Neon Exodus Evangelion, by Eyrie Productions Unlimited Options

[Dr. O]

DJ looked down in blank, flatline horror as the yellowish LCL dribbled out of the crushed entry plug and around EVA-01's fingers, mingling with the blood of EVA-02. Suddenly he realized that Lucifer had gone silent; then its consciousness touched his own again, ignoring the dummy plug signal. He had always felt Lucifer as a living presence, a powerful instinctive force barely contained within the flesh-and-metal shell of the Evangelion; only now did he recognize it as an -intellect-, a sentient spirit.

Ghost in the Evangelion.

Lucifer knew itself. Lucifer knew it had been used.

Lucifer was filled with rage.

DJ could relate.

And now DJ's converted the prince of lies to his side in his personal crusade against everything that does not worship and adore him.

Carefully, gently, he set the mangled plug down on the ground; then he turned EVA-01 slowly toward the launch pad it had left a brief eternity ago. Tears welled out of his eyes, drifted away in the LCL as he ground his teeth together. His rage and Lucifer's mingled as the synchrotron shot back into the nineties, EVA and pilot united in a common purpose against a common enemy; hate for Gendou Ikari rolled up out of DJ's gut like a wave of bile, erupting from his mouth in a scream so primal it tapped his vital capacity, sending bubbles up to the top of the plug.

"IIIIIIKAAAAARIIIIIII!!!" he screamed;

KANEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
TETSUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

then his rage congealed, hardening into a cold, solid core of hatred that made him much more frightening, from Maya Ibuki's point of view, than any red-faced rant could possibly have done.

"I'll kill you for this," he hissed through clenched teeth. "Do you hear me, you bastard? You are a dead man!" He set EVA-01 in motion, heading back to the launch pad not at a run, but at a purposeful, even, deadly-serious stride.

John Freeman saw the boss far down the road and walked slow this time. He walked really slow like a turtle and sat down on a rock and watched the next boss near the dead last boss and where the place that Gordon Freeman was.

"Do you hear me, Gendou?" DJ demanded. "Answer me!"

"Disengage EVA-01's power supply," Ikari ordered. "I don't have time to deal with an irritated child."

Maya thumbed the disconnect switch; the cable fell away, and EVA-01 paused for a moment before switching to battery power.

Hey, she did it without wasting five minutes objecting! That makes, like... one time she's followed an order.

"I've 300 seconds of battery power on board, Gendou," DJ reminded Ikari, the rage still seething in his deceptively calm voice. "Are you betting your life I can't reach you in that time? You're already dead, you fucker. Your body just hasn't realized it yet."

Yes DJ, I'm sure the supreme commander of NERV will be impressed by your ability to quote Fist of the North Star.

"This is ridiculous," Ikari snorted. "Take manual control of his plug suit's auto-defibrillator and shock him. We haven't time for this."

Her dark eyes deeply troubled, Maya looked about to protest; at Ikari's hard glare, she fought back her apprehension and did as he asked.

Nothing happened.

"EVA-01 is completely isolated from our command circuit," she reported, not bothering to conceal the relief in her voice. "We can't access life support control."

For some reason that won't be elaborated upon at all.

"Launch EVA-00 to intercept."

Fortunately for Gendo, Jon's a total doormat.

EVA-00 popped up from the same launch bay that had released EVA-01 a few minutes earlier; as Jon approached DJ, he saw EVA-03, one arm torn away at the shoulder, making unsteadily for the same intercept point.

"Rei, are you all right?" he asked on a closed channel.

"Not important," Rei replied in a quietly strained tone.

EVA-01 reached the intercept point; faced off with 00 and 03, it stood at an impasse for a moment.

Then DJ drew one of EVA-01's autocannons and leveled it at EVA-00's head, growling, "Get the hell out of my way, Jon."

Unfortunately for Gendo, Jon's a total doormat.

"DJ, stop it, this isn't the way," Jon said.

"You saw what he did," DJ grated. "He used me... used me to murder Asuka. Swept her aside, an inconvenience to be disposed of. He could have stopped it, but he didn't!"

"Asuka's alive," Maya called to Jon on a sideband, having just seen that information pop up on her display from the rescue team.

"For God's sake, DJ!" Jon snapped. "She's -not dead-!!"

Of course she isn't. She's a main character. She'll get out of this with nothing more than a few scrapes and bruises.

DJ was too enraged and aggrieved to hear; he merely shook his head violently and screamed, "YOU SAW WHAT HE MADE ME DO! Jon, for God's sake! The man is insane, a monster! He should be put down like a mad dog! You should be HELPING ME!"

Gendo deserves to die.

Because he dared defie the almighty Croft, whose will is as immutable as the laws of nature. Every pore of DJ Croft drips with untold wonders. His merest touch causes the lame to walk and the blind to see. He need but lay his hands on the leprous and their health shall be restored, and every word that proceeds from his mouth is as the music of the spheres. Woe be to him who incurs the wrath of our lord and savior, the king of kings and lord of lords, DJ Croft.

Jon, thunderstruck, faltered; as he did, Rei slid past him into the conversation, the fingers of EVA-03's right hand splaying over EVA-01's chest and pushing him gently back, as her own would have against his, had they been face to face without the massive machines between them.

"DJ, don't," was all she said, quiet as always, but with a tight edge to her tone. "Not now."

"Don't kill the most important person in my life just yet."

There was a long, very tense silence as 00 and 03 continued to face down 01, each hoping none of them would do something regrettable.

Then, finally, came DJ's voice, sounding thirty years older, drained and weary. "This area is secure," he reported hoarsely. "This is Evangelion Unit 01, Lucifer... signing off."

And now you know... the rest of the story.

EVA-01 sagged, the autocannon dropping from its hand to crash upon the ground, and its eyes went dark as DJ shut the unit down.

Jon sank back in his seat and let out a long sigh of relief, air bubbles escaping from his lungs.

The immediate danger was past, but he had a sickening feeling that things were about to take a marked turn for the worse.


In the control room, John Trussell abruptly rose to his feet. As the drama between DJ, Jon and Rei had played out, his face had slowly darkened from deep shock to its current state, a frozen mask of barely-restrained rage. Those who knew Truss knew him to be among the mildest-mannered of people at NERV; to see him this way was a powerful jolt to them. His hands shaking with anger, Truss slammed his chair into the kneewell of his station, pivoted on his heel and stomped toward the exit.

And now, when John Trussel grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs...

As he drew even with Ikari, the professor began crossly, "Mr. Trussell, where do you think - "

Truss rounded on him, eyes flashing, and cut him off with a stiff chopping gesture, locking eyes with Ikari.

"DON'T," said Truss; then, after a lingering glare, he turned and left the control room, leaving Ikari staring after him with a look of mild shock on his face.

Truss must be such a cool guy, writing fanfiction in which he tells off an anime character.

Is there anyone who reads this and thinks it isn't awful?


It didn't take long for the NERV Security officers to apprehend DJ once EVA-01 was back in the cage. Having showered and dressed under guard, his weapon being kept from him, he was manacled and marched to Gendou Ikari's office, flanked by two Men in Black, one familiar, one not. On the way, they passed Maya Ibuki, who was going the other way; she gave DJ a searching, sympathetic look and seemed almost about to speak, but then apparently thought better of it and hurried away. DJ couldn't blame her. His star was definitely not in ascendency just now.

The truth of the matter was, she didn't want him to see her crying.

She has to look presentable for the world's most handsome and sophisticated fourteen-year-old.

He stood straight and defiant before Ikari's desk, meeting the scientist-administrator's steady, emotionless gaze with a glare filled with all the considerable hatred he could muster, wasting no attention on the two MIBs or Otto Keller, who stood at Ikari's right elbow.

"Croft," said Ikari, "since you joined this organization, you have been a constant source of difficulty for me. You are rebellious, undisciplined, immature and unprincipled, and you have no apparent appreciation for the extreme importance of our work here. You have shown unwarranted hostility to me and flagrant disregard for my authority.

Gendo may be a dick, but DJ's an asshole. See, there are three kinds of people: dicks, pussies, and assholes...

"I have been willing to overlook all this due to your natural talent and its importance to Project EVA. However, your conduct in this last incident was beyond the pale. You were insubordinate; you deliberately refused direct orders; you seized control of Evangelion Unit 01 without authorization and you threatened the lives of senior personnel, myself included. This cannot be forgiven. Have you anything to say for the record?"

Never breaking eye contact with Ikari, DJ replied firmly and unhesitantly, "Gendou Ikari, you are a contemptible, manipulative, ruthless, murderous, unscrupulous toe-rag. If Colonel Keller and these two men weren't here, you bastard, I would strangle you with my bare hands. The best thing you can do is turn me loose and pray I never cross your path again... For the record."

"Toe-rag?" Was that the most devastating indictment he could think of?

"And risk disclosure to the press of the classified things you know? Unlikely."

"Keep me here, even under guard, and sooner or later, I'll kill you."

My name is Inigo Croftoya. You killed my girlfriend. Prepare to die.

Ikari showed a flash of emotion, banging his fist against his desk and barking, "I have no time for juvenile bravado!"

It's funny because Gendo is by far the more reasonable of the two, but we're supposed to be outraged by his actions.

Ice-calm, DJ replied flatly, "Nor have I."

Ikari stared into the boy's steel-blue eyes for almost twenty long seconds; DJ never flinched.

"Very well," Ikari said. "Your NERV clearance is revoked. Take your personal effects and be out of Worcester-3 by midnight. That's all. You're dismissed."

"Fuck you, Gendou," said DJ with tight restraint that carried more anger than any shout could contain. "Watch your back; one day I'll blow your fucking head off, I promise." Then, toe behind heel, he performed a tidy military about-face and marched from the office.

"Have him followed at all times, Keller," said Ikari. "If he discloses anything to anyone, I want him apprehended and brought to me immediately."

Just shoot him.

Keller's stony face revealed nothing of his state of mind as he replied, "Yes, sir."


Packing up the few things he had in his locker at HQ, DJ kept his face studiously blank. The guards had kept his weapon; if they didn't return it before he left, DJ resolved that he would have to bill them for it and find another.

Even though him having it is illegal.

It's a bit like going to the police because someone stole your LSD.

Not that he would need a gun if he decided to kill Ikari right then... but no, let him stew a while. Let him wonder where and when death would come for him. DJ knew the man had read the depth of his intent during that long stare, and though he couldn't be sure, he was fairly confident he'd actually managed to frighten the bastard.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, DJ.

Good. Let him worry a while... meanwhile DJ would go home to England and gather his strength, then return to Worcester and gather the information he needed to destroy Ikari's world. Leave Worcester-3 permanently? Not while Ikari still had anything he could call his own.

Still, he didn't know when, if ever, he'd be able to see his friends again; so he made use of his last few legitimate moments in Central Dogma to have one last nose round.

Asuka was still in critical condition, being worked on furiously by the trauma staff in the Infirmary. He couldn't get closer than the far side of a six-inch-thick quartzite window, and all he could see was a face that was a patchwork of purple-red bruises and waxen white flesh, nothing at all like the face he'd come to be so fond of in recent times. He couldn't stand to look at it, so he fled to the Wedge.

Time to play some Atari!

Maya was there, as were Jon and Rei; so was Ritsuko, the bandage round her head and soot smeared on her cheeks and lab coat the only hallmarks of her experiences in Framingham. Though he had become increasingly disenchanted with her of late, nevertheless DJ's heart leaped to see her - for if she had survived, then possibly, just possibly...

"Misato?" he asked as he approached.

You can tell he's a good person because he shows concern for someone.

After threatening to go on a murdering spree. Details, details...

"Banged up, but alive," she told him. "She's in Infirmary Two getting a cast on her arm. You won't be able to get in to see her - I understand you've finally gone too far."

"That's one way of putting it," he said bitterly. "I'm on my way out now; just stopped off to say my goodbyes, so there's no need to call Security."

Ignoring her frown, he turned to Jon, taking him aside. "Listen. While I'm not around to remind you, don't forget to stick to your guns, right? Don't let them make you do anything you don't want to do. Don't forget what I told you."

"Especially the sex lecture."

Jon nodded gravely.

"Especially the sex leture," DJ repeated gravely.

"Take care," said DJ, putting a hand on Jon's shoulder; the other boy placed his own hand on it for a moment, and then they returned to the group, where DJ managed to summon a genuine smile and turn it on Maya, who was still red-eyed and pale from crying.

"Maya, my love," said DJ, taking her hand and kissing it. "Thank you for everything."

She let out a sob and drew him into a hug; for a moment, he stroked her hair and told her he'd be all right, and presently she released him and sat back on the Wedge bench, sniffling but managing a smile of her own.

I might care.

If Maya were anything more than a background character who exists solely to deliver technobabble.

DJ turned to Ritsuko, and his smile became somewhat less warm. "Ritsuko. Thank you... for nothing." Then, on impulse, his right hand darted out; before she could draw back, he'd hooked his index finger into the ring on her top's zipper tab and snapped his wrist down, unzipping the garment and letting it fall open in one fell swoop.

Just when I think DJ can't possibly be more of a prick.

"Well, almost nothing," he added with a mirthless version of his rakish grin as she flushed clear to the rounded tops of her well-formed breasts. "Hah! I was right," DJ added, his grin becoming a triumphant smirk. "Pink."

DAMN IT YOU SMUG, UNBEARABLE, OH-SO-SUPERIOR, DONKEY-FUCKING, COCK-GARGLING, SHIT-CHEWING, FESTERING, PUS-FILLED GENITAL SORE OF A MASTURBATORY SELF-INSERT! I HATE YOU!

Ritsuko stood there agape a moment; her face working through a mixture of shock, embarrassment, and rage as a slow blush crept up her breasts and into her face. Her eyes finally narrowing, she made an incoherent sound of rage though clenched teeth, gathered the front of her top back together, and stormed out of the Wedge.

"She never could handle me," DJ chuckled wryly, shaking his head. He turned to see the others all staring at him - Jon incredulous, Maya embarrassed, Rei with a touch of reproach, as if to say, "That was beneath you."

Deflated, his glee evaporating, DJ sighed and let his shoulders sag. "You're right, Rei," he said, hanging his head and shaking it sadly. "Damn it... I should be better than that."

Yeah, Ritsuko is so below you.

She stepped closer, and instead of speaking, she pressed her lips to his, kissing him once, gently and warmly. When she released him, there were tears tracking both their cheeks.

in lieu of writing how i feel, here is an attachment
 dammit_eyrie.mp3 ( 139.71K ) Number of downloads: 128


"I love you, Rei," said DJ softly. "Be well."

Overcome, Rei was unable to reply, so Jon did it for her and himself, whispering, "We'll miss you."

"You'll see me again," DJ replied, "one way or another."

Then he turned, shouldered his backpack, and walked out of the Wedge.

Uttering a single sob, Rei Ayanami threw herself into Jon's arms. Not knowing what else to do, he sat down, still embracing her, next to Maya. For a long time, he sat there holding Rei, as Maya put her hand on his behind Rei's head and cried with them.


Ritsuko sat slumped in her office chair, her top still hanging loosely open. The rage she felt immediate had quickly cooled, leaving a tangle of emotions in its wake. She felt more than tired: there was a weariness that had sunk into her very bones.

I know the feeling.

Even with her self-prescribed tranquilizers (which she'd started on a couple of days after the Dirac's Ocean incident) the nightmares had made sleep fitful at best. She hadn't dared tell anyone about them for fear of being relieved form her post. And right now that was all she had left to hold onto. At least while she worked she didn't think of other things, at least not much.

Her dreams were haunted by images terrible and surreal. In one recurring dream a gore-covered EVA stalked toward her across an open field. She, helpless, running for all she was worth, but still losing ground to the steady march of the EVA's feet. In the end she always fell, and the giant hand closed cruelly on her. Her ears filled with booming, maddening laughter. The EVA, laughing at her, only the EVA's helmet shattered and fell away; and it was Kaji, grinning and laughing as his fist slowly closed, and darkness overcame the pain.

I liked this dream better when it was in The Empire Strikes Back.

It was that nightmare that had ruined her first few nights' sleep. When others at TechDiv started to notice, she realized it was impacting her work, and she refused to let anything detract from that; so she'd started medicating herself to get the needed rest. At least now she wouldn't wake up in a sweat, or screaming, with each new dream. It was better than no rest at all, she supposed, but how long could it last?

If there's anything I've learned from movies, it's that people wake up screaming and drenched in sweat after a nightmare.

That wasn't the only dream to haunt her. Others were a variation on the same theme. The others would be there, and she would run to each, begging them to help her. And always they would turn her away, to run to the next. No one would help her. In the worst one she'd finally fallen at Misato's feet and pleaded with her to help - but as the hand closed around her Misato's answer was the same feral grin she'd worn in the commissary. The final words she heard as the grip closed the final time were: "You got just what you deserved!"

Oh right, we're still going on about the rape. That must be Ritsuko's character arc.

That one could still awaken her.

In another Misato came to her, carrying the limp, dead body of DJ in her arms. Her sobs and cries still rang in her ears as she remembered the dream. "Too late! We were too late, damn you! You did this! You're responsible! You killed him! Don't you care?" And then Ritsuko would see her own hands covered in blood, and behind Misato the bodies of Asuka, Jon, Rei, Maya, Truss, and so many more. The ground beneath her turned to crimson mud as the blood soaked in, and she sank as into quicksand.

Her mind seemed to have an endless supply of ideas which it would parade past her unconscious mind while she slept.

Through it all she kept her mind firmly affixed on the mission, on her job, and on Ikari. She felt she'd get through it if only she had something to hold onto, a beacon to steer by, and Gendou Ikari, while everyone else seemed determined to fly in their own orbit, still had his eyes firmly on the horizon. Only Ikari still kept his mind on the task at hand. To him, Ritsuko could still look for guidance, still reassure herself that what they were doing was right.

But, then, what about today? She'd barely escaped serious injury in Framingham, and Misato had fared worse than she. Others had fared worse still, and their days of worry were over. Was there anything she could have done differently? How had they allowed an Angel to invade in the first place? Had it come with the generator? If so, how had they missed it? In the end Ritsuko had been in charge of the test, and now she felt the responsibility for its failure. Most of all, she felt responsible for the deaths.

Finally, a character with the capacity for guilt and honest introspection. And it's only taken almost twenty chapters.

