From: laudre@null.net (Sean Simpson) Subject: [Eva/KoF][FanFic] Evangelion Densetsu X-Moderation-Queue-Date: 20 Feb 2002 21:55:09 -0800 o/~ [Main Title] Lunatic Calm - Leave You Far Behind o/~ L D S F A N W O R K S (a division of Drelau Productions) - and - C Y A N I D E B R E A T H M I N T P R O D U C T I O N S - proudly present - E V A N G E L I O N D E N S E T S U inspired by and based on: Neon Genesis Evangelion by Anno, Gainax, et. al. - The King of Fighters '94 and sequels by SNK - Fatal Fury and sequels by SNK - and other sources that will be credited as they come along --- Written by Sean "Laudre" Simpson and Mel "Loremaster" Wong [=--------------------------------------------------------------------=] Neon Genesis Evangelion and related concepts and characters belong to Gainax. The King of Fighters, Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and related characters and concepts belong to SNK. This work is not intended as a challenge to any of those copyrights or intellectual property rights; this work is intended to demonstrate respect towards those properties and to the minds behind them, and is done in fun only. In other words, while this story is our work, it's based on a bunch of other people's work, and you should go watch Evangelion and play SNK video games. If any of the copyright owners asked us to cease and desist distribution of this work, we'd have to comply. So we're trying to play fair, and we hope you do too. [=--------------------------------------------------------------------=] CHAPTER 01: INTO THE FIRE --- The city was completely silent except for a thin whistling wind making little twisters of fallen leaves and scraps of paper. The sky was an ominous shade of dull greenish-gray, late afternoon fading into a heavily overcast early evening, the clouds heavy and gray, threatening a storm. But what was so unnatural was the absolute hush, the kind of non-sound that always seemed to envelop a place before all hell broke loose. Somehow, it felt to Morgan that whatever was going to hit this city was a lot more than just a storm, or even heavy artillery. It was so quiet she could hear her pulse throbbing in her ears; the slow crawl of goose bumps running up her arms and shoulders, the nape of her neck, and her scalp made her want to reach for her sidearm, concealed in a shoulder holster under her leather jacket. The weight of the pistol under her left arm was strangely reassuring, as was the faintly tannic, chemical tang of her jacket, still new enough to creak softly with her movements. As Morgan reached for her transfer documents, she had the faintest feeling that she wasn't alone, and turning to her left, she glimpsed a pale, ethereal figure that vanished as soon as she'd thought she seen it, leaving a sense of forlorn loneliness behind. Frowning slightly, she looked at her transfer documents again, just to see if she had missed anything in the first few times she had read them. There was a photograph that had accompanied the papers, scrawled over with black Sharpie in a curly, feminine hand, "Morgan, I'll pick you up at the airport," and signed in a wildly unreadable series of loops, punctuated with little hearts. In the photograph was a striking, dark-haired woman in her mid-to-late twenties, dressed in a pair of cutoffs and a tank top, beside what looked like a low-slung sports car, although it was hard to tell in the picture. What could have caused this state of emergency? Nothing seemed to indicate why the residents of Tokyo-3 had been presumably evacuated to shelters. All in all, it did look like quite the city, a huge sprawling expanse of concrete jungle, punctuated with occasional bursts of greenery, the artificial topology too-cleverly replanted with supposedly natural-looking shrubs and trees. She wondered if it had ever occurred to the planners of this city that the slopes were too perfectly irregular, or that the trees were simply too gnarled, cute, and definitively treelike to be natural looking. After a moment, she sat down on the curb, considering her next action carefully, cool gray-blue eyes alert and patient. It was a strange sight, a leggy, coltish girl of fourteen sitting on the pavement in a deserted city as though she belonged there. In her slightly large leather jacket and her faded, well-worn jeans, she could have been mistaken for a boy, if not for the seeming delicacy of her features. The growing wind blew wisps of her fine dark hair around, ruffling the short-cropped strands like an invisible hand, and blowing more grit on her faded, scuffed combat boots. What most people wouldn't notice was the tone of her muscles that showed her deceptive strength, or the small ways in which she arranged herself to be ready for anything. She'd been born into the military, and had followed in the footsteps of her mother and grandfather as soon as she had been old enough to know which way a gun was supposed to be pointed, training with her mother, and learning tactics and strategy with her grandfather in endless games of chess. At the stage where most other children had been reading fairy tales, she had been reading Sun Tzu's Art Of War. Unarmed combat and sniper training had taken the place of tea parties and dollhouse antics, and Morgan would never even think of having it any other way. Pondering the nature of her transfer letter, she gnawed on her lower lip thoughtfully, the tip of her tongue finding a flake of dry skin coming loose. It was much less informative than the norm, probably due to the highly classified nature of the organization to which she was being transferred. There wasn't much she knew about NERV; those people knew how to keep secrets, even from the UN, whose command her parent unit worked under. Suddenly, the silence was blown apart by the shriek of aircraft engines. Standing almost instantly, her hand moving automatically to draw her gun, she looked up to see the faint trail left by a pair of combat aerodynes, and two diminishing specks in the far horizon. Before she could think on it, the deafening, ringing silence left in the wake of the aircraft was disrupted by the screech of brakes. A blue car, identical to the one in the photograph, pulled up scant inches from Morgan's position, and the driver opened the passenger-side door. She was the same woman in the photograph, except in a fitted dress, and a jacket that looked cut to be part of a uniform. Driving gloves and wraparound shades completed the outfit, and if Morgan hadn't noticed the rank insignia on the collar, she might have assumed that the woman was a civilian. "Captain -- " Morgan started, but was cut off mid-sentence. "I'm Misato Katsuragi. You must be Morgan Heidern. Sorry I'm late." Morgan climbed in and shut the door, throwing her only luggage, a battered green duffel bag, in the backseat, before putting on her seatbelt. Only then did she notice the small gold cross hanging from a necklace around Misato's neck, and noted that she was most probably not carrying a sidearm. Her jacket just didn't seem to hang the way it would have if she were carrying a pistol in a concealed shoulder holster. "I must say, you look quite different from the photographs we have on file. Why the sudden haircut?" Misato asked as she engaged first gear and slammed the vehicle down the empty road at what looked to be at least 60 miles an hour. "Training accident." Morgan volunteered no further details in the silence that followed, her cool gaze fixed on the horizon ahead. "Do you have your transfer documents with you?" Misato seemed to have given up on small talk, when faced with Morgan's silence, and moved straight to business. Wordlessly, Morgan reached into her jacket pocket and fished out the much-folded papers, as well as the photograph, and handed them over. Misato gave them a quick once-over, and then reached for a binder, and handed it back, with the transfer papers wedged in between the cover and the first page. The binder was surprisingly heavy, and on its cover it bore some faintly ominous-looking text. NERV Personnel Handbook, it read, in a solid, blockish font. Morgan immediately flipped to the first page and started looking through it. "This should tell all you need to know while you're working for us," Misato said, as the car roared along a deserted highway. "Captain Katsuragi -- " Morgan didn't get very far before Misato interrupted her. "Just call me Misato, okay?" "...Misato, what happened? Most, if not all, of the residents appear to have been evacuated. What is the situation?" The girl's head was turned to look out of the passenger side window, and Misato noticed a faint, healing scar along the curve of her ear. No answer was needed, for as they approached the center of Tokyo-3, the cause of the current emergency state was revealed. Silhouetted against the darkening sky, a huge, looming humanoid thing was busy destroying a squad of combat aerodynes. As they watched, an immense missile -- one that Morgan recognized as the largest of the UN's land-based, non-nuclear ordnance -- flew at the huge creature from between two of the aerodynes. The thing caught the front of the missile in one spindly claw, and the missile's casing started to shred before it exploded. The aerodynes bucked in the shockwave, and the creature appeared unaffected as it strode forward, knocking another two aerodynes down as it moved. Misato heard a soft gasp, and then Morgan spoke, "It's an Angel, isn't it?" "They're back," Misato confirmed. Then she blinked. "How do you know about Angels?" "When I was identified as the Third Child, I was formally commissioned in my grandfather's unit and briefed on what I would need to know. That includes what really happened during the Second Impact." Misato pulled the car over to the side of the highway as soon as they exited Tokyo-3 proper and could get a good view of the battle with the Angel. It was immensely tall, about a hundred meters by Morgan's best guess, mostly a green so dark it was almost black, but with a strange white masklike thing in between its shoulders. Morgan guessed that that was what passed for its face. Directly underneath the face was what looked like an external ribcage, protecting a red orb dead center in the thing's chest. Misato pulled a pair of field glasses out of the glove compartment and handed a second pair to Morgan. They watched several more fighter jets fire at the creature; the Angel ignored most of it, but paused to swat one out of the air. Suddenly, all the aircraft in the area turned and fled. Morgan was already out of the car and running for the opposite side of the road; Misato peeled the car around and into the ditch Morgan was heading for. Morgan kept her head down as Misato jumped out of the car and flattened out next to her. "It just got out of the shop," Misato explained. The bright flash of a high-powered explosion cut off any further conversation. A few seconds latter, the bang followed the flash, and Morgan and Misato risked looking up. The high-speed winds of the shockwave blew their hair around; in the distance, in a crater that had to be fifty meters deep, the spindly black thing seemed to be inert. "Did they kill it?" Morgan asked. "That was an N2 mine, wasn't it?" "Yes, it was, and I'd be surprised if even that was enough to kill it," Misato replied. "It probably just slowed it down." Seeming to rush to prove her right, the Angel jerked suddenly. It had been affected, it seemed, by the blast; the face looked like it was split... no, it wasn't split. The face had been moved by the impact, and a second one was visible beneath it. The Angel pulled its feet out of the glassy floor of the crater, and began its slow walk to the heart of Tokyo-3 once again. "Back in!" Misato ordered. Almost before Morgan had her door shut, the car was moving again. As soon as the wheels got out of the dirt and back onto the highway, Morgan heard a distinctive squealing sound, and they were off again, headed towards an underground tunnel. They emerged after a few moments into a cavern so huge that Morgan couldn't even see the far end. It looked like the city -- which had seemed a little small -- was hanging suspended from the roof of the cavern like a collection of giant icicles, and the very sight of it boggled the mind, especially when the car was hurtling rapidly down a very highly elevated, and seemingly fragile, freeway. Miles below was a huge lake, buildings encroaching on its shores. A fine network of suspended freeways spread out from what Morgan guessed was a central point in the cavern's geometry. It was an amazing sight to behold, well worth the faint sense of unease that came from looking at something so vast. Morgan didn't know why, but as far as she could remember she had always had a faint fear of spatial disorientation, and when faced with this construct like an Escher painting come to life, she felt faintly uneasy, and somewhat nauseous. "This is a Geo-Front," she guessed. Misato nodded. "This is your new home while your under NERV's command." She pointed to a building like an Aztec pyramid that, even in the scale of the Geo-Front, looked huge. "And that is Central Dogma." The freeway curved gently towards the bottom of the huge spherical cavern, eventually reaching a short section of road before coming to another underground tunnel, and Morgan found herself able to ignore the disorientation by simply not looking up. She wondered what her reassignment to NERV meant, and why they would want a fourteen-year-old girl working for them, as well as how the returning Angels tied into the whole equation. The car flew down the freeway, and peeled down a road aiming straight for Central Dogma. They went faster and faster, the needle going well past the 100kph mark, until Morgan couldn't help wondering if they were going to drive *through* Central Dogma. Abruptly, Misato swung the wheel in a completes circle and slammed on the brakes, and the tires screeched a protest as they car skidded perfectly into a parking space marked, in Japanese kanji that Morgan could only partly read, for Captain Katsuragi. Misato led Morgan out of the car and to a huge metal gate in the side of the pyramid, which a swipe of Misato's ID card opened. The interior of the pyramidal building called Central Dogma was a dizzyingly complex, mazelike warren of identical hallways, elevators, escalators, and large, ambiguously labeled rooms and chambers. It seemed ridiculously easy to get lost here, especially with the apparent lack of directions, and the twisting, turning passageways and corridors. That seemed to be the case now, as Misato wandered from hall to hall for what seemed like an eternity. Now they stood in yet another elevator, Morgan wondering how long Misato was going to take to get where they were supposed to be. Then, the elevator halted gently, and with a quiet, unobtrusive "ding," the door slid open, to reveal a coldly attractive woman, whose ID badge identified as AKAGI, RITSUKO. Akagi was a total contrast to Misato, bleached-blonde chin-length bob, fitted blue top and black miniskirt contrasted with a pristine white lab coat. Her presence seemed to unsettle Misato a little, who managed a weak, "Um, hi, Ritsuko." Ritsuko stepped in and pushed Misato aside, her voice faintly annoyed as she spoke, "Rather slow, aren't you, Captain Katsuragi? How much more time are you going to waste? The Angel is almost on top of us." "Sorry, Ritsuko. I... got lost... again," Misato replied sheepishly, a faint flush coming into her cheeks. Morgan felt an icy gaze brush against her, appraising and dispassionate, as Ritsuko regarded her coldly. "This is the one?" the blond woman asked. Morgan had encountered looks like these in dress inspection, but somehow now she felt as though more than just conduct and attire were being appraised. "Yes, according to the Marduk Report, she's the Third Child. Morgan Heidern. She's a recent transfer from her parent unit with the UN security forces." Misato was looking at a data pad in her hand, presumably displaying Morgan's file. "Morgan Heidern, this is Dr. Ritsuko Akagi, Technical Director." Morgan turned back to reading the manual as she walked along behind them, out of the elevator and down a long escalator, paying attention to their conversation with half an ear. Something about testing synchronization, which made little sense to her. She guessed that it would make some sense sooner or later; with the way things were happening right now, she was taking it as it came. Wherever they were headed, it sounded like a very large place, going by the echoes of their footfalls resounding against the walls. When Morgan looked up from the book, after nearly colliding with Misato, she found that they were standing in a huge, cavernous room on a metal catwalk suspended over some sort of pinkish liquid. It looked eerily like bloodstained bathwater, and the whole room reminded her of a submarine base she'd been in a year earlier. What caught her attention almost instantly, however, was a massive set of head and shoulders, fixed to the wall by gigantic bolted mechanisms around those same immense shoulders, going over where the collarbone would be if it had been a human being. It was covered in purple armor that reminded her, strangely, of a lobster's shell, and a pair of eerily alert, slit-like eyes stared her down, seemingly watching for her next action. She'd heard rumors of a black project budget designated for the design of humanoid war machines, but this was the first time she'd gotten conclusive proof that they existed. She wondered why it seemed to be watching her, and why she felt a sudden echo in her head that hadn't been there previously. Further down the catwalk was a wheeled gurney, on which lay a boy around her age, apparently seriously injured. His eggshell white skin was so pale it seemed to glow, almost the same color as the bandages covering most of his torso, from what she could see from the white uniform he was wearing, and his fine hair was sweat-soaked, the color of dull pewter. A single pain-dulled red eye looked