Yet another scene.
And sleep at 6:40am finish off
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
And sleep at 6:40am finish off
Quote:Shinji was still shaking.________________________________
A painted sign on the rock wall opposite him flashed by telling him he still had a nine-minute ride to the bottom. More than halfway down. The lift carriage thundered on its tracks, booming in the tunnel.
He wished for his player back, if only to protect his ears.
He stared at his hand, clenching and releasing it. It still felt perfectly normal. It refused to feel in any way weird. The load indicator on the control panel told him he weighed about twenty kilograms more than he should have.
But if he jumped, he jumped just as high as he always had, and landed just as hard. The load reading peaked high, but still informed him that there were thousands of kilograms to spare.
The image of Rei was either a construct of his mind, the Rei who he was inside trying to..... do something, he didn’t know what. Trying to get him comfortable, to accept this place. A place inside her?
And the Rei they said was coming, was either a fake image like Mackie, or just another attempt by this false reality to get him to stay inside. Or Rei just trying to ensure he was happy wherever he was.
And a hundred other theories that made even less sense than those.
And what was Neon Genesis Evangelion? He guessed that might be his movie, or his OVA. Everyone around him probably knew every intimate detail of his life. He didn’t doubt he was one of the main characters.... Though what sort of mecha show would have him has a protagonist, he didn’t want to know. Real life was nothing like television.
Either that or it would all be part of the illusion.
Shinji promised himself he wouldn’t ever watch it.
An unlit tunnel went by; he felt the cold draught of air rush out from it as a carriage passed. The teen paced around the carriage, steel floor rattling under his feet. It was large enough to park a decent bus on, easily.
Above him, the same two hoverbots descended, keeping a safe distance. That had long gone past simple curiousity. Shinji was clever enough to realise that they were specifically following him now.
They’d likely been ordered to keep a watch on him.
Which meant that the Friggans wanted to keep an eye on him, without being seen to be following him. They were probably giving him space on his own to come to terms with things, or come to his own conclusions.
If his own life had been a TV series which they’d watched, they were probably thinking about the time he’s run away from Misato. He felt tears well up, remembering how warm she’d been and how her body’d been as soft as her smile when she hugged him.
And how sad her eyes had been when the lift door had slammed shut.
He stood alone in the carriage, sniffling and trying to clear his eyes and stop himself from breaking down into wreaking sobs he could feel rising up inside him.
And still those exocomps silently watched.
Shinji fought down the urge to give them the finger while trying to grind the tears out of his eyes with the heels of his hands. He tried to swallow the ghost flavour of blood that tingled in his mouth.
The carriage shuddered to a halt at the bottom of its shaft. The doors fell open with a hard metallic slam. He blinked, for a few moments expecting his blurred vision to clarify into something resembling Unit 01’s arm trapped in bakelite.
He saw windows instead, overlooking the landing bay. Below him, a black jet reminiscent of a type of UN bomber was pushing itself out of a side hanger Shinji swore he hadn’t seen despite clearly being large enough to hide a 4-engined jet. Yellow lights blinked out at warning rhythm overhead.
It silently rolled forward, engines kicking up dust.
It was a stealth bomber. There were no running lights, no markings on matte grey paint that seemed immune to the overhead lights. It’s engines ran silent as a ghost. It was, he felt, something he wasn’t expected to see.
He stepped forward, a little bewildered by the sight of it.
It was a B1. Old United States Air Force. He remembered the recognition guides. Russian gunships that were spacecraft, and now a bomber?
It rushed out of view riding a puff of vapour. Shinji ran to a nearby door and tried to pull it open, to see who was running away and why. It unlocked, but some unseen force pinned it shut when he tried to pull it open. Stuck?
Shinji strained, feeling a hot flash of energy rush through him. The door groaned and pulled open just a crack. A cool rush of air rushed through, grabbing at the door and slamming it hard shut again.
A gauge beside the door informed him that the pressure on the other side was zero. Zero pressure, he thought, taking a few moments to grasp what that meant. A few deep breaths cleared his mind.
He’d tried to open a door, with the vacuum of space on the other side. Air pressure pinned the door shut. The bomber’s engines were silent because there’d been no air in the hangar.
The same pair of hoverbots were still observing him, hovering there with lenses staring. A few more hoverbots whirred passed, going about their business. One shot by going at a speed that would’ve been lethal if it’d hit him before banking around into a side passage.
He swallowed a calming breath and decided it was best if he just hurried up and got to where he was expected to be. From somewhere further up ahead, he could hear the sounds of machinery working from further down the corridor, mingling with some jazzy music that brought a smile to his face.
Life!