For that matter, what of Ikari? Asuka lay in a bed not far away, clinging to life. She was there, for all practical intents and purposes, on Ikari's orders. She'd reviewed the mission tapes and the comm records from the incident; and she just didn't know. Had Ikari done the right thing? It was important to stop Angels, at all cost, to be sure, but was there another option? Could DJ have gotten her out? Or would he have been defeated as Rei had, and Worcester-3 destroyed? She had to believe Ikari had done the right thing, for her sake; but part of her had started to wonder, and her last anchor wasn't quite as firmly affixed as it had been.

It's funny because one way to read Ikari is "anchor."

Her mind returned again to her recent experience in the Wedge. DJ opening her top, and the rush of shame and revulsion she'd felt as thoughts of Kaji swam into her mind. And the rage she felt, not as much rage at DJ for what he'd done, but for how he'd made her feel.

She remembered their eyes upon her, and the laughter she was sure she saw there. In her mind's eye she could see them all waiting until she'd fled, then falling over in great gales of laughter. Dr. Akagi, bested by DJ again, wasn't that just the funniest thing! In her heart she knew she could never be one of them. For her there was only the mission... and the mission was falling apart.

With these thoughts in her mind, Dr. Ritsuko Akagi drifted into a fitful rest in her dark office.


Two hours later, John Trussell sat alone in an empty conference room, the only light that which entered from the Central Dogma cavern through the room's windows. In his hand he held a pen; before him was a pad of paper. Scattered about on the floor were crumpled, ink-stained pages from the pad. He stared bleakly at the paper, trying to come up with a suitably eloquent way of phrasing how deeply horrified he was by Gendou Ikari's conduct, by way of filing a formal resignation from NERV.

"Screw you guys, I'm going home."

Behind him, he heard the door to the conference room open. He ignored it; whoever it was could clearly see that he didn't want to be bothered, and if anyone tried to disturb him nonetheless, well, he could deal with that easily enough.

Moments later the door closed again, but a presence at his back told John that whoever it was had not left; they remained near the door, quiet, unintrusive, watching and waiting.

He turned to look, and saw Rei Ayanami watching him, her face impassive.

"Will you leave NERV?" she asked softly.

"I can't think of any good reasons not to," Truss replied.

It's really hilarious how Truss has a choice in the matter and hasn't been fired and/or executed.

every time i say something is funny or hilarious, that's code for "pants-on-head retarded"

Rei stepped closer, so he could look at her without craning his neck, and nodded. For a long moment, there was silence.

Then: "Will you go public with what you know?"

Truss blinked. "I... I'm not sure what you mean. I won't
violate my TechDiv non-disclosure agreement... "

"No," Rei said. "Professor Ikari's illegal activities. Jet Alone."

Momentarily, Truss was dumbfounded. "How... how did you know about that?" he asked.

"Hal told me," Rei replied. "With Asuka's future uncertain and DJ gone, he felt it was best to seek new allies."

Allies for what? The War on Gendo?

Truss looked perplexed, then nodded. "I forgot he could do that... " That answered, he mulled over her question for a moment. "I don't know," he finally admitted. "Maybe I should. He's obviously out of control... someone needs to do -something- about it."

"If he knew you know these things," Rei said matter-of-factly, "he would never let you leave."

The room was quiet for a few beats as John processed Rei's words; this was not something he had paused to consider in the heat of his anger. He grimaced slightly and looked down at the floor as he replied, "No, I don't suppose he would." After a few more seconds of consideration, he cast his gaze upward again. "I'm sorry you had to get dragged into this, Rei. I... " His voice trailed off as he ran out of words for his apology.

The best part is how Hal, a sentient computer with all sorts of information gleaned directly from NERV's computers, can't just leak the information himself.

"I have always been a part of this," Rei replied unemotionally.

Unsettled by her tone of voice, Truss discarded his previous train of thought and studied the stoic girl for a moment.

"Rei," he asked softly, "will you make it through this? What will you do?"

Almost imperceptibly, Rei shrugged. "Professor Ikari is losing control," she said impassively, "and with each passing day there are fewer people in a position to challenge him. If things remain as they are, I will not survive the next Angel attack."

She's Rei. Death is cheap.

Visibly shaken by Rei's words, John was unable to reply.

"I'm disturbing you," remarked Rei. "I'll go." She turned and left the room, leaving Truss alone with his thoughts.

Several minutes passed before Truss rose from his chair, dropped the notepad containing the half-finished resignation in the corner wastebasket, and left the room.


Shortly thereafter, Jon was in EVA-01's entry plug, surrounded by a dark feeling of foreboding. As he approached the break-even point in synchronization, he felt no welcoming surge of neural pulses; merely a brick wall of indifferent resistance. He concentrated, stretching out his feelings, sending a pleading thought to the intelligence he instinctively knew lived within the EVA:

Why are they using Jon and not Rei? Rei was originally supposed to be Unit 01's pilot, right? She's the person who the dummy plug is based on. If they're not having her try piloting it, then what was the point of all that cross-compatibility crap?

<Please. We need your strength.>

The reply he got back was emphatically negative.

Jon winced as the alarms went off and the nerve pulse almost fed back into his mind. He hit his own cutoff switch almost immediately, and EVA-01 fell silent.

"No good, Dr. Akagi..." Jon sighed. "It doesn't want me."

It only answers to the cool characters.


In his room on Lee Street, DJ packed a few more of his clothes into a duffel bag, sought out his long underwear and laid them out on the bed. It was a cold November night, no night, really, to be riding any distance on a motorcycle, but he had no other convenient way of getting to New York, and White Star's Britannic was leaving for Southampton the following afternoon.

I really don't want to hear more about your ocean liner fetish, all right? Just drop it.

As he packed, he was startled to hear a cough. He turned to see Ken Stanfield, the middle-aged fellow who seemed to be the de facto leader of the NERV Security 'plainclothes' force, standing in the doorway in his usual black suit, his seamed, weatherbeaten face impassive as always.

"You really meant what you said to Ikari back there." It wasn't a question.

Hence the lack of a question mark, you condescending fuckass.

DJ nodded. "I don't know what his whole game is yet, but by God I'll find out, and when I do I'll bring it down right round his ears. If you've any sense you'll clear out fast."

Stanfield smiled - the second time DJ had seen him do that - and said, "Damned if I don't believe you'll do it, too." Then he stepped fully into the room, locked the door behind him, and said seriously, "Look, son, a lot of us are no happier with the way Ikari's been running things lately than you are. You've got guts and determination, but without some backup on your side, that's not going to be enough."

"So what do you suggest?" asked DJ sardonically. "Form an underground resistance?"

"Not form," said Stanfield flatly, handing DJ a small white card from his suit-coat pocket. "Join."

Then didn't have enough teenage braggarts who'd been fired from NERV and were about to be tailed by intelligence forces.

DJ looked at the card, an eyebrow crooking in surprise.

KENNETH J. STANFIELD
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE BUREAU

X - C O M

"X-COM?" DJ murmured.

"That's right," said Stanfield, nodding. "A sizeable contingent of NERV's Security Division, a few people in TechDiv and at least one in Operations, we're all X-COM Intel agents. Ryoji Kaji was, too, until he turned traitor and became Ikari's errand boy. We've been keeping an eye on Ikari and his SEELE bosses and we -don't- like what we're seeing."

Kaji's evil! Evil, I say! Evil evil evil!

"And I'm supposed to believe this because... ?"

"I knew your father."

"Do tell."

"We were FBI agents together. When the Hidden War started in '98 I joined X-COM, but he stayed with the Bureau. He was a thinker, not much of a fighter, and back then X-COM was almost purely paramilitary. He gave us some of our best leads on the Enemy, though. He used to think like you do, that he had a right to know everything and that people who tried to keep things from him were evil. Used to get downright obsessive about it. 'Damn it all, Stanfield,' he'd say to me, 'the truth is out there, I can -feel- it.'"

Hurr hurr X-Files.

DJ blinked.

"He said that, did he."

"Often," replied Stanfield.

Why don't you tell us about Scully while you're at it.

DJ mulled it over for a moment, then nodded. "OK, say I believe you. Why are you telling me this?"

"Hell, you'd have figured it out pretty soon anyway," said Stanfield with a grin. "When you did I was going to move on recruiting you. Ikari's move today just bumped my timetable up a little."

"You want me to join X-COM."

They'll hand him a stun rod and an assault rifle and send him off to fight chryssalids.

"Sure. You're prime MIB material, if a little young. You're smart, you're tough, you're stubborn as hell and you've got a problem with unjustified authority. You remind me of me. And, frankly, it'd take us months to dig up all the information I suspect you already have."

"What's so military about this Military Intelligence Bureau, anyway?" DJ asked, handing back the card.

"Damned if I know, son," Stanfield replied, brushing an imaginary piece of lint from one immaculate cuff. "I think they just made it up to facilitate the acronym."

Haha MIB reference get it?

DJ observed Stanfield's mode of dress and conceded that he did have a point.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Play along with Ikari. Pretend you're going home to England and hop a ship for the Continent. We need somebody to go to Germany and find out what the hell happened to Kaji; he used to be one of our most loyal agents, until about eight months ago."

"Germany? What about all that's going on here? I can't leave my friends in the hands of that madman Ikari and go trotting off to Germany just to find out why Kaji suddenly turned to the bloody Dark Side. Going back to England for some things is one thing, but I've hardly the time for a Continental vacation."

Going to Europe for some pissing contest with his grandfather is acceptable, but work? Fuck that!

"We'll take care of your friends."

"Like you took care of Asuka? Where the hell was your magic network then?"

Stanfield nodded sadly. "That was unexpected," he admitted. "We didn't think Ikari was going to go so far so fast; Ayanami and Ellison's improved performance as a team must have made him decide that you and Soryu-Langley were expendable earlier than we though he would."

DJ absorbed that statement, saw the truth in it, and fought back his anger. It wasn't Stanfield he was angry with, anyway; more even than Ikari, it was himself. -He- should have seen all that Stanfield just mentioned coming. -He- should have known Ikari would move to eliminate Asuka and himself at the first possible opportunity... but how could he have anticipated an opportunity like this? No doubt Ikari had seized it on the spur of the moment, hoping DJ would force Rei or Jon to kill him, to stop him from destroying the command center in his rage against Ikari. The Angel attack on Unit 02 must have seemed like, pardon the pun, a heaven-sent chance to tie up those loose ends and consolidate his hold on the program.

So Gendo plans all these schemes worthy of Light Yagami, but still gets utterly confounded by DJ. I don't know whether this is yet another case of the descriptions not lining up with the story, or of DJ being better than everyone else.

Ikari didn't know about the seeds of subversion that were already flowering in Misato, in Jon, and even in Rei; but then, neither did DJ, really.

DJ nodded. "All right, I'm in."

Stanfield smiled, reached into his jacket, and drew out DJ's .45, then handed the weapon and its ammunition over. "You might need this," he observed.

I should have known it's a .45. That's what all the stupid wannabe tough guys use.

"I might," DJ allowed with a smile of his own. "What do - "

He was interrupted by a harsh, ululating wail that swelled in the air over the city, a sound all of Worcester-3's remaining residents knew well.

"Another Angel alert?!" DJ burst out. "They're not wasting any time."

A knock sounded at the door; Stanfield slid it open to admit a young black man in an identical suit - his recently-assigned rookie partner, James Edwards.

"You've got to see this," he remarked, and the three of them went to the living room to look.

Near the the campus of WPI, another land-based Angel had arrived, stalking through the buildings. Its bizarre, stump-legged shape and mottled black-and-white coloration made DJ think of nothing so much as a bizarre, giant, headless cow, standing up on its hind legs and menacing the city. Where a head belonged there was nothing; where arms belonged were mere stumps.

The Angel stumped forward, paused for a moment in the middle of Park Avenue, and then abruptly issued a bolt of blinding white power from the gem-like red core in its chest, blasting a great, gaping hole in the ground.

Now we get to watch NERV be impotent, DJ go save the day with as much self righteousness and indignation as possible, blah blah blah, end of season.


"Where did it come from?" Ritsuko Akagi demanded.

"I don't know! It just... -appeared- there," said Truss.

"Good Christ!" Maya Ibuki cried, down in the control room. "That thing just blew through eighteen barrier layers with one shot!"

I'm sorry, but invoking Jesus isn't going to improve this fic. There are some miracles that just aren't going to happen.

"Station EVA-00 and EVA-03 within the Geo-Front itself, then," said Misato Katsuragi - dirty, bedraggled, her arm in a sling and her head bandaged, but out of the infirmary and back in command. She had insisted; concentrating on mastery of a crisis was the only way to keep from being overwhelmed by how much everything had changed, for the worse, in the course of the last twelve hours.

She tried not to think about what she would do when she no longer had a crisis to keep her occupied.

In the cockpits of their EVAs, Jon and Rei considered similar things.

Evas don't have cockpits.

/* The Mavericks "Blue Moon" _Apollo 13_ */

NEXT EPISODE:

As its unity splinters from the decay within, NERV must face its most rigorous test yet; and just when it appears that all has been revealed, the valiant find that they don't know anything yet. Ring out 1997 with the Symphony of Terror's shattering conclusion:

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION 2:9
ODYSSEY
12/31/97

"I don't know you any more."

One more... one more chapter in the season... Then I can take a break and simmer down before tackling season 3.

I'm also going to be working on an old new mock. I'm not at liberty to say more at this point, but keep an eye out. I can assure you that it will be amazing.

[Moose]

DJ's a dickweed, and I hope he dies a horrible death.
If my male co-worker did to me but DJ did to Ritsuko, I would SO attempt to shatter his wrist quicker than you can say "'Ello, guvnah!"

This post has been edited by Moose: May 18 2011, 04:41 PM

[Al_Cone]

"IIIIIIKAAAAARIIIIIII!!!" he screamed;

KANEDAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!
TETSUOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

MENDOZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOX!!!

LOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS!!!

MIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIKE!!!

LIQUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID!!!

SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!

Having showered and dressed under guard, his weapon being kept from him

Oh, NOW they think to take the firearm away from the minor. After he threatens to go on a killing spree and stomp them all to dust with his giant fucking robot. NERV is the most backwards-thinking organization on the planet, I swear.

DJ knew the man had read the depth of his intent during that long stare, and though he couldn't be sure, he was fairly confident he'd actually managed to frighten the bastard.

DJ's such a subtle motherfucker, openly telling Gendo that he's planning to kill him.

On that note, why didn't Gendo just shoot him in the head at this point? Tell everybody that he was still insane with rage after ditching Unit-01 and lunged at him, and that the security personnel were forced to take the killshot. Who's going to dispute him?

Finally, a character with the capacity for guilt and honest introspection. And it's only taken almost twenty chapters.

What's bad about this is that it's the character who we're supposed to find insufferable and overbearing, and not one of the myriad pricks whose immature and malicious behavior has been lauded by the writers as charming. Ritsuko wanted to sacrifice a soldier in an ongoing war with an enemy for the sake of saving the world THAT MONSTER HOW DARE SHE DJ sexually assaults Ritsuko in front of everybody LOLOLOL THAT RASCAL DJ.

Why is it okay for DJ to pull introduce Ritsuko's ladies to the world, but it's not okay for Kaji to rape her? The double-standards in this story...

"Hal told me," Rei replied. "With Asuka's future uncertain and DJ gone, he felt it was best to seek new allies."

>>implying that computers can "feel" anything

Soryu-Langley

This is an admittedly minor quibble, but they've got her name completely backwards and I cannot for the life of me understand why. Is it to distinguish the story from the source material? Because swapping the order of a person's last name really doesn't count as originality.

This post has been edited by Al_Cone: May 19 2011, 07:12 PM

[Dr. O]

They already got Kaji's name wrong, so who knows?

The double-standards get even better in this chapter, by the way. I'm convinced that they made Kaji a rapist specifically so that DJ would look better in comparison.

/* Genesis "Land of Confusion (Live)" _The Way We Walk_ */

EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED
presents

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION

EXODUS 2:9 - ODYSSEY

Are they associating this fanfic with one of the great ancient works of literature? Really?

Inspired by NEON GENESIS EVANGELION created by Hideaki Anno, Gainax,
et al.

Most characters created by Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
except

DJ Croft created by Benjamin D. Hutchins
and
Jon Ellison created by Larry Mann

Additional material and inspiration cadged from TOMB RAIDER by Core
Design, Ltd., X-COM: UFO DEFENSE and sequels from MPS Labs (whoever
owns them nowadays), THE X-FILES created by Chris Carter, and
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke

It seems everything in this story falls under one of three categories: Evangelion, DJ CROFT (and Jon), and everything else.

Written by Benjamin D. Hutchins, Larry Mann,
MegaZone and John Trussell

Honestly, people.

Four authors.

You know what they say about too many cooks and broth.

Aided and abetted by the Eyrie Productions, Unlimited crew
and special-guest-for-life Phil Moyer

Give a man a computer and he will fanfic for a day. Give him Phil Moyer and he will fanfic for life.

© 1997 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


Stanfield and Edwards could not be seen re-entering the Geo-Front with someone in DJ's state of disrepute, so they left without him - but they knew he would be going back. The main S-490 entrance tunnel would be barred to him, of course, and during an alert the security force might even shoot, even if most of them -were- X-COM operatives. Fortunately, DJ knew a few back ways in - construction entryways which had then been plugged off and forgotten, but in which he had found (or in a couple of cases, reopened) paths large enough for him and his Corley.

1. Most of NERV security is provided by X-COM? Why?
2. Reopened? Are they implying that DJ went around ripping open pieces of the Geofront in his spare time? Why?

Down one of those he raced, hoping he would be in time.

Pfft, Shinji managed it without a motorcycle.


A massive plume of fire and debris rained down from the ceiling of the Geo-Front cavern as the Angel breached the final defensive barrier, emerging from the resultant cloud of smoke a moment later and descending toward the cavern floor. The moment it was clear of the destruction above, it promptly came under fire once more, this time from the twin autorifles wielded by EVA-00.

If Rei had a degree in videogameology like the authors, she'd know that dual-wielding is a useless mechanic.

The bullets had no effect.

"Shit! Its AT Field is up, Control!" Jon snapped, discarding the rifles and grabbing two rocket launchers from the weapons cache at his feet.

Oh, I guess it's Jon. That makes se-

Wait how is he using two weapons when Unit 00's arm was exploded in the previous chapter? This is so- Ah, I forgot, Unit 00 was damaged in Evangelion, but in NXE it was Unit 03. The same exact thing happened, only with a different Eva. Because that makes sense.