wearily up at the newcomers in the room, the other one covered with bandages. One arm was wrapped in a heavy cast, and there was an IV line trailing from the crook of his other arm. Standing over the whole tableau, in a glass-encased chamber high above, like a priest at the pulpit, was an imposing man, dark-haired, with tinted spectacles on. He was most probably Commander Gendou Ikari, the head of NERV, according to the folder Misato had given her. If the feeling Morgan had gotten from Dr. Akagi was cool appraisal, she felt as though this man was regarding her with a mixture of impatience and curiosity. "Commander Ikari, this is the Third Child, as presented in the Marduk Report." Misato had stepped forward, looking up at the console where the Commander stood, holding up the data pad and reading through the information. "If she proves compatible, we won't have to send Kyo out in this condition." The boy, clearly the Kyo Misato was talking about, was struggling to rise, sharp exhalations of pain escaping gritted teeth, as he leaned heavily against the gurney in a crouch. "I'll... I'll do it, Commander," he managed to say, his voice raspy and thin with agony. Morgan saw beads of sweat roll down his face, dripping off his chin and mingling with his tears. He was clearly in no condition to do anything. Before anything more could be said, a low rumble ran through the building, and the chamber started to rock as though in an earthquake. The gurney started to tip, and to her horror, Morgan watched as the boy fell onto the catwalk, his cry of pain nearly drowned out by the roar of sound. Sprinting to his side, Morgan didn't heed the mess of debris falling from the ceiling until a wrenching, splashing sound echoed through the chamber, and she looked up to see the robot's huge hand and arm, raised out of the liquid to shield her from the chunks of concrete and metal. She bit her lip as Kyo's head lolled heavily against the crook of her arm, feeling strangely protective over this wounded boy, and at the same time trying to comprehend how the robot could move, when clearly nobody was at the controls. Kyo was obviously in too much pain to do much of anything, and as her free hand brushed damp, pale hair away from a shock-ashen face, she felt hot, sticky blood soak into her jeans from wounds reopened in the fall. The commander and Ritsuko were looking at each other, and the machine, with some kind of bitter triumph, even as Misato walked to Morgan's side. "Morgan," Ritsuko said, in a carefully modulated voice, "This is the Test Type Model of the artificial life form, Evangelion Unit 01." There was a brief pause, punctuated only by the slow drip of liquid from the outstretched hand of the EVA, still suspended over Morgan, and Kyo's rasping, pain-labored gasps. "It is not a robot, as you may think; it is far, far more." "You will pilot it, and destroy the Angel." Commander Ikari's tone, as his voice resonated out from his console, made it clear that it was a command, not a request. He stood grimly surveying the strange scene; Morgan holding Kyo in a pose reminiscent of a Renaissance Pieta, the yellow eyes of the EVA patiently observing them, while Misato and Ritsuko stood like witnesses to the Crucifixion. Morgan looked back down into Kyo's face, and she knew that if they were asking her this, then she was probably the only person who could do it, even if the very idea made her uneasy. What a fine mission this was turning out to be. Still, she couldn't shirk responsibility. She would do it, or die trying. Her mother had told her enough times: orders were orders, no matter what they might cost the soldier. Staring back into the eyes of the Evangelion, gray-blue gaze meeting an unflinching yellow one, Morgan spoke. "Morgan Heidern reporting for duty, Sir." This isn't too bad, Morgan thought as she looked around the entry plug of the EVA unit. The bloodstain on her jeans leg was drying to a dull brownish stain, stiffening the denim. She had left her leather jacket and sidearm behind, reckoning that they wouldn't do much good in the cockpit of a giant humanoid war machine. The pilot's seat was a rather comfortable half-reclining seat, and lining the walls were seamless display screens, currently offline and going through a colorful screen-saver of sorts, displaying mutating fractal images. Good thing she wasn't claustrophobic. The cockpit space was narrow, but just large enough for her to shift comfortably. It was definitely much more pleasant than a SDV, or Swimmer Delivery Vehicle. Morgan had never been trained for those, but she had seen them up close, and they had struck her as dark, dank, and claustrophobic. How someone substantially larger than her could spend hours in one during mission prep and training was beyond her. The only thing that really bothered her was that the whole narrow space seemed to smell faintly of blood, a faint iron tang in the air, slightly salty. Before she could think too much on that, however, she was interrupted by the sound of Ritsuko's voice. "Can you hear me, Morgan?" It struck her as vaguely illogical. If Ritsuko couldn't be heard, asking if she was wouldn't really matter. "Affirmative." A sudden, familiar sensation seemed to fill Morgan, a mix of anticipation and fear. The thrill of battle, the fear of death. "Good. Are you ready?" Morgan took a deep breath, and let it out. This was it. "Affirmative." Her voice didn't show the sudden, illogical fear that she had started to feel, her heart thudding between her sternum and spine much faster than normal. "Begin synchronization procedure. Begin the first connection, and flood entry plug with LCL." Morgan forced her fists to unclench, and regulated her breathing, as the screens stopped displaying the fractal test patterns, and cycled through a few other patterns, before coming fully online and displaying a status screen. Just then, she watched as the entry plug filled with a cool, yellowish liquid with much the same relative viscosity as spit, and fought off a momentary spike of panic as it reached chest level. "Don't worry," Misato's voice came from the speakers just as the fluid rose above head level, "You can breathe the LCL. It will oxygenate your blood directly." It didn't feel all that bad, except for a slight congested feeling in her chest as she coughed up a stream of bubbles, and the sudden sting in her nose as she got used to inhaling a liquid oxygenation medium. The smell of blood was somewhat stronger now, but not overwhelming. Her heart rate slowed again, as she got used to the sensation, and managed to convince herself that she was not in immediate danger. Ritsuko Akagi watched the status displays as the large main monitor reported synchronization taking place smoothly, the nerve blocks connecting one by one. There didn't seem to be any problems with the activation as the synchronization approached baseline. Green spread through the monitor display as each nerve block was connected, showing nominal status. It appeared that Morgan was meshing unnaturally well with whatever passed for a sentience in Unit-01, and that might have been frightening to a less clinical mind than Ritsuko's. "Connect to the main power supply, transmit power to all circuits." Console techs were going through the checklists, much like a pilot would perform a preflight check before takeoff. "Commencing second contact. Connection to the A-10 nerve is operational." Morgan's sense of balance went crazy for a second, as two sets of sensory information overlapped, conflicted, and then meshed. For a single, precarious moment, she was both half-reclining in a cockpit, and standing tall, braced up by gantries. And then the sensation resolved itself, and she was suddenly aware of the massive body her mind seemed to be able to feel with. And just when she was convincing herself it was all right, she felt parts of her mind start to float away, as though a formerly well-defined border had dissolved and let foreign thoughts drift in. It was unsettling, as though some part of her brain in the back of her head was suddenly receiving ghost signals from a badly tuned radio station, transmitting a faint chorus of dissonant howls. A sudden surge of nausea rose up inside her, making her shiver as she tried to fight it off. "All initial contacts are set. English has been set as the operating language for control." "Synchronization is holding steady at 41.3%," reported the main console tech, Maya Ibuki. "Excellent for a first synchronization," Ritsuko commented. "Especially considering which unit she's piloting." "All harmonics values are normal. Everything is under control." "Morgan, how do you feel?" Misato asked over the communications system. "Like... like I'm between two radio stations," Morgan replied faintly. "My head feels strange. Not quite painful, but --" "It takes some getting used to. We're prepping unit launch soon." "Can we do this, Dr Ikari?" Ritsuko had turned her back to the huge display unit, and was looking to the back of the room where Commander Ikari was standing, his face bearing the stillborn ghost of a smile. Somehow, he seemed... smug, as he replied with his usual poker face, "Humanity has no future if we don't." Ritsuko returned his cold expression with an thoughtful look herself, before turning back to face the monitor. "Captain Katsuragi, over to you." Misato's smile faded, replaced by cold resolve. "Prepare EVA Unit-01 for launch. We'll use Gate 15." Inside the entry plug of the EVA unit, Morgan was struggling with the new thoughts in her head, when she felt a shudder pass through the whole unit. From what she could tell with her new sense of balance, the EVA was being moved, along with its gantry. She looked out through the side monitor, and saw the huge suspension pool being drained, gates overhead being opened, and the expansion grate catwalks being moved away. Above it, a series of gates opened, giving her a view into a dizzyingly long tunnel, so high it narrowed into a vanishing point somewhere far, far over the EVA's head. "Exit path clear, EVA-01 is ready for launch," Maya Ibuki reported from her console. You don't have to like it, you just have to do it, Morgan told herself, remembering the many times her grandfather had told her that. Orders were orders. She gritted her teeth and did her best to screen out the whispering, crackling howls in her head. "EVA-01, stand by for launch." "Affirmative." This was what her mother would call a SNAFU. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. There she was, no training at all, and yet the only mission-capable pilot for this hundred-meter-tall war machine. Murphy was most probably sitting on her shoulder right now, cackling. "Launch!" Misato's order seemed shouted, even through the cockpit speaker systems. Magnetic induction rails on the sides of the gantry launched the EVA unit up the wall at dizzying speed, reducing everything to a blur of movement. Morgan felt gravity weigh down on her, pushing her down in her seat like a freefall in reverse. The sensation was strangely like the times she'd zip-lined down to her objectives, except less enjoyable. Less than twenty seconds later, an emergency hatch opened in the middle of an empty junction, with sirens blaring and emergency lights flashing. EVA-01 emerged and crashed to a shuddering halt. Dimly, Morgan noticed that evening had fallen already, the sky now a deep twilight purple. Discarding the thought as irrelevant, Morgan glanced at the monitors, looking at the silent, dead city. The EVA seemed to tower over everything, and she had the vague sense of standing in a toy city built for some brat prince. Some way down the street stood the hunched, looming form of the Angel, already turning towards the EVA, its long, gangly arms swinging like pendulums. "Release the gantry interlock." Misato's order was followed by a sharp mechanical sound, as the bolts holding the EVA to the gantry snapped back, allowing it to sag forward under its own weight. There was a sudden, blind moment of panic, as Morgan felt a sensation of falling, and heard the whispers grow somewhat louder. Her mind... itched, and badly. "Ok, concentrate on walking, Morgan." Misato's voice gave Morgan something to anchor her scrambled mind on. Pushing everything aside, Morgan tried, and found the EVA taking a slow, hesitant step forward. The sound of that single, massive footfall caused the surrounding buildings to rumble in sympathetic vibration, windowpanes rattling from the movement. She tried another step, but a sudden stab of vertigo hit her, sending the EVA reeling as a fresh burst of sound assaulted her mind. "Get up, Morgan!" Misato yelled over the communications channel as Morgan fought off another wave of nausea. Before she could do anything, though, the EVA lurched as a massive claw wrapped around its head and hauled it up roughly. Its feet dangled off the ground like a those of a hanged man, swinging ever so slightly. The Angel gripped the EVA's left arm tightly in its other claw, making Morgan gasp in pain. "Morgan, it's not your arm!" Morgan dimly heard Misato yelling. "The AT Field isn't unfolding!" Maya's shout cut in, making almost no sense as Morgan tried to fight off the pain and the voices in her head. It was utterly nauseating, as the ghostly howling in the back of her head grew louder with the pain. The comm transmissions just made it worse. "It's useless?!" Ritsuko sounded as though she was on the verge of panic herself. There was a loud, popping sound followed by a dry snap as the Angel first dislocated, and then broke the EVA's left arm, the armor completely shattered. Morgan let out a single, short cry of agony; it was as though someone had done the same to her own arm. The pain was like black fire lancing down her nerves. "The left arm has been damaged! The circuits have been snapped!" "Morgan, try to break free!" Misato shouted over the comm line, desperate. A bright spike of light assaulted Morgan's vision, and pain lanced through her right eye. Unbearable pain. She could barely hear the voices from the control room, and couldn't have understood what they were saying if she had been able to try. Her vision faded out, retinal flares caused by the brightness blossoming red and violet behind closed eyes. Such pain. Had it been like this when Grandfather lost his own eye? Her last conscious thought echoed and died in the vast emptiness of the EVA's inhuman mind, as she was swept away on a tide of pain. The armor gave under the relentless assault of the energy lance, and it punched through the EVA's head, sending the whole machine crashing against a building, broken arm flopping uselessly beside it. What looked very much like blood spurted out from both sides of the wound, surging like a pair of geysers. The command center back in Central Dogma was in a state of chaos. "Head damaged! Extent unknown!" "We're having trouble maintaining activity!" "What's the status?" Misato's voice was now very concerned indeed. "Sync rate has reversed! Pulses flowing backward!" Ritsuko shouted over the din of alarms and worried voices, "Cut the circuits! Stop them!" "It's useless! The signal has been refused! Monitoring systems unresponsive! Pilot's physical status unknown!" "Unit-01 has gone completely silent!" "Misato!" Ritsuko's voice bore an edge of desperation as she turned to the tactician. "Mission abort! Pilot's protection and recovery has top priority. Eject the plug by force!" "We can't! Unit-01 is totally out of our control!" "What?!" Morgan felt very warm and sleepy, as she drifted weightlessly in a blood-warm sea. The right side of her head and her left arm throbbed heavily, a phantom pain still haunting her as she lay in this contented peace. She was lost in this warmth, almost all identity and feeling gone for now, except for the urge to just shut her eyes and go to sleep. There was a faint, purple light flickering around her, and vaguely, the little fragment of consciousness in her head wondered if this was death. If so, a lazy, soothing voice somewhere else in her head whispered, this wasn't such a bad thing, was it? As if in response, some animal rage in her hindbrain came alive, howling. As the world was washed a bloody crimson, she heard a second, greater voice joining her in that defiant scream. A terrifying, hungry rage burned deep inside her, surging from the base of her spine, and filling her head with a cleansing fire. She was alive. Back in the control room, the monitor filled with green as the synchronization rate increased to 76%. "Unit-01 restarted!" Ibuki shouted in surprise as the status readout updated itself. "But... it can't be..." Ritsuko whispered in a kind of awe as the EVA's remaining eye blazed yellow, and it lurched back upright, a wail emanating from its throat as its sharply-angled jaw snapped open. "We'll win," the commander remarked coldly, as he watched the EVA crouch on all fours like a beast, and then spring into the air. Its first strike was met with resistance, as the Angel's AT Field manifested, the giant fist of the EVA glancing off the force field. Apparently without effort, the EVA flexed its left hand, and its shattered left arm regenerated, including the armor, and then it tore at the AT Field with both hands, roaring loudly. "Left arm has regenerated!" someone shouted, unnecessarily. "Incredible... " Ritsuko murmured. Misato watched, rapt, as ghostly purple flames seemed to materialize around the EVA's hands, negating the Angel's AT-Field. Out of the corner of one eye, she saw one of the screens displaying data readings analyzing the phenomenom. "What have we created?" she murmured to herself. She didn't have time to think again, as the Angel counterattacked with another energy blast from a spindly claw, but this time it didn't seem to bother the enraged EVA at all. Instead, the EVA lunged forward, a screaming a wail that caused most of the windows in the city to rattle in sympathetic harmonic vibration, and knocked the Angel off its feet, skidding to a halt against a building. Savagely, it kept tearing