The Ghost of Evangelion (NGE/GitS)

[LatwPIAT]

I've decided to post this here too because fanfiction.net destroys my foreboding binary scene cuts.

So, yeah. It's a Neon Genesis Evangelion/Ghost in the Shell[1] crossover, with a quite a few plot points lifted from Serial Experiments Lain and Snow Crash and a few other books I have have in my shelves.

I guess I should thank Enki_v2 for Neon Cognogenesis Omega, a NGE/Lain/Snow Crash crossover written around 2000 - Enki_v2's work and reserach has greatly inspired and helped me.

Even moreso, I should thank EarthScorpion for a) writing Aeon Natum Engel, which directly inspired me to write this, b) helping me a lot with the story, and c) recommending it to other people. Thanks!

I'm also going to thank prescience, Tzetze, QQQQQ and my mother for help with the first draft and piling up the Xanatoses.

So, yeah... Um... This is an incomplete Sumerian mythological family tree I made. You're probably going to need it. (Look at all the incest! Perfect for an Eva-crossover!)

RAKBU ATTACK/Unnatural Night
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The Ghost of Evangelion – Layer 01
A Neon Genesis Evangelion/Ghost in the Shell crossover

AD 2030, Present day, present time
There was a tense silence in the air all over Odawara District, broken only by the humming of Jigabachi attack helicopters. Old, black, charred buildings poked crookedly out of greenish-brown water, a testament to long-dead engineers and architects. The lower districts of Odawara had once been populated, but the shifting seas has flooded the streets and displaced the citizens, spreading the urban sprawl towards Manazuru and Yugawara, almost touching to create a continuous urban wall stretching from Wakayama to Chiba, against the advancing waves of the Pacific Sea.

And in this sea, swam the messenger of an ancient civilization, all but forgotten since man had left the cradle of civilization; man cannot, after all, stay in the cradle forever.

This ancient god, the Rakbu, drifted further into the sunken city and set foot in the abandoned streets. It began its stride up, rising shoulder-first between the black skyscrapers. A Jigabachi hovered at the other end of the street, capturing the rising creature in all its horror; 40 meters tall, humanoid and black with a single white bird-like skull.

“OK, Sergeant,” the helicopter-pilot heard in his audio implants “Pull out; we’ve got confirmation from ECCO; it’s a match,”

The helicopter pilot, Kentarou Hayashida, pulled his Jigabachi out of the venetian streets and back towards the “Pacific Wall,” a joint Japanese/AE defensive line of rowed and columned Type 10 tanks brandishing 120mm high-velocity cannons, backed by brand new EW204 Multi-ped Tanks and lines of Type 21 Howitzers. The seas were patrolled by a mix of Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force destroyers and an AEN Carrier Group conveniently stationed in Yokosuka, Kanegawa.

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Damn it! Misato thought. How could I miss him now of all days? She bit her lip and peered over the shoulder of the Operator android piloting the Botanachi DLCH tilt-rotor. She kept on making these stupid mistakes in front of JSDA, who’d stood there waiting, with her own car already warm by the time she had found a clean dress. She looked over at the Special Forces-detachment she was working with; their commander, a female full-conversion cyborg, was loading her Seburo C25A.

“You can relax Major,” Misato yelled over the thundering twin rotors “there won’t be anyone to shoot at; it’s only a pickup!”

“You never know…” Major Motoko Kusanagi replied. ‘Overkill’ decided Misato was the best work to describe the woman; half a platoon of heavily armed soldiers and a small one-man tank, all for a job Misato could have done alone with only her car – less intimidating that way, too.

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“Today, a special state of emergency has been declared,” the speakers sounded over Ashigrashimo: “throughout the Kanto and Chubu districts around the Tokai Area. Please take refuge in your designated shelter.”

A teenager, dressed in a plain school uniform, sighed loudly to nobody in the abandoned streets outside Odawara Central Station. He’s just travelled 8 hours by train, travelling the on both the Sanyo and Tokaido Shinkansen, because his father was too much of a bastard to pay for a plane ticket; Shinji was dead tired, and it was raining. He looked down at the picture of Ms Katsuragi; it was a picture of her, showing a V-sign with her hand and smiling at the camera in a very loose t-shirt and no bra; not hard to tell, considering she was leaning sharply forwards, giving Shinji an appealing view of her cleavage. The arrow labeled ‘look here’ helped. Still, who gave away pictures like that?

Shinji stuck the picture back in his pocket to protect it from the rain; the edges were well worn already and for some inexplicable reason he’d like to keep that picture. It was certainly a lot better than anything else he had been given; transfer papers (written by an android and signed by his father) and a note that said ‘come,’ the epitome of his father laconic writing, like those hastily written birthday cards that had stopped arriving in the mail many years ago; the entirety of his father correspondence with him could fit inside a thin envelope. Not that Shinji had tried.

Yet, it was from his father, asking him to come.

Shinji thought that he’d been alone on the streets, but in the distance, partly obscured by heavy rain, he could see a pale, blue haired girl; actual, faded blue hair, not electric blue like cyborgs had. What’s she doing here, in the rain? A gust of wind threw water in Shinji’s eyes. When he opened them, the girl was gone – disappeared – with no trace of where she had left to. What am I doing here? It’s raining, Shinji reminded himself.

The thundering sound of a helicopter entered Shinji’s ears; it was flying overhead at an atrocious height, throwing old newspapers and tissue papers around. It landed almost on top of Shinji, facing away from him. The heavy downwind almost threw Shinj off his legs, and he had to swat a newspaper out of his face. The rear hatch of the tilt-rotor folded down, and a woman in a short black dress jumped out, backlit by a pair of headlights.

“Shinji Ikari! the woman yelled and waved “Sorry to keep you waiting!” The tilt-rotor downwind rippled through her tight, clinging dress, though Shinji didn’t notice that. Honestly.

The woman, who could only be Misato Katsuragi, was flanked by another woman; a military full-conversion Megatech cyborg with a plain (by modern standards, anyway) face Shinji had seen thousands of times before framed by purple hair, and standing next to Misato Katsuragi didn’t help, even if both were wearing formfitting clothes. Shinji boarded the tilt-rotor.

“See?” Misato said to the purple-haired woman once they got inside “It went by smoothly. You didn’t need the tank,”

An explosion shattered nearby windows, as if to prove Misato wrong. Shinji turned to face the mirrored façade falling to pieces. The purple-haired woman pushed him further into the tilt-rotor behind a small military Spider Tank facing out the rear hatch.

“Take us out of here!” she yelled. As the tilt-rotor rose above the skyscrapers, Shinji caught a glimpse of a black giant illuminated by explosions scattering against a snow crash. Another bright fire backlighted the impossible giant; something that big shouldn’t exist, yet it did, so it must be real.

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The sky lit up in a reddish hue once more. Another round of High-Explosive Anti-Tank missiles slammed into the Rakbu’s face.

“HEAT-shells have no effect on the target!” Taku Tanikawa, a VTOL gunner, reported over the radio.

The slaved Jigabachis kept firing. Giant, grey wasps, each Jigabachi was part of an AI-controlled hive mind, both a genius and an idiot at the same time; they didn’t have any concept of “nothing could survive that;” the enemy was either destroyed, or it wasn’t; there was no room for probably. Their meter-long stingers kept firing, releasing a thick beam of 7.62mm bullets onto the pillar of smoke.

The smoke cleared, revealing that as each 7.62 NATO bullet hit, the air flickered like TV noise with the appropriate sound, scattering a pattern of static all over the Rakbu as rotary guns swept over it. The Rabku itself was unharmed; not even a scratch. To it, the Jigabachi were nothing more than bothersome wasps, and it went fly-swatting.

Taku Tanikawa’s body was vaporized by a blooming purple bar of light. His Jigabachi was burnt to nothingness, fried by the photons. Rainwater steamed off the beam of light, misting up around the Rakbu. Metal shards dropped into the harbor, glowing white-hot and steaming.

“Get us out of here!” captain Katsuragi yelled. The Jigabachi and the Botanachi were somewhat similar, and she’d rather their fates didn’t end up resembling each other. She looked over at Shinji, who was staring terrified out a window at the monstrosity. She – humanity – couldn’t afford to lose him. She bit her lip and stared out the closing rear hatch while darkness turned to light and hell was unleashed.

Hell was an inferno. In a desperate last attempt to stop the Rakbu, the JASDF had tried to overwhelm the Rakbu by unleashing all remaining firepower at the Rakbu simultaneously. The Jigabachis fired their 105mm rifled cannons. Loud cracks sounded to the air, and any windows not already broken splintered and shattered from the shockwave of cannons firing.
There were no moments of silence, for as soon as the limited supply of 105mm shells was squandered, they’d unleash a barrage of all their remaining ATGMs, resulting in a sound much like celebrating with fireworks inside a metal barrel. Once the Rakbu was surrounded in a literal firewall, the whirring motor sound of spinning barrels, followed by the loud, saw-like sound of 3,000 rounds per minute cracking through the sound barrier, each crack before the old had gone quiet, like the Devil’s own electric razor running along the flesh of the innocent.

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Along the highway connecting Tokyo and Hakone, Japanese–owned M270 MLRS, loaded in all 12 tubes with solid fuel rockets, received orders from the JSDA. Go-codes were given and barrages were greenlit. The M270 crews had already aimed and calibrated their guns to hit the Rakbu in centre of mass, and began firing immediately. Supporting them were division of heavy armor; Type 10 tanks and EW204 multi-peds fired their 120mm main cannons, supported by a hailstorm of 7.62x51 mm rounds. Suddenly, the Rakbu was covered in a burning firewall of artillery explosives and tank shells. A purple beam burst from the flames, vaporizing a platoon of tanks at once. Another beam burst forth and turned a column of EW204s to ashes. Faced with the gunboat diplomacy of this giant, the Blefuscu could only watch in despair.