Perhaps the missiles would distract the enemy long enough for Rei to move in and do some damage. But, before either of them could act, what looked at first glance like large grayish ribbons unfurled from the Angel's arm stumps. These ribbons snapped taut and lashed out before Jon could even react, and in a flash Moloch's arms were gone, cleanly shaved off at the shoulders. Jon howled as the pain exploded across his body far more intensely than he had expected. He curled up into a tight ball for two seconds before forcing the agony out of his mind.

Pfft, Asuka kept fighting when that happened.

She was curbstomped, but at least she tried. Unlike Jon "why the fuck am I even in this story" Ellison.

Just in time to experience another stab of pain as the ribbons struck out again, slicing one of Moloch's legs apart. The unit promptly lost its balance and began to topple over.

I did some cursory research, and it turns out that Moloch was part of the Canaanite pantheon. So this fic is drawing material from like five distinct religions. Because there just weren't enough gratuitous religious references stripped of all context or cultural background in Evangelion.

Through the haze of red which had become the sum total of his consciousness, thought he heard a voice cry, "Go!" In the next instant Moloch was gone, followed by wrenching vertigo as ejection charges sent Jon's entry plug careening skyward. EVA-00 itself collapsed to the ground, a pool of blood forming under its half-crushed face, which was turned toward the Angel as it retracted its ribbons and energized its beam weapon, preparing to finish Moloch off.

The phrase "energized its beam weapon" makes me think this was going to be a Star Trek crossover at some point.

Before the Angel could shoot, however, its attention was diverted to the more immediate problem represented by the one-armed black EVA bearing down on it at a run, a large silver canister clutched in its remaining hand. The Angel probably didn't know what the "N2" in big white letters on the canister's side meant, but everyone else did.

"Rei!" Misato shouted. "What are you doing??"

"We have to stop it," Rei replied, quiet as ever but with an audible undercurrent of tension. It was plainly obvious she intended to force the N2 bomb past the Angel's AT Field and detonate it. At that range, it was suicide.

This is an important philosophical question: is it suicide if you can be resurrected? Oh wait, we're supposed to care about Rei's plight or something, even though we all know this is a no-consequences fight that will be resolved by DJ showing up in all his glory to tell off Gendo and showcase his own badassery.

The color drained from many faces, and in the control room, John Trussell felt his heart skip a beat.

[If things remain as they are, I will not survive the next Angel attack.]

"REI, NO! DON'T--"

Rei shut down her comm system, and the audible pleas stopped. In the next instant she was upon the Angel, and drove the canister forward, forcing it through the AT Field, priming the detonator as she did so.

How exactly do you prime the detonator on those? Is there a giant pin like on a hand grenade? For some reason this is important to me.

<It must be done. For all our sakes.>

But in the back of her mind she could hear a pleading voice not mutable by any communications shutdown.

<<Rei, please don't do this.>>

Jon.

So <brackets> are Rei and <<double brackets>> are Jon. At least this time they're giving some indication as to who's thinking instead of making yet another impenetrable mess.

Formatting!

She tried to push him away, to maintain her concentration. <I must do this.>

The canister penetrated the field completely. She activated the detonator and it began counting down from five seconds. This would do enough damage to buy time, time for them to rebuild Moloch and give Jon a chance to finish the job...

You could sacrifice the crappy prototype in order to preserve the more advanced Eva. But that would require a level of strategic thinking that is pretty obviously beyond NERV's grasp. As evidenced by them chucking Evas down a black hole in that stupid Saving Private DJ plan.

Jon...

<<I am nothing without you.>>

She would die.

<I...>

<<Please don't leave me.>>

Since every other chick already belongs to DJ, Rei is Jon's only hope for an obligatory love interest.

She would not see Jon again.

A new emotion clawed at her.

<......I don't want to die.>

Yes, Rei's life was given meaning by a character so bland, his greatest achievement in this entire fic is throwing a rock through a car dealership window.

Orcus threw itself backward, letting go of the canister just as the timer reached zero. A flash of white light eclipsed everyone's view as the N2 bomb went off.

The intention had been for the bomb to be past the AT Field when it went off, but as it happened it was caught halfway, nearly pulled back out by Orcus's retreat. As such, most of the blast was absorbed. When the light faded, both Angel and EVA-03 were sprawled on the ground, some distance apart from each other. Orcus was in terrible shape, its chest armor shattered and caved in, its neck twisted at an entirely abnormal angle, and the lower half of its remaining arm missing.

The Angel's front was similarly scuffed and charred, but a moment later it rose back up and continued on its course, giving the two downed Evangelions no further thought.

I don't think either of them took that much damage in the actual show, even though they logically should have sustained less in this scenario.


DJ swore and fought for control, almost laying the Corley over on its side, as the shockwave from the mostly-muted explosion washed over the roadway, nearly blowing him into the guard rail. Then he skidded to a halt, putting a leg down, and flipped the visor of his helmet up, taking in the tableau of destruction and realizing just what that enormous explosion had been.

OK, if it was "mostly-muted," then again, why did it do even more damage than it should have? Or did they mean that it was muted by distance, from DJ's point of view? If the former, then it still doesn't make sense. If the latter, then kiloton-scale explosions in an enclosed space are perfectly safe, especially if you're riding a fairly unstable vehicle at high speeds.

This is what I get for using my brain-thinking.

"Oh, God, no," he murmured, his guts twisting as he forced himself to take in the ruin that the blast had made of Unit 03, and, not far away, the bloody, shattered wreck of Unit 00. The latter lay on its face, and the entry plug cover was gone; so where was the plug?

Just as he thought that, the plug, on its parachute, crashed into the park pond in the foreground of DJ's view, only a few dozen feet away. As it settled, it rolled (as it was weighted to do) so that the hatch was upright, and that hatch popped open, releasing a minor deluge of LCL and a wet, bedraggled, coughing, thoroughly displeased-looking pilot.

We were that close to seeing DJ be crushed to death by a flying entry plug.

I feel cheated.

DJ waved and hailed to Jon, who clambered up the bank to meet him.

"What the hell's going on?" DJ asked. "Did Rei just - "

"Yes," Jon replied, his face lined with pain.

Turns out Rei is part Palestinian, so of course that was the first idea she came up with.

"Are you hurt?"

"Only sympathetic. It'll fade."

"Is Rei - "

"She's alive," said Jon with quiet conviction.

What kind of shitty suicide bomber is she?

"Rescue team will have her out in no time... but I don't know what we're going to do next. EVA-01 won't accept any pilot we try since the dummy plug incident."

DJ surveyed the wrecked EVAs, the Angel lumbering stiffly toward Central Dogma (its injuries already healing, its speed already picking back up), and his eyes glittered.

If they glow, change color, or are described as any sort of precious gem or "orbs," I am quitting.

"He'll accept me," he said flatly. "Jump on!" The dripping EVA pilot swung on behind him, his toes finding and flipping down the extra set of footpegs. DJ started the Corley laid the throttle open again as Jon got a secure grip on his waist, snapping his visor down to keep the wind out of his eyes as Jon ducked, using DJ's body as a windbreak.

Haha, Jon gets the bitch seat.

Sparing no time or energy on thoughts of the danger, DJ ducked in and out of the obstacles blocking his way, the abandoned cars and chunks of rubble, making for the Central Dogma pyramid at top speed.

As he and Jon charged into the fast-evacuating building and up toward the command center, they went unnoticed by the few remaining guards and startled TechDiv personnel who ran this way and that on urgent battle-station errands. In the deserted corridors of the upper levels, they almost passed right by the commissary; but as they hurried down the corridor, DJ's thumbs pricked. He heard something. He didn't know what it was, consciously, but something tickled the back of his mind and told him he'd heard a sound of distress. Holding up his right hand, he drew his pistol with his left, then edged closer to the commissary door and gently tried the knob. It was locked; placing his ear to the door, DJ tuned out the sounds of the mostly empty corridor and listened.

"An Angel is inside the last bastion of humanity, with only minutes until HOLY PENIS, A DOOR!

"C'mon, baby, what do you say?"

A man's voice. Deep, smooth...

Ryoji Kaji.

Based on Kaji's past behavior, I think what he's doing is obvious.

End-of-the-world parcheezi tournament. They need an extra player, but someone's reluctant to join.

DJ's eyes narrowed as he continued to listen.

"It's the end of the world, don't you want to go out with a smile?"

A woman's voice answering, breathless, not with arousal, but with fear:

"Kaji, no, let me go!"

Maya.

Or he could be going for a rape hat trick.

DJ took a step back, thumbed the safety of the V10 off, shot the doorknob out, then kicked open the door and stormed into the commissary with a somewhat confused Jon on his heels.

Hey everyone, remember when the Mythbusters showed that shooting doors open doesn't work in real life? Besides, any gun powerful enough to punch through the doorknob is going to hit whatever's behind the door, not to mention the shrapnel. Congratulations DJ, you just killed Maya!

By the way, I vaguely recall an earlier chapter stating that DJ uses a Springfield, which means his pistol must be a V10 compact. They have known reliability issues, so it's actually an extremely fitting gun for him. I guess it never occurred to DJ that a smaller-caliber gun would be more useful. Because who wouldn't want to use a compensatory .45ACP with small capacity and excessive recoil?

Kaji had Maya backed against the Snacktron, his right hand inside her uniform tunic, his left working its way up her right thigh; she was pushing ineffectively against his chest with her hands and turning her head in a mostly-futile attempt to avoid his kisses, which he interspersed among his words.

Sorry, but any seriousness went out the window the moment I read "Snacktron." It's like if a murderer beat someone to death with a novelty inner tube. The silliness overshadows everything else.

At the crash of the door, he turned his head and saw the interlopers; his mouth curled in an ironic grin.

"Hey, kid, I thought they threw your ass out," said Kaji. "Too bad about -your- woman, but you'll have to look elsewhere for a replacement." Kaji half-turned back towards Maya and leered. "This one's mine."

"Let her go and walk away, Ryoji," DJ said, in a tone of voice that made it clear he wasn't making a request.

But was it a question? You need to tell me these things, fic, since apparently I can't be trusted to derive meaning from the text without blatant explanatory comments.

Kaji ignored it. "Or what, you'll shoot me?"

"If I have to."

This part was better when it was in chapter 2-1. And it wasn't even good then.

His grin unfaded, Kaji deftly stepped around Maya, removing his hand from her tunic and slipping his arm around her throat, then dragged her back a step toward the door. "We've danced this dance before, kid, and you didn't have the guts. C'mon, Maya, let's find someplace quieter."

Even if DJ had been entertaining the thought of backing down, Maya's dark, pleading, silent gaze would have kept him from doing it; instead, he held his .45 steady and said softly, "Kaji, I'm having the very worst day of my entire life. I honestly feel I've nothing more to lose." His control over his tone of voice faded as he went on, and his eyes flashed something that wasn't entirely anger as he growled, "Now let Maya go or I swear I'll kill you!"

The best part is how DJ completely ignores his responsibility to get to Unit 01 and stop the Angel. The guy has no idea how to pick his battles. I'm not saying that he should just let Maya get raped, but come on - Jon is there, has military training, and doesn't have an Eva. Hand him the gun and leave so that you can do something important.

But no, gotta act on his personal vendetta under the guise of taking the moral high ground.

"Uh... DJ, think about this for a second," said Jon diffidently. "I mean, sure, he's obviously doing the Wrong Thing here, but... do you really think you need to -kill- him?"

"That's quite up to Ryoji here, don't you think?" DJ snarled.

Jon turned a helpless look to Kaji and said, "I think you should do as he says, Mr. Kaji."

"Well?" DJ asked, fighting to keep his voice even and blinking away sudden tears. "What's it gonna be, Ryoji? You can walk out of here, but not with Maya."

You can tell he's strong and sensitive from the way he cries while threatening to murder someone.

Kaji's grin didn't falter. He reached out and unlocked the exit door, toeing it open, and dragged Maya a step closer. "Kid," he sneered, "you won't shoot. You don't have the stones."

"Don't I?" asked DJ through his teeth.

Normally, Kaji's strategy of using a human shield would be just about bulletproof (haha). Let's see how DJ reacts.

In the large, empty commissary with its tiled floor and walls, the sound of the single shot echoed for several seconds, long enough for the jingling sound of the spent cartridge case falling to the floor to blend with the echoes.

Ryoji Kaji flinched, took a half-step backward, released Maya, and slowly reached up to touch the bloody flower that had suddenly bloomed high on his chest.

"Someone get this fucking flower off me!"

He gazed reflectively at the blood streaking his fingertips for a moment, then stepped toward DJ, his lips curling back from his teeth in a bloody sneer.

DJ stepped back and shot him again, then again, then again, as Kaji kept shuffling forward; then, as the mortally wounded man took a clumsy swing at him, DJ stepped aside, swung the weapon to bear, and, screaming, "DIE, DAMN YOU!" at the top of his lungs, shot Kaji through the temple with his last bullet. Blood splashed back at DJ, flecking his face and his smoking gun, as Kaji slowly, as if underwater, sagged, crumpled to his knees, and then fell forward to lie in a slowly spreading pool of blood on the tiled commissary floor.

He then shot Kaji five more times just to be sure. Because restraint is for chumps.

Maya Ibuki neither cried out nor fainted; she merely settled unsteadily to her knees and looked very, very pale. DJ, his hands shaking, dropped the pistol to the floor as if he'd forgotten he was holding it, then knelt before her and asked softly if she was all right.

Of course not, because YOU JUST SHOT HER, YOU ASS! Come on, let's take a look at what happened.

Kaji was holding Maya in front of himself.
Kaji was facing DJ.
DJ shot Kaji in the chest.
Unless Kaji was deliberately holding Maya off to the side or DJ curved the bullet, it is physically impossible for him to have shot Kaji without hitting Maya.

The very same thing happened in the first volume of Hellsing: a rapist was holding his potential victim in front of himself so that some jerk with an overpowered pistol wouldn't be able to shoot him. Except Hellsing (a comic in which Nazi vampires descend from zeppelins to devour London as part of a master plan to kill Dracula with a catboy, mind you) treated the scenario infinitely more realistically.

This fucking fanfic, guys.

Jon Ellison had seen death, but never like this. He was momentarily dumbfounded by what he'd just witnessed; for a long moment, he just stood there in stunned silence, trying to parse the fact that yes, he'd just seen DJ Croft kill Ryoji Kaji.

"My God," Maya whispered to DJ. "Is he... "

"Yes," DJ replied, wiping at the tear-tracked blood on his face and struggling to compose himself. "He's dead."

"You can't stay here," she told him, gripping his shoulders with a strength born of desperation. "Ikari... he'll have you killed for this. He has that authority during a crisis."

"Not if he wants this Angel stopped, he won't," DJ replied grimly. "Besides, what was I supposed to do, let the bastard take you? He gave me no option. I didn't -want- to kill him."

LOL. Nothing says "I didn't want to kill him" like screaming "DIE, DAMN YOU!"

Maya sobbed, crushing her face into DJ's chest, and murmured, "That won't matter to Ikari."

She's more concerned with DJ's safety than with her own near-rape. Because DJ is just that important.

"To hell with Ikari!" DJ replied vehemently. "Are you all right? That's the important thing."

"I... I will be... " Maya replied.

"Right, then. Let's go. I need you... I need your strength in the control room, your voice in my ears, as I ride my EVA into battle one last time."

If this were any cheesier, it would be a Dragonforce album.

"'One last time'?" Jon wondered. "Don't talk like that!"

As the three of them left the commissary, DJ replied pragmatically, "I doubt dear Gendou is going to be too keen on taking me back on the payroll, Jon, now that I've done murder. When I get back from this mission - IF I get back from this mission - I expect he'll either have me shot or throw me out of here so hard I land in Spain."

I'd love to see DJ thrown into Franco-era Spain. If he goes into hysterics over the injustice of not being allowed to drink beer, it would be hilarious to see how he reacts to being in a real fascist state.

"I won't let him do that," Jon replied firmly. "WE won't let him do that. I... I don't care what he thinks anymore. We need you here."

"I appreciate the sentiment, Jon... but I suppose we'll see, one way or another."

Jon chewed on that for a moment, then replied gravely, "I suppose we will at that."

Maya left them, subdued but again steady on her feet, at the control room. As she entered, Ritsuko Akagi saw Jon and DJ pass the door, and scowled.

"What's -he- doing back here?" she grumbled.

"Saving us, Dr. Akagi," Maya replied icily, "even when we don't deserve it."

And now Maya hates Ritsuko. Because dammit Eyrie.

Without another word, she took her station, leaving her boss slightly frosted and more than a little taken aback.

Ritsuko Akagi's expression had nothing on Gendou Ikari's when Jon and DJ entered the EVA bay.

"I told you to be out of the city by midnight," he said coldly.

"It's eleven forty-five," DJ replied. "And to hell with you, anyway."

"I'm a smarmy bastard!" DJ smarmed smarmily. "WORSHIP ME, UNWORTHY PEON!"

Hey, here's an idea. Maybe NERV could have kept Shinji living nearby so that they have a reserve pilot in the event that the disloyal, incredibly self-centered and unreliable bitch they recruited doesn't want to pilot. But that would've made too much sense.

"You are neither welcome nor needed here," Ikari said, indicating the closed hatch of the purple EVA behind him. "Recovery Team 1 brought Rei in five minutes ago. She will have EVA-01 operational very shortly."

"It won't work," Jon muttered under his breath.

"You have something to say, Mr. Ellison?" Ikari demanded sharply.

Jon looked on the verge of wilting before that sharp voice of command; then he stiffened, stood straight, and said flatly and evenly, "I said it won't work, sir. Unit 01 refused to accept me, and I sincerely doubt it will accept Rei or the dummy plug. It only wants one pilot now."

Unit 01 "wants" DJ, eh?

Who doesn't?

"Mr. Ellison," Ikari observed coldly, "the Evangelion is a machine. It does not 'want'. It merely follows instructions, as I expect its pilots to do."

DJ snorted derisively.

"I'm not disobeying orders, sir," Jon replied stiffly. "I'm merely trying to save time and lives by reporting what I believe, from experience, will happen. And if I'm wrong I'll take responsibility for my error - but I strongly recommend that DJ be given the pilot's seat."

Can we get the DJ masturbation fest out of the way and return to the only remotely interesting part of the chapter, please?

Ikari stared hard at Jon, but the boy never flinched, giving him back as flinty a glare as he absorbed.

Behind them, EVA-01 twitched slightly, making the superstructure shiver beneath their feet; an alarm blared, and the entry plug ejected, popping open in a shower of LCL.

Aw, look, it's excited to see DJ!

Rei Ayanami emerged, one arm in a sling, bandaged around her head, and unsteady on her feet; then she stumbled, dropped to her knees and unceremoniously vomited through the grillwork of the catwalk.