at the glowing red sphere in the chest of the angel, first scratching, and then pounding at it, snapping off one of the Angel's rib spikes to jab into the sphere, sending spurts of blue blood spraying. As the sphere began to crack, it started to pulse with a rhythmic glow, and then the Angel wrapped itself around the EVA, in a gel-like mass of rubbery flesh. "It's going to self-destruct!" someone in the control room shouted. The resulting blaze of purple flame and blue light left most of the observers flash-blind for several seconds, and leveled most of the adjacent buildings. In the center of the devastation stood EVA Unit-01, no longer the raging beast it had been a brief moment ago. "Circuits have been reconnected, the system has returned to normal." "Pilot's survival has been confirmed." Misato heaved a sigh of relief as she got the news. "Recovery squad. Pilot's protection is the top priority." Morgan's vision was fuzzy, and her head hurt. The only memories she had had after the blackout was that sudden rage, and then an explosion so bright it had felt as though someone had flash-fried her brain. After the ringing in her ears had faded and her vision had returned to relative normalcy, there was an utter, absolute sense of silence that had made her wonder if she had gone deaf. After a few moments of careful waiting, she realized that it seemed so quiet because the voices she had been hearing since she had started the synchronization process had gone silent. Now, all she felt was a hollow, empty peace, the kind of quiet found in an empty crypt, long abandoned. There was still an occasional whisper from the EVA, but it had mostly gone silent. There was a loud crash, as the armor on the EVA's head came loose and fell to the ground, raising a cloud of dust near the massive feet. The side monitor switched to an external camera position, and Morgan found herself looking at the dull brown head below the armor, much more humanoid than she'd expected, and almost totally featureless. There was a pale scar where its eye had been, but no outward wound. As Morgan continued staring back at it, the flesh rippled for a moment, a slit opened in it, and then a large green eye budded from the socket, and blinked once. The main iris contracted, and then dilated as three secondary irii, set in the main pupil, around it compensated. She gazed at it for a moment, and then felt vertigo and nausea slowly surge up, riding on a feeling like she was seeing her own insides and her own eye all at the same time, like staring at two mirrors that faced each other and finding oneself riding a photon that bounced between them. Then, mercifully, blackness overcame her. Ritsuko Akagi did a double take as she saw that at a certain point, the synchronization rate had approached an 87% peak for a millisecond or two, and requested a double-check on the data. All Gendou Ikari did was smile faintly, and the platform on which he had been standing while observing the fight sank slowly into the floor with a mechanical whir. Things were going according to plan, indeed. --- o/~ [Closing title] Live - Face and Ghost (The Children's Song) o/~ Evangelion Densetsu web presence (by Laudre): http://www.drelau.com/creations/eva-d/ Evangelion Densetsu LiveJournal (Announcements and such): http://www.livejournal.com/users/eva_densetsu/ Comments, criticism, death threats, and marriage proposals to laudre@null.net (Laudre) and loremaster_evil@hotmail.com (Lore). ------------------------------ From: laudre@null.net (Sean Simpson) Subject: [Eva/KoF][FanFic] Evangelion Densetsu 02: Welcome to Tokyo-3 X-Moderation-Queue-Date: 15 Mar 2002 12:20:47 -0800 o/~ [Main Title] Lunatic Calm - Leave You Far Behind o/~ L D S F A N W O R K S (a division of Drelau Productions) - and - C Y A N I D E B R E A T H M I N T P R O D U C T I O N S - proudly present - E V A N G E L I O N D E N S E T S U inspired by and based on: Neon Genesis Evangelion by Anno, Gainax, et. al. - The King of Fighters '94 and sequels by SNK - Fatal Fury and sequels by SNK - and other sources that will be credited as they come along --- Written by Sean "Laudre" Simpson and Mel "Loremaster" Wong [=-------------------------------------------------------------------=] Neon Genesis Evangelion and related concepts and characters belong to Gainax. The King of Fighters, Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and related characters and concepts belong to SNK, or whoever owns that IP now. This work is not intended as a challenge to any of those copyrights or intellectual property rights; this work is intended to demonstrate respect towards those properties and to the minds behind them, and is done in fun only. In other words, while this story is our work, it's based on a bunch of other people's work, and you should go watch Evangelion and play SNK video games. If any of the copyright owners asked us to cease and desist distribution of this work, we'd have to comply. So we're trying to play fair, and we hope you do too. [=-------------------------------------------------------------------=] CHAPTER 02: WELCOME TO TOKYO-3 --- "Ikari. You could use NERV, and the EVA project, in better, more efficient ways," one of the ghostly faces stated. The conference room was dark except for the tiny holographic figures of EVA Unit-01 and the Third Angel fighting it out, again and again, like a pair of masterfully detailed, autonomous toys. The light reflected off grim faces, and made them seem to hover above a dark emptiness. Gendou Ikari's face was an expressionless mask as he listened to the committee's recurrent complaints about the way he was handling the EVA project. "The cost for the repairs on Unit-01 already equals the GNP of a small nation," another said. "Lives, time and money. How much will you waste until you are satisfied?" This one from a long-nosed, birdlike man whose own holographic image sat closest to Ikari. "Besides, Ikari, you have another job to do," said the visored, ageless figure at the head of the table. Gendou looked at the report before him, on the smooth, featureless tabletop. TOP SECRET HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITY PROGRAM TOP-LEVEL EXECUTIVE COUNCIL 17TH INTERIM REPORT HUMAN INSTRUMENTALITY COMMITTEE PROJECT OUTLINES FOR FISCAL 2015 SUMMARY "Your highest priority remains the Human Instrumentality Program," the head figure continued. A grim, humorless smile spread over Gendou's face like a slow, rolling fog. "That's right. That project is our only hope in the current circumstances," the birdlike man interjected. "Even with the second coming of the Angels, we must not allow this project to fall behind schedule. We will consider the budgetary concerns, Ikari," the first man added. "The committee will continue deliberations in private," the committee head announced. Gendou rose easily, holding the folder under his arm, his tinted glasses reflecting the dim lighting in the room. "There is no turning back now, Ikari," the committee head said, as the other holographic images faded out. "I know. There is no more time left for humanity," Gendou responded. With that, Gendou Ikari turned sharply around, and left, his footsteps echoing in the dark, silent room. The area where the Angel had self-destructed was cordoned off, with large "Danger! Keep Out!" signs everywhere one looked. Near the middle of the rubble-filled area, where the reconstruction and recovery was taking place, was a tent erected as a temporary office and command center for the senior onsite NERV staff. Inside, Misato Katsuragi flipped through various television channels aimlessly, watching the news reports on the previous day's battle. "Looks like Scenario D-22 for the press. They're covering it up again," Misato observed, fanning herself while cycling through several essentially identical news reports. It was hellishly hot out, even under the shade of the tent. "The staff in the Public Relations department seem happy to finally have something to do," Ritsuko said calmly, paying no attention to the television as she entered data into a portable computer console at her usual dizzyingly rapid rate. She seemed to not even notice the ovenlike heat; not so much as a bead of sweat was visible on her forehead. "They seem optimistic." Misato had given up on the television and returned to fanning herself in an attempt to cool down. "Well, the truth is, everyone is afraid." Ritsuko commented matter of factly, never looking away from her work. Ghostly snatches of conversation echoed through empty hallways, fading, forgotten. There was a faint sense of movement, of directionless drifting in an empty ocean, and then a faint, buzzing sound. The sound persisted, and Morgan's distant mind dimly identified it as a cicada's call. Moving slightly, she grew aware of a bitter, antiseptic scent in the air, and opened her eyes to a light so bright, it sent spikes of pain jabbing into her eye sockets. Squinting blearily, she made out an unfamiliar ceiling, and sunlight streaming in from the gap between the curtains on the side wall. Her head felt immensely heavy; when she tried to lift her head, it felt as though her scrambled brains were sloshing around in her cranium like water in a bucket. Fighting the disorientation, Morgan sat up in the bed and waited for the resulting headache to fade before looking around the small, square hospital room. Outside, the cicada continued its droning, high-pitched buzz. After a few moments, Morgan got out of bed, and rode out the headrush before walking to the door to look out into the hallway. Standing in the doorway, one hand on the frame, she saw a bed being wheeled through the corridor by a doctor and a nurse. The constant beep of some medical equipment and the squeak of the wheels grew louder as they neared her room, and the occupant of the bed looked up at her with a single red eye. It was Kyo, the boy who had struggled to pilot the EVA even when gravely wounded, and she had the sudden sense of his weight in her arms again, his head lolling back, limp against her arm. The faint disorientation of deja vu hit her, making her feel as though she'd somehow known him many years ago. The moment faded almost before it had started, leaving her with the sense of something dying, as she looked up to see Gendou Ikari, walking close by Kyo's bed, protectively and somewhat possessively. He glanced briefly at her, nodded once, slightly, in acknowledgement, and then continued on his way, without a single word. Morgan wondered why she abruptly felt so cold. "I've always thought that the air conditioner was the greatest treasure of humanity!" Misato said as she leaned back into the seat of the truck heading back to Central Dogma, opening her shirt slightly to give greater access to the cool air and allowing the sweat to evaporate that much quicker. "It's a true scientific success." "Morgan has recovered consciousness," Ritsuko said without preamble as she cradled the truck's wireless phone. "How is she?" Misato sat up straighter in her seat at the news. "No physical injuries, but she is suffering some disorientation and memory loss," Ritsuko answered. "Could it be mental contamination?" "I was told not to worry about it." Ritsuko's tone was purely clinical. Misato's mouth twisted in thought. "You think it was because it all happened so suddenly?" "Probably. There was a lot of strain on her central nervous system." "Her mind, Ritsuko. You keep forgetting," Misato chided good-naturedly. Misato arrived an hour later to handle Morgan's discharge from the infirmary. She found the girl sitting on the side of the bed, reading the NERV personnel manual, already dressed in her own faded jeans and long-sleeve shirt. "You might want these back," Misato said as she placed the paper bag she was carrying on the bed beside Morgan. Inside were Morgan's jacket and her subcompact Glock 26 pistol still in its shoulder holster, with her two spare magazines. "By the way, nice gun." "Thanks." She pulled her jacket on over her shoulder rig, and tugged at the hem so it hung more comfortably. "It's small enough to conceal on someone my height and build." Now that she had her gun and jacket with her, Morgan felt a little more comfortable, despite the slight headache she had. The doctor had told her that it would go away in a few hours, as her system recovered from the neural shock of the battle. "HQ wanted to quarter you in base housing on the outskirts of town. I decided it would be less of a hassle for you to just move in with me. Closer to the HQ as well. You don't mind, do you?" Misato said as they walked down the hallways to the parking lot, already holding the keys in her hand. "I'm fine. If it's any trouble, I can still live on my own. I'm used to taking care of myself." From anyone else, the statement might have sounded bitter; coming from Morgan, it was simply a fact. "It's no problem. Your stuff should have been shipped by now. You hungry?" They had reached Misato's parking space, and Morgan could see her own bag still in the back seat. A gnawing, growling hunger reminded Morgan how long it had been since she'd last eaten anything. "Yeah, I haven't had anything since the flight out." Morgan settled in her seat and buckled her seatbelt on, as Misato turned the key in the ignition. The engine purred smoothly, and the car turned out of the parking lot at an alarming speed. "Well, we'll get something. After all, a party is in order!" "A party?" Morgan sounded dubious. "A welcoming party for you, silly. But first, let's go someplace I'd like you to see." The sun was setting as they stood on a hill on the outskirts of the city, leaning on the railings on the edge of an observation point. Morgan's first thought was how lonely the city looked; the small, low buildings seemed to huddle around each other for warmth, and she could still see the scars of her battle with the Angel. In contrast, the sky was a wonderful shade of orange, shading into a delicate seashell-pink and the faintest violet high up. Clouds gathered in the sky, glowing with the dying sunlight, and shadowed on their edges. It was altogether a much more appealing sight than the almost barren-looking city. Only the warm glow of the setting sun brought a sense of humanity to the place, casting the sparse, squat towers in the same gold that limned Morgan and Misato. "What are we here for?" Morgan asked. "The view is nice and everything, but..." "Shh, it's time. Look!" Misato answered, pointing back to the city. A siren echoed against the hills, like the all-clear sounded after an air raid. Amid much noise, gears grinding and clacking, and the low creak of machinery, skyscrapers sprouted from among the smaller buildings, almost like flowers blooming in morning sunlight. "Those buildings hanging from the roof of the Geo-Front... they're emerging," Morgan realized. It was a sight to behold; the taller buildings reflected the dying splendor of the sun, sending the last gold rays of light glowing throughout the city. "This is Tokyo-3, the Fortress City, built as a defense against the Angels. Morgan, this is the city you saved yesterday." "It's beautiful." Morgan's voice held a faint note of awe as she looked at the city once more. There was a certain warm satisfaction at a job well done, as well as a faint glimmer of pride. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad a permanent duty station after all. Half an hour later, they had arrived at an apartment complex in the suburbs of Tokyo-3, carrying large bags of groceries (mostly instant convenience foods). Misato's apartment wasn't too bad a place, Morgan thought. Cluttered and somewhat messy, but rather nice, and apparently quite large by Japanese standards. The building was so new it still smelled like paint and plastic; not too strongly, but there was nevertheless a distinct chemical note to the air. Just outside the door was a heap of empty cardboard boxes bearing the logo of a shipping company. "I just moved in a few days ago," Misato explained. They had removed their shoes in a small foyer, Morgan remembering belatedly that the occupants usually went barefoot in Japanese homes, and then headed into a kitchenette just small enough to turn around in. Misato had headed further into the place, presumably to her own bedroom. Almost every available square inch of horizontal space had been taken up by empty beer cans; a familiar and somewhat welcome sight, to Morgan. It reminded Morgan of her mother's teammates, Ralf and Clark, her surrogate uncles, and the endless rounds of lager they would chug; the jacket she was wearing had been a farewell gift from the both of them. It was then that she realized she was homesick, not for the place she'd lived in (wasn't much in that barren desert anyway), but for the people who'd always been around her. She missed her unit, becayse even though she'd only been formally commissioned for a short while, it was her only family. She had grown up around those people, and this was the first time she had really been apart from them. "Just toss the food in the refrigerator," Misato yelled loudly from her own room, breaking Morgan's train of thought; Morgan moved efficiently to comply. There wasn't much in the refrigerator, besides ice, junk food, and beer. Lots of beer, probably several cases' worth. As Morgan arranged the groceries in the shelves, she found herself liking the friendly clutter in this place, as a pleasant reminder of home. The only thing that struck her as peculiar was the second, somewhat smaller refrigerator beside the large, beer-filled one. "What's with the other refrigerator?" Morgan asked, as Misato emerged from her own room, in cutoffs and a sleeveless top, tying her hair up in a high ponytail. She looked much less like the tactician she was, and more like a grad student, dressed for a night at home. Mother wears her hair like that, Morgan thought, in a sudden rush of homesickness that surprised her. She had never expected to feel like this, and she didn't know how to handle it. "Don't worry about it, he's probably sleeping." Sleeping? It