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There was a tense silence in the CIC-room provided by ECCO. The holographic map and the wall-sized projector screen only served to emphasize exactly how outgunned the JSDA was. The JSDA Chief of Staff Army, Kii Kawamoto, looked over his folded hands as his forces were driven further and further back. JASDF jet fighters and US Navy fighter-bombers from the USS Philip Mead would cover the Rakbu in smoke and explosions, and they would fade only to reveal the black giant still standing – walking even – unfrazzled towards Yugawara.

In the uncomfortable moments that passed, only three men remained calm; the first two were Koto Fuyutsuki and Gendo Ikari:

“As we expected, it is protected by an A.T. Field,” the old greying Deputy Commander said, a little too loudly

“Yes,” his old student concurred “Conventional weapons will not harm it,”
The third was Daisuke Aramaki, an old man who’d never learnt when to quit playing with soldiers and battleships. He was at least as old as the Chief of Staff, Ground and losing his hair, letting the remaining whitish-grey strands hang down the back of his simian face, as off-colour as his worn, once navy-blue suit. He turned to Gen. Kawamoto

“Are you really this stupid?” he asked; Daisuke Aramaki was a shrewd man.
General Kawamoto stared down at the old man who had, quite rudely, interrupted his command of Operation Hashidate.

“Explain.” he demanded.

“General Kawamoto, your aerial and ground forces have tried to engage the target without success. Right now it’s advancing on the city. You need to slow it down to buy more time to find an effective solution. You must find some way to slow it down, and you might just get the time you need to find a way to destroy it,” Aramaki continued.

Kawamoto paused for a moment – the old man was right, after all – they needed to buy more time, and Kawamot knew just the person for the job. He turned to an android secretary to open a line for him.

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Cpt. Eiri commanded a small detachment of forces – an artillery battery, comprised mostly of old Type 96 Howtizers, supported by a platoon of mechanized infantry. His role during Operation Hashidate had been to provide fire support against the Rakbu by lobbing – to no avail – 155mm shells at it. Other than the Howitzers, the heaviest weapon around was the Sumitomo Type 18 7.62 mm Machine Gun, which had rather poor penetrative power when compared to the Type 96. He looked the Rakbu through his binoculars. Occasionally a barrage of time-on-target fire would approach Isimud. The shells would slam into a snow crash, hanging, bouncing, deflecting – The Rakbu was an implacable wall of walking destruction.

And Eiri had been given orders to take it down with what amounted to a fancy popgun.

Which was why he wasn’t even going to aim at it.

Isimud took a step. There was a single loud ‘crack’ as 12 howitzers fired; their shells sailed through the air – a flotilla of 600 kg of steel - and struck the ground before the awakening alien god’s feet. The asphalt was ripped to pieces. Flakes tore off and embedded themselves in old, abandoned buildings. Sand and soil scattered in all directions, leaving a giant hole in the ground. Isimud completed the step, found the ground no longer there, and became a victim of gravity. It fell.

For good measure, the howitzers cracked again.

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A single B52, courtesy of the Japanese/American Defence Treaty, which actually did count in the case of alien invasion, flew towards a clearing among the ruins of old Odawara, guided both by GPS map and by a laser painted on the Rakbu by a JSDA Forward Air Controller. The continued white noise and electric sparks that filled the air as artillery barrage met AT field made dropping the 20kt, laser guided, non-nuclear cruise missile considerably easier, even in the dark.

The CIC was bathed in white light as UAVs transmitted images of a detonating bomb. The non-nuclear bomb had been designed to wipe forests off the map. It carried nearly two tons of liquid ethylene oxide with evenly distributed aluminium nanoparticles, spread around by powerful magnetic fields in cyclotrons. The resulting explosion would cover an area over 3 kilometers in radius. The overpressure caused by the explosion could crush a human skull into itself and shatter buildings instantaneously, like matchstick houses in a hurricane. Then, like a matches, everything inside the blast radius would spontaneously self-ignite from the extreme heat; the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. All of this would have happened after the bomb had sucked in every living being within a reasonable distance outside the blast radius, like a black hole on fire.

Ground zero had been wiped. There was nothing left. It was a gaping black crater surrounded by collapsing structures again surrounded by black monoliths (themselves previously nuked) covered in thick layers of old and new ashes, broken and deteriorating. A cloud of concrete dust swept through the ghost city, rolling over buildings and through the broken windows, shattered all at once so many years ago. A bright fireball rose upwards in an incandescent red glow and melted the asphalt on its way up. The old city had been toasted, leaving only the smell of oxides at noon: Victory.
Then a living shadow rose from the ground.

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The Botanachi tilt-rotor flew into the crater that hollowed out the south-eastern part of Ashigarashimo District – there was an artificial island in the very middle, with a single bridge connecting it to the mainland. The island was almost flat now, rather than a towering Gaussian curve made from skyscrapers defying gravity, tectonic plates and common sense.

“What is ECCO?” Shinji asked Misato, breaking the monotone silence of thundering rotors.

“The Earth Coincidence Control Centre is a defence contractor for the JSDA – we provide the JSDA with the weapons and personnel to defeat monsters like that,” Misato answered, pointing in the direction of the one-sided battle.

“You don’t seem to being a very good job!” Shinji blurted out. He got a sharp stare in return.

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Gendo Ikari faced a panel of Japanese Self-Defence Generals, himself backlit by the hideous Rakbu, its bird-like head wrung and crooked, revealing another skull. The generals, hard-faced old men still trying to fight the last war against enemies so ancient that nothing recognizable as a man had even seen them before; this was not a war won by an army; this war would be won by the born-again epic hero, and only he, Gendo Ikari, knew how the story went.

“You’re now in command of the operation. We’ll see how you deal with it,” Kawamoto said. The implications of the latter sentence hanging in the air like thick cigarette smoke hangs in a closed room in a black-and-white film.

“Yes sir,” Ikari said with a solemn face. In his mind, he smirked – he had proven to them, although it was as much their doing as his, that the JSDA was useless against the Rakbu; he could expect their full, if reluctant, co-operation, rather than the constant inter-branch infighting between two groups thinking they are much better than each other – his metal smirk turned to a mental smile – Yui.

“Ikari, considering out available weapons… I have to admit we have no effective way to deal with the target. Are you confident you can defeat it?” Kawamoto asked, concerned rather than mockingly.
Gendo Ikari adjusted his glasses. Hyuga, Ibuki and Aoba turned their heads and waiter for his answer. Dozens of eyes rested on him, some real, som artificial; even androids had turned their heads to transcribe him perfectly. A simple “Yes” would not suffice.

“That is why ECCO exists,”

Then, a little later:

“Activate Unit-01”

Tensions rose among the ECCO staff. Fuyutsuki turned to Gendo once the Commander had sat down.

“Unit-01?” Fuyutsuki asked with a hint of surprise; the implication was carried across perfectly.

“A pilot will arrive shortly; he will pilot it,” Gendo answered the statement-that-ended-in-a-question-mark. Unseen though his glasses, he looked up at his teacher and, in some sense of the word, friend. He paused, then continued “Have Dr Akagi prepare Unit-00 for deployment; shell only,”

Fuyutsuki smiled for a fraction of a second.

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Had Misato not had a cyberbrain, she would have been overwhelmed by the beehive of passageways that were strewn across the GeoFront; the excavated shafts were hexagonal, but all the rooms had been constructed according to a square grid layout. That is to say, one square grid layout for each of the six walls, built by different engineers under the supervision of different architects with different ideas. Room and corridors met at bizarre sums of 90 and 70 degrees, as if someone had not yet realized they were working with Euclidian dimensions, or for that matter that they were limited to only three of them.

Automaps were a nice feature of both cyberbrains and PDAs, Dr Ritsuko Akagi reflected. Granted, some people, and we’re not pointing any fingers here Captain Katsuragi, sometimes managed to get lost even with map software.
Luckily, though Ritsuko, today was not one of those days.
It might be attributed to Maj. Kusanagi’s presence, but the doctor liked to think the best of her former roommate.

“…and he is the one?” she asked Misato, looking down at the quizzical, unsmiling boy she’d dragged along; there were some overall similarities in the facial structure with Gendo Ikari, but that didn’t necessarily mean that it was Shinji Ikari, just someone with his Y-chromosome. As long as it’s not any of my X’es…

“Yes,” Misato answered, “according to the Marduk Report, he’s the Third Child,”

“So I’m my father’s third child?” Shinji spewed with genuine surprise. Really shouldn’t have surprised me. How like my father – not that Shinji actually knew him that well. “I didn’t know that,”

For a second, an uncomfortable silence filled the corridor.

“Not in that way. Your father would never…” Misato and Ritsuko said at once “It means you’re number three on a list of applicants for ECCO,” Ritsuko explained.

“Oh, by the way Maj. Kusanagi – are there anyone under your command who are experienced with ICE? I’ve tried to set up a defensive system but…”

“Well,” the Major interrupted “”for a system this large, you’ll want to set up a total-barrier with independent reverse probes arrays. However, I’d recommend investing in a hardline to make your main CPU a lead box to prevent infection using independent operators. You’ll want to avoid barrier-fusion and polymorphic algorithms...”

Ritsuko heard and ignored the muttered utterance of “…hackers…” that came from her former roommate.

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Ritsuko had brought Shinji, Misato and Maj. Kusanagi up to level B-20 and onto an artificial lake, towered by tall, pressing walls coated in water-proof pain that had occasionally flaked off, revealing rusty metal or grey concrete beneath. The water was clear, and Shinji could see all the way to the bottom; it was at least 30, give or take a few from refraction. Ritsuko steered to boat into a small channel and up to a small port. She tied it to a pier and motioned for her passengers to get out; Misato left first and helped held out a hand to help Shinji. Maj. Kusanagi, about seven times as dense as the equally sized-Cpt. Katsuragi, made sure to leave the boat in a safe manner; she didn’t exactly float and her artificial lungs didn’t take well to water.