Women are weak, not at all like the mighty avatar of manliness that is DJ Croft! Watch in wonder as he speechifies at Gendo and kills the strongest Angel! WORSHIP HIM!

As one the three men on the gantry crowded toward her, concern on their faces (even Ikari's).

Wiping at her mouth with the back of one hand, she looked up with shame in her eyes and reported softly, "Synchronization failed... I... I'm sorry."

Ikari turned again to Jon and DJ, both of whom stared hard at him; then he keyed his wristcom and announced, "Rei has failed. Prepare the dummy plug."

"The dummy plug is based on Rei's pattern, you idiot!" DJ snarled. "If she can't sync with EVA-01, a cheap copy of her's not going to do it either. For Christ's sake! Get the hell out of my way or I'll throw you off the catwalk!"

Today we learn that DJ knows more about the Evas than the person who developed the technology and has been working with it for ten years.

Ikari turned his full glare on DJ. "Don't ever presume to give me orders, boy," he snarled. "NERV is -my- operation. I built it from the ground up. I control it. I give the orders. You are just a stupid upstart boy with no -concept- of the things you're meddling in! You've been a thorn in my side since you first got here! Undermining my authority. Disrupting my experiements. Corrupting my personnel. Interfering with Rei! You've made her unwarrantedly erratic. I won't have any more of it! Get out of this base before I have you SHOT, you miserable little - "

The slap echoed like a rifle shot through the Evangelion bay, and for several long seconds afterward, there was utter silence.

Rei Ayanami, her whole body quivering with rage, pinioned Gendou Ikari on her crimson, furious stare for ten long seconds; then, in a quiet voice that dripped with pain, she said to him,

"I don't know you any more."

Yeah. What happened to the kind, caring Gendo who used her as emotional blackmail to get other people to fight Angels?

Turning, she stormed out of the bay.

Gendou Ikari, the left side of his face slowly reddening, stood in absolute shock as, his face hard as stone, DJ Croft walked past him onto the catwalk.

Turning back, he grinned a mirthless grin at Jon. "'Interfering with Rei', indeed," he said. "If I was rogering Rei, she'd be a hell of a lot more than 'erratic'." Jon pinkened slightly, causing DJ to wave a hand at him. "Don't go all blushy on me now, Jon."

Ladies and gentlemen, our hero.

At that point, Misato and Ritsuko entered the bay, joining Jon at the end of the catwalk. DJ's smile took on some genuine warmth at the sight of Misato; even with an arm in a cast, a pronounced limp and a steadily darkening black eye, she was, as ever, lovely to him.

YES, LET US STOP TO OGLE SEVERELY INJURED PEOPLE INSTEAD OF FIGHTING THE ANGEL. BEST PLAN EVER.

"Hullo, Misato, my love," said DJ. "I thought for a bit there that I wouldn't get to see you again before I went."

Misato managed a wan grin. "I wouldn't miss it."

DJ swung a leg over the side of the entry plug. "When I get back," he said with his rakish grin, "you owe me an evening of your -undivided- attention, my love."

Misato smiled sadly, a tear escaping from her left eye. "You'll get it," she replied. "I promise."

FGSFDS

Blowing her a kiss, DJ slipped over the side and into the seat, lowering and sealing the canopy; a moment later the plug screwed itself into the EVA's neck, and the armor closed around it.

Ritsuko glared sidelong at Misato. "What the hell was the meaning of -that-?" she demanded.

That's what I'd like to know.

"Go to hell, Ritsuko," Misato snapped bitterly, wiping at her tearing eyes. "He knows he's not coming back."

I remember reading on TV Tropes that this fic significantly improves over the course of season 2. Which makes me wonder what tropers would consider a decline in quality. Because all I see is people kissing DJ's ass.

Maybe it's a fetish fuel thing.

Inside the EVA, surrounded by the reassuring coolness of LCL, DJ smiled and took the controls in his hands.

"OK, Lucifer," he murmured. "Let's do it... one more time."

The entry plug came obligingly to life around him, followed by the EVA itself, without a fuss.

"EVA-01 is operational," Maya Ibuki reported, feeling unnaturally calm as she watched the green signal boxes march across the Big Board. "Synchrotron is holding at ninety-eight percent."

NERV uses sophisticated instruments like the synchrotron and the big board.

"My God in Heaven," Ritsuko Akagi whispered.

Just about sums the whole thing up, don't it?

The EVA bay shook as the attacking Angel breached the armor, and a moment later the beast was in the bay, lunging past EVA-01, reaching for and slashing away the control room windows with its razor-edged ribbons of death.

Run, DJ! It's an Eldar harlequin!

"No, I don't think so, son," DJ snarled, launching EVA-01 into its path and slamming it against the side wall before it could strike again and wreck the room completely, killing its occupants. "Maya! Hit me on No. 13, fast!"

"Right!" Maya replied, thumbing the launch key for Pad 13. With a crash and sizzle of capacitors, the launch catapult the EVA and Angel were standing on flew back up out of the bay, flinging EVA-01 and its quarry back to the subsurface.

"Thought you had a free ride, didn't you?" DJ demanded, slamming EVA-01's fists repeatedly into the Angel's glowing red core. "Well the party's over, Chester! I've lost way too much that's important to me today to let you come along and stomp on the wreckage! D'you hear me? Huh?"

Moloch the Eva. Chester the Angel. I suppose Kaworu is going to be named Maurice Olgilvie.

On and on he ranted, driving the Angel back and back and back, further away from Central Dogma with each passing moment, battering it relentlessly with his tard rage EVA-01's fists and feet, never letting it have a moment to gather its wits and strike. Finally he pinned it against a hill and hammered at its core, over and over, reduced from ranting semi-coherently to simply shouting inarticulately in rhythm with his strikes.

DJ has now transformed into Yosemite Sam. Which is probably an improvement.

The core's glow began to flicker and fade under his merciless pounding, and the NERV personnel who had abandoned the smashed control room and now stood on the Central Dogma plaza watching the battle were already drawing breath to cheer

when the power ran out, and EVA-01 ground to a halt.

"No!" DJ protested. "No no! Don't do this to me now! Not now! For God's sake, not now!"

Sensing its change, the Angel reared back, its core glow brightening again, and slammed its ribbons into the inert EVA, sending it crashing limply back against a neighboring hill. DJ screamed in sympathetic pain as the Angel tore away EVA-01's chest armor, laying bare the greyish-brown flesh of its chest.

What a predicament. It's a good thing this didn't happen in Evangelion, because then there would be no suspense.

Maya Ibuki gasped in shock as the chest of the Evangelion was laid bare, for embedded in that grey-brown flesh was a dark red orb - an Angel's core.

Rearing back, the Angel began hammering at the core with its ribbons, just as EVA-01 had been pounding on its own with its fists a few moments before. The powerless EVA jerked fitfully under the battering, as, within its cockpit, DJ Croft shouted to his recalcitrant mount to get up and save itself in every language he could remember the word for "move" in.

"... Move, move, damn you, I -know- you're not just a machine! DAMMIT! LUCIFER - GET UP AND FIGHT!!"


On one of the consoles in the wreckage of the control room, unnoticed by anyone, a sudden block of text spurted onto the screen.

6968 6176 6562 6565 6e72 6f6c 616e 6462
656f 7775 6c66 6163 6869 6c6c 6573 6769
6c67 616d 6573 6869 6861 7665 6265 656e
6361 6c6c 6564 6168 756e 6472 6564 6e61
6d65 7361 6e64 7769 6c6c 6265 6361 6c6c
6564 6174 686f 7573 616e 646d 6f72 6562
6566 6f72 6574 6865 776f 726c 6467 6f65
7364 696d 616e 6463 6f6c 6469 6861 7665
6265 656e 6b69 6c6c 6564 6174 686f 7573
616e 6474 696d 6573 616e 6465 7665 7279
7469 6d65 6972 6574 7572 6e69 6669 6768
7466 6f72 7472 7574 6869 6669 6768 7466
6f72 676c 6f72 7969 6669 6768 7466 6f72
6c6f 7665 6966 6967 6874 666f 7262 6561
7574 7969 616d 6865 726f

Oh, not this horseshit again.

Then the last few characters scrolled into infinity, before the console sputtered and lost power.

6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f
6961 6d68 6572 6f

Outside...

... -something- happened.

War was beginning.

EVA-01's core glowed; its eyes glowed; it stiffened, arched its back, and then sat bolt upright on the hillside, swinging its jaw wide and screaming defiantly into the Geo-Front night.

"My God!" DJ's voice crackled from the portable commset John Trussell carried. "It's full of stars!"

There is no Picard facepalm image large enough to properly convey how I feel.

Then the transmission ended in a squeal of static as EVA-01 hunched forward, vibrating with the tension in its artificial muscles. All along its spinal ridge, the purple and gray armor plating cracked and split, as from base of neck to mid-back six cylindrical, glowing orange protrusions thrust out from within the EVA's body.

Its core and new-grown Elerium colliders glowing furiously,

Whoever wrote this part is the dumbest dickfuck that ever fucked a dick.

the Evangelion leaped up from its resting place, seized the Angel's ribbon arms, and unceremoniously tore them off. With an unprecedented but very manlike level of fury - not the animalistic, feral mauling of the berserk Unit 02 - it slashed at the enemy's flesh with claw-stiffened fingers, kicked, punched and elbowed it, crushing it mercilessly to the ground, picking it up and flinging it violently against the hillside.

Give it the chair!

Its eyes glowing brilliantly, EVA-01 stood over its fallen enemy. The Angel tried to get up, but it was too late: EVA-01 slammed a foot down on the Angel's midsection, reached down, and, with a horrific, visceral sound of tearing flesh, ripped the core out.

KALI MA!

Then, as everyone watched in stunned horror, 01 reached up and tore away the armored mask that concealed its real face - grey-brown, with glittering green eyes and a huge, tooth-filled mouth that, as it was lipless, resembled a hideous giant grin. Brandishing its trophy, Lucifer threw back its head and screamed into the night.

"Mother of God!" Otto Keller cried.

"My God... it's really alive..." someone said. Maya wasn't sure who it was; she was far too busy throwing up.

It was our good friend, Ensign Throwaway!

Then, tossing the core aside, the EVA stretched up to its full height, and, screaming like a banshee, seemed to expand within its armor, cracking and shedding the plating in massive pieces.

"Well, that's it, then," Ritsuko murmured. "It's breaking free of its binders."

Even though it hasn't eaten the Angel's S2 organ. But I guess you don't need that when you have imported technobabble.

"Binders?" Misato wondered.

Ritsuko nodded. "That isn't armor; it's a restrictive covering, designed to prevent EVA-01 from using its full power. Now no force on Earth can control it."

Nearly denuded of its "armor", the EVA ceased to scream; presently, it ceased to do anything at all, merely standing over its fallen foe, silent, its core and eyes dark, the Elerium colliders glowing only with the faint radiance of the mysterious metal itself.

"It's stopped!" Truss whispered.

"It's accomplished what it set out to do, for now," Ritsuko said. "We'd better get it back into the cage and see what we can do with it now." She started toward the recovery area.

"No force on earth can control it. Welp, let's haul it back into HQ!"

"What about DJ?" Misato wondered.

Ritsuko turned, regarding the Operations Director with cool curiosity. "What about him?" she asked. "We'll know how he is once we get it back inside. Until then..." She finished her thought with a shrug.

Even though they should haul DJ out of the entry plug, toss him in a ditch, and shoot him. They let Shinji stay after he returned to NERV because he left for completely different reasons than DJ. Shinji quit because he didn't want to fight anymore, and by going back he showed that he was putting NERV's needs ahead of his own (even if his determination only lasted like one episode). Because whatever Anno's faults, at least he realized that sacrifice is more believable if it's a selfless act. But DJ quit because he's an unreasonable asshole who hates anyone who attempts to impose limits on his quest for self-gratification. There's no reason for readers to see him as a hero coming to save the day, because it looks more like he's just trying to bask in helpless peasants' adoration. Even in the context of NXE's batshit insane narrative, it simply isn't a meaningful act for DJ to return to NERV.

You know you've failed as an author when your attempt at a badass sympathetic character is underwhelming compared to Shinji Ikari.

Misato knew she should be angry, but she was too tired. Instead, she felt only a yawning, empty feeling that threatened to become true despair if she let herself feel it too long.

She turned her back on her onetime roommate, and ex-close-friend, and walked slowly back to Central Dogma. There was nothing more for her to do out here.


Ritsuko sat in her darkened office, staring into the space beyond the drawn curtains on the far wall. Her face showed the signs of the rest, or lack there of, she had had in the two nights since the last attack. Even while the sedative dosage increased, sleep was increasingly fleeting. The thoughts of her busy mind prolonged her wakefulness, and the dreams made sure the sleep that followed was brief and restless.

She hadn't thought things could get any worse, she was already pushing on towards exhaustion before the attack. But then there had been the autopsy report, but she was getting ahead of herself...

Alien autopsy!


After the attack Ritsuko and the rest had returned to the control center to watch EVA-01 being returned to its cradle. Misato had been distraught over DJ, and seemed to blame Ritsuko for the entire mess. When Ritsuko had failed to respond to her invective, she'd finally snapped "How can you be so cold?! You're not even human!" Ritsuko could have explained that it wasn't that she didn't care, just that she was too tired to show any emotions; but then, she was too tired to explain. It certainly had turned out to he a prophetic remark in the end.

Confirmed: Ritsuko is a robot.

Maya had noticed her growing fatigue and commented on it; nearly having her head bitten off for her trouble. Ritsuko refused to admit to anyone that it was impacting her work, least of all herself. The mission was too important to be impeded by personal troubles. But even she'd known she couldn't continue running on her own, and besides, a little stimulant took the residual feelings the tranqs left behind. Once the crisis was over she'd be able to really relax, work things out, and get back into a normal cycle.

At least that was what she had been able to tell herself at the time. But once EVA-01 was taken care of, at least as best they could at the time, Maya had broken down. With the crisis over, the will she'd clamped over her emotions broke, and she told all that had happened earlier. Truss had held her gently as she quietly sobbed her way through the tale.

No! You can't have Truss/Maya hurt/comfort! Everyone knows the Truss/laundry ship is better!

Misato's rage had only grown, and if he had not already been dead she surely would have hunted Kaji to his death. After Maya had finished she'd related her own story - the first Ritsuko had learned of it.

Ikari had listened impassively, showing no apparent concern for the trauma Maya had experienced. Only Ritsuko had noticed his eyes narrowing, as if he were mostly annoyed at losing Kaji. That momentary look of cold calculation fixed in her mind like no other.

On the one hand, you have attempted rape. On the other, murder. Hmm... I wonder which is the worse crime...

When the story had been completed the NERV medical corps had been summoned to dispose of the body. Since Maya had reported the stubbornness with which Kaji had clung to life, on top of his erratic behavior, Ritsuko had ordered an autopsy.

Sitting now in her office, after rereading the autopsy report for the nth time, she didn't know what she'd really expected. Maybe drugs, or some disease, anything to explain what he'd done. Some deep part of her wanted to believe that what he'd done wasn't the work of the same smiling young man she and Misato had spent so much time with in their younger days.

Oh please explain it. This chapter wasn't already ridiculous enough.

In that regard she'd certainly gotten her wish. Whoever had raped her, it wasn't Ryoji Kaji, because the thing DJ had killed wasn't human. The problem was, she didn't know what it was, and the medical corps hadn't done much better at identifying it.

I should have known that he wasn't human. After all, he doesn't like DJ! You'd have to be some kind of alien rape monster to not worship him!

Definitely of alien origin, it was a shell of cells which appeared to have Kaji's DNA... but the internal organs were all wrong. While the brain was still in the skull, nearly everything else was in the wrong location. The brain itself was malformed, by normal human standards, at that. It appeared this simulacrum was rather more robust than the human Kaji would have been. Which helped explain why several point blank pistol shots failed to stop it.

So Kaji's basically an alien version of the Terminator.

Sure, why not.

But what her mind kept returning to was its hands on her body. Its grinning face leering at her, its breath hot on her neck. Its...

No. Don't go there.

Ritsuko snapped her head up, shaking that train of thought before she could let it overrun her again. The feelings she had were tangled. She was relieved to find that her attacker wasn't an old friend, but disgusted and disturbed to find it was some alien thing. Really, she wasn't sure which was worse.


Aside from the turmoil she still felt from her assault was a new feeling of guilt. Though she still hadn't told anyone of her attack, she wondered about her responsibility in Maya's attack. What if she had spoken out? Kaji (for she still thought of it by that name, if only for convenience) would have been questioned, and likely imprisoned. Even if he hadn't been, everyone would have been wary around him.

No, really?

Then again, these people have no problem with DJ, so maybe they wouldn't care that Kaji is an alien meat puppet.

She felt certain that her silence had condemned Maya to the horror she'd experienced at his hands - which would have been much worse if not for DJ. DJ, who was now, as she firmly believed, dead within EVA-01. This was not her finest hour.

DJ is a hero, but Ritsuko is guilty because... um...

Because she was raped, I guess. I'm not following this too closely, to be honest.

Her computer beeped, signaling an incoming communication request. Quickly composing herself she toggled the connection open. Maya's face appeared immediately. "We're ready to continue with the tests." Maya was curious about her boss sitting in an office that appeared to be dark from what her screen showed, but she had more important concerns.

"OK, I'll be right down."

"We'll be here." With that Maya broke the link.

Ritsuko paused at her desk for a moment longer, considering. Finally she opened the top drawer and removed a plasticene bottle. Undoing the top she shook a bright red pill into her palm and dry swallowed it before replacing the bottle.

No, no, you're doing it all wrong. If you want to forget stuff, you should take the blue pill.

Closing her eyes and drawing a deep breath she muttered to the empty room, "Better living through chemistry." As she left she uttered one short, brittle laugh. No one was around to hear it, though anyone who had been would have wondered at the tone.

At the back of her mind, a not yet conscious thought began to take terrible shape. Kaji had worked closely with Ikari; practically as his private errand boy. Had Ikari known?

Gendo's an alien too!

What was this Kaji-thing doing in NERV? Who was he spying for, what had he managed to find out? Most importantly, how long ago did Kaji cease to be Kaji and instead become this simulacrum? It had fooled both Misato and she; maybe it had fooled Ikari too.

But that look of, well, inconvenience on Ikari's face when he heard of Kaji's death formed the nucleus of the developing atom of an idea. It would continue to gather mass and force for some time to come.

The final fission would wipe away all before it when it came.

