from an emotional pit.

"You said that," he once spoke to a woman with a pair of police officers that brought the girl to him when she was a newborn, "she's my child, right? Doesn't that… Doesn't that mean that I have a right to decide whether or not I want to keep her?"

Rattrap wasn't sure how to respond when they saw the memories escalate to the day this young man met his father again after so many years of absence, accompanied only by the little girl that had a resemblance to her father, learning of a monster that was attacking prior to their reunion.

"You're only here because I have a use for you," his father expressed.

"You're really crazy if you think that I'm just going to fight a creature I have never seen before until today, in some thing that you built…and with no guarantee of coming out alive," he had expressed in anger, wanting to leave and not return.

"Daddy," they hear the girl express to the boy one night as he was putting her to sleep. "I don't like the man we saw the other day. He was mean. Really mean."

"I'll try to limit our time around him as much as I can, Shado," they hear the boy say to her, giving her a small smile.

"Question," went Tigertron with a revelation of his own. "Even if we could send these two back to their time before the human race went extinct…would these two even want to go back there if they were both suffering on account of the people they were around?"

"Given the boy's recollection," Rhinox responds, "his father was among the ones that exploited him with threats of having his child taken away. That can put undue pressure on anyone that refuses to do anything other than what they have reconditioned themselves to do. Even if we could send these two back to their original time, we don't have the authority to do so."

"Yeah," Optimus agrees; such a responsibility lies with the Maximal Council of Elders. "How are they medically?"

"For now, they're stable."

"Everyone that doesn't get it tells me that Shado and I would be better off if we were separated from each other," they hear the boy say, "but if I gave her away, I'd be no better than my father, and I refuse to be anything like him. He chose to walk out on me. I refuse to walk out on Shado. Who would willingly cast aside their own child and feel nothing for them? Even if it means being ostracized or stigmatized by other people, I won't abandon Shado just to make my own life easier, so says some other people. I prefer being her father over an Evangelion pilot."

It was that one word that made most of the Maximals uncomfortable with what led to the extinction of the human race to begin with: Evangelion. From what their records had gathered, human beings had created the Evangelion in a series from two primordial beings from before their time, and exploited the service of children to use as soldiers to face creatures descended from one of the primordial beings that sought to return to it, only escalating their situation by leading to the complete eradication of the human race and all other forms of life on the planet Earth, down to the last microbe. If this boy had been involved in the same faction of people that created the Evangelions, he had likely gotten away by an unexpected chance encounter with this being they had dubbed the Twelfth Angel, an organism that functioned as a gateway to other dimensions outside of time and space. If something had gone wrong…or even right…anyone could've ended up anywhere beyond time and space, to the ends of reality, to the beginning of time, or even to the dominions of Unicron himself. While it was human nature to seek its own destruction, not every human demonstrated this nature, and it was evident that this young man and little girl, practically the last of their kind, did not possess the drive to want to destroy anything or anyone in their lives yet; while the young man did not particularly like the presence of most others, he never actively sought out the ruination of other people, and the girl was too young to desire any measure of destruction.

For now, the question the Maximals had was: How were they going to handle these two vestiges of a forgotten species that destroyed itself by trying to play with being the harbingers of life and death on a grand scale?

-x-

Tokyo-3, post-Twelfth Angel

Evangelion Unit-01, the Test-Type Evangelion assigned to Third Child Shinji Ikari, the only child of Yui and Gendo Ikari, and the teenage father of illegitimate daughter Shado Ikari…had been totally destroyed beyond recognition by the detonation of over nine-hundred N explosives within the Dirac Sea of the Twelfth Angel, leaving nothing much to salvage. There wasn't even much of the Entry Plug to salvage, with just half of it, melted and crushed. The only plus side to the operation to salvage the Eva was that the Angel had been defeated, but the cost had been high. Much higher than any at NERV had really expected it to be. Not that anyone was really speaking much of it out loud.

Shinji Ikari had been problematic for NERV from the very start since it was learned that he had a child at his age, that he had no prior knowledge or experience with the Eva, that he was basically anything but a regular civilian that they were drafting into a paramilitary service to defend mankind against the Angels. He had initially refused to pilot against the Third Angel and wanted only to leave with his daughter, but then his father gave him an ultimatum: Pilot the Eva or lose his daughter. Even after defeating the Third Angel, it had been clear to Misato Katsuragi that nobody in NERV had gotten anywhere in the young father's good graces after his father threatened to have his daughter taken away from him. And now…now NERV was down an Evangelion and short a pilot, even if the one they lost had been unwilling and had no positive standing with them because of the threat that was made against him.