At the other end of a passage wide enough to carry two way traffic. He passed a shuttered door large enough to drive a truck through. The word ‘Maintainence’ was painted on it in faded letters taller than he was..
Outside one of a number of doors was an old Ford motor company badge, beside another logo formed from the letters FH superimposed over a yellow crescent moon on a black background.
‘Ford’s Heavyarms’
He swallowed again and raised his hand, paused for a moment thinking better of it, before finally knocking on the door.
He knocked on the door.
No answer.
She took another calming breath, knocked again and waited.
The music kept playing, the machines kept turning. The door remained closed.
Shinji knocked for a third time. One of the hoverbots following him knew better and shunted the door open for him. He stumbled through after it, into a room smelling of metal and oil, packed with machines working away by themselves cutting metal. Like everything else on Frigga, it dwarfed its occupants. Shinji could tell just by how the music echoed that the room extended far beyond the workshop area that was lit up. Shadows of sleeping dinosaur machines slumbered in the distance. A glint off something metallic caught his eye for a moment.
Ford was busy working in the guts of another one of those hoverbots, its shell split open with a spaghetti of wires trailing. Each one had been meticulously labelled with masking tape. Beside that was a comically oversized double-barrel rifle with some ornate, almost antique-looking fixtures on the barrels. It was still dirty and waiting to be finished. One of the outer covers was off, revealing some sort of rotating brass coil which looked like an odd kind of electric motor.
Stacked against the wall in the far corner, carefully sealed in plastic, were three chromed cylinders taller than he was, each as thick as his leg with a coil of pipework wound around them. Each one was labelled as radioactive. Above them, a faded poster detailing emergency first-aid proceedures.
Three laptops sat on a table beside them, each hooked up to a spaghetti tangle of cables and circuit boards. They were on, but seemed to be doing nothing at all except flickering their screens. Shinji almost thought they might’ve been having an argument with each other, MAGI-style, but they were just laptops. He guessed they were just networked somehow and sharing some workload between them. Some engineer thing maybe.
Music came from a two-speaker stereo set beside that, which could’ve been made anytime since 1982 and seemed to be firmly unremarkable amongst the supertech.
His feet scuffed along the floor. Even above the noise of the machinery and music, Ford heard him.
“Oh, hiya Shinji! I’ve been waiting for you.”
The sheer force of cheerfullness from her face froze him to the spot. Half his mind immediately screamed at him to get out the door, it just wasn’t Japanese. It was so different to what he was used to. The rest of him easily picked her accent out as mid-western American, probably from Chicago.
“Hi.” He looked up at her, “I was told to come here.”
“So you enjoyed your little drive yesterday then?”
He nodded. “Yes ma’am,”
“And you want to do it again, right?”
“Yes ma’am.”
He tried to hide how much he was shaking inside.
She was wiping her hands off in a rag, resting back against the workbench. “I assume you can’t drive stick.”
He smiled nervously. “I didn’t even know I could drive.”
“Well, driving an auto isn’t hard. Especially with no traffic to worry about. The problem is, we don’t have many auto’s.”
Shini’s eyebrow rose “Many?”
Ford’s smile broadened into a grin. “Follow me and I’ll show you.” She pushed herself up off the bench, stretching herself, giving Shinji a wonderful view of the side of her tank-top. and the point where the metal of her arm met her natural body.
He gave her a wordless nod, his mind already drifting back to the door. Shinji immediately decided never to tell anyone about it. Still, he hadn’t expected there to be vacuum on the other side of the door.
The thought occurred to him that he’d normally expect there to be a vacuum on the other side of a door. And dreams, weren’t they...
The thought was interrupted by the overhead lights punching on. The first revealed a small selection of various cars and motorcycles. For a brief moment, Shinji actually expected the whole room to be filled with cars.
It was actually a minor dissapointment to find that it was mostly empty space,
One was an old model, with patchwork paint and engineless. What must’ve been the engine was on a bench. The windscreen was gone and the interior looked to be a mess. It looked like a drowned car that’d been dredged up from one of the old cities. The only visible identification were the letters ‘GT-500’ on the lower edge of the door.
“What a heap of junk,” he commented.
Ford’s eyes narrowed at him. “Even like that it’s worth more than everything else in here combined.”
He cringed. “Sorry,”
“Hey, it’s alright. It looks a lot like the standard one to people who don’t know better.”
Beyond that, something with a South Australia registration. It was another old Ford, this one a four door police-car painted in yellow and blue with a white and red cheatline separating both colours.
“That’s a Falcon XB Jet bought for me. It’s an automatic.” Shinji dreaded being told to drive it. “But the transmission was blown on it by some idiot thinking he was Mad Max. That’s how she got it so cheap.”