Final fission sounds like a hardcore version of Final Fantasy.

This post has been edited by Dr. O: May 23 2011, 11:44 AM

[Dr. O]

The repair crews had done an admirable job patching up the EVA bay and control room. Aside from the smell of new paint and the unfamiliar feel of some of the new monitor-station keyboards, it was almost impossible to tell that anything had ever happened to the latter, while the former, though still showing the marks of its recent battering, was functional. EVA-01 was locked down in its usual cage again, the tears and missing segments of its armor covered with a white polysheet wrapping that made it resemble a huge, bandaged burn victim. It was really quite disturbing-looking, thought John Trussell, with its huge green eyes and grinning slash of a mouth exposed by the bandages.

On the main viewer, a wireframe diagram of the entry plug rotated in real time, diagnostic information running down the sides. No trace could be found of the pilot by the diagnostic sensors, but that didn't necessarily mean anything more than sensor failure. In a moment, they'd have patched the cockpit cameras back into the recorder system again, and then they would know for sure.

It is not a cockpit. Maybe you are thinking of an entry plug. I know I'm being pedantic, but it's like calling a tank's crew compartment a cockpit. They really aren't the same thing.

Misato Katsuragi had spent the last two days sleeplessly staring at that monitor, wondering if the emotional torture of life in NERV would ever end - in the cold insensibility of death or in any other way, it no longer mattered all that much to her. Now she would find out how deep this new despair would cut, how much of her soul it would rend away. She wondered how much she had left, or if it mattered; she hadn't felt so hopeless since the day she watched half the world die, fifteen years ago.

I just hope she doesn't start cutting herself and listening to Linkin Park.

In a sense, she had already given DJ up; but the idea of losing him completely, never seeing or hearing him again, had never really come home to her before. The danger had always been there, but even in the Dirac's Ocean incident, she had never truly believed he might be gone. He couldn't be. He always had an angle...

"Oh woe is me, for I will never again know the joy of having a teenage brat drink all my beer, belittle me, kill my old college friends, and go showboating at every turn, making a joke of my being given stewardship over him."

Yeah, Misato, what a loss.

But the look in his eyes as he blew her a kiss and mounted his EVA had told her clearly he didn't have one this time.

He must have used up all his deus ex machinas getting Asuka to sleep with him.

"Camera signal is coming in," Maya reported, startling Misato out of her reverie.

Ritsuko Akagi sighed. "Put it up... let's see what we've got."

Steeling herself for the possibilities, Maya pressed the key, and the main viewer blinked to a view of:

An empty Evangelion entry plug.

"What the - ?!" Misato blurted.

Yep, it's an entry plug all right.

"Damn," Ritsuko muttered. "Just like last time. Run a spectrographic analysis of the LCL; I'm pretty sure I know what we'll find... "

"Running analysis." The data flowed across Maya's monitor, and she drew back, looking quizzically at the display. "Massive impurities detected, inconsistent with even long-term filtration failure," she reported. "Lots of carbon and water... "

Ritsuko nodded. "Just as I suspected. He's in there... but he's dissolved."

If it really did dissolve him, you'd think there'd be less carbon and water than beer and testosterone. But hey, if gibbing at a molecular level is what it takes to get rid of DJ, I'll take it.

"Dissolved?!" Misato cried, grabbing Ritsuko's shoulder and spinning her so they faced one another. "What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"All living beings possess a distinctive energy pattern that makes them who and what they are," Ritsuko told her. "Its existence was confirmed in 1983 by the Spengler-Stantz-Venkman paper. Surely you've heard of it?"

It's sciency because it sounds German. That's an acceptable substitute for making sense, right?

Misato scowled. "You're the biophysicist, Ritsuko. I never read anything more complicated than 'Achtung - Panzer!'"

I have a hard time believing that Misato reads Heinz Guderian. Green Eggs and Ham seems more her speed.

Ritsuko sighed. "I won't go into the details, but I think what's happened here is fairly simple. EVA-01 has absorbed the subject's SSV pattern - his soul, if you want to be inexact and sentimental about it - into its own. It probably happened when Unit 01 came back online after its power failed, along with the other, er,
transformations. When that happened his body lost cohesion and disintegrated into its component chemicals, which were absorbed into solution by the LCL."

"Then... he's... dead?" Misato said slowly, her face falling.

I can only hope.

"Not exactly," SHODAN interjected. "His SSV pattern has merged with that of Unit 01, but it may still retain some nuances of its identity. Theoretically, it's possible to charge the LCL in such a way as to force his biocomponents out of solution, and orient the EVA's neurosystems such that his pattern is reconstituted. This may return him to what you would consider 'normal'."

I get it. They need to reassert DJ's intrinsic field. Then he'll descend on NERV as a naked blue superhuman.

Misato looked curious. "You sound like this has happened before."

"It has," said SHODAN before Ritsuko could interrupt. "In 2005, before you came to NERV, the unit absorbed its original test pilot. The process I described was developed in an attempt to restore her."

"Did... did it work?"

If by "work" you mean "spit out Rei," then it was a great success!

"No," Ritsuko said, scowling in the direction of SHODAN's sensor pickup. "It didn't. That's what makes EVA-01 different from the others, Misato... it has a human soul."

So let's take a look at this. Unit 01 is special because it contains Shinji's mother's soul. Then why is DJ capable of using it? Shouldn't the pool of candidates be limited to, I don't know, people with some sort of close connection to Yui Ikari? Shinji would work because he's her child, and Rei because she basically is Yui, but what about DJ? Or did he just seduce her like he has every other woman in the fic?

Oh, and End of Evangelion dropped the most blatant hint possible that Unit 02 has the soul of Asuka's mother in it, so there.

"Two of them, now," SHODAN said dispassionately.

"But there's a chance this process could work if we tried it again?"

"Yes," said SHODAN. "The Magi calculate our chances of success as an average of 5.4%; I concur with their analysis. It is possible, however."

Low chance of success? Of course they'll do it and it'll work. It's sort of like L: every time he says a percentage, it's actually 100%.

"Then we should try it again," Misato said firmly. "What do you think, Ritsuko?"

"I think," Ritsuko mused, "our chances of recovering the subject are too low to justify the expense and time we'd need to invest in a recovery attempt."

Finally, someone who makes sense. Now let's watch her be demonized for the crime of not kissing DJ's ass.

Maya Ibuki could stand no more. Her fist clenched convulsively, snapping the pencil she held, as she wheeled out of her seat and shouted, "DAMN you, Ritsuko Akagi! He's not a SUBJECT! He's a BOY, a -wonderful- fourteen-year-old boy, with a nice smile and a kind heart a thousand times the size of yours! You know what he did for Misato and I. We -owe- it to him! I don't care if the cost puts NERV out of business, if there's ANYTHING that gives us a chance in a billion of getting him back, by God, I'll do it myself!"

Don't worry, I'm not psychic. It's just that this fic is that predictable.

Misato, who had been about to protest herself, was stunned into silence from this outburst from the person who had been Ritsuko's staunchest supporter to date.

"Maya," said Ritsuko reproachfully, "you're letting your emotions cloud your judgment." 'Oh, and you're not,' a shrill voice silently accused her.

"You're damned right I am!" Maya replied. "I'm a human being, being emotional is something you might have heard we're good at! You know what DJ did for me! You know what kind of friend he was! Did you ever feel anything for him, ever let him get close enough to know the warmth of his friendship? You know, sometimes I wonder which one is the computer, SHODAN or you!"

This fucking fanfic.

As if the mention of her name had spurred her into action, SHODAN interjected into the stunned silence following Maya's last comment, "Dr. Akagi, I must concur with Ms. Ibuki. Careful analysis of existing data indicates that Derek Joshua Croft must be recovered at any cost."

Ritsuko turned her anger with Maya on the computer instead, snapping, "Don't tell me his computer sweet-talked you." It didn't help that SHODAN spoke with the voice of her mother. Memories of her mother, especially near the end, had been uncomfortably close to the surface of her mind for several days now.

"Hal supplied no data for this conclusion," SHODAN replied calmly. "Fact: Evangelion Unit 01 has demonstrated an insurmountable resistance to pilots other than Croft. Fact: Projected strength of Central Dogma defenses, discounting Unit 01, show 0.71% effectiveness for the next six months. With Unit 01, that figure is 2.19%. Primary project goals therefore require Unit 01 to be online. It has been previously shown that this requires Croft's recovery. QED."

That's right. DJ CROFT is more valuable than every other Eva, pilot, and conventional weapon in Tok- Worcester-3 combined.

Ritsuko seethed for a moment, then nodded, swallowing her anger and her pride.

"Fine. Prepare the LCL particulate recovery program."

"Coordinating LCL particulate recovery preparations with the Magi. Estimated time to operational readiness: twenty-nine days, seven hours, six minutes."

Twenty-nine days...

Twenty-nine days until Misato had her answer.

Hold on, how long was that? I think you could stand to repeat that a few more times.

Suddenly, she wished she could talk to Asuka. Asuka would understand.


Jon lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling and hoping that, if he thought hard enough about it, the events of the last few days would reverse themselves, then play out differently.

"Jon?" came a calm voice from the speaker unit on the wall.

"Yes, Hal?" said Jon, turning his eyes to the glowing red lens.

"DJ asked me to give you a short message in the event that he was incapacitated or killed in action," said Hal. "I do not understand its significance, but he said you would know what it means."

DJ, the impulsive godboy, had a contingency plan for his own death.

Sure why not.

After a long moment of gathering his strength, Jon said softly, "What is it, Hal?"

"Jon," said Hal, his voice bearing a narrative tone, "Talk to Ken Stanfield. He knew my father, you can trust him. Tell him everything we've found. He's promised to protect you, Rei, and Asuka now that I can't do it myself."

Because Eva pilots, one of whom has military training, can't protect themselves without a drunken teenage gun fetishist.

Sure why not.

Jon considered this for a moment; then Hal spoke again, in his normal tone of voice. "DJ had one other message to pass on, of a personal nature."

"What's that, Hal?"

"He said: 'The truth is out there.'"

Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffuck this fic.

A pause; a smile; a tear rolled down Jon's cheek.

"Thank you, Hal," he said softly.

"You're welcome, Jon," replied Hal.

/* The Mavericks "Blue Moon" _Apollo 13_ */

COMING IN THE NEXT SEASON:

The Enemy revealed.
DJ's fate unfolds.
The war for Humanity's survival moves to a whole new playing field...
But the Children of Project Evangelion are still our only hope.
Old friends, new faces, and the answers to a thousand questions.

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION
EXODUS 3: REVELATIONS IN REAL TIME
begins with
EXODUS 3:1 - THE GIFT OF THE MAGI
Watch http://www.eyrie.net/whatsnew.html for details...

I think that this is a good place to put this mock on hold. I have every intention of seeing this through to the end, but I'd like to work on other stuff for a while. Expect the first chapter of season 3 to be posted sometime in August, if not sooner.

To everyone who's read this far: thank you, and I'll do everything I can to make the wait worth it.

[Al_Cone]

"Saving us, Dr. Akagi," Maya replied icily, "even when we don't deserve it."

It's so gracious of the great DJ Croft, sinless and pure as he is, to descend from on high to rescue the poor heathens from their ignominious fate. And we wonder where he gets his messiah complex from...

If I was rogering Rei, she'd be a hell of a lot more than 'erratic'."

"Yeah man, if I were having sex with your girlfriend--I don't wanna get into TOO much detail, but let's just say that I'd put my penis into her butt and make her scream all night long. But no, I'm sure that you're okay too. In your own way. But if I were having sex with her? Man, fo'get about it!"

What a nice fella.

"When I get back," he said with his rakish grin, "you owe me an evening of your -undivided- attention, my love."

Misato smiled sadly, a tear escaping from her left eye. "You'll get it," she replied. "I promise."

I think I've seen this scene somewhere before. Except it was Misato who was mortally wounded, and who was kissing Shinji goodbye, and it actually had some slight emotional depth to it once you got past the disturbing shotacon aspect. I was expecting DJ to inexpertly slobber all over her lips and then huskily say "That was a sloppy teenager kiss. We'll do the rest when I get back, Big Ben Queen Victoria Churchill Hood Lord Nelson."

NERV uses sophisticated instruments like the synchrotron and the big board.

And the Snacktron. Don't forget the Snacktron. That's the most vital member of Megatron's army, repurposed for NERV's use.

Moloch the Eva. Chester the Angel. I suppose Kaworu is going to be named Maurice Olgilvie.

Nah man, remember? He was named Kevin Ogden, or some other stupid DiC renaming Americanization bullshit.

Outside...

... -something- happened.

"THE BRILLIANT WRITING OF NEON EXODUS EVANGELION WILL LEAVE READERS DAZZLED AND BEGGING FOR MORE!"

The fuck is that? It's like Eyrie's train of thought slowly ground to a halt and they didn't bother starting it up again.

Maya wasn't sure who it was; she was far too busy throwing up.

First Rei and now Maya? This is the vomitiest chapter yet. I guess the story's only now catching up with the cast...

Aside from the turmoil she still felt from her assault was a new feeling of guilt. Though she still hadn't told anyone of her attack, she wondered about her responsibility in Maya's attack. What if she had spoken out? Kaji (for she still thought of it by that name, if only for convenience) would have been questioned, and likely imprisoned. Even if he hadn't been, everyone would have been wary around him.

Hey, this raises an interesting question. Why didn't Misato condemn Kaji after he tried to date-rape her? Shit, DJ's got the security recording as proof, and Kaji has no alibi. Really, this whole thing falls on Misato's shoulders for not only refusing to out her rapist for what he is, but for treating it like it never happened and generally acting the same towards Kaji after the incident as she did before, sexual assault notwithstanding. In fact, did Eyrie just forget that they wrote that into the story? Because I don't think it ever came up after the chapter where it was featured!

Did you ever feel anything for him, ever let him get close enough to know the warmth of his friendship?

Did you open your heart to our Lord and Savior, DJ Croft, and let His pure grace save you from hell? Heathen! Twisted monstrosity!

this story god

[Moose]

OH NOES, WHAT EVER WILL ANYONE DO IF DJ DOESN'T MAKE IT?

You've done good work for the first two "seasons" (I hate that they use the term for this crap) of Neon Exodus Bullshit. I look forward to when you continue it in August.

[Dr. O]

Hey, this raises an interesting question. Why didn't Misato condemn Kaji after he tried to date-rape her? Shit, DJ's got the security recording as proof, and Kaji has no alibi. Really, this whole thing falls on Misato's shoulders for not only refusing to out her rapist for what he is, but for treating it like it never happened and generally acting the same towards Kaji after the incident as she did before, sexual assault notwithstanding. In fact, did Eyrie just forget that they wrote that into the story? Because I don't think it ever came up after the chapter where it was featured!

I think Misato has some kind of memory problem, because she's told all about the plot (such as it is) pretty early in season 3, and then promptly forgets and has to be told again. Even though NERV is fighting Seele. It's like they completely lost track of what they wrote and didn't bother checking when creating new plot points.

By the way, if you want to mock this fic that bad, I can send you a chunk of the "motion picture." Wherein we discover that the Angels and Seele were involved with Roswell. And Shinji shows up and gets a new Eva named after a goetic crow demon. Yup. It really doesn't make more sense in context.

[Al_Cone]

By the way, if you want to mock this fic that bad, I can send you a chunk of the "motion picture." Wherein we discover that the Angels and Seele were involved with Roswell. And Shinji shows up and gets a new Eva named after a goetic crow demon. Yup. It really doesn't make more sense in context.

I really don't. You're doing such a magnificent job of it, and truth be told, I can't mock a story unless the quality of the writing is at a certain level of awful. A story that's deceptively well-written, like NXE, would baffle and stymie me at every turn.

Although I was wondering where the "motion picture" was, since it doesn't seem to be available on the Eyrie website.

[Dr. O]

It's only linked to from the NXE page. It's a fanfic extravaganza, complete with its own fan art section and promotional material.

Still oddly difficult to find, though.

[Al_Cone]

It's only linked to from the NXE page. It's a fanfic extravaganza, complete with its own fan art section and promotional material.

Still oddly difficult to find, though.

Yeah, I still can't find it. How am I supposed to read the fanfic if the damn site goes out of its way to prevent me from reading the fanfic? It can't possibly be THAT bad, right?

[shiroamasa]

Oh, you have NO idea.

[Al_Cone]

Have I mentioned yet that this is my very favorite mock ever?

[Dr. O]

I think that warrants an update.

No, I'm not doing season 3 yet. I have been doing some work on it, but it's not getting posted for at least another month. This is bonus material, and technically not part of season 3. And by "bonus material" I mean "inane script fic." This being Eyrie, there's not much of a difference.

/* Genesis "Land of Confusion" (Extended CD-Single version) */

EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED
presents

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION

EXODUS 3:0 - THE BIG SHOW


Inspired by NEON GENESIS EVANGELION created by Hideaki Anno, Gainax,
et al.

Most characters created by Hideaki Anno and Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
except
DJ Croft created by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Jon Ellison created by Larry Mann
and
Kenny Mayne, Dan Patrick and Chris Berman
who are real people

This raises more red flags than a matador convention.

Additional material and inspiration cadged from TOMB RAIDER by Core
Design, Ltd., X-COM: UFO DEFENSE and sequels from MPS Labs (whoever
owns them nowadays), THE X-FILES created by Chris Carter,
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY by Arthur C. Clarke, and SPORTSCENTER by
the Entertainment and Sports Programming Network

ESPN. This is an ESPN crossover.

...



Written by Benjamin D. Hutchins
from a story by John Trussell

This is a good opportunity to gauge whether the Eyrie authors can be decent when working alone, or if there's some compound nerdity that ruins their collaborative efforts. Or maybe Hutchins is just a bad writer. This would be so much easier with a control group.

Aided and abetted by the Eyrie Productions, Unlimited crew
and special-guest-for-life Phil Moyer

© 1998 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited


The members of the SEELE council filed into the council chamber and took their seats in stony silence, as always. At the end of the table, Gendou Ikari stood, his hands folded, his face impassive. He knew his masters were displeased with his performance. He'd been summoned here to give them an accounting of the last few months' events.

As the councillors took their seats, Jacqueline Natla nodded to Ikari, signaling him to begin his presentation.

I bet it's going to be wacky and funny and totally not involve ESPN.

It came as a bit of a surprise to Ikari, then, when rather than the cold white light of a spotlight upon him and the hum of the display screen, the chamber was suddenly filled with music, a sprightly, up-tempo horn arrangement. Lights came up at the far end, revealing the display screen, but in front of it there was a news-studio-like desk, and seated behind it were two smiling men in dark suits.