probably was testament to how odd things had been since Morgan had arrived in Tokyo-3, that she didn't wonder about Misato having something in her house that slept in the fridge. It would probably be revealed in due time. "Ready to eat?" Misato prompted. "Yes." Morgan hung her jacket on the back of her chair, and set about helping Misato pick and choose the microwave food they'd be eating for that night's dinner. Finally, a few minutes later, it was all set down, and Morgan popped open a ginger ale, and, after a bite of a dish that didn't remind her too strongly of MREs, pronounced it ready. In response, Misato popped the beer open, and downed it in one long gulp, something that Morgan had seen Ralf and Clark do countless times before. "AAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! YEAH! I live for moments like these," Misato exclaimed, slamming the empty can on the table, drawing a faint smile out of Morgan, who had started to eat her dinner. "You know, you should smile more often, Morgan," Misato commented while winding strands of instant spaghetti around her fork. "It doesn't hurt your face to do it, and it looks good on you." That had the effect of making the faint smile widen, but the girl remained silent, concentrating on finishing her meal with impeccable manners and a voracious appetite. Privately, Misato had to remind herself that this wasn't a typical 14 year old she was looking at. According to the personnel database, Morgan had been trained as a combat operative since an early age, by a grandfather who was known for his tactical and strategic brilliance, and a mother who was currently heading a counterterrorist team under UN command. The evaluation notes were somewhat frightening. Morgan had bested opponents taller and heavier than her in unarmed combat, and was an excellent shot with pistols and rifles. Survival skills were excellent, as were physical fitness levels. It was rather jarring to look at this petite, slender girl and see a highly trained soldier. "We've made arrangements for you to attend a school near here. It's an international school, so you can take the subjects you already did, and most of the other children there have parents working for NERV." Misato said as Morgan put her plate away, and sipped at her ginger ale. "I've never been to school before." Morgan replied in a perfectly matter-of-fact voice. "You can't be serious!" Misato spluttered in reply, eyes wide with surprise. "Your personnel file says that you're up to date with school requirements. How did you do that if you haven't been to school?" "I was tutored by my grandfather and mother. I took my exams privately." "Well... I'm sure you'll adjust and get used to school life, then," Misato had the feeling that she was in way over her head when it came to dealing with this child. Morgan had already started to clear the dishes and put them in the sink, her sleeves already rolled up above her elbows. Trying to find something to say, Misato finally suggested writing up a roster for household chores. "How's about we play Janken for it? Rock-paper-scissors, I mean. Loser does the chores." After a few moments of silence, Morgan finally spoke, over the clink of dishes being washed. "I'll just do the odd days and you can do the even." Misato sighed. Conversation with the girl was like pulling teeth. "Isn't this nice, having someone around for dinner?" she finally came up with. "I guess it is. I'm used to having more people around, though." There was a faint sadness in her voice as the dishes were dried and put away, the set of her shoulders eloquent in the silence that followed. Suddenly Morgan seemed more like a lost, homesick kid more than the efficient, effective soldier her personnel file made her out to be; disoriented by all the changes that had happened in such a short span of time. "Well, go have a bath, and wash those bad thoughts away." Misato said, putting on a cheerful tone of voice, waving her hand in a shooing motion. "It's good to take some time out and clear your mind." "All right," Morgan rummaged in the battered bag she had brought and pulled out a large towel, a toiletry bag, and a change of clothing. Slinging the towel over her shoulder, she headed straight into the bathroom without a word. The bathroom was fairly roomy: a sink, toilet and mirror separated from the actual bath by a wall with a sliding door. Morgan set the towel, clothes and bag on the countertop of the sink, and then removed her shoulder holster. Glancing around, she decided to hang it from a towel hook, and then proceeded to undress, idly watching herself in the mirror as she did so. The face staring back at her was almost a twin of her mother's: eyes so pale they seemed bleached, sharply angled jaw line, high cheekbones, and the same fine, wispy straight hair. The main differences were hair and eye color; Morgan's eyes were a good deal more colorless than her mother's, and her hair was so dark it was almost blue-black. Pushing a few wisps of hair away from the curve of her cheekbone, Morgan looked at the fading scar left behind by a stray piece of shrapnel in a training accident. It had only cut her shallowly, and the resulting wound hadn't even needed stitches, but it had shortened a good amount of the hair on that side of her head, and she had eventually gotten the rest cut short to match. Swallowing a yawn, she walked over and slid the door leading to the bath open, almost bumping into a small figure emerging from within. "Wha --" Morgan yelped. "WAUGH!" was the equally surprised response. It was a large penguin, with incongruous spiky red bits on its head like eyebrows, and its green eyes were bright and intelligent. Cocking its head, it looked at her curiously, and Morgan noted that it was carrying a towel and wearing a metal collar around its neck. Returning to the kitchen-side door, Morgan pushed it open to speak to Misato. "Are you aware there's a penguin in your bathroom?" As Morgan spoke, the penguin walked out of the bathroom and made its way to the second refrigerator, where it pushed a button near the door with a claw, making a panel hiss open. With a last curious glance at Morgan, it headed inside for the night. "Oh, him? He's one of those new hot-spring penguins. His name is Pen-Pen. He's your other roommate," Misato said, unperturbed. "Hm. I didn't know they were so smart." Morgan said, still looking at the fridge into which Pen-Pen had disappeared. "By the way," Misato said as she took another sip of beer, "You might want to cover up." Morgan simply glanced down at herself, back at Misato, then shrugged. "Why?" Then she closed the door, leaving Misato staring at it, bemused. She's an odd one, Misato thought, taking another long pull from her can of beer. A very odd child indeed. The hot water was wonderfully soothing and relaxing as Morgan lay in the tub, eyes half-closed. Sleep would come quite easily in her current state of jetlag and overall exhaustion, but she wasn't in bed yet. Misato Katsuragi isn't too bad a person, Morgan thought, a competent commander, and a good person. For a moment, Morgan began to doze off, and then a face seemed to hover in her field of vision. The Commander, Gendou Ikari, and the way he'd stood over Kyo, possessive and protective. Like the boy was an valuable possession, not just a subordinate. And Kyo, unflinching, willing to suffer and die for the Commander. Startled, she came back to full wakefulness, and realized she'd started to dream. She thought of a single, solemn red eye in a face that spoke volumes in its silence. She wondered why she felt like she knew him. She wondered if he felt that way too. Deep in Central Dogma, an EVA was frozen in bakelite, like a giant trapped in an iceberg. Already the unearthing process had started, crewmen shattering the rigid resin with jackhammers, like so many swarming ants compared to the EVA. High above them, in the remains of an observation room, two figures observed. "You did go to the hospital today, didn't you? How is Kyo?" Ritsuko was looking at the extraction process with the a cool, detached expression. "He should be fully recovered in about 20 days. We will make ready to restart Unit-00 then." Gendou Ikari stood before the shattered safety window, his expression unreadable. "They bear so much pain upon their shoulders..." Ritsuko whispered, in an odd moment of empathy. "They are the only ones who can pilot the EVA units. As long as they live, they will do it." Conviction weighted every word. "The Fourth and Fifth Children have been found. They're American, and will be brought to the Second Branch in a week's time. I'll be leaving in a few days to oversee their arrival and indoctrination. Once they've been trained on their EVAs, they will be transferred to Central Dogma." "Have they been notified yet?" "They will accept." There was not even a sliver of doubt or compromise in the Commander's voice. "No matter what the children think, right?" It was a decision born out of sheer necessity, yet Ritsuko felt like a war criminal. With that, she turned and left. She was much too tired, she told herself. Things had to be done, and they would be done. Morgan staggered into her room, dragging her duffel bag behind her. She was too tired to unpack the things she had brought, so she set her sidearm on the bedside table, placed her leather jacket on the chair back, and collapsed into bed. Almost immediately after that, she sank into an exhausted sleep, haunted by intermittent dreams of howling demon voices, and a purple fire flaring behind her eyelids. At the other end of the apartment, Misato was soaking in the bath, up to her chest in almost-scalding water, a phone held to her ear as she spoke to Ritsuko. "I don't know, Ritsuko. I'm afraid." "It is your job, isn't it? You volunteered to take care of her. Now you're responsible for her." Ritsuko was still at her office at this hour, and Misato could hear the clack of a keyboard. Was she still working? Misato let herself sink further into the water, up to her shoulders. "But I don't know how to get along with her." "You did declare you would take care of her, Misato." Ritsuko sounded faintly annoyed over the phone, and the clacking of the keyboard had ceased in the background. "I was just thinking of her as an asset we need to keep an eye on. I don't know if I can look at her that way again. Even if we have defeated the Angel, it doesn't feel right." "Well, she isn't any trouble, is she? Besides her carrying a handgun at her age, I don't really see anything about her that would be a problem." "She's an odd one. So old, so grown up, and so young at the same time. She's so... efficient and practical on the outside, but I can't get any sense of the real her. It's like she's doing it because she has to. I don't know if it's the way she grew up, or if she's just that way." "Well, that just makes her easier to deal with. You told me about the problems with the Second Child when she was first brought in. You should be thankful." "Big help you are," Misato muttered, and hung up. She gazed up at the ceiling of the bathroom, and the steam hanging in the air. She wondered if Morgan knew that she was little more than a tool to NERV, and, if she knew, whether she cared. On her way to bed, Misato checked on the girl, and found her in an exhausted, motionless sleep, curled on her side in a near-fetal position. Misato had wanted to tell her how proud she had felt, but it was best to let her rest, and so she headed into her own room to get some much-needed sleep herself. The next two weeks were a battery of further synchro tests, training, and adjusting to the routine at NERV. In the meantime, arrangements had been made for Morgan to start school at the beginning of her third week, though, and she had already been fitted with a school uniform, and had other necessary items bought with her salary. If anything, at least this assignment paid reasonably well, by Morgan's lights. As she thought about this, Morgan was sitting in the entry plug of EVA Unit-01, dressed in a plug suit made specifically for her build. It fitted loosely until she depressed the control switch on her wrist, and then it contracted to cling like a neoprene wetsuit, except with more resistance in the material. It was reasonably comfortable, if anything, and surprisingly well insulated for something so form-fitting tight. The sensors also improved the synch with the EVA unit, allowing the pilot's commands to be tracked much more accurately. She braced her mind for the imminent synchronization. She had gotten somewhat used to the constant whispering howls in the back of her head, but it was still a rather unpleasant sensation. In the past two weeks, further systems calibrations had lessened it to some extent, but there was always an unpleasant feeling of otherness somewhere in her head every time she synchronized with the EVA. The screens came online, and there it was, the chilling wails and howls at the edges of her awareness, as well as the expanded sensory input, and the sheer power in her now huge fists. "Good morning, Morgan," came Ritsuko's voice over the internal speaker system. "How are you today?" "All systems nominal. I'm getting used to this." The talking distracted her from the itch in her mind, making it easier to ignore. "Have you memorized the appearance positions, emergency power sources, locations of weapon depots and recovery spots?" "Yes." "Remember, the EVA runs on power supplied from its umbilical cable. If the EVA uses its internal battery in an emergency, at full strength it will run for one minute, or for up to five minutes on conservation mode. Do you understand?" "Yes." Morgan glanced at the battery display on the side monitor. It showed that the EVA was currently running on external power. If the power were cut off for any reason, it would start counting down the amount of time left under emergency battery power. "Let's resume where we left off yesterday." Ritsuko said. At that, Morgan forced herself to ignore the ghostly screams in her head, and concentrated on the matter at hand. Weapons drill for an EVA was ridiculously easy. As soon as she had gotten used to the balance and handling of the huge weapons made for the EVA units, she had been able to hit targets reliably. It was very much like aiming a gun herself, thanks to the neural synchronization. All she had to do was think of aiming, and her own reflexes came to the fore. Currently she was training with a rifle that worked quite like an EVA scale Steyr-AUG. It handled quite like a real AUG, so Morgan used her familiarity with the weapon to make things easier. Up in the control room, Maya and Ritsuko watched as Morgan practiced her aim with the rifle, as the EVA was hooked up to the wires of a simulator system, quite like the VR gear that was used for training purposes in military units. "I wonder how she finds the courage to pilot it since it went berserk," Maya said, her expression pensive as the muzzle flash lit the room up. "She's a soldier, Maya. She's used to following orders. It's the way she's lived her whole life." In the entry plug, Morgan was concentrated on learning the EVA's aiming systems, trying not to think about the cold presence she felt in her head as she piloted the EVA. In the back of her mind, something growled and paced, waiting for the time it could unleash its rage. The next morning, Morgan tapped lightly at the papered sliding door to Misato's spectacularly messy room and, after hearing no response, slid it open. Misato was still curled up in a hump on her futon below the blankets, presumably still asleep. Unwashed clothes, magazines, and other assorted clutter surrounded the futon, a stark contrast to Morgan's almost empty, spartan room. "It's morning, Misato." Morgan said. She was already dressed in her school uniform, the matching skirt and vest with the white short-sleeved blouse, with white socks and lace-up sneakers. She had decided to throw her jacket over it, as it had was a somewhat cool, windy morning, with low, rolling clouds threatening rain. She wasn't wearing her pistol, but had tucked it, still in the holster, in a pocket of her school bag, just in case an emergency happened during school hours. A sleepy, muffled voice came from somewhere in the middle of the futon, saying, "I just got back from the night shift, and I don't have to be back until this evening. Just let me sleep." "I'll be off, then." "Take the trash out with you, please," Misato mumbled. As Morgan turned to leave, she heard unexpectedly, "Have a good day at school." Misato's voice trailed off, and she sank back into sleep with a faint "Goodbye." The phone rang in Misato's room a while after Morgan had left for school. A searching hand reached out for the receiver, grabbed it, and then pulled it under the covers. "Hello? ...Oh, it's you, Ritsuko." "How have you been? Are you getting along with Morgan?" came Ritsuko's voice. "Huh. Well, today's her first day at school. I don't know how she's going to get along with others her age, though. Compared to them... she seems too serious, too old. I just hope she makes some friends." The classroom was almost empty when Morgan stepped in and placed her bag on a desk. There was a freckled, bespectacled boy playing with a video camera near the front of the class, recording the movements of a model airplane he was holding in front of the lens, as a girl with her straight dark hair tied neatly in two ponytails stood before him and questioned him. "What, Monitor?" "Yesterday's printout, did you give it to Sakazaki?" The boy put his camera down, and pushed his heavy glasses up on his nose. "Er...there wasn't anyone at Touji's house when I went there." Morgan noticed him putting down the airplane and fumbling around under his desk, shoving something deeper inside. "Kensuke, you're good friends with Sakazaki. Why don't you want to see him?" Morgan found herself half-listening to the conversation as she shrugged out of her jacket and hung it on her chair. There wasn't anything else happening in the