Those four headlights menaced him as he passed.
There were three others, new models, one of which Ford Sierra told him she’d taken her own name from. They seemed a little less remarkable, more modern 4-door family cars. He looked ip at her.
“How do you afford all these?”
Again, she smiled down at him.
“Well, we only getting one chance at the trough. We might aswell eat our fill and enjoy it while we can.”
The boy nodded. A very American attitude, he thought.
“Besides, I think it’s important to try and preserve a few of them for the future. Especially with how fast the universe is changing.”
Again, he nodded. “That’s why Misato kept her car. She loved pre-impact cars.”
She’d’ve probably been able to appreciate this little collection.
“What did she have?”
“A Renault. I think....” To his shame, he couldn’t remember more about it that than. “The engine was in the back,”
“Probably an Alpine then,” said Ford. “Those are rare.”
Shinji went quiet. His last memory of that car was of bullets clattering against the engine. Misato yelped and pumped at the brakes as the concrete wall grew inexorably closer. The next thing he knew, he was bleeding out his mouth where he’d bitten his lip in the impact.
He licked at his lip. There wasn’t even a tender spot left.
“It’s just back here.”
She pointed at a low-slung shape lurking behind a collection old ancient firecracker-red Kawasakis, something sleek and modern called a Stingray and an ancient BMW with an incontinent oilstain on the floor underneath it.
It was a red monster, stretched out and styled like something stolen from an ancient animé series, reminding him a little of the motorcycle he’d seen up in that house. It was stretched out between front and rear wheels, almost like it was going past as at full speed despite being parked up and supported by a pair of stabiliser wheels beneath what appeared to be a set of oversized panniers suspended either side of the rear wheel.
Ford put a hand into her pocket, fumblin with what sounded like change, before extracting the keys. She dangled them in front of him.
The boys eyes went wide.
“It’s yours, unless you’d rather walk.”
“But...” He glanced up at her. No... this wasn’t a joke, she clearly meant it. She was offering him that monster. “But...” His mind spinlocked for a moment. The keys still dangled, shining in the light. Fresh and new. “I don’t know how to ride a motorbike.”
He’d found a bicycle once and been called a thief for riding it. His eyes pleaded for more reassurance.
“it’s turbo-electric with a tanalloy battery. Just don’t flick the red switch and the rest should sort itself out. Twistgrip goes faster. Brake slows it down. Try to keep it below a hundred, ,mmm’kay?”
Shinji opened his mouth to say something
“It’s mine?” He finally managed to force out.
“If you want to use it, yeah, you can keep it.” Her shoulders shrugged. “We built it and we’re not using it. It’s yours.”
“It’s mine?” Shinji repeated.
“Yep. All yours,” she confirmed.
“But...” he glanced between her, clearly serious and struggling not to smirk, and the motorcycle which he was certain must’ve cost a large amount of money. There was no getting around it, he had no choice but accept the gift. “Thank you,” he said, with all the reluctance of a death row inmate thanking the execution.
Ford dropped the keys into his hand. They were still warm from being in her pocket.
“There’s a manual and a helmet in the right pannier. You should be able to figure it out yourself.”
“That’s more training than NERV gave me,” he murmured.
“Well, I don’t have time. I’ve got work to do,” she explained. “Just take it easy and you won’t have a problem. It’ll even stabilise itself so it won’t fall over.”
“Well okay....”
He didn’t understand how it could possible that a motorcycle would be more complicated than an Evangelion. The control handles looked similar, but they had far more buttons. Something mysterious under a transparent molly guard was unhelpfully labelled ‘switch’. There were three small square screens under the windshield, with a fourth set into what he thought was the fuel tank.
Again, it was nothing like what his expectations of a motorcycle should have been. And nothing did what he expected it to. He tried the molly-guarded switch.... and nothing happened. He tried it again with the key in what he thought was the ignition.
Both panniers opened instead.
He could hear Ford chuckling away to herself as she got back to work, probing in at the guts of the hoverbot, reading the results out on the meter beside her. It chirped and cheeped as she poked.
Shinji found the manual in the pannier.... as some strange keyboard and screen slab like a laptop opened flat.
He looked up from it just in time to see Jet Jaguar roll in through the door, her body encased in some sort of crash padding. Shinji blinked at the wheels strapped to her feet.
“Got another brick.”
She had one of the hoverbots under her arm. And still managed to sound rough and husky as she spoke.
“One of the 17’s?” Ford asked, throwing a glance at her for a moment.
“Yep. The old ones don’t like the new updates.”
Shinji silently crouched down onto tank of the bike, hoping the cyborg wouldn’t spot him.
Ford sighed. “Stick it on the bench, I’ll get to it after I work on the Padraig project.”