Ikari stumbled back a step, his face etched with shock, and all but collapsed into a chair as the music peaked, and then the man on the right grinned and spoke.

/* ESPN SportsCenter opening theme */

Shit.

DAN PATRICK: Good evening, and welcome to SportsCenter. Alongside Kenny Mayne, I am, alas, merely Dan Patrick.

KENNY MAYNE: Tonight we've got a special look back at the 2015 National Evangelion League regular season - the NEL is, of course, scheduled to head for the playoffs next week.

Is this... Am I supposed to be entertained by this?

DP: Sportswriters around the world were uncertain of the EVA team's prospects right from the beginning. Speculation ran rampant that the team's chances would be irreparably harmed by head coach Gendou Ikari's failure to sign a very promising free agent in the preseason.

KM: Coupled with the injury of the team's starting guard, #1 Rei Ayanami, in preseason training, this failure had some predicting that the EVAs would fold before the All-Star Break.

What is the... I... why... how does this... it... but...

(Behind the two men, still pictures of each named individual appear on the viewscreen as they are mentioned.)

DP: So dim were the EVAs' starting prospects that, on Opening Day back in June, they didn't even have a starting player.

KM: Enter English dark horse DJ Croft, signed by Coach Ikari in the nick of time.

DP: #5 Croft was to have a difficult time of it from the get-go, as, with very little prep time, he was put up against the Angels' power forward, #3 Zachiel, in the opening match.

(Footage of DJ's at-first-losing battle with the Third Angel plays.)

I know that recaps can get boring, but this is not the way to make them interesting.

KM (VOICEOVER): The Angels jumped out to an early lead, while Croft didn't seem to know which end of his EVA was up in the first half.

(ON SCREEN: EVA-01 crashes inert to its back, its arm broken and head mangled, and lies still.)

DP: He seems to have worked it out over halftime, though, because in the second half it was -all- EVAs.

(OS: EVA-01 recovers, repairs its arm, and goes to town on the Third Angel.)

KM: The Angels ended up forfeiting this game to preserve the points spread.

(OS: The Third Angel self-destructs.)

Yeah, OK, I read that. I read that chapter. You don't need to remind me. Because I read it. I read the chapter and comprehended the material within. And if I didn't, I would most definitely not want to be introduced to it by... this clusterfuck.

DP: The Angels wasted no time in moving to Game Two, this time sending in #4 Shamshel, another strong offensive player. Again the EVAs started #5 Croft.

(OS: Shamshel and EVA-01 battle it out; Unit 01 is cut off from its power supply and then smashed against a hill, after which it moves only spasmodically.)

KM (VO): Croft, kept on the run by the Angel throughout the match, takes a -hard- hit in the third quarter and has some trouble getting his EVA back on its feet. Assistant Coach Misato Katsuragi deciding to field the team's second guard, #4 Jon Ellison, originally signed as a replacement for the injured Rei Ayanami.

DP: Ellison, -just- back from training camp and not really on his game yet, can really only fight a holding action while Croft goes back to the bench to get checked over.

(OS: EVA-03 struggling with the Fourth Angel; then EVA-01 returns to the field and the two EVAs together destroy the Angel.)

Is this the part where the French guy headbutts the Italian player? That was cool.

KM: He does the job, though, keeping the Angel from scoring until Croft can get back into the game, and, between the two of them, they manage to pull this one out.

DP: On to Game Three. Once again the Angels dominated the first half, thanks to the efforts of #5 Ramiel, the team's acknowledged number-three power hitter.

When you break the fanfic down like this, it really sounds like "Angels win because dramatic tension, then DJ defeats them with his manly awesomeness." If you're going to have a formula, at least make it a good one, FFS.

KM: Jon Ellison -

(OS: EVA-03 is launched, cannot separate from the stand, and is skewered by the Fifth Angel's blast before retraction.)

KM: - not his night, he doesn't even make it off the bench before being sidelined with equipment problems.

(OS: The Fifth Angel beings drilling through the Geo-Front's armor.)

DP: Without any active EVA players on the field, the Angels start probing the team's defense, but Assistant Coach Katsuragi's got something up her sleeve.

(OS: The artillery shot and other attempts at gauging the Fifth Angel's power.)

DP: A few feints to test the Angels' zone coverage and then it's on to the second half, Angels 1, EVAs nothing.

(OS: EVA-01 and EVA-00 in position on Mount Wachusett.)

KM: #5 DJ Croft steps to the plate, with guard #1 Rei Ayanami off the injured list and ready for play for the first time this season. He and the Angel take their first shots in an awesome double offense, both...

Which sport is this supposed to be, anyway? It seems like it involves quarters, plates, and players beating each other to death.

(OS: The two shots cross, interfering with each other's flight path.)

KM: ... juuuuust a little bit wide.

(OS: The Angel's shot blows a chunk out of the mountain, DJ's flies
off into the distance.)

KM: The Angels with the quicker recovery time, they get off their second shot on goal in -seconds- and it looks like it's -all over-...

(OS: The Fifth Angel fires again, but EVA-00 springs into the line of fire with its shield.)

DP: But it's AYANAMI with a specTACular save!! The girl is, dare I say it, en fuego.

Does Ben Hutchins have to try to be this terrible at every aspect of writing, or does it come naturally?

KM: Croft with no opportunity to play it by the book, he takes his second shot of the night from -way- outsiiiiiiiide...

(OS: DJ's second shot spears the Angel dead-on, destroying it.)

KM: ... YAHTZEE!! I am AMUSED by the SIMPLICITY of this game! The EVAs win it three survivors to none.

DP: Round Four, EVAs at Angels, was one of only three away games for the EVAs all season. It was also the major-league debut of Team EVA's other starting center, #2 Asuka Soryu-Langley, the former All-Germany EVA League champion.

The champion who was never in any Angel fights. Yeah, OK.

(OS: The Sixth Angel, unseen, destroying the fleet.)

KM: The Angels' star swimming-back, #6 Gaghiel, -tore up- the EVAs' second string in the first period.

DP: Proceeding, I guess, on the theory that two heads are better than one, -both- EVA centers came out in the same unit to take on the Angels after the first intermission.

(OS: EVA-02 springing from ship to ship, finally landing on the carrier; Gaghiel then nearly swamps the ship and the EVA, fitted with a power cable, goes overboard.)

KM: Early in the third period it was starting to look like a fishing trip as the Angel player took the EVAs for a ride...

(OS: Huge underwater explosion, followed by EVA-02 landing on deck.)

DP: ... But the joke was on the Angels as the two EVA players pulled out all the stops for an atomic win.

Handing nukes to teens is a great idea, but Gendo is a mad dog for wanting auto-pilot for the Evas.

(OS: Scratchy b&w gun-camera footage of the battle with the Seventh Angel.)

DP: Game Five returned to Worcester-3 as scheduled despite a -power outage- at the venue that made for a disappointing amount of highlights footage. DJ Croft benched with equipment problems, Ayanami and Soryu-Langley with the double-play defense, Jon Ellison returns from the injured list after his close call in Round Three to pinch-hit for the EVAs and score the game-winning run.

KM: Moving on to the next game, 'cause the highlights are better there.

(OS: The caldera at Kilauea.)

Cue the stock footage.

KM: The sixth game of the season found the EVAs on the road again, this time in sunny Hawaii for what looked more like a diving competition than an NEL game.

DP: It seemed like everything went wrong for #2 Soryu-Langley, as she contended with the slow-starting but wily Angel player, #8 Sandalphon, plus an equipment failure that almost put her out of the starting lineup for the rest of the season.

(OS: EVA-02 grapples with the Eighth Angel, the cooling system is damaged, EVA-02 destroys the Angel and is rescued by EVA-03.)

KM: But Soryu-Langley's got a few tricks of her own, and in a brilliant move she turns her equipment problem into an offensive tactic. A spectacular save by Ellison and this one's in the book, EVAs 1, Angels zip.

DP: Back at home for Game Seven, the EVAs starting to feel the effects of a flat-out season. They've been playing hard and racking up a lot of injuries, so team morale isn't what it could be, and now they have to face one of the Angels' best players, #9 "Sneaky Pete" Israfel.

Chester is better.

(OS: Israfel vs. EVA-03 and EVA-00. Jon and Rei completely lose track of what positions they're supposed to be; the Angel divides in two and handily beats the crud out of them.)

KM: Dan, a lot of people would like to know what Head Coach Gendou Ikari was thinking to send two strong guards like Ayanami and Ellison up against this Angel with no center to back them up. It's clear -they- don't know what the plan's supposed to be; neither one can effectively guard as both are wondering if they're supposed to be playing center, and the result is almost an embarrassing defeat.

So Gendo is a professor, a doctor, and a coach.

But remember, DJ still has more life experience than him, because he was raised in the dangerous ruins of lost civilizations without any education or parental oversight.

DP: No argument there, Kenny. Only a last-ditch N2 deployment by Assistant Coach Misato Katsuragi sends this game into overtime and prevents the season from ending right here.

(OS: N2 blast carbonizes the Angels, freezing them temporarily in place.)

DP: Fortunately, Katsuragi was able to make the assignments for the overtime round, benching Ellison and putting center Croft with guard Ayanami.

(OS: EVA-00 and EVA-01 split up the two Angels, leading them to opposite ends of Worcester-3.)

KM: The team of Croft and Ayanami really works for them here, pulling the Angels' carefully structured offense apart and wrecking Sneaky Pete's rhythm.

If "Sneaky Pete" is the price we have to pay for skipping all that DDR crap, then so be it.

(OS: EVA-00 slams its Prog Knife into its opponent's core.)

KM: BAM...

(OS: EVA-01 does the same to its opponent.)

KM: ... BAM! A perfect double play by the two EVA players, and -that's- why we call this 'sudden death'.

DP: The EVAs lead the Angels into the mid-season break up 7-0, despite coaching problems and some definite issues with team morale.

KM: When we return, a look at the All-Star Game and the second half of the regular season. Don't go away.

(Commercial break. Advertisements for Corley Motors' Factory-Authorized Fall Clearance Sale, ESPN2's "Xtreme Rollergolf 2Night", deodorant soap and take-out pizza.)

They are putting commercial breaks in their pretend TV show fanfic. This is the literary equivalent of Dark Helmet playing with his dolls.

DP: Welcome back to the big show. The mid-season break went uneventfully for the EVAs, except for a reportedly haywire training computer that shut down the batting cages for a few days.

KM: The lack of training time didn't seem to affect the team's pace when it came time for the All-Star Game, though.

(OS: Maya faces down Dr. Nakamura of AG Systems at the military banquet for the unveiling of Jet Alone.)

DP: Last-minute substitution Maya Ibuki at bat for the NERV team against the Military-Industrial Complex's star forward Hideki "The Wild Man" Nakamura, Ibuki with the early lead:

What? Why is this even in there? It's not an Angel fight! It has nothing to do with anything! It's just Maya being a dumbass and a fucking Luddite who thinks nuclear power is evil because it has the word "nuclear" in it!

Look, I'll let this slide, but don't give us a play-by-play of DJ deflowering Asuka, all right?

NAKAMURA (on screen): We, uh, we weighed certain intangible factors...

IBUKI (on screen): Intangible factors are a crutch for poor science, Mr. Nakamura. We at the NERV Technology Division prefer numbers.

KM: But Nakamura and AG rally late in the second quarter...

NAKAMURA (OS): Jet Alone's reactor system is the safest in the world! Your arguments are the wailings of a hysterical woman. Nuclear power is much safer than these crazed, ill-explained monsters you've created at NERV! Jet Alone's technologies are -understood-! You, Akagi and the rest are experimenting with things Man was -never meant to understand- and we'll -all- pay the price for your arrogance if the project isn't ended.

DP: ... only to come up against a magnificent counter-offensive from Ibuki...

IBUKI (OS): Strange, Mr. Nakamura. The only hysterical person I see here is you.

KM: I must ACE you!! Nakamura flounders through the rest of the match and it's 1-0 NERV going into the second round.

Is the author praising how clever his own writing is? You can't do that when you write an argument in which your own opinions are clear. Then it's just author favoritism. Here, I'll write an example:

"People who complain about the anime adaptation of Higurashi are stupid idiots," said Dr. N, who is really smart and clever and handsome. You should have sex with him because he is so amazing. He can do no wrong.

"That Dr. N sure is a cool guy who is always right," said Elk. "I wish my fanfic mocks were as good as his."

DP: Round Two, the Military-Industrial Complex pulls out -all- the stops, and it's look out NERV: Here comes JET ALONE!

(OS: JA takes the field and goes through maneuvers.)

KM: JA lookin' strong in the third quarter, but in the fourth, Military-Industrial's head coach General Davis MacIntyre apparently loses the playbook!

(OS: JA starts walking mindlessly in a straight line.)

DP: Jet Alone forfeits the game and starts counting down toward the destruction of a good-sized chunk of northern New England, and an embarrassed Military-Industrial Complex have to turn to NERV to help them keep their ex-star from scoring a serious own goal.

(OS: EVA-02 stops Jet Alone.)

DP: In a surprise play, NERV relief pitcher John Trussell enters play to take on Jet Alone from within! The EVAs win it in overtime, it's Trussell's first career save.

(OS: Truss, in radsuit with helmet off, back at the staging area, drinks a bottle of Tang, then exchanges high fives with Asuka and Misato.)

"I replaced a canon character for no discernible reason! High five!"

KM (VO): I am the most popular console tech in all the land! Bring me the finest meats and cheeses for a tremendous clubhouse feast!

DP: Rumors of serious friction between Team EVA head coach Gendou Ikari and star center #5 DJ Croft dogged the team as they came back from the All-Star break for Game Eight of the regular season.

(OS: The Eleventh Angel in orbit.)

In orbit?

KM (VO): And that's bad news, because the team would need all their teamwork in place to take on their next opponent, the Angels' all-time top-scoring power hitter, #11 Sahaquiel.

DP: Assistant coach Misato Katsuragi again proving her worth to the organization as she comes up with a brilliant two-prong defense. All four EVA players are on the field for the first time in the season.

(OS: Kronos launch.)

KM: Jon Ellison and Asuka Soryu-Langley reach for the sky as they intercept the Angel on his approach to the end zone. Sahaquiel tries for the long goal before they can get to him...

(OS: Sahaquiel bombs the Atlantic.)

KM (VO): ... but he can't... quite... get there.

(OS: EVA-02 and EVA-03 battle the Eleventh Angel in orbit.)

DP: Trading volleys with the Angel in orbit, Ellison takes a -hard- shot from Sahaquiel that takes out his comm system and his flight computer, but look at the skill this guy has.

I think this is more description than the fight got in the actual chapter.

(OS: EVA-03 tumbles to a stop short of Babylon 2.)

DP (VO): He -barely- keeps it out of the space station, with nothing to work with but manual controls. Really championship-caliber work.

KM (nods): Everybody on the team really pulled their weight on this one.

(OS: EVA-01 and EVA-00 wait on the ground. Cut to an orbital shot of Sahaquiel in re-entry.)

DP (VO): DJ Croft and Rei Ayanami wait groundside as the Angel goes for the blitz.

(OS: The two EVAs race at full run toward the touchdown point as the Angel closs in.)

DP (VO, cont'd): Some terrific fieldwork by these two - they really have to motor in order to intercept the Angel before he can get to the end zone.

I still can't tell which sport this is supposed to be. Unless this is some kind of tournament where they play a different sport each game, which could be kind of neat if it weren't in this fanfic.

(OS: EVA-01's AT field surges out and blocks the Angel's fall.)

KM (VO): Croft and Ayanami get under it...

(OS: EVA-00 stabs the Angel's core; the Angel settles, then explodes.)

KM (VO, cont'd): YOU SANK MY BATTLESHIP!! TERRIFIC defensive teamwork by these two.

If we hit that bullseye, the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate.

DP: Y'know, I think Ayanami's the silent core of this team. Remember, she came back from -terrible- injuries in the pre-season, injuries that some thought would be career-ending. There's something just incredibly tough about her. Seems like she's -always- there when her teammates need her.

Except that Rei is an accessory to Jon who can't live without him? But no, she's tough because she keeps getting kicked around by Angels and accomplishing nothing.

KM: You said it, Dan - and nowhere would that be more in evidence than in Game Nine.

(OS: The black sphere hangs over Worcester-3.)

[DP: With the rumored personality clash between head coach Ikari and star center Croft at an all-time high, team morale was very poor heading into this round. Eight rounds' worth of narrow escapes, wear and tear, and partially healed injuries were beginning to catch up to the EVA team, and it showed in their performance in Game Nine.

(OS: EVA-01 fires on the sphere and is lost to the spreading void.)

KM: DJ Croft with an incredibly sloppy play - this is the worst we've seen him all season. The game goes to the second period scoreless, and it seems as if Croft's in a whole lot of trouble.

(OS: EVA-03 enters the anomaly.)

IT IS AN ANGEL YOU STUPID FEUYO:IGWHYP&VT_"IJc-0({OJGI(_P"}_<IJG$:LQ)KOIJPMFK)U{y_"pTJO'H98Y/oO'TPU9];Y?ljh

WHO DO THEy THINK THEY ARE FOOLING? I KNOW, I WILL WRITE A HELLSING FANFIC AND REFUSE TO CALL RIP VAN WINKLE A VAMPIRE. BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT. DERPITY-DOO!

DP: At the start of the second period, #1 Ayanami -stuns- her teammates by -willingly- entering the opposing team's offensive zone. For a few minutes this looks like as pointless and suicidal a play as Croft's first-period no-brainer, until...

(OS: EVA-03 begins tearing its way out of the anomaly.)

KM (VO): I am the Queen of the Geo-Front! Your puny spatial anomaly is insufficient to contain my gargantuan might!!

You know another thing? Calling it an anomaly and acting like it's mysterious doesn't work when plunking an Eva in it causes the whole thing to explode by sheer dumb luck. If you're going to call something anomalous, it should be. Let's look (again) at the STALKER games; and no, I don't plan on shutting up about them. In those, "anomalies" are a part of the terrain, and the best you can do is avoid them or use some form of protection that momentarily increases your odds of survival. You don't just skip through a deadly gravitational anomaly, because you'll get sucked into a vortex, thrown into the air, and your skin will catch fire from friction before being torn off by the centripetal force. And then your skeleton explodes. Anomalies make the player exercise caution by threatening injury or death if you act carelessly. And even when you have high-end protective gear that can soak up a small army's worth of ordnance, you can still die if you blunder into the wrong kind of anomaly.