class. "I'm not sure, but he might have been hurt." The class monitor frowned a little at the thought, and wrinkled her nose. "Really, in that robot incident?" Morgan's started listening more intently when she heard that. "The television news said that nobody was hurt when it happened," the girl continued doubtfully, still looking at the boy. "You saw the center of that explosion, right? Several blocks were leveled. The civil-defense units based in Iruma, Komatsu, Kyushu and Misawa were activated and mobilized. There were probably ten or twenty casualties, maybe some fatalities, too." Just then, a tallish, well-built boy with a stubborn, spiky shock of brown hair stepped in, dressed in a track suit rather than the uniform the other boys Morgan had seen in the school wore. He threw his school bag on his desk with an expression of frustration on his face, and the resulting bang reverberated through the mostly empty room. "Touji!" "Sakazaki!" Morgan could hear the relief in their voices as the girl and the boy greeted him. He simply cast a disinterested look at the deserted room, before his gaze settled on Morgan. "Seems like there're less students than ever," he said. "Well, most of them were evacuated," Kensuke said, fiddling with his video camera. "No surprise, really. There really is a war in this city now." "You should be happy," Touji replied, sitting on top of his desk. "I mean, you're the one who's always wanted to see a real war." "Sorta." Kensuke didn't seem to take any offense. "You've been absent for a while. Were you involved in that incident?" The first response was the bravado in Touji's face dissolving for a moment, to show real concern and worry. "My sister was buried in rubble. She lived, but she's in the hospital. Since my father is busy and can't find the time to leave, I had to stay by her side or she would have been all alone there." His eyes flashed with anger as he continued, "I don't know what that idiot pilot was doing. It makes me seethe just to think that our supposed defender did more damage to the city than whatever was attacking. What was he thinking?" Morgan remained silent, reaching into her bag for a notebook and her pencil case, keenly aware of the gun in there. If it came to blows, she probably would be able to discourage Touji unarmed. For now, it was better to keep a low profile. "Did you hear the rumor about the transfer student?" Kensuke whispered to Touji, nodding over to Morgan. "Transfer student?" "Her, over there. This is her first day here, but the arrangements were made while you were gone. Isn't it strange someone would be transferred in when almost everyone else gets evacuated? I bet you she's the pilot." Before anything else could happen, though, an elderly teacher came in, and the monitor called to the class, "All rise!" Morgan was finding school insanely boring, if anything. She had covered most of the curriculum on most of her subjects already -- her mother and grandfather had never believed in giving her breaks from her schooling -- and had been sketching in her notebook instead of taking notes. Beside her desk, to the left, sat Kyo, his gaze cast out of the window. He was still heavily bandaged, but he was walking, at least. The teacher seemed not to notice the lack of attention as he droned on and on about the events of the Second Impact, part of their History class. The monitor of the notebook computer on Morgan's desk flashed once, signaling a private message being sent to her console. "Is the rumor true? That you're the pilot of that robot?" it read. A Y/N prompt flashed beneath it, and Morgan let out a little exasperated sigh before turning the console off. She probably didn't need it, not in a class like this. Somewhere in the back of the classroom, she heard a little sound of dismay, and ignored it. Kyo continued staring out of the window, looking out at the schoolyard silently. She found her pencil sketching out the outline of his face, in an unguarded moment of boredom. Before she could continue, however, a bell rang. Class had ended. "Class, all rise!" the monitor shouted. Morgan, jacket back on and bag on her back, was walking across the schoolyard when a faint gust of wind and faint sound made her duck. She managed to slip under a punch that would have hit her in the jaw, had she not moved, and instinctively shifted into a fighting posture, feet apart, one arm out for defense, and another drawn back to strike. It was Touji, standing in a karate stance, clearly well trained by the way he moved as he circled her. "I don't usually hit girls, but this one is for my sister," he growled, and then pivoted into a smooth kick, his weight shifting nicely. Touji did know what he was doing, but his movements spoke of dojo training. Morgan was willing to bet he'd never encountered anyone who fought like a Special Forces-trained fighter. Getting the job done mattered more than sticking to any rules of the ring. She leaned away from the initial force of the kick, and then slid back in and caught Touji's leg in a smooth scooping motion, hooking it in her left arm. Her right hand shot out in a low punch to his abdomen, intended to wind him more than hurt him. Caught off balance, Touji fell easily to her right-footed leg sweep, as she tucked her heel behind his knee and pushed. She shifted out to the side as he fell so he couldn't pull her down with him, still holding his leg so he couldn't get back up, and then planted her right foot right above his groin, ready to inflict further harm if needed. "Would you rather the EVA had not gone out? That all of Tokyo-3 be destroyed? This is nothing less than war. Casualties will happen, even if we don't like it. You should be happy she is alive," Morgan told him curtly, her eyes a cold, steely gray. All Touji could do from his position on the ground was goggle up at her helplessly, Kensuke standing nearby and watching silently, a look like awe in his eyes. She let go of his leg a few agonizing seconds later, and had turned to leave when she found Kyo standing in front of her like a wraith, like he'd come out of the ground. "There's an emergency call. I'll return to HQ first." With that, he was gone, surprisingly fast despite his injuries. Morgan decided to follow suit, heading back to HQ as quickly as she could. "She's amazing," Kensuke breathed in her wake, still gazing in the direction she had gone as Touji got up slowly, cursing. "It's here sooner than usual," Misato said as she watched the screen on which the Angel was displayed. "And Commander Ikari isn't here." One of the console techs, Makoto Hyuga, commented, "The last one came after a fifteen year wait. This one appeared only after three weeks." "Inconsiderate, aren't they?" Misato commented. "Reminds me of some of the men I've dated." The comment earned a derisive snort from Ritsuko. Maya turned from her console, after receiving a call. "The Committee is demanding we launch an EVA." "Bastards," Misato muttered softly. "We would have launched one even if they hadn't asked." The underground shelters were full, packed with students and residents who had been evacuated for their safety. Not much was known about the situation; although the usual news reports were promising more information revealed as more was learnt. Touji and Kensuke sat among the students, Touji sullen and slightly bruised, Kensuke fiddling with his camera, watching the enormously uninformative news broadcast. "Hey, Touji," Kensuke whispered. "What?" Touji responded curtly. "I've got something to tell you, just not here." All right, all right." Touji muttered, and then he shouted to Horaki, the class monitor. "Hikari! We need to go to bathroom." Horaki sighed, feeling more than a bit frazzled. "Why didn't you go before?" Kensuke and Touji stared at her blankly. "Fine... just go." Morgan was leaning back in the seat as the entry plug filled with LCL. One by one the monitors came online, and then the disturbing sensation of synchronization filled her again. This time, she could feel a strange gladness in the mind of the EVA, a joy in the promise of battle. It wasn't fighting her so much as whispering murderous words to her out of the darkness, making her shiver unconsciously despite the insulated plug suit. "Confirm readiness, Unit-01." That was Maya Ibuki, the lead console tech. "All systems nominal. Ready for launch." "So what is it you want to talk about?" Touji asked Kensuke, in the men's room, as they both stood in front of urinals. "Didn't your dad ever tell you never to hit a girl?" "I've seen him spar with Mom and Aunt Yuri lots of times." His tone was grudging, still refusing to admit his misconduct. "That's different from just out and hitting her in the middle of a schoolyard. At least she can defend herself." Kensuke suppressed a slight chuckle at the memory of Touji, resident class badass, getting his butt handed to him by a girl not much more than half his size. "What do you want? You're not bringing this up just to make me feel bad, are you?" Touji glared at his best friend. "Well, I want to see it once before I die." "You mean..." "Yeah." "Launch Unit-01!" Misato shouted across the command center, and Morgan was on her way. This time, the gantry rose into the middle of one of the defensive buildings in the city, whose facade rose to reveal the EVA. The final interlock came free, and this time, Morgan was a lot more prepared. EVA-01 moved with a cautious grace, sticking to cover as she tried to get a visual confirmation of the target. "They get weirder and weirder," Morgan muttered as she caught sight of it. Immense as always, this Angel looked like a giant squid, somehow defying gravity to coast smoothly above the ground. It had only two tentacles, one on each side of its head, glowing with a pink energy field. "Mean looking bastard," she whispered, instinctively keeping her voice low, even though the Angel couldn't hear her. Training and habit made her keep her voice low in any combat situation, to prevent being located by sound. Meanwhile, Touji and Kensuke had managed to sneak out, and were climbing up the stairs to a shrine in the hillside when they caught sight of both the Angel and the EVA. "It's amazing! Well worth the struggle. I've been waiting ages just to see something like this." Kensuke had already trained his camera on the scene, recording it faithfully. "Aren't you even afraid we'll get killed, idiot?" Touji said crossly, swatting the bugs away. "We only live once," Kensuke said, mildly. Just then, the Angel lashed out with its tentacles, apparently having spotted the EVA. Out of instinct, Morgan ducked back and to the side, the building she had been using for cover falling in several neatly quartered sections. She bit back a curse, and then Misato called over the communications system, "We're opening a weapons block for you." Right beside the EVA's current position, a building opened up to reveal an EVA-scale rifle like the one she had trained with. She pulled it free and got into firing position, instinctively firing a quick burst, before ducking further back into the warren of buildings. She fired another burst, realizing that the exploding shells used for the rifle were generating huge amounts of smoke, which would impair visibility. She would have to play cat and mouse with the Angel to win. Suddenly, the Angel's tentacles lashed out with a dizzying speed, and though Morgan managed to sway out of the way, the rifle was now in two useless halves as Unit-01 rolled for cover. "I wonder if being hit hurts," Kensuke said offhandedly, zooming in on the conflict. "Shut up." Touji, having been guilted into helping Kensuke, was now rapidly losing patience with him. Morgan came up rolling, the angry whispers in her mind getting louder, just as the side monitor flashed to "Internal" and started displaying the amount of time left. Things had gone to TARFU; the cable had been severed. She had five minutes of power left, max. Murphy was having a field day. She tried to dodge back as one whip lashed at her position, but was batted out of the air by the other, and she felt the EVA being lifted off its feet. The world spun as the Angel flung the EVA away, sending it crashing into a small hill. "Report, Unit-01!" Misato shouted over the command frequency. "I'm still operational, Command." Morgan managed through gritted teeth, thankful for the cushioning effect LCL had. Just then, she glanced out of the side monitor, and spied two figures huddled mere feet away from the massive hand of the EVA, between two splayed fingers. Back at the command center, the computer display showed the data found on the two students. "Morgan's classmates?" Misato sputtered, confused for a moment. "What are they doing here?" Ritsuko asked, rhetorically. The Angel coasted to Morgan's position and drew its energy whips back to attack again. If they even came close to her classmates, she realized, the disruption field would almost certainly kill them. Things had hit the magical point of FUBAR. As the whips lashed out again, Morgan managed to grab them, wrestling the Angel with all her strength as her hands burned. The EVA's voice urged her on to kill it, but she couldn't. There were noncombatants in the area. The pain was like placing her hands on a hot iron plate, as the EVA's hands blistered and peeled from the energy fields surrounding the twisting, writhing tentacles. "Why isn't she doing anything?" Touji stuttered, watching the EVA fend off the Angel, but not attacking. "Because of us. She doesn't want to accidentally kill us." Kensuke whispered, almost blinded by the intense light. "I have three minutes and twenty-eight seconds left and counting, Command," Morgan managed, the EVA still trying to wrestle with the Angel. Her hands hurt so much she didn't feel the pain in the flesh anymore. It was a deep bone pain, burning all the way up her forearms. "Let them into the cockpit, Morgan. When you pick them up, retreat." Misato ordered, her voice seeming very small through the constant hiss of static generated by the energy field. "We can't have unauthorized civilians in the cockpit, Captain Katsuragi!" Ritsuko shouted. Wonderful. Command bickering it out as she put her life on the line, Morgan thought. And in the back of her mind, she could feel the he impatience of the EVA growing stronger. It wanted blood. "Do it now, Morgan! On my authority!" Morgan put the EVA on command hold and ejected the Entry Plug on the three minute mark. "Get in quick, you two!" she shouted, not wanting to lose any more time than she had to. "You're overstepping your bounds, Captain Katsuragi," Ritsuko said coldly as the two boys climbed up into the entry plug. "What? Water? ...My camera!" Kensuke cried in dismay as the LCL reflooded the entry plug. "We have interference in the nervous system." Maya reported as a status anomaly came up on the display. "Retreat, Morgan!" Misato urged, panic starting to color her voice. "She asked you to retreat, transferee," Touji shouted. She ignored him, assessing the situation and realizing the magnitude of the trouble she was in. "No good, Command." Morgan said, the cold steel calm in her voice cracking with pain and fear. "I turn to run, and it'll rip me to pieces." She pulled back hard, overbalancing a little, and yanking the Angel back, and then planted a foot on its midsection and kicked out just as she let go, sending it flying and giving her some precious space to act in. The right shoulder pauldron opened, ejected the EVA's only integral weapon, the hypersonic vibrating progressing knife. "Retreat! That's an order!" Misato shouted, to no avail. Sheer instinct filled Morgan as she attempted a killing strike she had never tried to execute while piloting an EVA Unit. In the back of her head, there was a hint of approval, as she lunged in low and drove the progressive knife into the glowing gem just below the Angel's head. Before she had driven the EVA's full weight into the lunge-stab, however, she felt something like fire deep in her chest and abdomen as the Angel impaled the EVA's narrow torso on its tentacles. Beyond pain now, she let the momentum drive the blade further in. As though in response to her rage and pain, she felt something come loose, and she fed her rage back into her foe, just as she had learned to do in close combat. A hail of sparks fell from the point where the blade cut into the Angel's core, and the approval in the EVA's, even as the countdown reached thirty seconds. "Unit One, active time remaining is 30 seconds, 28, 27, 26, 25..." Maya read out, as the Angel still writhed under the attack. "DIE, DAMN YOU!" Morgan shouted, the last of her calm vanishing in a sudden rage that was terrifying in its intensity. Purple flame engulfed the Angel at that point, channeled through the knife-stab in its glowing heart. Sparks flew everywhere as the Angel struggled still, in its death throes. "...14, 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1." The countdown ended with a note of dread, but the inner light in the Angel's heart faded. It was dead. The entry plug went dark, and silent, and the voice of rage no longer filled her head. The last echoes of pain started to fade. The synchronization link had gone dormant. She could still feel it if she tried, but she shut it away from her mind. "EVA Unit One has ceased all action." The Angel's energy whips died, too, now inert black ribbons hanging silent through the EVA's abdomen. Morgan felt very empty all of a sudden, and utterly exhausted. She ignored the faint calling of the EVA, and the voices of the command center. Touji and Kensuke were silent behind her. "The target is completely silent." That was one of the console techs, reporting her mission complete. Suddenly, without knowing the exact reason for it, Morgan started to cry; the first time she had done so in as long as she could remember. And in the edges of her conscious mind, it seemed as though the EVA was trying to console her mutely, its voice less invasive, and more reassuring. It was actively reaching out for her, with its alien thoughts, in