"Believe me when I say if I have to choose between NERV and Shado regarding who is more important to me than the rest," Shinji had once told her after the Third Angel incident. "Make no mistake, Ms. Katsuragi, Shado is more important to me than any of you. I don't care what you think of me. If the opportunity ever presents itself, I'll take her and flee from here the first chance I get, leaving you to whatever situation the fates have dealt you with."

He was clearly nothing like his father, Misato Katsuragi thinks as she ponders how they were going to adjust to the fact that they now have a dead pilot and child on their hands. He put her first before any of us in everything we had him do.

Despite Section Two keeping tabs on the Third Child, it was evident that the boy had difficulty with making time for his daughter with the responsibility of defending humanity against the Angels…but he chose the fight to be a father over the war to save mankind, seeing this little girl's smile and laughter as being worth his struggles, not the places he would never get to see in his lifetime or the people that would never truly know the real him in their lifetime. This only seemed to get worse for him when word got out to the Japan Heavy Chemical Industries corporation that he was the pilot of Unit-01 that NERV's commander personally handpicked …and they made the information public knowledge to spite the paramilitary agency. They couldn't mitigate the damage that had been done by the leaking this information, and the target on Shinji's back had expanded because of the death threats to him and Shado; if it wasn't people that hated his father that wanted to harm the two, it was random strangers that held animosity towards Shinji for the Third Angel aftermath.

"Those monsters you make Daddy face are scary," she recalls Shado telling her once, "but the people that do not like Daddy are scarier because they always want to hurt him. It doesn't matter what he does, you people always want to hurt him…just like how you hurt him because he didn't want to face that monster that was here that day we came. You may think it's easy to make Daddy do these awful things, but it is not easy. He does not like it…and I do not like it that you make him do this because you don't have anyone else to do it for you. Even after you got those other people to play with the orange and red toys you made, you still make him do it. How much longer does Daddy have to do this? I hear him cry at night."

And I couldn't give her an answer, Misato thinks as she finds herself regretting the fact that, despite having Rei and Unit-00 return to service and Asuka and Unit-02 transferred to Japan to aid in the fight against the Angels, they still made Shinji pilot the Eva due to the threat on his life by the random masses, exploiting this knowledge to make it easier to exploit him. It must've been hard on him, trying to put up with everything.

-x-

Cybertron

One of the probes had returned, responding to a signal sent by the Maximals of Optimus Primal's crew…and something else that had been scanned coming from a prehistoric version of Earth. With the message received, the Maximal Council of Elders now knew where they were stranded with the Predacons and could begin rescue operations to head to Earth in the past and retrieve their own and apprehended the Predacons.

"What else did the probe scan coming from Earth?" A Maximal soldier asks the Diagnostic Drone extracting data from the returned probe.

"Data extracted," the drone responds. "Confirmation of two human temporal abnormalities detected on prehistoric Earth. Scan concluded approximately twenty-two seconds before reception of Maximal message from prehistoric Earth."

"Humans appeared on the planet in its prehistoric era? What is the status of prehistoric Earth's early species of human beings?"

"Gathering data. Data retrieved. Species is currently in early stages of evolutionary development. They are still not yet evolved to utilize tools and weapons and are below acceptable levels of cognitive intelligence."

"And the two humans that appeared on Earth?"

"The two specimens are of the evolutionary development of last recorded life prior to the planet's decimation of life. Further scans indicate that both specimens are under the age of full maturity. Male subject last recorded in early stages of intermediate development while female subject is in later stages of infancy."

"In other words?"

"The male subject is a teenager. The female subject is a toddler. Both subjects, in terms of human perceptions, are children."

"And they're in a time period they shouldn't be in. They're from the last days of the human race's existence?"

"Affirmative."

"We got a problem!" Another Maximal soldier alerts, just as a ship shot up into the atmosphere and vacated airspace. "Depth Charge took a starhopper and is heading towards the coordinates of prehistoric Earth!"

"Why would he go there? Only Optimus Primal and his crew are there with the Predacons, and he's not interested in the humans there."

"He's after Protoform X. If it's still on the Axalon, or better yet, on Earth, he's going to make sure that it doesn't get a chance to pick up where it left off."

"We need to assemble the team, immediately. We're going to Earth."

To be continued…

A/N: I may not be the first person to break any ground on this crossover, but I like to think of myself as being original when making use of the same scenario, time and again, but with new twists and turns. So, say that Shinji and Shado Ikari ended up on Earth during the Beast Wars, and that their arrival revealed some interesting facts about what became of the human race in the era of the Maximals and Predacons? And for the sake of inspiration, the idea of Japan Heavy Chemical Industry revealing that Shinji was the Third Child of NERV to the public came from reading the earlier chapters of Jocasta by Reluctantly a MisaShin Fan, something I'm behind on like every other story that I find worth my time to read because of the real world. Now that I have this down, things are going to change.