Doing It Right This Time [NGE]

[Jake]

Heh. The old guy ain't seen nothing yet!

 

[Datcord]

Heh. The old guy ain't seen nothing yet!

Click to shrink...

*glances at comment*
*glances at Gendo's pantlessness*
Well. Either it's REALLY cold in there or... Yui had a reason to dump him for the giant robot. *eyebrow waggle*

 

[Jake]

Shinji's mood was not improved by the looks he kept getting from everyone else at school, ranging from pitying to amused to vaguely envious.
"It'll blow over by the end of the week," Hikari assured him. "And you would be surprised how many other kids this has happened to. Okay, not the part where it made the front page of the local paper, but my father and I play a game called 'Guess who Daddy's had in his holding cells' at parent-teacher conferences."
Shinji gave her a sidelong look. "And how many...?"
"More than you'd expect, and not just the delinquents. And that's as much as I'm saying."
Shinji was not at all sure what to make of that, but it did make him feel a bit better.

Knowing what was taking place in the Geofront would have made him feel a lot better.

"Gendo."
"Go away."
"You can't stay in there forever, you know."
"I don't plan to. Just until the gossip dies down."
"You realise that sequestering yourself in your office will only cause even more talk, don't you?"
"Why? I sequester myself in my office all the time for brooding and manly angst purposes."
"Well, it's different this time, isn't it? Everyone knows you're not doing it for brooding and manly angst purposes this time; you're doing it because you're embarrassed about getting drunk and making a complete fool of yourself in public, which incidentally is your own damn silly fault and you know it as well as I do. Now get your sorry backside out here and take the consequences like a man, because the staff meeting starts in five minutes. And if you continue playing silly buggers I'm going down to Maintenance to borrow a plasma torch and opening that door the hard way, so come on, let's be having you!"
Gendo sighed heavily. "If I unlock this door, will you stop being paternal at me?"
"I'll stop being paternal if you stop regressing to adolesence," Fuyutsuki retorted. "I was already too old for this when you still had the excuse of being too young to know better."
"Fine." Gendo unlocked the door.

Several thousand miles away, Mari Makinami was sitting in the Entry Plug of her Evangelion, managing the difficult of feat of being nervous and bored simultaneously. "Seriously, would it have been that hard to let me stream audio in here?" she complained. "Or pull up an ebook viewer in my HUD?"
"Sorry kiddo. No budget for non-essentials like that, or so they tell me. I can tune one of the backup radios into a local station if you want, though."
"Hey, that's an idea. What sort of local stations are there around here, anyway?"
"Oh, they got both kinds a' music, honey! Country and Western!" her "handler" and temporary guardian replied, doing a passable Southern accent. "Are you as sick of this place as I am?"
"Almost certainly, Dave. Almost certainly." And luckily for you, we'll both be leaving sooner than you think.

Mari felt vaguely guilty about leaving him out of the loop like this. David J. Croft (who'd really hated being called "DJ" even before Mari had shown him a certain notorious, hilariously bad work of Tomb Raider fanfiction) had been a sort of honourary older brother when she was younger, the son of one of Mum's best friends who shared her love of reading and the outdoors, and made a point of talking to her at family gatherings and standing up to a certain cousin who thought quiet and bookish Mari was a good target for picking on. In the long months following what she thought of as The Accident, when her mother died and Dad sank so deep into his grief -and his gin- that he might as well have perished too, it had been David who took her to school and made sure she had clean clothes and done all the other things a parent should have been doing. He'd also been the one to "persuade" Dad to see a proper bereavement counsellor and cut down on the drinking, by the somewhat drastic but effective expedient of threatening to report him to Child Services if he didn't. When the Marduk Institute had put her forward as a pilot candidate, he'd immediately volunteered to act in locum parentis while she was overseas for training.

Still, even though Kaoru was pretty sure he wasn't anything to do with SEELE and genuinely did care about her, the fewer people who knew what was actually going on the better. Plausible deniability might be the only thing that kept David out of trouble come the inevitable official inquiry into what was about to happen, not to mention the very unofficial one into why things hadn't happened the way the Old Men wanted them to happen.
Besides, if she told him the survival of everyone within a fifty-mile radius hinged on the Sufficiently Advanced Alien equivalent of Clippy he probably would've had a fit of the vapours, and that was before she got to the really bad parts.

The voice of one of the tech crew dragged her back to the here and now. "Okay, Miss Makinari, we're all ready out here. If the synch test goes okay we'll do some basic tests, then you can knock off and grab some lunch while we get the S2 Engine warmed up."
"Ready when you lot are!" Mari called back cheerfully.
"Understood. Setting plug depth... now. Interface language set to English. Muscular interlocks released. Synchro start in three, two, one..."
Mari reached down and muted her microphone, then took a deep breath. "Hi Mum."