a mental equivalent of wiping her tears away. It was a terrifying comfort. --- o/~ [Closing titles] Live - Face and Ghost (The Children's Song) o/~ Evangelion Densetsu web presence (by Laudre): http://www.drelau.com/creations/eva-d/ Evangelion Densetsu LiveJournal (Announcements and such): http://www.livejournal.com/users/eva_densetsu/ Comments, criticism, death threats, and marriage proposals to laudre@null.net (Laudre) and loremaster_evil@hotmail.com (Lore). ------------------------------ From: laudre@null.net (Sean Simpson) Subject: [Eva/KoF][FanFic] Evangelion Densetsu 03: Companionship X-Moderation-Queue-Date: 15 Apr 2002 21:19:52 -0700 o/~ [Main Title] Lunatic Calm - Leave You Far Behind o/~ L D S F A N W O R K S (a division of Drelau Productions) - and - C Y A N I D E B R E A T H M I N T P R O D U C T I O N S - proudly present - E V A N G E L I O N D E N S E T S U inspired by and based on: Neon Genesis Evangelion by Anno, Gainax, et. al. - The King of Fighters '94 and sequels by SNK - Fatal Fury and sequels by SNK - and other sources that will be credited as they come along --- Written by Sean "Laudre" Simpson and Mel "Loremaster" Wong [=-------------------------------------------------------------------=] Neon Genesis Evangelion and related concepts and characters belong to Gainax. The King of Fighters, Fatal Fury/Garou Densetsu, Garou: Mark of the Wolves, and related characters and concepts belong to SNK. The X-Files belongs to Fox, and was created by Chris Carter. This work is not intended as a challenge to any of those copyrights or intellectual property rights; this work is intended to demonstrate respect towards those properties and to the minds behind them, and is done in fun only. In other words, while this story is our work, it's based on a bunch of other people's work, and you should go watch Evangelion and play SNK video games. If any of the copyright owners asked us to cease and desist distribution of this work, we'd have to comply. So we're trying to play fair, and we hope you do too. [=-------------------------------------------------------------------=] CHAPTER 3: COMPANIONSHIP --- It rained torrentially outside, the sky a leaden, chilly gray, as Misato staggered out of bed, turned the alarm clock off, and brushed her teeth, getting ready for work. Morgan hadn't spoken much at all since she had received an official reprimand for her recklessness in the fight against the Fourth Angel. Misato had gotten the feeling that Morgan wasn't angry at the reprimand; it felt more like she had been blaming herself for losing control. The sobbing Misato had heard from the Entry Plug of the EVA made her heart twist; it sounded like a lost child out alone in the cold, a stark contrast to the cool, steely exterior Morgan always displayed. The recovery team had found her in a state of shock, shaking badly, and she had been given a weak's leave from school and training in order to recover. Misato headed over to Morgan's room to check on her; it was unlike the girl to be asleep this late. She was usually up and about before 7. "You awake, Morgan? I'm heading to work soon." Misato called through the closed door. When there was no response, she opened the door to find the room empty. Spare and neat as ever, Morgan's book bag was right beside the desk, and the bed had been made perfectly. Misato gave the room a quick once-over and noted that her jacket, and presumably, her sidearm were gone. There was a note left on the writing desk, in a loose, brisk hand, weighted down by the unused cellular phone Misato had gotten for her. Misato- Need some time to myself. Will be back soon. -Morgan "Damn," Misato breathed to nobody in particular. The thought of Morgan wandering through Tokyo-3 alone made her feel as though the floor of her stomach had just sank below her knees. She just hoped the girl would return soon, in case anything happened. It would be hard to explain to HQ how she had lost the only operationally ready EVA pilot if an Angel attacked. She was brought back to reality by the ringing of the doorbell, and rushed out to see if it was Morgan, back from her stroll, maybe having forgotten her key. Opening the door, however, she saw two teenage boys whose faces she found familiar. Pen Pen wandered over, curious about the visitors, peeking out from behind Misato's left leg. "We're Morgan's classmates, Kensuke Asamiya and Touji Sakazaki," explained the shorter, bespectacled one. He was clutching a sheaf of papers in his hands, and seemed somewhat nervous. "You're the ones who got into Unit-01's entry plug, if I remember correctly?" Misato asked, a bit testily, as she picked Pen Pen up "We're very sorry about causing you so much trouble," the taller boy said, running one hand through his stubbornly messy brown hair. He was Touji, Misato remembered from the information she had read about them. "Morgan's been absent since then, so we decided to pay her a visit to see how she is," he continued, looking faintly contrite. "Well, she's at the NERV training facility," Misato stated. "She's been ordered to take a few days off school." "Oh." Kensuke's face fell in disappointment, and then he handed the papers to Misato. "These are the assignments she's missed the past few days." "Thank you for bringing these," she replied, shifting Pen Pen's weight to one arm and taking the worksheets in her other hand. "I'll give these to her when she gets back." "Please say hi for us. Um... we'll be off now," Touji said, suddenly looking much more nervous. "Bye." With that, the two boys left for school, Misato holding her friendly expression despite the fact that she felt angry enough to eat rocks and spit fire. It lasted just long enough for the two boys to head out of the corridor. "You idiot!" she cursed once they were safely far from her apartment, aiming a half-hearted kick at the door, wanting Morgan to be back right now. "She's so beautiful," Kensuke whispered in awe. "I'd never expect someone like her to be so... gorgeous." His eyes went a bit glassy as he undressed Misato in his mind's eye. "Yeah, she is hot, isn't she?" Touji concurred as they headed off to school. "So this is the infamous Area 51," Rock Howard commented as the 757 set down on tarmac with a screech of tires that Rock could easily imagine, though they couldn't hear it in the plane's interior. Jeff Bogard, his foster brother (and often taken for his real, fraternal twin, brother; they were close in size to be able to wear each other's clothes, both blond -- though Jeff's shortish ponytail was a slightly darker shade -- and there was a similar glint in their eyes, for all that Rock's were an odd brown and Jeff's bright blue), nodded. "Remember, though, that it's the Groom Dry Lake Research Facility, officially. And now, it's also the Second Branch of NERV." Jeff held up the binder entitled _NERV Second Branch Personnel Manual_. "No Geo-Front here, like in Tokyo-3 or Chicago." The two boys had grown up in Chicago, after Terry Bogard, the man that both called father, relocated there after the destruction of Southtown -- Terry's own hometown, and where Jeff had been born -- and the death of Jeff's mother Mary. "And Tokyo-3 is also NERV's headquarters..." Jeff blinked. "Central Dogma? Who the hell thought of that name?" Rock and Jeff looked at each other, brown eyes meeting blue. "The Japanese Monster Defense Force," they said, in stereo, making the sergeant who was accompanying them blink. Then Rock shook his head. "Close, but it's way too baroque for them, and not nearly cheesy enough." "Yeah, it'd be the Anti-Angel Defense Center or something." Further conversation stopped for the moment as the plane finally came to a halt and the hatch opened. Rock and Jeff followed the sergeant, Jamison, down the stairs and to a waiting Humvee at the bottom of it. The Humvee's driver nodded to Sergeant Jamison as they got in, and Jamison started talking, the first time since he'd greeted them when they'd gotten on the plane. "The first order of business is to get you to your quarters on base. You'll be rooming together in Building G-71, which, if you haven't noticed in your manual, is the housing for all senior NERV personnel." If Jamison's voice carried any tone at all beyond simple efficiency, it might have been one of slight envy. "You'll have one hour to yourselves to get settled in, per Subcommander Skinner's orders, and then you'll be reporting to Hanger 14 -- that's the big building over there -- " Jamison paused to point to a truly immense building, had to be at least fifteen stories tall, towering over everything else in the base -- "for testing baselines for the units you'll be piloting. You'll also be meeting Commander Ikari, Director of Project Evangelion and the head of all of NERV. Your direct superior while you're here in Groom Dry Lake, Commander Skinner, is subordinate only to Commander Ikari, so you boys should now have some idea of your position here. You are only answerable to Commander Ikari and Subcommander Skinner." "So what does that make you to us?" Rock asked with a mischievous grin. "One of the men who make sure that you follow orders, as long as you're working for NERV. Service is, of course, completely voluntary," Jamison added, in a tone that said it wasn't, in his opinion, but there wasn't a whole lot he could do about it. The Humvee came to a stop beside a long, low building that was in no way any different from any of the other long, low buildings that made up a good two thirds of the facility. Jamison got out, and gestured for Rock and Jeff to do likewise. They did, and Jamison led them inside. He pointed down the main hallway as he spoke. "Your quarters are the third door on your left, number 5. The Humvee will be back in an hour, at 1300 hours. Be ready." With the same military precision that had defined every other motion and word, Jamison turned on his heel and marched out "Another fine product of the Kill-Bot Factory," Jeff observed. Rock snickered in agreement as he led the way to their quarters. It was the time of morning in which the monorail was packed with commuters, bustling on their way to work. It never seems to change, Morgan thought as she sat in a seat near the train doors, second from the right from the door, in the fifth car of the train. She had her jacket on, and a faded blue cap was pushed low over her brow, a hand-me-down from Clark. Her expression was one of boredom, and she was holding a copy of the morning paper beside her, with her backpack on her lap, watching as people got on and off the train. The first lot of commuters debarked, and more people got on, filling their places, indistinguishable from each other. After a few more stops, she got up from her seat, newspaper left forgotten on the seat beside her. As she headed off the train, she bumped shoulders with a tallish salaryman in a blue pinstripe business suit. He headed to the seat she had recently vacated and started to read his own copy of the paper. Standing at the platform, she watched the train leave before walking away. Morgan wandered around downtown, winding up in a movie theater, watching a bad disaster film portraying the events of the Second Impact. The person beside her had fallen asleep, probably because of the numbingly, boring plot -- nearly fifty percent of the films released in the past three years centered on the Second Impact, and it was wearing thin. "A meteor impacted in Antarctica hard enough to shatter the polar icecap," the movie went on, in all its B-grade glory, a lumbering hulk of bad plot and worse special effects. What is NERV trying to do? Morgan wondered, her mind far from the UN-sanctioned falsehood being portrayed onscreen. Instead, she recalled the touch of Unit 01's mind to her own, like cold, icy fingers, gently caressing the lobes of her brain. The ghost in the machine came uncomfortably close each time she sat in the entry plug and piloted the EVA. "Couldn't it have been detected?" the dialogue rambled on. "It was traveling at 10% the speed of light. Modern science wasn't equipped for this." Was the EVA sentient? It had tried to console her, and had urged her on to kill. It had acted on its own when she had been unconscious with pain. Was it trying to protect her? "The atmospheric flow caused from the change in the Earth's axis has lessened somewhat, but there's a tidal wave headed straight for our position at a velocity of two hundred thirty meters a second." Silently, Morgan got up and slipped out of the theater, a crumpled leaflet left where she had been sitting. Does it know me?, she thought as she turned her back on the reenacted deaths of half the world's population. She had no answer at hand. At about 1315 hours local time, the Humvee was pulling up to a side entrance to Hanger 14. At least, Jeff guessed it was a side entrance; at a mere twelve feet tall and six feet wide, the gate was vastly smaller than the hangar's main doors, which stretched all the way to the roof. Jeff confirmed his initial opinion of the building's size; it was a little over fifteen stories tall, judging by the size of the side entrance relative to the entire structure. Jamison saluted the guards on duty at the front gate, and then swiped his ID badge through a magnetic reader to one side of the big gate. A panel opened above the magreader, revealing a retinal scanner and a vidscreen. Jamison put his eye to the retinal scanner, and a face appeared at the vidscreen, although Jeff couldn't make it out from where he and Rock were standing. "I've got the Children with me, Control," Jamison said to the vidscreen. The image on it winked out, and, with a shuddering groan, the gate opened. Slowly. It had to be three feet thick, and swung ponderously outward. Jeff and Rock stared at it, and finally, Rock said, "Damn, that's a big door." Jamison almost had a visible reaction. The sergeant led them down a short hallway that turned off to the right, leading to an elevator. Jeff and Rock followed a couple of steps behind him, not saying anything, communicating with silent, significant glances instead. The elevator doors shut with an almost jarringly mundane "ding", and Jamison withdrew a key from his pocket. He inserted it into a matching keyhole on the elevator's control panel and turned it a half-twist to the left. Jeff felt his stomach start to climb into his throat as the elevator suddenly dropped with a sickening speed, but, after a second, his stomach returned to his proper place. Jamison spoke again. "You boys understand why you're here." Rock answered first. "To pilot Evangelions." Whatever they are, Jeff added silently, as he knew Rock meant, as well. That the Evangelions were some kind of war machine was abundantly clear, and the fact that a couple of boys had to be recruited to pilot them implied that there was something exotic about them, but more than that, the personnel manual didn't say. Jeff went next. "Fight off the Angels." Whatever *they* were. The personnel manual made it quite clear that Angels were the enemy, though it was marvelously vague as to exactly what an Angel was. "Save the world." That much the personnel manual -- the Great Book, Jeff was starting to call it in his head -- was quite clear on: if the Evangelions, also known as Project E, were to fail, then there wasn't much else to do but put one's head betweens one's knees and kiss one's ass goodbye. Then, in stereo, "The usual." Jamison glanced at them over his shoulder, then faced forward again and shook his head. He didn't envy whoever got stuck with them after he got done chaperoning them around; he knew that their official guardian, while on base, was one of the higher-ups in NERV, who would have been there to greet them had he not been busy preparing for their first sync tests. Jamison didn't know which, one, exactly, and he wasn't all that familiar with the NERV personnel, anyway, nor did he want to be. He was an Army man, through and through, and tolerated NERV's presence here because his superiors ordered him to. The rode downwards in silence for several more minutes, until Jeff and Rock glanced at each other, the same question in each's eyes. By unspoken consent, Rock was the one to ask. "How far down are we?" "When the elevator stops, we'll be one mile below the surface of the dry lake," Jamison answered. Almost on cue, the elevator opened again, with that "ding" that sounded like it belonged in an office building or a hotel, not a military installation. The boys followed Jamison out, and into a control room that could only be described as cavernous. Rows of computer banks lined the walls, and consoles were laid out in a geometrical fashion on the floor. Beyond the console bridge, hanging in the immense void, was a hologram that appeared to depict all of Area 51 and the surrounding terrain; on the far side of *that* was what looked like a display screen several stories tall, though the sheer immensity of the chamber was throwing off Jeff's sense of scale. Off to the side of the chamber, windows were visible, though the chamber they opened onto was dark; Jeff could make out nothing in it. Several techs in tan uniforms were working at the consoles; one, in particular, who caught Jeff's eye, was walking around quickly, giving orders, and stopping periodically to tap away at the console in the center of the room. He didn't look at all the military type; while he was fit and trim, he wore a somewhat scruffy beard, had his long hair tied into a horsetail that went halfway down his back, and the sleeves of his tan uniform shirt were rolled up and the collar unbuttoned. He wore loose blue jeans in lieu of the tan slacks that looked to be standard, and Jeff wasn't completely certain, but those shoes looked like the same Chuck Taylors he himself preferred, although in black with white trim instead of Jeff's monochromatic black. Jamison led them to a raised platform at the rear end of the control room, where two men, one bald and in his mid-fifties, the other, a black-haired man in tinted glasses, somewhat younger, perhaps, but looking like he felt