Ritsuko led them through a door into a pitch black room. Shinji could hear the sloshing of small waves and smell the thick smell of chlorine from the water. A single lane was lit by blue cats-eye LEDs in front of Shinji. The door slammed shut, leaving nothing but himself and the badly illuminated trio of women. The darkness was uncomfortable; Shinji felt like he could suddenly step into a deep pool of water with each step he took. He heard the distinct slap of hand against face and turned to see Maj. Kusanagi let out an annoyed grunt.

“What, if I may ask, is that?” she said and pointed into the darkness. Shinji squinted in the direction of her arm, but couldn’t see what she was pointing at. Ritsuko smiled and pushed a button on her PDA. The entire room was floodedlighted with bright fluorescent light; like a bleached picture, washing all the colours out.

Shinji faced a gigantic white, inhuman head. It was like a perversion of a samurai helmet, with giant red eyes staring at him from beneath protective plates. He glanced down to see the silhouette of a torso submerged in the greenish water, reaching down from the neck. Shinji knew exactly what he looked at, even though he’d only though they were fictional.

“This, to answer your question…” Ritsuko shouted “is the epitome of cybernetic engineering; the “Evangelion” Type 36 multi-purpose armed suit,”

The Evangelion was as tall as Isimud, 40 meters, 30 of them underwater. It weighted over 400 tons, most of it armor. The visible part of the Evangelion was its shoulders and head, both coloured in thick white paint to prevent corrosion. Under the helmet was an actual lower jaw, seemingly for no particular reason other than to give a monstrous look, as it had obviously been welded shut at some point. There even was a horn.

“…this would be Unit-01, the first combat-ready model, beating the predicted deadline of our European partners by several months,”

“My father built this?” Shinji asked, raising a single eyebrow while staring at the doctor.

“That’s right!” a voice said, slightly tinted by the PA system, but clearly an adult male. Shinji didn’t recognize the voice, he didn’t need too. He knew the laconic way of speaking, he knew the subtle pride, as apparent in real life as on paper, he didn’t even need to look up, although he did, to recognize the man standing in front of a massive window overlooking the Eva pen, still unchanged in appearance after 12 years. It was his father.

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” the elder Ikari asked the younger.

The bastard, for that was only word Shinji could use in this situation, stared down at him. Shinji had brought many questions he wanted to ask his father, yet he had been afraid of the answers, and unsure which to ask – Why did you leave me, Father? Why didn’t you ever visit me, Father? Why didn’t we ever talk, Father? – and now he knew which question to ask, and he knew the answer.

And it was terrifying to know.

“Why am I here Father?” Shinji asked “You’d hardly have transferred me across half of Japan, by train in the middle of the night, no less, just so I could go to school here the next day,” he dreaded the obvious answer “You want me –“ Shinji continued “–to pilot that–“ he pointed at Unit-01 “–against that thing I saw?”

“Precisely,” Gendo replied.

“No way,” Shinji said “That’s an armed suit. They require training. Training I do not have,” and going by the reaction of the purple-haired woman “Training nobody has.”

Gendo looked dismissively down on the pilot – his son – before him, catching Shinji in the wall-mounted screens from a variety of angles in the corner of his eye; he could of course verbally push the Third Child until he complied, as usual, but the JSDA would probably react very badly to say the least, to overt manipulative persuasion of minors, so Gendo Ikari would have to rely on less overt and more uncomfortable (to him as well) techniques of persuasion (which in itself, of course, was a backup plan) Gendo pressed a key.

“Fuyutsuki,” he called over a private channel, to a stoic avatar of Fuyutsuki “wake up Rei.”

“Why the hell does he have to pilot anyway?” Maj. Kusanagi asked Cpt. Katsuragi “he’s a child!”

“Adult brains are less receptive to the surgery required;” Ritsuko answered “as the brain ages the neural plasticity is gradually lowered. Attempts at augmenting the neurons with nanite-capsids at a later age will increase the risk of exponential neural hardening…”

“Thank you! That’s enough!” Misato yelled. Ritsuko mumbled “I’m sorry,” at a just above audible level.

Ritsuko’s earpiece beeped – she didn’t have a cyberbrain; anyone with enough time and CPU resources could potentially read and control her mind; all her thoughts would become open, and her mind nothing but a complex system open to Class A ‘WIZZARD’ hackers, cyber-brainwashers, ghost-dubbing devices and dangerous viruses; she felt less… expendable… with a fully organic brain.

“Reconfigure Unit-01’s systems for pilot Rei Ayanami! Restart!” she transmitted after playing the message.

Ritsuko walked away before she’d even received a reply. She knew Maya Ibuki well enough know that for all her minor quirks, she’d turned EVA-g2g-compability restarts from a computer science into a near art form. Maya and Ritsuko had spent an entire night in a secluded corner of the computer lab with obscene amounts of caffeine (and in Ritsuko’s case, equally obscene amounts of nicotine) and converted the entire program from high-level code into hex, and therefore Maya knew just as well as Ritsuko how to configure Unit-01.

“Yes ma’am!” Maya answered Ritsuko, like a bright sun in the otherwise gloomy room, “I’ll restart the loader,”

Maya Ibuki looked at the graphical user interface. It showed a node labeled “UNIT-01,” compromised all the way to its ghost-barrier. Adjacent to the node was a list of currently running programs. She hit a few keys to change the criteria so that it would show only non-vital security programs, and quickly moved her mouse over to a drop-down menu with the option: “disable all” and clicked. She could have terminated them all with the command line window, but unlike the GUI it didn’t differentiate between vital and non-vital security measures, and she would either have to type in each and every program name, or she would have to restart all the vital processes which would take much too long time. As soon as she’d typed her password to confirm the termination of all the non-vital security measures, she switched to the command line interface:

.cmd/projectg/unit01

end

NEW GHOST CONFIGURATION ENDED. 0 ERRORS.

configure /p

CONFIGURING PROFILE. NO PROFILE FOUND.
TO LOAD OLD PROFILE TYPE “LOAD [PROFILE NAME]”
TO CREATE NEW PROFILE TYPE “NEW” TO INSTALL A
PROFILE DRIVER TYPE “INSTALL [DIRECTORY]” FOR
MORE OPTIONS TYPE “HELP”

load “pilots/ayanami”

LOADING PROFILE “AYANAMI”

PILOT NAME: Ayanami, Rei
ESTIMATED SYNC RATIO: 54% +/- 09% STANDARD DEVIATION
LOADING... PLEASE WAIT

So he had another pilot all along… Shinji though. Still, something was amiss – he’d been dragged from Kyosho all the way to Odawara on a day’s notice, complete with transfer papers for a new school; he’d been airlifted from the train station by special forces, and yet he was, in one sense of the word, expendable, because his father already had someone else to pilot for him. So, in the end, he was losing sleep (how late was it anyways?) for no good reason; another day ruined by his father. Great.

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Rei Ayanami could feel the adrenalin spread around her body, causing her cold, feverish body to shake even more than just minutes before. She could feel her lacerated left arm better now, though it was still numb from her high dose of painkillers. Her right arm was in a cast, and she had no idea if it was broken or a prosthetic. It didn’t hurt, unless she moved it, but with her shivering and occasional involuntary trashing, that happened a lot. Breathing hurt, especially the rapid near-hyperventilation caused by the adrenalin cocktail she’d been given. She still had a concussion, so her head constantly hurt, only amplified by the stinging pain in her left eye. It was so tightly bandaged she had no idea whether the eye was just being protected from foreign objects, or actually gone. It mattered little to her now; she couldn’t use it anyway. Her broken ribs shifted uncomfortably as the nurse carried her stretcher. She listened to the pneumatic hissing from the nurses’ exoskeleton, to take her mind of the pain, a rhythmical air pulse as the nurse walked. Rei could only look into the roof, seeing each overhead lamp pass by, slightly out of focus as her head hurt whenever she tried to focus on anything. She tried as hard as she could not to fall asleep, knowing it would only make her a liability to wake up and make her concussion worse.

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Maj. Kusanagi looked at the new arrival; it was a young blue-haired girl, not exactly surprising at this point, in a white flight suit and covered in bandages. The Major read off her bed’s plaque that the girl was currently receiving cybernetic organ-replacements. Her artificial eyebrows furrowed and her lips tightened. She strode over to Cpt. Katsuragi and picked her off the ground.

“Why isn’t she in the ICU? You’re risking her life!” she demanded.

Misato swallowed and scooted down into the greenish water beneath her. “Uh…” she began “if that Rakbu – that monster – comes too close to the GeoFront, it’ll wipe out most of Japan – it’ll be like Second Deluge all over again, but on Earth; we’re not…” Misato gasped for breath. The Major faked letting go of Misato and swept her back onto the walkway.

Shinji looked at the blue-haired girl trying to stand up from the bed. She was shaking and grit her teeth in pain. He could hear her heavy breathing, complemented by the hollow sound of lungs with too much liquid in them. She sat, for a while, on the edge of the stretcher, quivering in pain.

“I thought using me was preposterous, yet, Father, you have outdone yourself,” Shinji mumbled, mostly to himself. So this was why his father needed him; because the other pilot was half dead – still in her flight suit; she’d been hospitalized recently; pieces started falling together, except that one non-Euclidean one as to why the bastard hadn’t simply told him what was going on. Shinji silently cursed a horse-salesman and a tax collector under his breath. “OK, I’ll do it. I’ll pilot it.

Before anyone could reply, the entire building shook from the force of a concentrated beam of cuneiform light. Cables snapped and the chlorine-heavy water spat him in the face. Light fixtures swung and their fluorescent pipes splintered and sparked. The walkway swung heavily and Shinji lost his balance and almost fell into the water. Major Kusanagi somersaulted off the slanted walkway and stood straight like a nail on its edge before coiling back to prepare for another jump as the walkway slid back into a horizontal position; she’d rather not drown. She heard metal scream and bend as three heavy H-beams fell towards the walkway. Shinji tired to get back onto his legs and away, but 450 kg of person slammed into his stomach. A giant off-white hand reached out from beneath the water like a giant claw ready to crush him. The H-beams bounced off the hand and towards Gendo, but much to the chagrin of Cosmic Justice he was protected by 100 mm of armored plastic. Once Shinji regained his breath, he found himself in Maj. Kusanagi’s one-armed bear-hug sprawled on the floor. The other hand carried the blue-haired girl.