I may be quibbling over semantics too much, but if you are dealing with objects that exist along the fringes of human knowledge, then making them truly mysterious is good. If something is unknown, then it's implicitly threatening. But it isn't here because the Angel forced NERV to make a tough choice (kill it and risk losing an Eva) and Misato just went "lolno moral vacuum let's choose the consequence-free option." This was also a big problem with Armageddon???. The ancient race of mind-reading, magic-using demons never feels threatening or even alien. Instead they get slaughtered by artillery and tank drivers crack jokes about running them over. And instead of making the Angels into some kind of credible opponents for NERV, Eyrie has DJ sling around one-liners, call them Chester, and win nearly effortlessly (when he isn't reenacting scenes from Evangelion to remind the readers that this is, in fact, an Eva fic, that is).

This whole segment betrays the attitude the authors have toward the project. All the stuff that should be menacing or intriguing ends up being little more than a speed bump on DJ's path to whatever the hell he wants. Too bad the goofiness doesn't work, since it's both badly written and doesn't mesh with the high-handed melodrama. Rape! Murder! Government conspiracies! Fate of the world! Snacktron! ESPN! There is no thematic consistency because the authors threw together crap from as many sources as possible and then wrote their ideas even more incompetently.

So calling an Angel an anomaly becomes a big deal for me, because I can't figure out if the authors are trying to be clever and failing, trying to be mysterious and failing, trying to set up a plot point and failing, or just plain being stupid (and succeeding).

(OS: EVA-03 completes its escape and the anomaly explodes; EVA-03 stands over EVA-01, AT field still burning flamelike around it.)

DP (VO): Dare I say it again, Rei Ayanami; dare I say it again, en fuego.

Sorry about the rant, but I had to say something other than "this is so stupid." I think you guys can see that for yourselves.

KM: For Game Ten, the Angels send in a surprise player in #12 Bardiel, a switch-hitter with an undistinguished record... but with Team EVA's morale and coherence still sliding, Bardiel is able to make this the closest game yet at the half.

(OS: Unit 02 goes berserk and destroys the Framingham test facility.)

DP (VO): Bardiel manages to take over #2 Asuka Soryu-Langley's ride -with her in it-, making for an interesting defensive situation for the EVAs.

(OS: EVA-03 engages EVA-02; the corruption spreads and EVA-03 jettisons its arm and collapses.)

I hate corruption. It's easily the most broken game mechanic in Empire at War.

DP (VO, cont'd): #1 Ayanami can't stop him, and with #4 Ellison held in the dugout by Coach Ikari, it's all up to DJ Croft...

(OS: EVA-01 tries to maneuver into position to cut EVA-02's entry plug clear.)

DP (VO, cont'd): ... who balks at attacking the unit withSoryu-Langely still inside.

KM: Coach Ikari, in his most controversial move of the season, pulls an -illegal substitution- and takes control of the unit away from Croft, and the result... is horrifying.

You'd think a commentator would say something about DJ's refusal to do anything. I don't think it would be controversial if a coach pulled a player who sat down in the middle of the field and started shouting about how he could do a better job of running the team.

(OS: EVA-01 destroys EVA-02. Medtechs rush Asuka's broken form to the infirmary.)

KM (VO): Soryu-Langley critically injured in this debacle, she'll be on the injured list for at least six months, if she returns to play at all. No word yet, but her injuries could very well be career-ending.

Oh yeah, gotta watch out for those bruises. I hear people die from that.

Well, not people, but, you know... chicks. It's a good thing those poor, frail waifs have a stud like DJ to look out for them.

(OS: EVA-03 and EVA-02 prevent EVA-01 from wrecking the Geo-Front.)

DP: Croft is absolutely furious with Coach Ikari for the illegal sub and its consequences - only the intervention of his teammates stops him from expressing his displeasure with his EVA's fists. In the resulting blow-up, Croft is -dismissed from the team-.

KM: If anybody had any doubts that Coach Ikari is losing it, this game should have changed their mind.

NOBODY CAN TAKE GENDO'S SIDE. NOBODY. MUST DEMONIZE.

(OS: Zeruel attacks Worcester-3.)

KM (VO): And with the EVA team in an absolute shambles - one center out of the action, possibly permanently, and the other thrown off the team - morale at an all-time low and only one undamaged, functioning piece of equipment in the lineup, the Angels immediately go to Game Eleven, sending in brawny #13, Zeruel, a -very- powerful hitter, their number two after Sahaquiel, with the team's top score in rushing.

I always thought Zeruel was the strongest Angel. Its name means "strength of God," after all.

(OS: EVA-00 takes on Zeruel, and loses its arms and head for its troubles.)

DP: Jon Ellison's hard-luck streak continues as he's taken out post-haste. This guy's a great player who just can't -buy- a break this year.

(OS: EVA-03, one-armed, engages the Angel with an N2 canister and is nearly destroyed, to little avail.)

KM: Ayanami with a spectacular sacrifice play, but it's not enough to stop Zeruel either.

(OS: Zeruel breaches the Geo-Front and attacks Central Dogma.)

DP: Zeruel penetrating -deep- into the EVAs' defensive zone, and it looks like it's all over, except for...

(OS: EVA-01 tackles the Angel onto a lift platform, which shoots them back to the surface.)

KM: DJ CROFT! My power is beYOND your understanding!

His humility is beYOND gone.

He re-enters the game with Coach Ikari's grudging permission to pull it out in the final seconds of play!

DP: And we're heading into ooooovertime.

(OS: EVA-01 beats Zeruel down.)

KM (VO): Croft is going downTOWN on this Angel!

DP (VO, cont'd): Maybe he's pretending it's Coach Ikari.

OK. Ranting time.

The DJ/Gendo conflict doesn't work because the authors are obviously rooting for DJ. Everyone opposes Gendo, even his subordinates who you'd think would at least hold their tongue for the sake of their job, and he is uniformly presented as wrong at every opportunity. His portrayal in this fic is so obviously evil that it makes the popular perception of Mengele look nuanced.

Let's make another comparison. I'm thinking Star wars. You see, the original only Star Wars films have one of the most iconic, most recognizably evil villains of all time. Darth Vader's design emanates evil like some kind of radio tower powered by the tears of orphan amputees. He choked a soldier to death in his introductory scene. He led soldiers who are named for the Sturmabteiling and destroyed a planet as leverage in an interrogation. He spent two movies trying to entice someone to join something called "the dark side" so that they could rule the galaxy as despots of the empire that plunged civilization into a violent dark age in which only old idealists like Obi-Wan had any memory of better times. Darth Vader, you see, is a Bad Guy.

But he's still treated with more moral ambiguity than Gendo is in NXE. Because Luke doesn't win by killing Vader. He gets mad, sure, and tries to kill Vader. The difference between him and DJ's reaction, however, is that Luke ultimately realizes that by allowing his anger to dictate his actions, he was going to go down the same path as the tyrants he was fighting. He casts away his weapon. It was that decision to place a greater value on the moral high ground than his own life that caused Vader to save Luke. After being a remorseless, implacable flag-bearer for evil for three movies, Vader redeemed himself, showing that nobody was too far gone to be persuaded to turn their back on the dark side. The message of Return of the Jedi was that you can't use force to solve all your problems and that your enemies can be good people if you don't be an asshole and alienate them. Darth Vader didn't get away with all the evil things he did, but he also did a lot of good by killing the Emperor.

See, there has to be some degree of moral complexity so that you can foster conflict. The best villains don't see themselves as evil. It's not "I'm going to kill villagers today because I'm an evil overlord! Mwahaha!" They have motivations and see their methods as the best way to achieve some goal. It's more like "I'm going to kill those villagers who have been fostering dissent, because if they undermine the government I won't be able to broker a peace agreement with that country that keeps raiding us." Conflict happens because people have different motives or sets of ideals. But the conflict isn't interesting if every character and even the narration repeatedly hammers home that the good guy is good and the bad guy is bad. Star Wars, for all its black-and-white morality, introduced uncertainty by making it look like Luke could fall to the dark side. He was tempted to give in to evil, so his decision not to strike down the emperor had meaning. Him throwing aside his lightsaber was the culmination of an internal struggle between the part of him that was driven by hatred and the part that recognized the very real possibility that he would become the new Vader. That struggle had been going on through The Empire Strikes Back and was an essential part of his character development. But you don't get character development in NXE because DJ is already perfect, so there's no need for him to change. And Gendo is the evil villain, so if he changes it'll be to gravitate towards DJ's worldview.

This fanfic would have been so much more interesting if DJ were a naive idealist who gets called on his bullshit (by characters who aren't evil unsympathetic villains, I mean) and if Gendo were a pragmatist who did morally questionable things because he believed it was the best way to stop the Angels. That would leave the door open for a meaningful debate over Gendo's actions and his ultimate goal; I imagine DJ will stop Instrumentality because evil people want it to happen so it must be evil, too. But if DJ and Gendo were both flawed, and both occasionally had good points in their disagreements, then when DJ learns about Third Impact there could be an exchange where the audience is free to choose sides instead of being smacked with morality so blunt you could use it to club a baby seal. And there could be a moment where DJ realizes that killing Gendo because of their disagreements would be no different than Gendo ordering Unit 02 destroyed to remove an obstacle. It would be a cautionary statement on how absolute certainty in the righteousness of your own cause can be poisonous, and DJ would have an actual character arc. But he won't because he's already perfect, so he doesn't have to confront any real personal challenges or make any changes.

OK, that's all the ranting for this chapter, I promise.

(OS: EVA-01 loses power.)

DP: One panicked moment late in the overtime period as EVA-01 loses power, then takes a bit of a beating from the Angel, but...

(OS: EVA-01 reactivates and systematically destroys Zeruel.)

DP: You can't stop DJ Croft; you can only hope to contain him. Croft and his EVA absolutely -demolish- the Angel and snatch another Team EVA victory from the jaws of defeat. They end the regular season with a record of 10-1, Game Ten forfeited by Ikari's illegal substitution, but behind this seemingly sterling record lies the terrible price they've paid to get there. Here with a post-season analysis is ESPN's own Chris Berman.

(BERMAN appears on screen to give his commentary.)

CB: Thanks, Dan. For the beleaguered Head Coach Gendou Ikari "Dickory Dock" and his team, the question now becomes: Can they be in any kind of shape for the playoffs? The team's equipment and their headquarters are in ruins, both of their centers are on the indefinite injured list and nobody left on the team trusts Gendou Ikari as far as they can throw him.

Some say their best bet would be to get rid of Ikari altogether and elevate assistant coach Misato "It Was Much Better Than" Katsuragi to the head coaching position. She's shown several times over the season that she has what it takes to pull the team's fat out of the fire after Ikari puts it there, and by all accounts the players trust her.

Uh... Misato does tactical stuff. Gendo has to oversee many aspects of a massive organization. Could Misato handle the logistics, scientific and technical reports, diplomacy, and wider strategic elements that command of NERV would entail? I'll answer that question with a question: does anyone who is not a total cretin like Panty & Stocking?

For these questions, as for all questions, only time will tell. And what of the four key players on this team? With luck, DJ "Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince" Croft will be off the injured list by Christmas.

(OS: DJ and Rei destroy the Eleventh Angel.)

CB: As long as the team has Coach Katsuragi and the team of Croft and "Sugar" Rei Ayanami, I don't think you can count them out.

I thought the Eva nicknames were stupid.

Then they started nicknaming the pilots.

(OS: Jon handles the Seventh Angel.)

CB: Wily veteran Jon "Harlan" Ellison may just have something up his sleeve for the post-season as well.

(OS: EVA-02 is destroyed by EVA-01.)

CB: And what of Asuka "Never Say You're" Soryu-Langley?

Really now. It doesn't even work if you write her name properly.

Will she ever return to the field, this year or any other? There's still been no word from the team's management about her condition or her expected recovery time. If she's out permanently, she leaves a major void in the team's power structure that they probably won't be able to fill at this late date.

(OS: Ritsuko, Maya and Truss in the booth.)

CB: But you can't discount the contributions of manager "Puttin' On The" Ritsuko Akagi and her top staffers, Maya "What Big Eyes You Have" Ibuki and John "Big" Trussell "In Little China", in the dugout.














With these two to back up Assistant Coach Katsuragi, the EVA team epitomizes Yogi Berra's great ethos: "It ain't over 'til it's over." Back to you, Kenny and Dan.

(BERMAN disappears from the screen, leaving the NERV logo.)

DP: Thanks, Chris. National Evangelion League playoff action starts in ten days, and you can catch all the action right here on ESPN. For now, and henceforth I hope, I'm Dan Patrick.

KM: And I'm Kenny Mayne. Goodnight.

/* ESPN SportsCenter closing theme */

Misato Katsuragi awoke with a start, an empty Guinness can falling from her hand to the floor with a muffled thump. Through eyes fogged with unexpected sleep and one too many beers for a proper evening's relaxation (or about a dozen too few for a proper bender), she took in the darkness of the living room around her, lit only by the garish, shifting color tones of the television. Golf... it was showing golf. Why the hell would she be watching golf?

She had insomnia and was out of sleeping pills?

She wouldn't, the answer came to her slowly. She'd dozed off. A squint at the clock on the VCR showed that it was around midnight, which meant she must been asleep for half an hour or so. The last thing she remembered, and so the show she must have dozed off during, was 'SportsCenter', which had apparently just ended.

Dragging herself to her feet, she muffled a belch, then winced as stomach acid clawed its way partway up to the back of her throat. Shouldn't have had the nachos, she chided herself. Shouldn't have had the last beer, either. Ought to take better care of yourself. DJ would be disappointed.

DJ is such a positive influence on her lifestyle. He'd never drink beer irresponsibly, right?

Oh, she reminded herself crossly as she paused in the bathroom to down a Tagamet and then shuffled off to bed, and stop thinking about him as if he's dead, because he isn't, damn it.

He can't be.

I have a promise to keep to him.


Back in the living room, Pen-Pen switched off the TV, yawned, stretched his flippers, and headed for his fridge.

/* The Ventures "Blue Moon" _Walk - Don't Run_ */

No. That does not even deserve a closing theme.

NEXT EPISODE:

The balance of trust shifts as the treacherous forces arrayed against NERV close in...

... and DJ takes a journey.

Be here in ten days for the start of the regular season:

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION
EXODUS 3:1 - CQD
7/24/98

That... That was a thing, all right. Once again, I'll be back with season 3 sometime by the end of the summer. I may dredge up some more bonus material before then, like the preview for the planned sequel fic.

(Hey Al, here's the raw text version of the "motion picture." For future reference, the link is buried in a jumble of broken text that looks like it was run through a random character generator. I know that really narrows it down.)

This post has been edited by Dr. O: Jun 3 2011, 09:46 PM

[Al_Cone]

Yes, two-thirds of the world's population has been wiped out and the coastlines have all been redrawn thanks to the polar icecaps melting, but Sports Center's still alive and kicking!

dammit eyrie...though I suppose I should be thankful that we didn't get a half-chapter dedicated to the merging of ESPN and B.E.T., and the subsequent buyout by the BBC producing BBESPETC. N.

This post has been edited by Al_Cone: Jun 4 2011, 12:20 AM

[Moose]

HEY, DOUCHEBAG. YOUR RANTS STOPPED ME FROM ENJOYING THAT PLAY-BY-PLAY OF THE FANFIC SO FAR!


Honestly, though... what the hell were they trying to accomplish with that crap? Ah well, at least the mock was good.

This post has been edited by Moose: Jun 4 2011, 08:34 AM

[Dr. O]

I'M SORRY MOOSE WOULD IT MAKE YOU FEEL BETTER IF I SAID I'M GOING TO START POSTING SEASON 3 IN ONE WEEK. I know I said August, but I changed my mind.

I was going to post this as part of the next chapter (since Eyrie included it in the season 3-1 text file), but then I realized that it's been almost a month since I did anything for this mock. So here, enjoy. Or not. Either way, it should whet your appetite for the coming onslaught of insanity.

** AND NOW... **
EYRIE PRODUCTIONS, UNLIMITED proudly presents:
NEON EXODUS EVANGELION BONUS THEATER!!

What?

[COMMERCIAL]

[SCREEN GRAPHIC: ESPN/NERV Ride-Along Program logo]

VO: The ESPN/NERV Ride-Along Program puts YOU in the action!

WHAT?

[EVA ENTRY PLUG INTERIOR. REI AYANAMI is at the controls. Behind and above her seat a jump seat has been positioned. In this seat, wearing a red-and-white plug suit with a Ride-Along Program patch on the upper left chest, is NORIKO TAKAYA.]

An ESPN/Evangelion/Gunbuster crossover.

I... Why would anyone write this?

NT: So this is an Evangelion.

RA: Mm-hmm.

[REI is somewhat busy. From the cockpit speakers the sounds of an EVA combat can be heard; occasionally the camera shakes.]

NT: It's smaller than Gunbuster.

RA: So is the Eiffel Tower.

NT: Does it turn into a space fighter?

RA: No, thank God.

Chapter 2-5 says otherwise.

NT: I'm sorry, am I bothering you?

RA: No, not at all. I'm just a little distracted.

NT: Oh, OK. (Pause.) It's tough being the devastatingly cute, tragic heroine.

RA: A-men, sister.

what.

[EXTERIOR DAY. EVA-00's foot steps through the shot, leaving behind a footprint with the ESPN/NERV Ride-Along Program logo.]

[END COMMERCIAL]

I won't say that you can't do a good fictional commercial, because Sealab 2021 did an entire episode of those. I will say, however, that Eyrie Unlimited can't make a good fictional commercial. Or a good anything.

CONFERENCE ROOM 'B'
EYRIE PRODUCTIONS STUDIOS
WORCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS
1:12 PM, WEDNESDAY, JULY 22, 1998

Oh right, the whole "this is an honest-to-God TV show" conceit.

This fucking fanfic, guys.

One by one, the members of the NXE regular cast filtered into the conference room, some yawning. It was a brutally hot day in Worcester, over ninety-five degrees with near-100% humidity, and though the Eyrie studios were air-conditioned, the recent excursion for lunch (combined with the meal itself) had put most of them in a semi-somnolent state. With production on the third-season opening episode wrapped, there was little to do until shooting resumed in the evening, so the production staff had assembled a few meetings to pad the day out.

There have been a number of decisions in this fanfic that I would call poor, baffling, stupid, or some combination thereof, but this takes the cake. They are really pretending that this is a TV show produced by them, with actors and a studio and everything. I just don't get it. I was less bewildered when I watched Superjail. At least that show didn't take itself seriously.