much older. Jamison saluted them and said, "Fourth and Fifth Children, sir." "Thank you, Sergeant. You're dismissed," said the bald man. Jamison saluted again and then turned and returned to the elevator. The two men turned their attention to the boys. "Jeff Bogard," Jeff said. He heard Rock say his own name at almost exactly the same moment. The bald man nodded. "We know who you are. I'm Subcommander Walter Skinner, head of this installation and second-in-command of NERV. While you're here, you'll be under my direct authority. This is Commander Gendou Ikari, my direct superior and, after you're trained and transferred to Tokyo-3, one of the few people to whom you'll be answerable." Skinner looked up. "Sean!" he called out. The ponytailed tech turned around. He saw the two boys, nodded, and strode quickly to the raised platform, climbing the stairs with an easy grace. On closer inspection, Jeff decided that Sean was in his mide to late thirties, maybe a youngish forty. The beard made him look a bit older, as did the crow's feet and laugh lines, but there was still a youthful sparkle in his eyes. "Jeff, Rock, this is Lieutenant Sean Simpson, Technical Director of the Second Branch. He'll be your guardian here." Sean extended his hand and shook first Jeff's, then Rock's hand firmly. "I'm glad you got here alright. I saw your test scores, and I'm quite impressed by them. Come with me," he said, all in a fairly kinetic rush. Ikari watched it all with silent impassivity, his hands steepled before him. In the Central Dogma infirmary, Ritsuko was giving Kyo a checkup, running him through a detailed examination to see if his injuries still required attention. The boy lay, uncomplaining, on the scanning table of the CAT scan machine, looking blankly up at the ceiling. "She's just fourteen. Even if she is a trained professional, it just seems unfair to put such a burden on her," Misato complained over the phone. "There isn't any other choice," Ritsuko said as she checked through the scans on the monitors. "She, and a few people like her, are the only ones who can pilot the EVAs." "I know." Ritsuko could all but hear Misato's resigned expression. "So, still no word from her? Nothing?" The monitors ran through several different views of Kyo, the false-color display indicating different results. "Nothing yet." "Are you going to do anything about it?" Kyo's latest results showed that he was indeed recovering fast, and would be fit for duty as an EVA pilot soon. "I don't know yet, Ritsuko. She hasn't been away long enough for me to call security down on her, and she said she would come back. Maybe it's best she doesn't." Misato sighed. "I don't know." "Well, if piloting the EVA makes her unhappy, it's better to not have her do it. She'll get killed with that attitude. However, we do need pilots." Sean led Rock and Jeff to a locker room and showed them the "plugsuits" that had already been prepared for them: Jeff's was black with blood red highlights, while Rock's was silvery gray with black highlights. "What are these for?" Rock asked. "They help to enhance your synchronization with the EVA units. You'll also find a headset that will boost the neural signals. Besides, I doubt you'll want to ruin your clothes by soaking them through with LCL." "What's LCL?" It was Jeff's turn to ask. "Liquid oxygenation medium. It also boosts signal gain, and, because it's a liquid, it functions as a shock absorber." "So we breathe fluid in those things?" Sean nodded. "It's slightly thicker than air, but you'll still be able to talk. You'll sound funny, though. Deeper. Your vocal cords won't vibrate at as high a frequency." Jeff and Rock nodded in unison. Then Jeff asked the question that had been on his mind since he'd first seen the tech. "Why do they let you dress like that?" Sean grinned. "Rank hath its privileges. Besides, there's maybe, all told, a dozen people worldwide who have any kind of understanding of the EVA tech, and I happen to be one of them. They want to keep us happy, since we're almost as thin a resource as kids like you. Nobody else can pilot the things." "How do they know?" Sean's smile vanished. "The early tests were not encouraging, to say the least. The EVA units you two will be piloting were two of the first seven EVAs built, back about twelve or thirteen years ago, not long after the Second Impact. Two of those EVAs -- one built in Germany, and one in Japan -- were destroyed in testing, and none of the original, adult, pilots survived the original testing." Rock and Jeff stopped in the middle of pulling on their plugsuits and looked at each other, then back at Sean. "...What?" they said in unison. "You guys will be fine. For one thing, we know a great deal about what happened and why they failed. And, don't forget, twice now an EVA has been sortied in combat against an Angel. There's a gift, a certain rare gift, that shows up in some children born between six and ten months after Second Impact, and you two have it, as far as we can tell without sticking you in them to see what happens. Worst thing that'll happen is that you two can't sync with the EVA units and you go home." "Oh," they said, again in unison, and looked much relieved. They finished putting on the plugsuits and followed Sean out of the locker room. They found themselves in yet another cavernous room, filled quite high with pinkish liquid, with catwalks crisscrossing it to provide access to the two things that the room was obviously meant to house. Those things stood up to their shoulders in the pinkish liquid, and Sean led them down the catwalk to look at them. "Beautiful, aren't they?" Jeff and Rock glanced at each other. One was black, the other chromed, and both were fantastically, amazingly ugly, with a strange jawlike construction hanging from the bottom of their faces, nigh-invisible eyes set in what seemed like precisely the wrong place, and both of the boys felt a slight shiver as they got the distinct impression the EVAs were watching them. "I... guess," Jeff managed to say. "They'll grow on you," Sean assured the boys. He led them up a different catwalk, to behind and slightly above the EVAs. He pulled a radio off his belt and said into it, "Prepare for plug entry." The backs of the EVAs, in between the shoulder pauldrons, opened up, and a long cylinder ejected from a hatch in each. Sean walked over to the black EVA and palmed a large button on the side of the cylinder, and the cylinder opened, its entire top half swinging up. "This is the unit you're assigned to, Jeff. Meet EVA Unit-03." He gestured for Jeff to get in. Jeff exchanged glances with Rock, and climbed inside. The cover closed, and almost immediately it lit up with a reddish light, and he heard a mechanical whirring and felt the plug descend back inside the EVA. As soon as it stopped moving, the light inside turned to white, and the walls of the plug lit up with a pleasant, colorful fractal pattern. Kind of a screen saver, Jeff surmised. It couldn't have been more than thirty or forty seconds later, although it felt like much longer, when Jeff heard Sean's voice. "Jeff, you copy?" "I hear you." "Rock?" "Yep." "Great. We're going to be starting up the sync tests in a minute. While we're waiting... you guys play video games?" To a child of 2015, one might as well have asked if they liked pizza or ice cream. "Sure do," Jeff and Rock said, as one. "There's a mecha combat game loaded into your EVAs' computers. You can only bring it up when you're not synchronized with the EVA, as a safety protocol, but I figure it'll help pass the time while we're doing baselines, and it'll give you some ideas as to how your EVAs handle. Press the green button in the center of your console." The control console was almost ridiculously simple: a pair of moving handles that swung fairly freely, with a trigger underneath and a thumbswitch on top. In between the two was a small control board, with a modern-style keyboard (instead of the staggered rows more common on keyboards from before 2005 or so, the keys were laid out in dish-shaped depressions that fit the curve of the human hand), and about a half-dozen buttons in the center, color-coded for ease of use during combat, Jeff supposed. Jeff hit the green button, and a screen came up explaining how to use the controls in the game. He studied it, nodded, and pressed the green button again to confirm deathmatch mode. He grinned as the display showed him a first-person viewpoint of the interior of some kind of massive elevator shaft, which his character was ascending, and then he surfaced in a full-sized simulated city, except that he seemed to be piloting a simulated EVA, and by the scale in this game, it would seem that the EVA was almost a hundred fifty feet tall. He found himself a good position and waited for Rock to show up. Sean stood behind his console, watching the display on the big screen that showed the deathmatch between Rock and Jeff. The game was custom- made, based on a highly modified Quake Quantum engine, with maps patterned after Tokyo-3 and its environs, and a second set of maps based on the area around Groom Dry Lake, going as far away as Phoenix, Vegas, or Dallas, since it was possible to deploy an EVA to almost anywhere in the American Southwest in a matter of a few hours at most, thanks to the high-speed system of maglev rails that covered the area. Jeff was ahead by two frags, but Rock had found a weapons stash, and was camped out, waiting for Jeff with a sniper rifle. Sean looked away from the game and down at his own console, where data about things like their reflexes, response time, and marksmanship using the Evangelions' internal targeting systems unspooled. It didn't take into account sync rate, but Sean would kill the game after another minute or two of gathering data for the MAGI to analyze. Ikari watched it all from the dais above, and turned to Skinner. "Whose idea was it to use a game to test the pilots?" "Sean's. I have some reservations about it myself --" "Not at all. It seems to be a good idea for preliminary testing and training, and it fits with what the children are already familiar with. Especially these children. Dr. Simpson will also be keeping an eye on them while they're here, I've gathered?" "He volunteered. I know he's rather unconventional, but he's spent time off with other teenagers who live on the base with their parents, and he gets along well with kids in general. He's a lot like a kid himself in some ways, for all that he's pushing forty." Ikari nodded. "Are we ready to begin the sync tests?" he called out. Sean tapped on his keyboard a few times. "Sensors are calibrated, and the EVAs are as ready as they're gonna get. Activate the comm line and kill the game." Sean's display console showed him a smaller version of the display now on the big screen -- images from the entry plugs of the EVAs and data about the nerve connections -- but with somewhat different data sets, focused on the data he needed to know without one of the other techs having to alert him. "Jeff, Rock, we're going to start the sync tests now. I'll warn you now... it is going to feel a little weird at first." Sean looked up for a moment so that he could see the two boys. "Begin synchronization routine. Flood the entry plugs with LCL. Boys, just breathe normally. You breathed liquid for the first nine months of your life; let your body remember." Jeff was the first one to speak. "This feels... weird. Kind of like... umm... I don't know what this is like." As Sean had predicted, his voice was a bit deeper, more resonant. "Yeah... it's just... odd." Rock paused. "Gag reflex isn't kicking in. I don't have any urge to try to swallow it. This is really weird. "Like I said, your body remembers. Wait'll you get out of it. That's an even weirder experience." Sean returned his attention to the sync routine. "Connect to main power supply, transmit power to all circuits." This was by-the-book protocol; everyone there could have done this blindfolded, but this was the first time in over ten years that these EVAs had been activated with a pilot inside, and everything had to be done right, especially with what had happened in Unit 00's first sync test with its assigned pilot. "Commencing second contact. Connection to A-10 nerve is operational." The voice belonged to Sean's head console tech, Jack Hawthorne. "Whoa!" Jeff and Rock's exclamations came simultaneously. "I thought the LCL was weird," Rock added. "Yeah... I feel really... tall. And I can feel the braces holding these things up." "Very good, boys. Jeff, Rock, just relax. How are we doing?" "All initial contacts are set. English is set as operating language." "Sync rate holding steady at 54.1% for Bogard, 49.8% for Howard." "No training, either. Very, very good. Better than I'd hoped for first sync test," Sean commented. "Harmonics?" "Normal. Everything well under control and within tolerances." "Excellent. How do you feel, boys?" "...Strange," they replied after a moment. "I can feel my own body," Jeff continued, "but I can also feel the other body. It's like... it's like I'm trying to look at two different things at once, one with each eye." "Yeah," Rock agreed. "That's exactly what it's like." "Alright. Just stay put for a few more minutes, and I'll buy you guys some lunch when we're done. You guys haven't eaten yet today, have you?" "No," they answered, even more in sync than usual. "Well, I can promise you this. It'll be an experience." Morgan took in the view of the mountains silently, pencil playing across a wide expanse of white paper. She had taken a bus up there, an sat at a spectacularly rocky cliff side, her sketchbook open on her lap She had already torn out several pages of the book and left the wadded up paper at her side. What did NERV want with her? A strong wind blew, sending her rejected drawings falling down the cliff, the sound of it whistling in her ears. As it got cooler, she packed her things up and walked down the long, winding footpath. A few sheets of paper remained where she had been, wedged between two rocks, not yet blown away by the wind like the others had been, lonely in the darkening twilight. Rock picked up the burger and took a huge bite out of it. He chewed it for a moment, slowed, looked at it, shrugged, and finished the bite. "When you said it would be an experience, I didn't think you meant it would taste like shoe leather." Sean shrugged. "I'm a vegan. Their vegetarian options aren't exactly Bloodroot, but decent. I've been assuming that their meat options were at least passable." "What's a Bloodroot?" Sean blinked. "Vegetarian restaurant, very good one, in the city I grew up. Like most of southern New England, it's underwater now." Jeff finished his burger on his third bite and set to devouring the fries on his tray. "Will we have to eat here all the time?" Sean shook his head. "Didn't know what you boys liked to eat. I've got food over in our building, and there's a kitchenette in my quarters. Another privilege of rank. By the way, I'm right next door to you guys, and, if you didn't notice, there's a door adjoining our quarters. You two are my responsibility while you're here." "How'd you end up stuck with a couple of kids?" "Volunteered," Sean answered after swallowing a mouthful of food. Suddenly, the sound of a siren filled the cafeteria, and the light went red. "Shit!" Sean exclaimed. "Take your food with you, if you have to, but we have to get to the control center, now!" He was already on his feet, running for the exit, and Rock and Jeff followed him out, gladly abandoning the food. Misato lay awake, thinking of the way Morgan had sat in the locker room, her plug suit still on. Drying LCL dripped out of her short hair in slow, heavy drops, having gone the consistency of slime, and she had hugged her knees to herself. "Why did you disobey my orders, Morgan?" she had asked, furious. "If I had retreated, the Angel would almost certainly have attacked while I was vulnerable. At three minutes of battery power left, any further damage would have slowed me further and I would not have been able to defend myself once battery power was depleted." Morgan spoke in a low monotone, with the air of a soldier answering to a superior who clearly didn't know what they were doing, and endangering lives through their commands. "I'm responsible for you, Morgan. You have an obligation to follow my orders. You, of all people, should understand the chain of command." Th reply had only angered her further, and she had been rather too curt in her tone of speech. "I'm sorry." Misato turned in her bed, unable to sleep. Where are you now?, she asked silently, hoping the girl would return soon. Back in the control room at Groom Dry Lake, Rock and Jeff watched the giant display screen as it cycled through satellite images, showing a crystalline, diamondlike figure, shaped like two pyramids stuck together at the respective bottoms so that one was inverted. It was floating steadily, based on sightings, straight towards Groom Dry Lake. "This was spotted west of Dallas fifteen minutes ago. It's heading towards us at about sixty miles an hour," one of the console techs -- a young woman by the name of Chung -- reported. "And... wave pattern is blue! It's an Angel, sir!" Skinner stood beside Sean, watching both Sean's console and the primary display screen. "So we've got time. Let's test this thing's AT Field," he ordered. "Send out a squad of combat aerodynes and have them fire on it. They are ordered to stay at least five hundred feet from the target." "Yes, sir." Within five minutes, the combat aerodynes were approaching the target. Sean was watching, obviously anxious, his left hand unconsciously massaging the back of his neck. "One mile from target and closing. Five thousand feet. Four thousand five hundred. Four thousand. Nearing targeting range. Three -- " Sean stopped in midsentence as an immense white beam lashed out from the giant octahedron, destroying the aerodynes. "...Bloody hell," he murmured. "It's proactive." "Prepare long-range targeting. Use