Shinji watched in terrified shock as Maj. Kusanagi checked the girl for wounds needing immediate attention. The girl recoiled and coughed hard, covering both Shinji and Kusanagi in mucus and blood. She started screaming and crying in pain. Maj. Kusanagi ignored it and ripped up the girl’s jumpsuit to fashion rudimentary bandages; she’d started bleeding from her ribs. Shinji touched his face and found his hand covered in tiny spots of blood. The world went out of focus and he had to genuflect on the walkway, breathing heavily.

“Maya!” Dr Akagi yelled, “Create a new profile for Unit-01,”

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The room around Shinji was another shade of bleak white. Computer terminals stretched from one end of the room to the other and hummed quietly. Coloured ribbons and trails danced around the screens while lines upon lines of text scrolled past on the active computers; the inactive ones just glowed ‘<Ω>’. In a corner, one machine went ’ping!’

“Ready for the second stage of the operation?” Ritsuko asked him, while standing somewhere outside his field of vision.

“You haven’t told me what it is yet,” Shinji replied. Blood was still creeping down his shirt from the first stage of the operation, and the part with the local anesthetic and the drill which had probably cut into his skull at several places had been terrifying, especially because his head was locked in place by a brace. He felt a prick on the back of his head.

“Ah. I’m injecting several clusters of micromachine B parts into the lateral and posterior aspects of your brain,” she answered. “Impelled by Van der Waal’s forces seventy percent of the B parts will undergo reversible absorption at the site where we injected the A parts earlier. Within microseconds, they will synthesize polymers, undergo ionic bonding and anchor themselves. Next we use a magnetic yoke to adjust the matrix settings so that the micromachines at each coordinate with the server grafted to your occipital…”

Ritsuko lowered a large box of some sort over his head, enveloping him in darkness. Only a small slit of light through which her feet could be seen was visible.

“…It takes time, since the number of scan lines increases relative to the size of the micromachines. This way, micromachines that have penetrated the brain can both send and receive signals on the brain condition and the distribution of electrical signals… Sensations are shared with the sensory nerves,” she continued.

“That’s a lot of…” whatever that science was called… “…invasive surgery for something that can be accomplished with Waldo’s…” Shinji said with an acerbic tone of voice. There was brooding humming, and then Shinji had a headache.

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Still with a headache, Shinji found himself inside the ‘Entry Plug’ of Unit-01; a large cylinder connected with a thick heap of cables to the Eva’s neck. He’d been strapped down into a seat with two joysticks, and ECCO technicians had connected four jacks to his new neural interface. Occasionally a drop of blood would slide down the back of his shirt, paining a blood-red tribute to Dr Akagi’s hurried work. It itched too.

“Hey, I told you not to scratch that!” Ritsuko’s voice ran through his mind, complete with a hypercard avatar in his peripheral vision. Shinji removed his had from his neck. It still itched.

“Now, we’re going to fill the Entry Plug with a liquid,” Ritsuko said, still reverberating though his mind, not ears, which heard a gurgling sound as a cold, clear liquid crawled up his legs, “after your lungs fill with the liquid – it’s called LCL – you should be able to breathe,”

Wait what?

“I have some doubts about this,” Shinji noted. Could they actually hear him speaking, or would he have to use the cybercom?

“You’ll get used to it,” Ritsuko said. The liquid reached his mouth.

There was no way he was going to let himself drown. Reflexively, he held his breath, struggling against the cold, viscous fluid. It struck Shinji, straight before he drowned, that his lung capacity was really poor.

Asphyxiation-reflexes forced Shinji to inhale, filling his lungs slowly with the viscous fluid. As it poured down, Shinji’s gagged and coughed while bubbles of air escaped his lungs and abdomen. He started to shiver.

“Don’t worry about the heat,” Ritsuko said, “or lack of it, as it may be. As soon as the environmental controls come online it will reach room temperature,”

Shinji gulped LCL in a flawed attempt to say something in return.
LCL contained proteins that synthesized perflurocarbons. Perfluodecalin, synthesized from carbon and fluorine found in the LCL would dissolve oxygen from Unit-01’s NBC-filtered air supply into the LCL, allowing the membrane walls of the lungs to absorb oxygen from the hyper-oxygenated liquid.
Shinji suddenly gained an uncanny awareness of the CIC, as if it was projected on the inside of his mind, filled with homunculi of Dr Akagi, Misato (she’d insisted on that) and the rest of the command staff. His real eyes were filled with the blurry, hazed glow of awakening eyes, while his mind was further stuffed with a fruitful feeling of intrusion.

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“Is it over ten percent?” Ritsuko asked as she strode over to Maya’s full-immersion dive station.

“Uh, senpai…” Maya began as Ritsuko’s hand clamped down on her shoulder “Alpha waves are already at forty…” she pointed to a pair of overlapping sinusoid waves, continuously graphed on her computer screen “Beta waves at forty-seven and rising – Theta waves are fluctuating but average at fifty” she isolated a frantic wave diagram and maximized the window to the benefit of Ritsuko. The good doctor’s eyes shot wide open, and her breathing, faintly audible in Maya’s ear, got more rapid for a second “The average level is 50%, plus-minus 2,”

“That’s incredible!” Ritsuko said. “Ayanami took seven months to reach that level of synchronization, not seven seconds; that’s better than the Second Child, even,” Ritsuko’s eyes darted around her skull, “Of course, this places an anomaly in hypothesis…” she said under her breath, so only Maya could hear it. She turned to Misato. “It’s working! The Third Child is sufficiently synchronized with Unit-01,”

Misato smiled. She’d waited over half her life for this.

“Prepare for launch,” she yelled through her mouth-piece “Awaiting launch authorization, Commander,”

“Granted,” Gendo replied half-heartedly, as always.

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Shinji was pushed down in his pilot’s seat by five times his own weight. The rapid acceleration made him attempt to vomit, but his half-a-day-old ramen and sandwiches were held back by their own weight and the LCL that had seeped down his esophagus. His eyeballs hurt, like they were being forced out of his skull. The lightheadedness returned as blood escaped to his legs. Then everything suddenly became so light, and he drifted out his seat, only held back by a five-point safety belt; he slammed back into the seat.
His vision was blurred and unclear, filled with dark spots. He could vaguely make out the greenish silhouette of the Rakbu against the grey-black city. He blinked, twice, to clear his eyes. He still couldn’t see any better. He was effectively blind.

In this situation, he did what any Shinji Ikari would have done.

He screamed.

[LatwPIAT]

DINGIR XUL/Denouement
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The Ghost of Evangelion – Layer 02
A Ghost in the Shell/Neon Genesis Evangelion Crossover

YUGAWARA, KANAGAWA PREFACTURE – Thursday August 1st, 2030
“The pilot is showing signs of extreme stress – his blood pressure and adrenaline level are…” Hyuga trailed off.

“Shinji, what’s the problem?” Misato asked.

“I… I can’t see,” came the reply.

“He’s suffering from a brown-out?” Misato asked Ritsuko “Now?”

Ritsuko nodded. “If, although I think it’s unlikely, we miscalculated the weight-to-power ratio of the launch pads, he might have experienced 5g’s or more of acceleration on his way up – it would explain…”

“Thank you. That’s enough,” Misato interrupted; neither she nor Shinji needed to know the details “Ibuki! Overlap his field-of-view with the visual feed, then find some way to give him a view of the Entry Plug.”

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Shinji’s vision returned, partially – he could see the Entry Plug now, as if seen through 3D glasses , projected from multiple angles at once, together with the sickly green hues of night vision filling the canopy. A map appeared, superimposed over his legs, not intruding his view of the outside world, offered by an array of cameras. A thick white line was drawn from a figure marked ‘UNIT-01’ to a nearby building, blinking ‘COVER’

“I… I can see again!” Shinji blurted.

“OK Shinji,” Ritsuko said from an avatar in his peripheral vision “Imagine yourself walking. Envision the feeling of movement in your legs and the Eva will move accordingly,”

Ah, Shinji thought they stuck me in a humongous mecha without motor control. He was certain there was a prize for that sort of thing, just like there was one for having ever climbed into Unit-01 in the first place.

Shinji tried to think about walking and felt a stinging feeling, pins-and-needles, in his legs; phantom sensations from a second pair of legs he had never owned. He felt Unit-01 – him – lunge 15 meters forwards in unsteady motions – he was going to regret this, he knew.

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Walking lessons, in a war-zone? thought Maj. Kusanagi baffled. Seriously? She sat perched on top of JSDA Armored Personnel Carrier, watching the impending battle through a pair of binoculars. The Ground Defence Force had ordered their troops to pull back, citing ‘overwhelming firepower’ as justification.

“So…” Togusa began “what’s happening Major?” He sat in the pod of a newly repainted Tachikoma, hanging his head in his arms.

“Well… The younger Ikari seems to have gotten the hang of drunken shambling…” Maj. Kusanagi replied

“He’s going to get himself killed,” Batou concluded. He threw a cigarette to the ground.

“And we’re just going to watch?” Togusa shouted, angrily. His voice echoed slightly in the empty streets.

The Major looked at her forces: Five platoons of Special Forces Mechanized Infantry and three artillery platoons – two now that one of them were out of commission, against an alien affront to nature that could taken small nuclear weapons to the face. A small smile appeared on her prosthetic face.

“Of course not,” she said “Tachikoma; fan out and surround the –“ she swallowed her pride “–giant monster, and await my orders.” The dark green robot vehicles wiggled off their pilots, and bounce up and down like a ship in a storm, waving their hands up and down in joy – “We’re going to fight a monster! We’re going to fight a monster!” they squealed as they drove off “It’s as big as Godzilla!”