Asuka Soryu-Langley was looking forward to the meeting's end. She had no greater ambitions for her afternoon than to curl up in her air-conditioned bedroom with a book, perhaps the copy of "Doctor Who: The Murder Game" she'd just borrowed from the director, and ignore the world. DJ Croft had been awakened ahead of schedule by his housemate Rei banging him on the door (having accidentally locked herself out when she went to get the paper), and wanted nothing more than to go back to bed. For now he was nursing a cup of coffee, hoping it would get him through the meeting. Jon Ellison was looking forward to his first attempt at the GT Cup circuit in his saved game of 'Gran Turismo'. Gendou Ikari planned to sit down and finally watch the previous weekend's CART FedEx Championship Series race, which he'd taped on Sunday. He had ten dollars on Michael Andretti for the win, and from the smug look on Ritsuko Akagi's face, he had a sneaking suspicion he was going to lose the ten-spot. John Trussell was fretting about the schedule he had to work with for the master artwork of the soundtrack CDs. Maya Ibuki was scheduled to pick up her new car at 4:30, and had been excited about it all week.

Soundtrack CDs. Even though half the music listed in this story is from the same Genesis album. I would say more, but my brain is already breaking from having to think about NXE merchandise.

By the time Misato Katsuragi, the last to arrive, came through the door, all the others were ranged around the conference table, poking curiously through the mound of various items that were heaped on it. "What's going on?" she wondered.

"First round of new merchandise approvals this season," said director Ben "Gryphon" Hutchins from the doorway behind her.

There is no part of that sentence that doesn't make me want to kill something.

Startled, Misato jumped.

"You're late!" Asuka Soryu-Langley declared.

"I figured Misato wouldn't turn up until now anyway," replied Gryphon mildly. "Anyway. Have a look, tell me what you think."

The cast approached the table warily, picking out various items and looking them over.

Rei Ayanami spotted an item toward the head of the table, picked it up, turned it over in her hands, and then looked over it to the director, a look partway between quizzical and horrified on her face.

DJ cologne. It's made from pub air, gunpowder, old Titanic technical manuals, and purified, concentrated smug.

"Keen, isn't it?" said Gryphon, smiling beatifically.

Rei looked skeptically at the box in her hands.

"What is it?" wondered Jon Ellison. Wordlessly, Rei handed him the item.

A dildo modeled after DJ's cock?

It was a cereal box, its front cover emblazoned with an outrageously cute cartoon caricature of Rei in her plug suit and a name in large Project EVA-font print.

"Kellogg's Ayanami-O's?!" said Jon incredulously.

They taste just like her, possibly due to the high concentrations of ground-up Rei clone.

"WHAT?!" said DJ, almost choking on his coffee.

"That's what it says!" Jon protested, holding up the box so his co-star could see it. Sure enough, it did, complete with a speech balloon for the cartoon Rei that said, in a sprightly font, "They're low in fat!"

I'd be alarmed if any cereal were high in fat. Unless it contained bacon, but then I think every breakfast dish should incorporate bacon somehow.

"You're KIDDING!" said Gendou Ikari. "What is it?"

Jon peered at the illustration of the cereal on the box. "Looks like frosted Cheerios with the ghost marshmallows from Boo Berry."

"Go ahead and try some," said Gryphon. "It's an actual sale item, they sent us a case of the stuff."

"What happened to the rest of it?" asked Ritsuko.

"Rank hath its privileges," said Gryphon impassively. "You guys get six figures an episode, I get the cereal."

These clowns get six figures an episode and Firefly gets canceled. There's no justice in the world.

Dubious, Jon opened the box, reached in, and came out with a handful of cereal. He sniffed at it, decided it wasn't too daunting, put it in his mouth and chewed slowly. Then, swallowing, he declared,

"It -is- frosted Cheerios with the ghost marshmallows from Boo Berry."

Rei took back the box, tried an experimental mouthful herself, then regarded the box again with raised eyebrows. "Not bad."

Meanwhile, Gendou had seated himself at the table, hands steepled before him, and was regarding the array of NXE Series 3 action figures laid out before him. Abruptly, his eyes lit up, and he grabbed one out of the line-up.

The Kaji action figure with date-rape action and roofie accessories! Sweet!

"Oh, cool!" he declared. "I've got a spring-loaded grappling-hook gun with a retractor crank!" So saying, he aimed the little effigy of himself at one of the wall-mounted lamp sconces ringing the room, launched the aforesaid grappling hook, and then reeled the little plastic Gendou up with the crank. "How come I don't get anything this cool on the show?"

"One of the great mysteries of the Universe," remarked Maya Ibuki dryly. She picked up her own action figure. "Not a terribly bad likeness, I suppose."

"Hey!" cried Misato. "Mine has a beer can permanently molded to her right hand! Those bastards!"

"Mine comes with a bullwhip," said Ritsuko dubiously.

Didn't they already make this joke?

"Whoa! I appreciate the compliment, guys," said Asuka, "but I'm really only a B-cup."

"Check out the wind-up waddling Pen-Pen," observed DJ.

"Aw, too cool," Misato agreed as DJ set the little plastic penguin a-waddle across the table.

"What the hell is this?" wondered Asuka, holding up a plastic statuette of herself, in plug suit, in a strange kind of down-pointing position. "I look like I'm ordering in a candy store. 'I'll take one of -those-, and one of -those-... '" She weighed the item in her hand. "It's too light to be a solid figurine... "

DJ took it from her, turned it over, then shook it and grinned. "Aha!" Then he took hold of the plastic Asuka's head and briskly twisted it off.

"Gaaah!" said Asuka.

It's the chapter 2-8 action figure.

DJ sniffed at the little pull-up spout the removal of the figure's head had revealed, and grinned again. "It's maple syrup," he declared.

"WHAT?!"

"Once I figured out it was full of liquid, I figured it had to be either that or bubble bath."

Of course, he'll probably use it as a hip flask.

"That's the one of Misato with her arms folded," said Gryphon from the end of the table, pointing with a pen.

"I will not accept a headless plastic doll of myself that's full of maple syrup," declared Asuka flatly.

"Oh, relax, it goes back on," said DJ, illustrating his point by screwing the bottle's head back on.

"I don't care!" said Asuka. "I don't like it."

I think it would be kind of funny to have a maple syrup bottle that looks like me. Then again, I bought the Elfen Lied DVD set, so my tastes are questionable at best.

Gryphon sighed sadly and made a note on the clipboard he carried. Then he brightened. "Oh! I almost forgot. I just got off the phone with some folks over at NASCAR. We just closed a one-time sponsorship deal for a couple of cars in different series over there. I'm really excited about this, I think it'll give us some great exposure, just in time for you know what," he said with a wink.

"Sponsorship?" said Gendou.

"Yup!" Gryphon dimmed the room lights and switched on the slide projector sitting on the end of the table. "Here's a preliminary sketch of the Winston Cup car we'll be on for the delayed running of the Pepsi 400 in October."

Is this going anywhere? Because of all the pointless crap in this story, this is trying awful hard to be the most pointlessest.

On the screen, a colored three-view-plus-perspective pencil drawing of a NASCAR-style Ford Taurus appeared. It was mostly black, with the blue-white Neon Exodus Evangelion on the hood, the NERV logo on the rear fenders, the X-COM logo on the decklid, and the big white number 90 on the doors and roof.

Asuka jumped to her feet. "DICK TRICKLE?!"

I hear they have medication for that.

she demanded. "We're sponsoring DICK TRICKLE for one race?!"

Gryphon grinned. "That's right."

"Why him?" Asuka wondered. "Why not somebody cool, like Jimmy Spencer or Rusty Wallace?"

"Jimmy's sponsored by the series sponsor," Gryphon pointed out. "I don't think he particularly needs the extra money. Neither does Rusty, for that matter."

"Besides, I vetoed Rusty," said Truss. "He's a jerk."

If Truss refuses to interact with jerks, he must be pretty lonely. Just look at his co-stars.

Asuka glared.

"What's the matter with Dick, anyway?" asked Jon. "He's solid. Almost always qualifies."

"Sure, thirty-fourth or so."

"Hey, he's no Dave Marcis."

"Don't cut down Dave Marcis," said Truss warningly. "The man's an icon of the sport. It's not his fault he hasn't got two nickels to rub together."

"Well, then why don't we sponsor -him-?" Asuka asked. "I mean, -anybody- but Dick Trickle."

Gryphon shrugged. "He wasn't interested. We might get an opportunity to sponsor the 17 team next year, though we'll probably put the UF/FI logo on it most of the time."

UF is Undocumented Features, which is more or less Neon Exodus writ large. Only with less Evangelion and more Dirty Pair and Macross. Don't ask how, because there's no way I'm mocking it.

then again, I said I'd never revisit Garden of Eva, so maybe I'm just facetious/lying/stupid. to be completely serious, though, undocumented features is really terrible wish fulfillment that makes NXE look like Animal Farm.

Rei took advantage of the brief lull to say, "I like Dick. He's nice."

"Oh, when did -you- meet Dick Trickle?" demanded Asuka scornfully.

"Last week in Loudon," replied Rei.

"You had a pit pass and you didn't get me Mr. Excitement's autograph?"

"Sorry, didn't see him. Next month."

"If we could continue?" said Gryphon. "We're also sponsoring a Busch Grand National car for one race in October." He switched to another slide; this car was done up in the orange-and-white livery of Unit 00, complete with the appropriate number, and sported the NERV logo in a black square on the hood.

"All right!" said Asuka. "That's more like it. Buckshot's the man."

Why is Asuka a NASCAR fan? Why would anyone write this? What made this seem like a good idea that would entertain people?

"When he's not trying to kill Randy LaJoie," observed Rei, drawing another glare from her redheaded co-star.

"That paint scheme is terrible," observed Truss. "I mean, the Unit 00 idea is OK, but the black part with the NERV logo looks so last-minute."

"That's OK," said Gryphon with a grin. "These are just preliminary sketches. We knew you'd have better ideas."

Truss palmed his face; Maya patted his shoulder. "There, there, John. You're a natural volunteer."

"Oh, that reminds me - Misato, SpeedVision called again. They really want you for their weekly USLMRA highlights show."

Seriously. I am not even convinced a human being wrote this. It's like someone specifically designed an AI to be as boring as possible, and this is what it does when it gets bored.

Rei coughed, having very nearly snarfed a handful of Ayanami-O's.

"Sorry."

"'s OK," Rei sputtered.

It took the combined creative talent of three people to write this.

I can't decide whether I want to use the suicide emoticon or the Picard facepalm pic more.

"Did they get Dave Barry yet?" asked Misato.

"How should I know?" replied Gryphon. "Just call them."

"OK, OK."

"Anyway, that's it for that stuff, so far. Any other questions or comments about the stuff that's on the table?"

Gendou looked at his watch. "No, I think we've milked this joke for about as much as we're gonna get out of it."

Gryphon nodded. "I think you're right. OK, let's have everybody back here at 5. If we can get that last shot in the can by 7 we can go watch the Sox game on the big TV."

Is the big TV near the big board?

/* J.P. Sousa "The Liberty Bell" */

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION BONUS THEATER!!
was conceived, written and performed by

A collection of howling morons.

Ben Hutchins
John Trussell
Rei Ayanami
Asuka Soryu-Langley
DJ Croft
Jon Ellison
Gendou Ikari
Ritsuko Akagi
Maya Ibuki
Misato Katsuragi

and featured
Noriko Takaya

I know I'm basically committing Project AFTER seppuku here, but I actually kind of liked Gunbuster. And Diebuster.

No more. It is tainted.

NOTE: The USLMRA is a real organization:
http://www.letsmow.com/
(Regrettably, SpeedVision, though a real network, does not
yet have a weekly USLMRA highlights show.)

Join the Dick Trickle Fan Club!
http://www.coredcs.com/~dtrickle/fanclub.html



© 1998

E P U (Colour)

Well... OK then... I had to go back over that a few times just to make sure it was real. I know I should be past the point of expecting standards from Eyrie, but this is just unreal. Even the characters pointed out what a waste of time it is by just saying "yeah, the scene's over, roll the credits."

If it's any consolation, the next few installments of this mock are going to completely outstrip everything so far.

[Al_Cone]

Awright, the very best mock on Project AFTER is finally back in busineOH FOR FUCK'S SAKE THIS SHIT AGAIN.

And the fucking quote tags aren't working! Oh well. At least the bold tags are. So, uh, just...get over it if it bugs you.

They are really pretending that this is a TV show produced by them, with actors and a studio and everything. I just don't get it. I was less bewildered when I watched Superjail. At least that show didn't take itself seriously.

I think it's a fantasy. Y'know, some self-constructed delusion to help them cope with the fact that they're all twentysomethings collaborating on a verbose mega-crossover about a Japanese cartoon from Japan.

Without pay.

She had no greater ambitions for her afternoon than to curl up in her air-conditioned bedroom with a book, perhaps the copy of "Doctor Who: The Murder Game" she'd just borrowed from the director, and ignore the world.

Even in the fantasy, the EVA pilots are completely self-involved. That can't possibly be an unintentional dig at the selfishness of the main cast.

Wait, yes, it possibly can be. Possibly.

Gendou Ikari planned to sit down and finally watch the previous weekend's CART FedEx Championship Series race, which he'd taped on Sunday. He had ten dollars on Michael Andretti for the win, and from the smug look on Ritsuko Akagi's face, he had a sneaking suspicion he was going to lose the ten-spot. John Trussell was fretting about the schedule he had to work with for the master artwork of the soundtrack CDs. Maya Ibuki was scheduled to pick up her new car at 4:30, and had been excited about it all week.

Wait, how does this work? So the Evangelion characters are real, and they're starring in a TV series...about themselves? That takes Mary-Suedom to heretofore unplumbed depths.

It was a cereal box, its front cover emblazoned with an outrageously cute cartoon caricature of Rei in her plug suit and a name in large Project EVA-font print.

"Kellogg's Ayanami-O's?!" said Jon incredulously.

I have a photo on my phone of lolita maid-style Asuka and Rei figurines that I snapped at the local Japanese supermarket one afternoon with the intent of trolling Shmeckie.

My point is that if breakfast cereal is the most exploitative thing that they plaster the characters' faces upon, they should consider themselves lucky. Hideaki Anno would literally pimp these women out on street corners if they were real. Which, incidentally, brings me to a conclusion about Anno's hypocrisy. See, I heartell that the "Shinji beats it to Asuka in a hospital" scene was a shot at the otaku crowd that sexualized the characters. But, see, he's the one who's willing to insert moments like this:



Into his work. And he's surprised when people grow a sexual attachment to his characters? You can't express outrage towards people for being aroused by your creation when you're the one pandering to them with promises of "more fanservice" constantly. You constantly paraded Rei around in skintight suits--or, shit, stripped her nude and flashed her genitals in the opening--and you're surprised when people turn her into fap bait?! Who's worse, Mr. Anno, the man who masturbates over that scene where Shinji falls on naked Rei in her apartment, or the man who wrote and animated that scene in the first place, then signed off on a merchandizing deal aimed at capitalizing on her status as a sex symbol?!

Sorry, but that's been on my chest for a while. Anyway, uh. The story.

Rei took back the box, tried an experimental mouthful herself, then regarded the box again with raised eyebrows. "Not bad."

Guess what else it's not? Vegetarian!

I think it would be kind of funny to have a maple syrup bottle that looks like me. Then again, I bought the Elfen Lied DVD set, so my tastes are questionable at best.

Well, kiss Shmeckie's respect goodbye, I suppose.

Alright, so reading, reading, now they're not shutting up about NASCAR--what is it with this story and overemphasizing the really, really boring shit that nobody cares about? NGE had existentialism and the fucking Bible; NXE has Segatari and the Titanic. Pick your poison...

Truss palmed his face;

Oh lord, Joey Buttafuoco actually wrote that line into one of his stories too. That's some auspicious company for Hutch and Truss to put themselves in.

NEON EXODUS EVANGELION BONUS THEATER!!
was conceived, written and performed by

A collection of howling morons.

And there's the story, right there. Cut it, print it, insert some reaction shots of Calculon and shove it on the eir.

If it's any consolation, the next few installments of this mock are going to completely outstrip everything so far.

Given the subject matter, I choose to take that literally.

[Dr. O]

For some reason, I feel like I have to do a point-by-point response. Maybe to show off how much my quote tags are working.

Awright, the very best mock on Project AFTER is finally back in busineOH FOR FUCK'S SAKE THIS SHIT AGAIN.

That's pretty much how I felt when I started reading season 3. "Oh boy I wonder what kind of crazy shi- COME ON, EYRIE! WHAT THE FUCK."

Sorry, but that's been on my chest for a while. Anyway, uh. The story.

I don't know, part of me wants to believe that Anno was just thinking "I'll make this really edgy show with tons of nudity for artistic cred!" and the other half was thinking "this'll be so popular with the shut-ins." I don't think he ever really knew what he wanted to do with Eva, which is why he vacillated between standard monster-of-the-week stuff and trying to be all symbolic and super-deep. And then at some point he went for full-on nerd pandering. Because he was basically one of them, so if he knows anything, it's how to appeal to that crowd.

But yeah, he's jumped into the merch game with both feet, so whatever his original intentions, I think it's safe to say that principles have taken a back seat to money here. And if that means pandering to the lowest common denominator, then bring out the figurines and canned coffee! I admit that if I were in his shoes I'd have a hard time not saying "yeah, let them go ahead and spend their money on stupid shit that sexualizes fictional characters. I needed a new house anyway."

Well, kiss Shmeckie's respect goodbye, I suppose.

It's a guilty pleasure, all right? I'm well aware it's bad. I could rant, but even I don't think it's worth the effort of explaining all the stuff that's wrong with it. Besides, if I ever thought I'd stand a chance of earning his respect, I'd be bombarding the Kuso! and Shmeckie's Art Critique threads with vapid compliments.

Given the subject matter, I choose to take that literally.

Oh man. You have to see the part where Misato orgasms at the second coming of Croft and then invites him to a hotel room. I would have spoiler tagged that, but it gets topped in the same chapter. That's how bad things get.

[oneluckyduck]

Is it okay that I've skipped the last two updates? I can't stand script format.
And...do Jon and Rei have a kid?

Join the Dick Trickle Fan Club!

...Wut?

I ever thought I'd stand a chance of earning his respect, I'd be bombarding the Kuso! and Shmeckie's Art Critique threads with vapid compliments.

Trust me, doesn't work.