the heavy mortars." Hundreds of miles away, high-speed maglev trains -- a different network than that of the EVA deployment system -- brought a trio of long-range, high-power mortar cannons into the Angel's path. From a distance of four miles, they launched their payload, three high-yield explosive shells that were designed to destroy large sea vessels from land-based installations, with an effective range of up to two hundred miles. In the control room, they watched as the mortar shells arced towards the Angel at speeds in excess of Mach 1, and explode a scant twenty or thirty feet from the Angel against an AT Field so powerful that the concentric hexagonal distortion was visible to the naked eye. "Goddess," Sean whispered as another beam erupted from the Angel, lashing out and destroying the heavy mortars. "How long do we have before the Angel gets here?" Skinner asked. "If it maintains its current speed and heading, six hours," Sean answered. "What kind of weapon was it using?" "Based on these readings, my best guess is a particle cannon, with enough power to destroy anything we can throw at it, including an EVA with its AT Field at maximum power. Maximum range... unknown. And I'm willing to bet that it'll destroy anything that could be a threat that gets too close, and will fire upon anything that shoots at it." "So we have to hit it from a distance, with something strong enough to punch through its AT Field. Can you give me an estimate on just how much?" Sean stared at his console for a moment, tapped a few keys "Something at least as powerful as its own primary weapon. Particle cannon, running off of..." Sean tapped his console. "About one-hundred eighty terajoules." Skinner frowned. "Can we produce that here?" "If we shut down all the base ops other than supplying power to the EVAS, yes. This installation is the most advanced research facility in North America, and it could probably power Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas if it came right down to it. And we've got a prototype particle cannon here on the base... there'll be some refitting needed, but we can have it ready in time if we start right away." "And if the EVA misses?" Sean tapped at his console. "We can deploy the second EVA with this. It was designed as the atmospheric reentry shield for a next-generation orbiter. Based on what our sensors picked up on the Angel's weapon, the shield should stand up to it for about seventeen seconds. Cooling and targeting cycle for the cannon will be about twelve seconds, best guess, but we're kind of winging it here." Sean glanced back down at the console. "The MAGI agree with my analysis, and approve the plan with two yes votes and one conditional yes. They give us an 8.7% chance of success." Skinner nodded. "Do it." Up above, still sitting in the observational chair, Ikari said nothing, and his hands were steepled in thought. Down in the wooded land near the mountains, Morgan saw a single figure holding what looked like a rifle off in the distance, heading her way. Senses suddenly alert, she reached for the Glock 26 in its shoulder holster, thankful for the Trijicon night sights installed on the pistol The sodium lamps in the front and back sights glowed just enough for he to aim in dim light, and made target acquisition much easier. If she had been followed, it would have made things very inconvenient, she thought, remembering the long, meandering trip she had made through Tokyo-3. What she saw as the figure came closer, however, made her draw a deep breath of relief and reholster the pistol. It was her schoolmate, Kensuke Asamiya, holding what was most probably a replica air gun. "Er, um, hi," he managed to sputter out when he saw her. He was dressed in military camouflage, although Morgan thought she could teach him a few things about remaining concealed in the woods. Still, she was glad of the company. She had been trying to sort her thoughts out for a long day, and no good had come out of it. "What are you doing out here?" she asked, casting a critical glance at him. The night air had gotten rather chilly, and only the small sounds of the forest's nocturnal creatures could be heard. "What else can I do with toys like these? I just like it, I guess," he said, looking away from her gaze. She would have said he was blushing, except that it that was too dark to really tell. "Touji's real sorry about trying to hit you. His sister told him off for that. Imagine... a guy like Touji being yelled at by a grade schooler. But it still makes me laugh to remember the leg lock you had him in, especially with your foot two inches from his groin." Kensuke was surprisingly chatty now that he seemed to have overcome his initial shyness. Morgan welcomed the conversation; it gave her something to think about besides the questions she had had in her head all these days. Kensuke's camp had been set up in a pleasant field some distance from the woods; a campfire crackled merrily, and over it supper was cooking. It all reminded her of the hunting trips her grandfather used to take her on, and it was on those trips she had first learned how to handle a rifle. She found herself missing the taste of venison cooked in an enamel pot over a wood fire. "I like it at night," Kensuke continued, "The cicadas are quiet. I remember when there were fewer of them, and there wasn't much sound, but now it seems the woods are full of them, whirring away during the day." The both of them were sitting around the campfire, warming the chill of the cool night air out of their bones. "Misato told me that the ecosystem is returning to normal," Morgan said, shedding her jacket and leaving it on the ground beside her. She was wearing a black long sleeved t-shirt beneath, and now it was warm enough near the campfire for her not to need the jacket. "I envy you, able to pilot that robot and live with... " Kensuke's voice trailed off as he goggled at Morgan, eyes wide with awe. "What? Anything wrong?" she asked, frowning slightly at the look on his face. "You carry a gun?" he managed to splutter after a few moments of silence. At that, Morgan simply shrugged, "I am fully authorized to carry a sidearm." "You *are* lucky. I wish I could be like you, piloting the Evangelion. You even get to carry a real gun around." His voice was completely sincere; he really did think her position was enviable. She took her cap off and stuck it in her bag, thinking up a reply. "It's a heavy responsibility, not the joyride you think it is." Kensuke stared at her blankly. "Your family would worry," she said after another moment or two, remembering the reprimand she had gotten after disobeying orders. She still felt vaguely guilty about it, though she hadn't had any other viable option. "Oh, my mom's always worried," he replied, checking on the food cooking in the pot over the fire. "I guess it's because she doesn't want to los me, after losing my dad. She even named me after him. Ah well... want something to eat?" Morgan looked at the time on her watch. She had been gone for fourteen hours already. She had to get back to Misato's place before they really had reason to send security after her. "No thanks. I have to go now." She stood up and put her jacket back on, shouldering her backpack comfortably. With that, she made her way out of the woods, leaving Kensuke at the campsite, staring in her wake. "Jeff," Sean said, once they were in the locker room, "you'll be taking gunner. You have a higher sync rate, and you're also the better marksman." As Jeff started to get undressed, Sean told him to stop, and he walked over and lifted up one side of Jeff's jacket. He reached into the shoulder holster hidden underneath, and pulled out Jeff's concealed Walther PPK. "Nice pistol," he said. He reversed it, handing it back to the boy. "And the real thing, too, not the PPK/S. You'll have to tell me how you got it sometime. In the meantime, though, you should have told us you were carrying. As NERV personnel, you have the right to carry a concealed sidearm. We'll just have to have you do some proficiency tests with it later. Prove you know what you're doing. Now, finish changing into your plugsuits." As Rock and Jeff changed, Sean continued speaking. "Rock, you will be providing Jeff's cover, should the first shot miss. As I hope you heard in the control room, you'll have seventeen seconds of cover against the Angel's weapon, which is five seconds more time than Jeff needs to eject the fuse, let the barrel cool, take aim, and fire on the Angel. Remember, you have a chance at one, maybe two shots. Now, I've got to get up to the control room and ready the EVAs for launch. You two get up to your EVAs and get ready for your baptism by fire." Sean turned and strode out of the locker room. "He's a little..." Rock started. "I think he's a lot." "And he's the one keeping an eye on us." "Yep. I don't know how living with him's gonna be, but it'd have to be better than Darth Vader up there. Does the man ever say anything?" "I was wondering that myself. Is it just me, though, or does Skinner remind you of that guy from that episode of Deep Space Nine?" "Oh, that guy with weird nose?" "Yeah, that's the one." Jeff and Rock stared at each other, and burst out laughing. After a minute or two of barely being able to zip up their plugsuits, they gained control of themselves again and headed out into the huge chamber that held the EVAs. "You have no idea who I'm talking about, do you, Jeff?" "Do you?" "No." "Scared?" "Let's review. We're going out to face the d8 from Hell using half of a space shuttle and an untested prototype weapon that, for all we know, could blow up in our faces and get us charbroiled. We're doing this in bizarre giant robots that somehow killed the last people who tried to polot them. Fuck, yeah, I'm scared. But this is the coolest thing that's ever happened to us in our lives, so I figure at the least we go out in a blaze of glory." "Amen. But I wanted to at least get laid once before I die." Rock was still giggling and shaking his head when he got into the entry plug of EVA 04. "Jeff, Rock, hit the blue button to bring up the map display," Sean was saying. "You'll be launched to the points labeled A and B on your map, and from there you'll make your way to Hanger 16, C on your map, where you'll find the cannon and the shield you'll be using. That's as close as we could get them without using an EVA, which wasn't an option. From there, you'll make your way to the point marked D, the East Hill, where you'll be linking up the cannon with the power supply and making your stand against the Angel. Good luck," he finished. Skinner nodded, and gave the launch order. For Jeff and Rock, it was one of the most sensational experiences they'd ever had. They shot up through the elevators, sometimes moving diagonally, at speeds so high that their EVAs could feel the wind and the cooling effect through their armor, and were feeding it back to their pilots. "Jeff, if I die now, I'll die happy." "Rock, I couldn't agree more. Not that I'm *planning* to die..." "Me neither. If you get yourself killed, I'll bring you back just so I can kill you again myself." "Likewise." Their conversation came to an abrupt halt as the elevators slammed home. EVAs 03 and 04 lurched for a moment, as their pilots got used to the control system, and then made their way over to Hanger 16 quickly, if gracelessly. "Sync holding at 74.3% for pilot Bogard, 71.9% for pilot Howard," Jeff heard one of the console techs say, the Chung woman. She was cute; he had to find out what her first name was. "Excellent. Remember, Jeff, Rock, just relax. Let yourselves join with the EVAs. I know it's hard to surrender to it, but that's the only way you'll get it to surrender to you." Sean's statement, which sounded vaguely Zen-ish to Jeff, made a degree of sense to him, and he allowed himself to relax into the feedback from the EVA. "Sync rate has climbed to 79.4% for pilot Bogard. It's holding steady. 77.2% for pilot Howard. Holding steady." "Excellent, boys. Now, get into position, and focus on the target." Jeff and Rock crowned the hill and made their way in front of the massive banks of generators and capacitors that would be powering the particle cannon. Rock got down into a crouch, heat shield in front of him, while Jeff linked the cannon to the power supply and ran the diagnostic, as he'd been instructed to. Then he linked the interface cable from his EVA into the cannon, watched the targeting reticule appear on the display that swung down to cover his face. "Right. No harder than bullseyeing womp rats in a T-16 back home," Jeff muttered to himself. Rock's voice came over the commline. "The Force seems as good an idea as the targeting computer. But this time the target area's a helluva lot bigger than two meters." Sean's voice came next. "I appreciate the levity, and the references, but let's stay focused on the task at hand. Target's approaching now. Should be on your scopes soon, Jeff, Rock." Sure enough, the targeting computer's display showed the octahedron nearing them, seemingly so slowly. The targeting reticules moved towards each other, attempting to line up in the center. "The computer will take into account the curvature of the earth, local EM fields that can disrupt or warp the beam, gravitational effects, and the heat of the barrel as you fire. Let it do its work, Jeff." Slowly, ever so slowly, the targeting reticules crept closer and closer. Abruptly, they swung together, and blinked red. "Target acquired and locked," Jeff reported. "Fire," Sean ordered. Jeff pulled the trigger, and a beam of light, so intensely white that it seemed to scrape inside Jeff's brain, exploded out of the barrel, heading directly towards the Angel. Almost simultaneously, the Angel fired, and its own intensely white beam shot towards the two EVAs. The two beams were on the same track, and as they neared, the magnetic charges lined up, and, growing exponentially more powerful as they grew closer, pushed away from each other, warping and twisting the beams. The Angel's beam blew out a furrow in the hill behind the two EVAs, while Jeff's cannon's beam disappated somewhere in the flat distance beyond the Angel. Jeff pulled himself into combat mode, forcing thought aside as he jacked the fuse out of the cannon, causing another to slide into place. Barrel heat warnings filled his display, and now the targeting computers seemed to be going even slower, forced to take into account potential disruption from the Angel's own beam. Then, his sensors went berserk, and he looked up, to see the Angel firing again. Rock stood up, holding the heat shield forth, giving Jeff the time he needed. The targeting computer continued to work, estimating ten to twelve seconds to cool the barrel and recalculate weapon trajectory. Before Jeff's horrified eyes, though, the heat shield was already melting, and before he knew what was happening, it was completely blasted through, and Rock stood before the onslaught, AT Field at maximum power and doing nothing to slow down the melting of his armor. Six seconds. With a cry of despair, Jeff ripped the interface cable out of the cannon, and lined up the sights himself as the targeting computer's display retracted. He ignored Sean and Skinner's orders as he pulled the trigger, and another white beam lanced out of his rifle. The beam tore through the Angel's own beam, this time the polarities forcing the enemy weapon to dissipate, instead of warping the beam. The cannon's beam continued, punching through the leading corner of the diamond shape, and going out the other side. Something exploded inside the Angel, blowing half of its top away, and the Angel fell out of the air, landing heavily on one of its flat sides, even as the safeties kicked in on Jeff's cannon and shut it down. Jeff cast aside the cannon, forgetting about it, and he scrabbled at his foster brother's EVA, tearing the plating off the back and pulling the entry plug out. Then, he got out of his own EVA and ran over to the other entry plug, scalding his hand on the emergency release. Steaming LCL erupted from the entry plug, and Jeff pulled his foster brother out of it. "You... you okay, bro?" Rock coughed and managed to sit up on his own. "I think so." "Good. 'Cause if you were dead I would have had to kill you." Misato had gotten up from bed, unable to sleep. Soon she would have to notify security; then, they would launch a search for the missing Child. She crushed an empty beer can in her hand, and started to search for another can, just to occupy her time, when she heard the key in the lock. The door opened, and there, framed in the doorway, was the person she'd been worrying about all this time. Morgan stood there as though nothing had happened, her expression as cool and serious as ever She was slightly rumpled, her boots muddy, but she was looking more alive than she had been for the past few days. Her face was flushed slightly, and her pale eyes seemed to glow. She looked to have walked all the way back from wherever she had been. "You shouldn't have just vanished like that. I've been worried sick all this time, and I was just going to call NERV Security." Misato tried looking stern, but found it hard to hold the expression for long. "You can't just go AWOL like that." "I'm sorry, Misato. I needed to walk it out. I'm back." Morgan shut the door behind her, loath to step further into the house because of the mud on her boots. After a few moments of struggling with her feelings, Misato walked over to Morgan and drew her into a hug. Unexpectedly, the girl leaned agains Misato, returning the embrace briefly. "Welcome home, Morgan." --- o/~ [Closing titles] Live - Face and Ghost (The Children's Song) o/~ Evangelion Densetsu web presence (by Laudre): http://www.drelau.com/creations/eva-d/ Evangelion Densetsu LiveJournal (Announcements and such): http://www.livejournal.com/users/eva_densetsu/ Comments, criticism, death threats, and marriage proposals to laudre@null.net (Laudre) and loremaster_evil@hotmail.com (Lore).