The Major turned to her squadmates “Ishikawa, Batou! I need your help to make a dive,”

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Shinji stumbled around in Unit-01, trying to maintain balance despite feeling 8000 times more sluggish than he expected. As he fell towards a building, he reached out to brace for impact, purely on instinct, and Unit-01 followed. His view rushed towards the ground, then stopped. He was certain his last meal was about to follow.

“OK, Shinji,” he heard Misato say in an encouraging voice “You seem to have gotten the hand of walking now – let’s get onto combat,”

“Your two most important tools are the AT field and the Type 28 Artillery Autocannon; that rifle-thing in Unit-01’s right arm,” she continued.

Shinji looked down at his own arm, which was skin-coloured, shifted slightly towards a green hue. Wait. Shinji reminded himself That’s my arm. Shinji shook his head slightly, and then looked down and out to his right. Unit-01’s arm, radiating greyly, held a large black rifle loosely – as Shinji thought he focused his eyes upon it, his meatspace eyes still blind and replaced with rendered views, a hypercard of information appeared, telling him everything he didn’t want to know and hadn’t really planned on asking (but in hindsight should have) about it – it fired 155x800mm APFSDS shells, Whatever that means, held 30 rounds and had a lot of other attributes. Shinji grasped the rifle in his hand.

It fired.

Into his foot.

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A dampened, once ear-shattering explosion rang out through the CIC, followed by the sundering scream of Shinji in pain. A lot of people winced.

“It’s not your real foot Shinji!” Misato said, in what she hoped was a reassuring tone “Try to concentrate on the mission objectives…” she paused for a fraction of second “your task!” she appropriated, “try to focus on fighting the Rakbu,”

Something resembling a reply hidden behind a moan of pain came back through the communications channels. Hyuga reported actual tinnitus in the pilot, form the resonating armour plating.

“Shinj, calm down.” Misato said. “Take some time to get back into shape. You’re safe behind these buildings…”

A purple beam of light burst from Isimud and burned through the building Shinji used for cover, scattering its façade all over the nearby ground while scorching the internal paper walls and lighting the floorboards aflame, before turning everything to ashes. Glass, steel and other assorted building materials were scattered all over Unit-01’s frontal armor, only to be blown away by the radiating force of the beam of light penetrating deep into the Eva’s chest and scorching flesh. The smell of burnt flesh and smoldered concrete spread throughout the building blocks at the speed of dispersion.

Shinji screamed again as Unit-01 staggered backwards, partly on his reflex.

The CIC erupted into unease – to Misato, it was as if the universe hated her, making her every word into an invitation to screw her (and everyone else) over in painful ways. She turned quickly to the MAGI operators:
“Is Shinji still conscious?”

“Yes, Captain,” Hyuga reported “The Third Child is still conscious,”

“Good,” Misato said, “Uh, place an emergency recovery team on high alert,” she added to Aoba. “Now…”

Misato was interrupted by a loud claxon wailing, complete with red light bathing the CIC in red lights for a few seconds, before fading a little. The main screen flashed [INTRUSION ALERT] Misato groaned – the universe really did hate her.

“Trace that.” she ordered Maya loudly. The MAGI operator pulled down her full-immersion headset, regretfully as Ritsuko leant away. Her eyes were assaulted by bright light in three colours, scattering red, green and blue points all over her prosthetic eyes, creating the shared hallucination of a physical world, slowly approaching the hacker’s position, complete with a satellite image from Molyina orbit.

“It’s…” Maya said, startled. “It’s Maj. Motoko Kusanagi of the JSDA, Captain!”

There were many surprised exclamations, all deafened by the sound of Misato’s right hand leaving a large red mark on the side of her face. Bitter, uncaring universe that hates me so…

“Major…” was all she could say over a secure line “what do you think you are doing?”

“I’m taking command of Unit-01,” the purple-haired woman’s avatar replied, inside the imagined hallucination of cyberspace that filled Misato’s head. In meatspace, the Captain hung her head in her arms, completely ruining all illusions of still having control as dozens of pairs of eyes, even android Operators transcribing from the CIC, were focused on her and her alone – the standing, half-fetal Unit-01 was of little interest, despite being the subject of conversation.

“You can’t hack Unit-01! It won’t obey you!” Misato yelled. She turned to Ritsuko. The doctor shook her head. Never.

“Major!” Misato pleaded.

“I’m not going to hack Unit-01;” Maj. Kusanagi explained, “I’m going to dive Shinji Ikari. He can control it, right?” she asked rethorically.

“Well, yes, but…” Misato stuttered “You don’t have any experience with the Eva-units!” Misato tried.

Maj. Kusanagi let out a sigh.

“Neither does the boy! I don’t think it’s going to make much of a difference,” Never mind the 25 years of military experience I have on him…

“Major!” Misato yelled in a desperate attempt to return things to a situation she was comfortable with, rather than spiraling out of control. Her demeanor had gone from unfrazzled commander (and hot to boot! She was very proud of that!) to frazzled and desperate in seconds, and her sweaty hands were tightly gripping her hair and leaving with several black strands. She let out a frustrated, mumbled scream.

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ECCO’s attack barriers were rather weak, and didn’t make up for it in quantity, the Major thought as she disabled a dozen of them – she’d seen freelance terrorists with better defences than these, and ECCO was a paramilitary organization. She, Batou and Ishikawa approached Shinji’s field of consciousness, currently experiencing heavy traffic, and stopped just before his mind.

“Batou, Ishikawa,” she transmitted “I’m going to make the dive from here, down to his ghostline. Back me up.” She didn’t wait for a reply as she disabled another pathetic attack barrier (Five years out of date? Seriously?) and decrypted his ghostkey. Wait. Something’s wrong…

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Shinji crawled up into a fetal position in his seat, constrained by the safety belts, making it not very fetal at all – it didn’t matter; he just wanted to get away from it all – away from battle, away from this stupid machine that hurt its pilot, which sort of ruined the idea of it being armour in any way, and away from the bastard of a father who thought this was a good form of reconciliation. Away.

Suddenly, a warm comforting feeling spread through his body. The pain almost subsided and he was filled with an immaterial feeling of comfort and safety, pressing against him and removing all feeling of inadequacy, solitude and loss, returning only warmth.

I love you Shinji. I do love you. I’ve always loved you, and I always will love you.

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Shinji’s mind was completely inert, yet the in-and-out-going traffic between it and the outside world had increased, and that was not something that was supposed to happen – especially not with a fetal, near-catatonic pilot. Something was amiss. Maj. Kusanagi’s attack barriers began screaming. Oh crap! A neural net unfolded itself and suddenly she was peering into the Eva’s mind. A flood of information streamed towards her. Someone else! It hit her. She was forcibly booted from Shinji’s ghost and mind as it collided with her own attack barriers. Half of them died instantly. Another two layers froze. In meatspace, a plastic device around her neck exploded, severing her connection. The Major’s limp shell fell to the ground like a brain-dead corpse.

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In the metaphysical cyberspace of consciousness between Shinji and Unit-01, something snapped.

Unit-01 gained a new posture; it stood up straight and perfectly balanced. Metal screamed as the welded seams of its mouth were torn apart. One scream gave way to another; an unearthly howl filled the skies of Hakone, like a whale singing a murder ballad, a terrifying sound both appealing and appalling to the Primal Fear at once, driving all the rats in Hakone away as if this was inverse-Hamlin, leaving a murder-zone around Unit-01. The Eva jumped out from cover and charged at the Rakbu.

Three beams shot out from Isimud. The first two missed the white giant. The third struck Unit-01 in the eye, deluging the Entry Plug in an incandescent glow. The beam had penetrated they eye and passed through the brain and burst from the rear armor into a skyscraper. Unit-01 didn’t flinch. Another three-round burst of light left large mounds of melted metal and charred flesh in Unit-01’s frontal armor.

Unit-01 had reached the Rakbu. The implacable wall met the not-quite-unstoppable object as the white and black giants crashed together. Unit-01 clawed at the AT field in a maddened frenzy, taking several more beams of light to the chest without stopping; the beams grew more erratic and scattered, firing faster and faster at the Eva. A few beams missed entirely and demolished nearby buildings, cutting deep into concrete and steel foundations; concrete dust and metal vapor flooded out from collapsing buildings like fully dilute pyroclastic density surges. Flashes of noise and static scattered in the air as Unit-01 scratched futilely. A rush of air emanated from the two battling giants.

Maya Ibuki felt a rush of substance through her brain. She lifted the brace of her dive-station and checked the graphs.

“Sempai,” she called “Unit-01 is projecting an AT field!”

Ritsuko got down on one knee and stared at the graphs; a manifold of sinusoid waves approached each other and transformed to random Schumann noise.

“They’re neutralizing!” Ritsuko blurted out.

Unit-01 wedged itself in the opening between the AT fields and shoved the 155mm autocannon into the gap, firing a three-round burst directly at the core. The shells ripped straight through Isimud, shredding its spine in two. Shockwaves ran through its torso, tearing capillaries and arteries apart. Blood poured out from both ends of the wounds at high pressure, leaving a black-blue pool of alien circulatory system on the ground.

Isimud collapsed onto Unit-01 and wiped out a veritable sector of the city with a sphere of thermal radiation enveloping Unit-01. The very air itself burnt and rose several kilometers into the air, a pillar searing the eyes of onlookers. ECCO and JASDF UAVs dropped out of the sky like poisoned flies, crashing into buildings as their outer skins were flayed off by the power of a local sun. Every single window in Yugawara shattered, releasing a murderous shower of polished death, raining down upon the streets with the density of acid rain. It sounded like a post-modern orchestra playing on panes of glass, broadcasted over loudspeakers for the benefit of a near-deaf audience. As soon as it had landed, the glass was swept away by a shockwave, a wall of certain death emanating away from ground zero shredding anything that might stand before it; a horde of sharp locusts embedding themselves in concrete as they struck into surfaces that were stupid enough to stand in their way.

And yet, even though Unit-01 had been in the very middle of this, it stood in the licking flames, air so hot even smoke could combust and burn again, covered in ashes and burnt paint, its remaining eye glowing.