* * *

"You want to what?" Ritsuko exclaimed. "Gendo, when the Committee get to hear of this-"
"It will be too late for them to do anything about it, or to retaliate without repercussions for their authority and prestige. And in any case, as operational commander this is at least technically within my authority."
"And apart from the fact it'll really annoy the Council of Ominously-Lit Placeholder Holograms, which I don't see as all that much of a drawback, I think it's a good idea," Misato added. "It'll be good for our reputation with the general public and our working relationships with the JSDF and the Ministry of Defence. The less time we spend butting heads with them, the more time we have to do what we're supposed to be doing. And more importantly, I don't want to see any more good soldiers die fighting a battle they can never win."
Gendo looked over to Fuyutsuki, the only one who hadn't yet spoken. "I share Dr Akagi's reservations, but Captain Katsuragi makes a good point. Squabbling amongst ourselves over jurisdiction and petty institutional pride benefits no one but SEELE."
"Well, that's settled then. Dr Akagi, how soon can you and your team come up with a Beginner's Guide to AT Field Theory that even the average journalism school graduate can comprehend?"
"If I gloss over the more esoteric parts, the first draft will be in your inbox by the end of the day. But I really hope you know what you're doing."
"That makes two of us," Gendo replied, smiling without humour.

* * *

"All systems go at this end. All set, Mari?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"Okay. Starting the power-up checklist now."

Kaoru glanced at the radio handset she had... borrowed from a security guard who'd been in cahoots with SEELE's embedded saboteur, and resisted the urge to swear. (She might not be that kind of Angel, but Kaoru had rather enjoyed Good Omens and identified rather deeply with the character of Aziraphael, who did not swear without a very good reason indeed.) Time was getting worryingly short, and these were some extremely delicate adjustments-

"Hey!" Oh, yes. That would be the saboteur, wondering why his co-conspirator was handcuffed to a pipe in the men's bathroom. This was most inconvenient. "What the hell are you doing here?"
Kaoru smiled in what she hoped was a pleasant yet slightly dangerous way. "Thwarting you."
The man sighed theatrically. "I suppose it figures you'd discover the concept of adolescent rebellion eventually," he remarked. "The Boss is worried about you, you know."
"Worried the brainwashing didn't take, you mean?" Kaoru retorted, with sudden heat. She gestured angrily, and whatever reply the SEELE operative might have had was abruptly silenced as the armour panel she had removed to access Unit-04's S2 Organ rose up and smote him mightily upside the head. The man collapsed like a puppet with the strings cut, and then went into a seizure. Kaoru gestured again, and with a sharp crack he was still, head lolling at a hideous angle.
Kaoru stared at the body for perhaps half a second, slightly concerned to realise she felt absolutely no sense of guilt, then decided she'd try feeling guilty about not feeling guilty once she no longer had her hands full preventing the deaths of several thousand people who'd done considerably less to deserve it than anyone high up enough in the ranks of SEELE to be entrusted with a job like this. With a shrug, she returned her attention to the S2 Organ.
I do hope this 'New Game Plus', as Kensuke put it, is being less stressful for everyone else...

Mari? Mari, is that you?
Last time I checked, yeah, she thought back, trying to feign nonchalance and not really succeeding.
Oh my God Mari I'm so sorry I love you I miss you-
Mari barely stopped herself from crying out at the sheer force of emotion that hit her. Mum! Take it easy, we don't want to give the game away!
Oh! The overwhelming sensations subsided. Sorry. It's just...
I know, Mum. I know all of it, or at least as much as Kaoru knows. Mari uttered a silent prayer that LCL meant nobody could tell you were crying. It's going to be alright. We're going beat the Angels, and then we're kicking SEELE's arses, and then we're getting you out of this thing. She paused, wondering how to project a mental impression of a smirk. Unless you're doing alright in here, in which case I'll pikey it and go see if International Rescue have any openings.
Not on your life. Do you have any idea how dull it is in here most of the time? And don't use that word, it's an ethnic slur.
Sorry. Mari chuckled mentally. You're taking this really well, by the way. Kaoru was worried you might've been a bit... what's the word?
Probably "traumatised", although I'm sure your father would put it much less delicately. And I did volunteer for this, after a fashion. Says something about SEELE that it took them four Evas to think of asking someone, "If you die, would you like us to use your immortal soul to power a giant biomechanical robot so we can use it to fight kaiju?" And even then there was nothing in the small print about them flattening you with a car when a vacancy came up!
They'll get theirs, Mari promised.

"Alright, Pilot Makinami, the S2 organ is spinning up now. Prepare for deployment."
"Okay. Ready when you are. How's my synch score looking?"
"Really damn good, as it happens. Fluctuated a little a minute ago, but right now you're holding at 89.2%. I think that's a new record. Whatever you're doing in there, keep it up!"
"With pleasure!" Mari snorted. See, if they'd just tell us these things... Anyway, this is where we have to rely on Kaoru. Hold onto your... something, because she tells me that this might feel unpleasantly like being drunk.
Two questions. 1. Was Kaworu quoting Ford Prefect at the time? 2. Didn't Kaworu used to be a boy?
The whole pronoun thing is a bit complicated. I'll tell you about it later. And I'm not sure, why?
Because when Ford said that, Arthur Dent asked him what was so unpleasant about being drunk, and then Ford replied, "You ask a glass of water."

Mari's mouth opened and closed feebly for a long moment as she tried to formulate a response. "Oh, bollocks," she said at last.

 

[Crazael]

Huh. I thought this had died...

 

[Jake]

Nope. I just had a bit of a rough few months, up to and including some time in hospital, and generally had other things on my mind.