Jet gave her a gentle smile. “I’ll take care of it.” She dropped it onto the bench beside her with a thud.
“With your fingers all you’ll do is break it more.”
The cyber’s disappointment was obvious. “Alright...”
“Beside, we have company.” Ford betrayed him with a quick nod of her head in his direction
He pressed himself down against the tank, trying his level best to merge with the metal and hope she didn’t spot him.
“Oh Hi,” she said. “How’re you feeling today, Shinji?”
He shuddered, she was trying to sound kind but it fell flat on his face. All Shinji could recall when he heard her voice was the gruff, painfully direct way she’d spoken at him the day before. The English language masked it, her expression was kind and her eyes had a gentle decency to them....
It was a mask, a lie that’d come out when she spoke Japanese.
“Better.” He lied too, breaking eye contact.
Jet rolled across the floor, using some rolleblade-like boots strapped to her feet. Shinji willed her to go away, but evidently telepathy was one thing she couldn’t do.
“I heard you talked with Anika this morning,”
Shinji just nodded. He didn’t want to speak with her, even though she seemed determined not to leave him alone. Has hand gripped tight on the throttle, forming into a fist around the faux-rubber grip.
“She told you about yourself?”
Another lump in his throat. Another nod. He couldn’t answer that.
“And how do you feel about it?” she asked again.
He looked at her, a momentary snarl crossing his face. She was the focus. She was the one behind all of it. She was the one who’d planned all of it.
She was fucking huge.
“I opened a door, and there was space on the other side of it. Dreams don’t work like that.”
He could feel himself starting to shake inside.
“If this is real, then everyone I ever cared about never was. I never was.” He swallowed hard. “Nobody I care a.... about.....” He gasped. They still watched.“The people I wanted to see and came...... and......and....” He hiccuped. He choked. He struggled to breath for a half second. Jet and Ford watched, both looking at eachother, then at him, faces a mix of confusion and concern.
“They’re not here and I’m...” he finally burst out in a wrecking sob that rose right up out of the pit of his stomach.
His breath was hot in his mouth between gasps, misting on the cold metal fuel tank. The metal was cool against his cheek, sucking heat from his body. Tear dripped from his cheeks onto the paint.
“I just want to see them again,” he choked out between sobs.
A heavy, cold hand gripped his shoulder like a vice.
“I know how you feel,” said Jet, her voice almost passing for gentle.
“You can’t possibly know!”
It was like hitting a scaffold pole. Her arm didn’t even budge. The shock of impact ran right up his arm and through his body, ringing his skeleton like a bell. A pinch of pain bit deep and he yelped.
Jet’s arm never even moved.
Shinji looked up at her, horror rising in the pit of his stomach. He was still panting, still shaking, with tears crawling down his cheeks. She was glaring hard at him...
“Jet...” Ford interjected. She was standing there, casually wiping her hands in a clean towel.
Jet glanced back at her, the ice in her eyes slowly melting away. The grip on his shoulder relaxed, but that hand felt like it was made from a solid block of iron, still pressing onto his shoulder.
“Right, the movers are on their way in. I’ll give them the escort.” Her hand slipped off his shoulder and she turned around. “If you want to talk about it, Shinji, message me.”
He sniffed and nodded. He didn’t really. It was just a promise to contact her if he wanted to talk to her, and he was certain he didn’t. He watched her leave, in between grinding the tears out of his eyes. Jet just bladed out the door with a wave to her partner.
Shinji looked at Ford, who’d sat herself up against her workbench. “Some of her friends were killed a few years back,” she explained.
Shinji hummed to himself. His reflection stared back at him from the instrument panel glass.
“I’m alone here.” he whispered.
“Now that’s just not true,” Ford stated. “Frigga’s a lonely place, but nobody’s alone out here.” She was arms akimbo, pretending to be offended by it.
Shinji give her a wan smile, at least appreciating the effort.
He sat on the saddle of the motorbike, steadily cooling off. His mind swam with ideas he struggled to make sense of. The words Neon Genesis Evangelion flashed through his mind, chased by the realisation that if Rei was coming, she was likely just another ‘fake’ like he was.
He closed his eyes, inhaling a long deep breath before blowing it out through his lips. He still felt like himself...
“So, what do I do now?” he asked.
“It’s your choice. You can talk to Jet, you can go talk to Anika like you planned, stay here and help me out, or if you want to take the time to think about it yourself you can go home to Kotono.”
The word ‘home’ made him wince inside, bringing up memories of a place he knew wasn’t real, but could still remember in such vivid detail that he longed for it anyway.
Shinji gripped his hand around the throttle and closed his eyes.
----
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?