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ASHIGARASHIMO DISTRICT, KANEGAWA PREFACTURE, Saturday 3rd August, 2030
Ashigarashimo District was one large fortress city. Hakone, Yugawara and Manazuru had grown in size, spreading outwards like resilient bacterial cultures and achieving a form of symbiosis as their fronts joined together, creating a seamless urban sprawl that stretched from Ashinoko to the Pacific Ocean. The monotone steel-and-glass structures were broken, occasionally, by a small parks and spots of grass; anachronism of the past standing steadfast against a future that tried, very slowly, to choke itself to death on alcohol fumes.

They were also nice live-drop points.

Maj. Kusanagi sat down on a park bench, took of her officer cap and hung her arms off the back of the park bench, staring up into the unblinking eye of the sun. She peered over at Chief Aramaki. He read a newspaper. She switched to cybercom, running a WLAN at wavelengths and amplitudes such that it was near impossible to detect mere meters away, much less hear anything but noise – short of an actual, physical connection, it was the safest way to communicate in low-EM-noise locations like parks.

“So. Is your cover holding up?” Aramaki asked.

“Me and everyone in Section 9 so far,” Maj. Kusanagi answered while looking up into the for-once-blue sky. A slight smile appeared in the vertices of her mouth. “I thought I was finished being the lapdog of the military years ago. Turns out I was always lapdog to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the end.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have punched the Minister in the face unprovoked, if you wanted his good favour” Aramaki said. The Major smiled as she replayed the memory in her mind.

“Anyway. My report. The Earth Coincidence Control Office presents itself as a military research laboratory subsidiary to the Tachibana Labs decentralized megacorporation – in reality its closer to an independent, paramilitary megacorporation in itself, controlled through a feudalistic hierarchy running down from the Ikari-family…”

“Of which there are only two surviving members – Gendo Ikari and Shinji Ikari,” Aramaki amended.

“Correct. The father made his son pilot his…” there was a pause “…giant robot, supposedly because only a very small fraction of the world population have the required neural plasticity…”

“You’re saying Gendo Ikari chose his son because he’s easy to control?” Aramaki asked.

“Not just his son. I talked to their other pilot, one Rei Ayanami, this morning in the hospital – another child; introverted, submissive and taciturn. If we want to shut down ECCO on short notice we can press charges for ‘corporate child abuse through emotional manipulation’ and bring a team of lawyers onto the case,”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Aramaki said, while reading an utterly uninteresting article about the Japanese economy. “When the younger Ikari recovers, I want Togusa to talk to him. Meanwhile, I want you to ask some question to this Ayanami, the Tactical Chief of Staff and the Scientific Chief of Staff. Discretely, of course,” Aramaki turned his newspaper over and checked the weather forecast –clouds with the occasional bout of sun and/or rain. The temperatures were going to drop heavily too – it hadn’t been like that when he was young...

The Major threw herself up into a standing position, not even acknowledging the old geezer sitting on the park bench beside her.
“Will do, Chief,”

Major Kusanagi left the park where no conversation had taken place, certainly not with Daisuke Aramaki, a public servant in the employ of the Minister of Interal Affairs. They had not discussed confidential information about a paramilitary organization commissioned by the JSDF, and they hadn’t discussed something as despicable as using children to unwittingly spy on their parents and friends, because that was something neither a JSDA officer nor a public servant would ever do, and in any case they had never met and could therefore not have discussed it in the first place, right? The fact that both the JSDA and the Ministry of Interal Affairs answered to the Prime Minister of Japan was not relevant. At all.

The Major walked calmly down the streets of the Hakone-Yugawara-Manazuru-urban sprawl, surrounded on both sides by endless buildings that towered towards the skies, their reflective mirror-windows reflecting off each other, generating an infinitely deep hall of worlds, each with the same pleasantly blue skies and right white clouds, colouring the grey city-white blue. In the distance, downhill from where she was, Maj. Kusanagi could see the experimental ellipsoid pyramids; giant apartment complexes covered on one entire side by a mosaic of flexible mirrors distributing solar power to the entire city – a cheap, alternative backup system to the nuclear power plants that were an eyesore to the still-mostly-untouched inland Japan.

At the bottom of the hill, she found Cpt. Katsuragi and Dr Akagi overlooking the preparation of Ashigarashimo against another attack. A Botanachi tilt-rotor passed overhead, carrying the detached head of Unit-01. Artificial white blood dripped from loose arteries that had fallen from their secured positions, onto the roads and rooftops, and as the tilt-rotor banked to make a turn towards Manazuru, it painted walls white, scattering the thick, coagulated fluid all over the side of a line of apartment complexes – later the body of the Eva would be dragged, ever-so-slowly, from Odawara and to the ECCO GeoFront on an island just outside Manazuru, on a pair of flat-bed trucks, parading the corpse around like one would a slain enemy, as opposed to the martyr-hero it was if one anthropomorphized it in the first place – the reek of rotting vat-grown flesh, mixed with the disgusting smell of melted plastic would linger through the cities, distributed by a wind that afterwards could only be described as foul – Maj. Kusanagi pitied those still left in their biological shells, trapped with noses that couldn’t be disabled.

“…a firing pin – if we need to replace them after every battle,” she could hear Cpt. Katsuragi say “it could get very expensive. There were minor deformations in the barrel too – it’s just not built for such a high rate of… Oh, hi Major Kusanagi!” Misato waved the Major over. Ritsuko turned her head towards the arrival. She was leaning out the window of an enormous ECCO truck, and shifted her weight against the windowsill.

Misato Katsuragi placed her arms akimbo and made a point of looking at ECCO’s defensive systems – 155x800mm shells had propellant changed duct-taped to them, before being shoved into oversized ammunitions belts – the Eva-rifle, as it had been dubbed, was belt-fed, pulling artillery shells from a box-magazine; pushing 2.25 tons of ordinance 4.6 meters straight up was simply not feasible using an (oversized) standard box-magazine – the work was handled by an internal engine running off the Eva’s own power supply. Filled belts were pulled into long, thin, black rectangular prisms, which then were hoisted by crane into special buildings strategically placed in the urban sprawl. A large ECCO truck rolled by carrying a backup Eva-rifle under a canvas.

“If we all work together,” the Captain said “…we might make it through this!”
“You’re optimistic,” Ritsuko said half-sarcastically. “Are you going to take on the Rakbu all by yourself?”

“If I could pilot I would,” Misato said with a mix of enthusiasm and regret.

“Why don’t you?” the Major asked as casually as she could.

“Ritsuko says I’m too old. Too old! I’m not even thirty!” Misato laughed.

“Sure, if you want cyberbrain sclerosis…” Ritsuko said

“Yeah, yeah. I know. I can dream, can’t I?” Misato said. “Still, if worst comes to worst…”

“Then I won’t let you, both as a friend and as a trained medical practitioner,” Ritsuko said, adding a harsh undertone of concern. “Besides, your compatibility with the KIDs Outer Receptors is…” the good doctor paused for words –

“Inadequate?” the Captain and Major both volunteered.

“Not the word I was looking for but, ah, adequate nonetheless,” Dr Akagi said matter-of-factly.

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Shinji awoke in a pool of his own saliva, with a subsiding (but not yet, much to his displeasure, subsided) migraine on the right side of his head. Entirely lost after unknown amounts of troubled sleeping, Shinji fumbled around in the bed sheets, trapping himself in a roll as he regained his Sixth Sense, namely balance.

Once Shinji got loose from the giant chocking snake of chalk-white bedsheets, he found another layer of chalk-white-and-grey in what could only be a hospital, a conclusion that was much easier to reach once he saw the shapely legs of a medical android. It had the trademarked pleasant, soothing voice instantly recognizable from Japanese medical dramas – the voice had been modeled after a now former Meditech office lady with a sharp mind who had secured herself the royalties when desperate R&D techs needed a voice for an already-delayed product-demonstration, and she was now relatively rich.

“Good morning, Shinji Ikari. Do you still have a migraine? Is there anything I can help you with?” the android said.

Shinji tried to rub the sleep out of his eyes – more importantly: WHY am I here? Could it actually answer that? Oh yeah. My father forced me to pilot a giant robot against space aliens. He should have thought of that at once.

His stomach growled and felt like it was trying to eat itself – it felt like he hadn’t eater for… days?

“Which day is it today?”

“Today is Saturday the 3rd of August, 2030,” it answered – one day; he’d been out cold for an entire day. He walked over to a window and stared out; everything was pale and washed out, like a bleached ink stain. Shinji pulled off the disgustingly white hospital gown he was wearing; his own clothes were neatly folded and placed at the foot end of his bed. He pulled the trousers on and stared at the shirt. It would have to do for now; it wasn’t as if he owned anything else.

As Shinji’s hand brushed over his chest in the process of tucking the shirt in, it felt like touching old bruises. His entire body felt sore. He’d felt the pain of Unit-01, not that inanimate objects could feel pain – which only served to make the sensation even stranger, but he’d still felt every blow and every ray of light; not only did his thoughts cross the barrier into Unit-01’s AI, but it passed back into him: he couldn’t shake the feeling that his mind was invaded by thoughts – data – that wasn’t his own; warm, comforting, yet unmistakably alien.

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ECCO GEOFRONT, 8th August 2030
Misato Katsuragi barged into Shinji’s hospital room and yelled “Sorryimlate” into the room before actually checking if he was there. An android nurse started a preprogrammed line on visitation hours, then stopped mid-sentence as it recognized that the Captain outranked such concerns. It switched over to another preprogrammed line on privacy, which was promptly ignored.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t get to see you all week,” Misato said. Her eyes scanned the hospital room.

“You’re all packed up?” she asked Shinji “Good; let’s get you out of here,” she continued before Shinji had answered or even processed the question. As she slammed the door open once more the android nurse aped clearing its throat and emulated the sound with a standard audio-clip; “Captain, please do not slam the…” The door slammed shut. “…doors.”

01001001 01010011 01001001 01001101 01010101 01000100

Up until one week ago, Shinji’s life had been uneventful – he rarely left Kyosho or even the four walls of his foster-father’s house, much less did he encounter something as fantastic as aliens, time travelers and/or espers – in fact, he was unaccustomed to fast driving.

He wished he wasn’t.

Misato’s (she kept insisting on that) driving was more intimidating than a fully-armed SpecOps team – and probably as dangerous – she appeared to have no concept of safety distances, speed limits, red lights, lanes…

Misato was giving Shinji a guided tour of Manazuru, showing him (in her opinion) all the best places to eat shop and entertain oneself. Shinji was certain he received the abridged version – occasionally Misato would demonstrate the Law of Conservation of Momentum (i.e. brake) outside, say, a liquor shop, state longingly for a while, before deciding that there were metaphorical spiders on the gas pedal that needed to die a stompy death, all without saying anything.

Misato fumbled for something the glove compartment, halfway leaning over him while glancing up at the road. The car swerved halfway into another lane before Misato corrected it, bumping hard as the front and rear wheels hit the sidewalk – Misato found what she was looking for, and handed Shinji a mindlink cable, while making hand-motions towards the jacks next to the car stereo and GPS, as well as her neck . What does she want me to...? Oh, yeah. He had a neural interface now.

He fumbled around his own neck – he had no tactile input from the plastic plate, leaving him with an unnerving feeling whenever he felt nothing as his hand passed over the plate surgically attached to his skull – his seventh sense (kinesthetic) telling him that he was shoving a blunt metal object into his most valuable nerves without feeling it did not help.

Four white circles, inhabited by avatars appeared in his peripheral view; Misato, Dr Akagi, Maj. Kusanagi, and an old man Shinji vaguely remembered, labeled Dr. Fuyutsuki.

“So, Shinji; where will you be living?” Misato asked.

While Shinji searched for the paper note telling him just that, Maj. Kusanagi took the word:

“I was under the impression that he would be living with his father?” she asked, leaving the implication of misinformation abundantly clear, despite (or perhaps because) the utter lack of facial expressions in her avatar.

“It’s only natural for Ikari and his son to live without each other,” Fuyutsuki offered .

Shinji dug a paper note from his pocket and read the street name and address. His own avatar, unseen to him but visible to all the other participants of the conversation, was an inert, slightly younger version of Shinji in a black school uniform taken a couple of years ago, chosen simply because there weren’t any other good pictures available when they needed him to use Unit-01’s internal communications system.

“Unacceptable,” the Major said “It’s too exposed,”

“It’s also a dump,” meatspace!Misato mumbled under her breath.

Misato, Ritsuko, the Major and Fuyutsuki discussed the issue back and forth, completely uninteresting to Shinji, who rather than following looked the windows of the car – it was sunset, and as Misato drove along the raised highway that connected Odawara, Manazuru and Hakone – she was driving surprisingly and pleasantly calm now; Shinji looked at the dashboard, which blinked [AUTOPILOT] That explains it… - he could see the red run reflected off the metal-and-glass buildings, reflecting the sky in pastels of orange, yellow and red, like a shattered mirror stretching as far as he could see, broken only by the calm, strongly blue sea at the edge of Japan. Black lines of newly lain road were sketched across the autumn-like landscape, complemented by their bright-white outlines – soon the sun would be down and all that would be left would be the thousands of neon-lights burning through the blackness in an infinite number of colours, like neurons firing.

It was beautiful.

“He could live with me,” Misato blurted out.

“What did you say?” Ritsuko’s avatar said flatly. The lack of expression in both Fuyutsuki’s and Maj. Kusanagi’s avatars were uncannily adequate reflections of their actual expressions. Shinji, meanwhile, tried to force a lot of air through his nose as his lungs contracted in shock.

“I have the space,” Misato explained “and I already live next to a private rail to ECCO headquarters and within walking distance from his school,” she said. A deem humming of displeasure originated from Ritsuko’s avatar.

“Relax, I’m not going to put the moves on him,” Misaot shot Ritsuko over a private line.

There was a silence, then an outburst.

“OF COURSE YOU WON’T!” Ritsuko yelled back “How can you even think like that? You have no shame at all!”

Can’t take a joke, can she? Misato thought. She turned attention back to the open (in the sense that there were more than two people involved) conversation, and away from everything else, including Shinji’s pretty face, where it had never been in the first place. Honestly.

“Why don’t we ask Shinji?” she said “He’s the one going to live someplace; he should be allowed to choose,” More silence. Maj. Kusanagi, among others, was not so sure if that actually applied to people whom the fate of the world partly depended on – it was not very strategically sound.

“What do you say Shinji? Where do you want to live?” Misato asked him.

“It doesn’t matter,” Shinji replied.

“Then it’s decided. He’s living with me,” Misato declared, much to the displeasure of logic.

There was a collective, subdued groan as Misato closed the conversation, and the four avatars disappeared. However, the happiness Shinji received from the return of his peripheral vision was quickly displaced by the gut-wrenching dread of realizing that Misato had no more use for the autopilot!

“If you’re going to be my new roommate, we’re going to have to have a welcoming party!” Misato declared as she demonstrated how to make a parking-break-U-turn with great skill and little concern.

01001001 01010011 01001001 01001101 01010101 01000100

Shinji considered Misato’s concept of a “welcoming party” – he couldn’t be too impolite in his thoughts, (well actually he could – he just didn’t consider it fair) considering that there was a lot of free food with raw materials that if not of stellar quality… Oh hell, who am I lying too! This is what broke students eat! …it was at least prepared with all the care an overgrown student and a microwave could manage… Which means nothing considering how this delinquent of a woman makes food!

Other Misatos’ cooking might be horrible because of a complete lack of taste, possibly even in both senses of the term, but not this Misato – no this Misato knew how to cook even if she had strange tastes – no, this Misato had another problem. She was a cyborg.

Shinji was not quite aware of how much of her was a cyborg, except that he knew she had a cyberbrain like over 99% of adult Japan, and he considered it impolite to ask directly (which meant he was probably going to do so within the next few weeks…) but she didn’t appear to be a full-conversion cyborg, as evident by her beautiful, distinctive face and the natural skin on her arms and, not that he had looked, legs – she was a common type of cyborg, and needed a diet of both normal and special food (the term ‘special food’ was frowned upon, and Shinji knew it was only a matter of time before ‘cyborg food’ would end up in that same treadmill and come out as a mutilated euphemism) like most people who had more than a cyberbrain needed. (This justified to Shinji how he could feel he had the right to be revolted at this sacrilege against gastronomy, even though he was, unfamiliarly, a cyborg himself)

Rather than, say, leave her sugar-rich food supplements and patches of brown animal fat without large fat molecules of the type that artificial digestive systems had problems with outside the main course, or, for that matter, making two dishes – one for Shinji without the supplements and one for herself with the supplements – or even, as Shinji knew because he had cooked for mixed cyborg/baseline groups before, hidden or combined the unfamiliar tastes behind something else. No, Misato Katsuragi had chosen to just dump everything in the same pile, mixing ramen, pork soup and ham with fat-sugar mass nonchalantly while Shinji cleared the dining table of empty (or half empty – there was still a wet spot on the floor) beer cans and car magazines.

It didn’t appear that even Misato herself enjoyed the food, pouring entire cans of beer into her ramen to douse the sickening taste. Did she intend for him to do the same? There were certainly enough cans – what with an entire third of her fridge consisting entirely of various forms of beer.

“So, aren’t you going to eat anything?” Misato interrupted his train of thoughts, “It’s good, even if it’s all instant!”

Like that’s the main problem.

“Oh, uh, sorry” Shinji apologized “I’m just not used to eating this kind of food…”

Misato frowned, the almost jumped across the table , leaning over and making him regress into his chair.

“Are you finicky!?” she asked in a voice that pulled his attention towards her face in an instant.

“I meant cyborg food,” Shinji lied in retort. Misato fortunately, perhaps, sat back down with another beer can.

“Yeah, well... Growing up in Japan today means you’re just going to have to get used to stuff like that,” she said matter-of-factly.

01001001 01010011 01001001 01001101 01010101 01000100

Misato had, after telling him to take advantage of everything in the apartment, suggested that the take advantage of the bath and wash away his troubles and worries by cleaning body and soul, which was why he was now standing entirely naked under what amounted to a chandelier of Misato’s underwear.

It was… surreal.

The penguin moreso.

“Mi-mi-mi-mi-Misato!” he yelled once he had ran out of the bathroom “A Pe-pe-pe-pen-pen-pen-g…” he stammered as the penguin wobbled past him over to a fridge.

“Oh, him,” Misato said as if it was obvious that a penguin used her bath – then again, he was getting used to the fantastic being obvious by now – next thing his school would fall into a dimensional hole and half the student body would act like they had expected it, or the nearest computer would manifest sentience and nobody would care – “He’s an uplifted penguin. His name is Pen-Pen; he’s your other roommate”

“Eh, Misato” Shinji said, marking his point with a raised index finger “Man-penguins are, like all uplifted animals, highly illegal and…”

“You’re a bit too naked to be lecturing me,” Misato retorted.

01001001 01010011 01001001 01001101 01010101 01000100

Misato knocked thrice on the bathroom door in quick succession. Shinji tried to duck further beneath the tiny waves in the bathtub, but alas, it was not sufficiently deep. At least, she didn’t enter.

“Shinji, are you there?” she asked “Just so you don’t think I’m some sort of complete monster who deserves cyberbrainwashing – I participated in a military raid a few years ago against a corporation that produced illegally uplifted animals for who-knows-what purposes. Pen-Pen was one of those animals. Killing anything with a human brain is illegal in Japan, so I volunteered to become his guardian,”

Shinji lifted his head out of the water.

“Just so you know,” she said and left; Shinji could hear her bare feet against the floor.

01001001 01010011 01001001 01001101 01010101 01000100

Ishikawa stretched his arms and rubbed his eyes – he’s just spent five hours straight having a computer screen projected directly at his eyes, and now he needed a drink – a hard one. Luckily for him, he kept a small bar cabinet in his office, something that had become legal shortly after the popularization of prosthetic metabolism that could break down alcohol in an instant, making it no less dangerous than water for consumption.

He sat down with a glass of whiskey on a tabled and waited until he’d drained the entire glass and gotten himself a new one before he called Chief Aramaki over the internal WLAN.

“I’ve checked ECCO’s employee and correspondence lists twice sir,” he said.

“Did you find anything?” Aramaki asked rapidly.

“The Control Office runs an entire school,” Ishikawa continued.

“We knew that. Get to the point,” Aramaki said.

“The class that both of ECCO’s pilots go to has an unnaturally high rate of cyberization,”

“Over 10%?” Aramaki asked.

Ishikawa laughed a short, quiet laugh.

“One. Hundred. Percent,” he transmitted while taking a sip of his whiskey.
“What!?” was Aramaki’s only reply.

“There’s not a single student who’s not a cyborg in that class, and over fifty percent in all the other classes,”

“Hmmm… That’s suspicious, even for a private school,” Aramaki said, “I’ll have you and Borma look into the matter tomorrow morning”

“I hear you Chief,” Ishikawa said, logged off, and yawned.

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[Ghostdraconi]

Very nice, I didn't think this would work but it very interesting so far.

[RazorSmile]

I was wondering when you'd get around to putting it up here. Maybe now, Google will be able to find the story proper as opposed to the link in your sig.

.

Chapter 2 was sweetness itself; loved the illustrations of the living-with-cybernetics lifestyle.

[Forgetful]

Scanned it quick-will read more clearly on it later.

[Rabe]

Um not sure what else I can say other then I'm happy to see someone get this close to the mark on these two series, Thanks. I'm eagerly awaiting Saito talking Shinji through Sniping The 5th angel, Ramiel (sp?).

[Phalanxone]

I like it so far.

[Jonen C]

I have been waiting for this. Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week... He didn't have much of a choice.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Jonen C

I have been waiting for this. Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week... He didn't have much of a choice.

He's been infected? Oh yes!

It's nice to see that you people like it - I'm never really sure myself - I can spend ages going over one sections because it feels forced, and then I'll go and write 4000 words with nary a spell-check and it's all fine, and I always fear that I'll somehow get the two confused and spend ages going over something that was fine and write 4000 words of forced gibberish.

As for those of you who like it "so far"... what do you like "so far"? and/or would like to see more of? (You can ignore this if you want RazorSmile, you've answered.) - and don't say "berevity," "sanity" or "MotokoxMisato ship-teases!" Now there might have been some sanity by virtue of the story not having moved too far, but the other two there really shouldn't have been any of at all...

[Stormwind]

Wow, NGE set in GitS world? Concept alone is pretty awesome. And execution is short of flawless. Poor mindraping angel...

Originally Posted by Jonen C

I have been waiting for this. Your appointment to FEMA should be finalized within the week... He didn't have much of a choice.

Oh no you le didn*sound of Deus Ex being reinstalled* ONORE JOHN C!!

[Forgetful]

I expect much better security from non-angel entities in the last battle.

[arthurh3535]

That is sorta given in a GitS/EVA crossover, isn't it?

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Stormwind

Wow, NGE set in GitS world? Concept alone is pretty awesome. And execution is short of flawless. Poor mindraping angel...

Thanks!

Originally Posted by Forgetful

I except much better security from non-angel entities in the last battle.

Originally Posted by arthurh3535

That is sorta given in a GitS/EVA crossover, isn't it?

I guess there are some things not even worth bothering to hide, eh? You've probably all figured out what's up with the battle against Nidaba too, right?

[Forgetful]

Nidaba?

[EarthScorpion]

As I think you can see, I'm providing advice, not only on the story, but also on how to properly confuse, befuddle, obfuscate, obtenerate, and otherwise baffle your readers.

Nidaba is going to be hilarious.

[Forgetful]

NIDABADBA DOOOOO!

Sorry, the name reminded me of the flintstones. And yes, I've gota pretty good guess whats going on with the aforementioned goddess. However, the 'hackwalls' and such was something new I've not seen.

[OrkKaptin]

I like.

When will there be more? I require more.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Forgetful

NIDABADBA DOOOOO!

Sorry, the name reminded me of the flintstones. And yes, I've gota pretty good guess whats going on with the aforementioned goddess. However, the 'hackwalls' and such was something new I've not seen.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface is stacked with hacking technobabble (and footnotes explaining it - it's Shirow we're talking about) and there's a not insubstantial amount of jargon in Ghost in the Shell and Stand Alone Complex, so I'm putting in a little work to make sure that hacking (be it of people, the MAGI, a certain Rakbu, and whatever Rei is) is internally and externally consistent.

Originally Posted by OrkKaptin

I like.

When will there be more? I require more.

When it's done.

[ObssesedNuker]

Originally Posted by LatwPIAT

When it's done.

Oh you are not going Duke Nukem Forever on us...

[Satori]

wait... was that a lain reference i just caught?

[RazorSmile]

Originally Posted by Satori

wait... was that a lain reference i just caught?

So, yeah. It's a Neon Genesis Evangelion/Ghost in the Shell[1] crossover, with a quite a few plot points lifted from Serial Experiments Lain and Snow Crash and a few other books I have have in my shelves.

Says so right there in the OP.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by ObssesedNuker

Oh you are not going Duke Nukem Forever on us...

What? No!? I've just been active in the Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 modding community - "When it's done" is the official[1] date of release of anything and everything.

The patterns of my writing are strange and incomprehensible. Sometimes I feel like I can push out thousands of words, yet the next day they're not good enough and I push out another thousand and they're still not good enough. I think I've rewritten the scene where Shinji first meets his classmates five time now and it still doesn't quite flow like it should. (I've written the journey to the school at least three times, and none of them are any good, and I've tried my hand at the battle against Samashel a few times (none of which are good) and Shinji training in the Pribnow Box at least twice - I am surrounded by my own Idiot Plots!)

Besides, if I don't keep going I'm going to be thrown off by my own inferiority complex; knowing I'm not even comparable to Aeon Natum Engel, which my superiority complex can't allow, because then I wouldn't be able to show you my brilliant plot twists and clever integration of Sumerian mythology in all its glory.

There's nothing to worry about. Honestly.

Originally Posted by Satori

wait... was that a lain reference i just caught?

Sure, which one are you talking about?

[1]Not kidding. We had a minor deity write it up in the FAQ.

[Jonen C]

It is only right and fitting that a GitS fic be delayed by the complex of the author., he supposes.

[Forgetful]

....why are you even comparing to ANE? You guys are writing two completely different genres of Evangelion.

[LatwPIAT]

Originally Posted by Forgetful

....why are you even comparing to ANE? You guys are writing two completely different genres of Evangelion.

It might have to do with ANE being my favourite piece of written fiction after Cryptonomicon at the moment, coupled with the belief that anything that doesn't merge the setting almost as well as ANE is of sub-standard quality.[1] (Which is a stupid attitude.) It might be so that EarthScorpion is writing a mix between a cosmic horror story, a giant robot show and a piece of hard military science fiction, while I'm writing a mix between a giant robot show and an espionage technothriller, but that doesn't mean I don't cry myself to sleep every time I see how perfectly he blends the conflicts of the Aeon War into a coherent narrative with the Eva storyline, knowing that everything I do will be inferior table-scraps jaggedly mashed together because the plot demands it, sprinkled with a few good ideas that I feel will only be painfully juxtaposed by the torturous methods...

Someone once told me it's not fun to listen to an author decry their own work...

...at times it feels like I just slave on, knowing in my tortured soul that the only reason I'm putting out this miserable drivel is from some imagined obligation to the faceless, unseen masses that were mistakenly mislead with false promises (made substantially more difficult by the revered holy one whose ground he walks on I worship (had we not been physically separated by a fairly large body of water) being among the faceless masses) of a story of quality, not knowing that I have never ever as much as tried to lead pen to paper to write anything even resembling a story (barring bad attempts in English class, forced by the limitations of curriculum) and a penchant towards procrastination with a tendency to start projects I never finish - that I'm really only fooling myself and prolonging the eventual hiatus and failure, only setting myself up for a painful fall as I betray even those I adore the most...

Ha ha ha

...all of which is caused by the sexual frustration I experience from my complete inability to approach, or even strike up conversation with, the immensely cute girl I harbour extreme affection towards purely by virtue of her physical, myopic appearance - the first person for whom I have really felt like this - knowing all too well the my own horror and awkward nature and perceived, self-deprecating ugliness in any social situation will never allow me to bring myself to...

...

...as I feel I draw myself towards what can only be called "Hikikomori" as I spend less and less time with my friends and withdraw from social situations I once used to gain some form of joy from, spiralling even further down into an evil circle of self-enforcing belief that there is some excuse in the form of a psychological disorder that will somehow make me exempt from my actions and/or inability to act, clinging to looser and looser definitions of sane only because I feel I lack the maturity of my peers, feeling ill-adopted towards my rapidly approaching adulthood and increase in responsibilities, fearing I've never really gown up, but am rather some miserable husk of a proper human being, knowing that when my own towering pile of repressed flaws come collapsing down and I am exposed, naked, to the rest of the world, I will go mad, having lived a lie of being smarter and more mature than everyone else, knowing that if I had been a better human being, I could have avoided all this...

A wangsty Eva-fanfic-writer. Who'd have guessed.

...yet even in these moments of self-reflection, I am only using a sardonic overblown style because I am not willing to face the cold hard reality of my own flaws, hoping that I am really blowing everything out of proportion for the aforementioned pride and haughty nature...

I guess you're right.

[1]eh... That's one of my problems and perks - I set my standards for quality so high I can easily afford any piece of fiction I want, because the number of fictive works that approach Cryptonomicon is, in my opinion, quite low, at the cost of leaving me quite starved. I stopped watching TV quite a long while ago, and most of the games I buy are at least half, sometimes a whole, decade old.