Shinji Ikari Raising Project

[Black Aeronaut]

Hmmm.... I like the idea. Let me flesh it out a bit here. Make it something a little more worthy...
UPDATE: As promised...
Also, if the one little phrase of German I used is mangled, then please forgive me.  I'm using Google Translate in hopes that it wouldn't terribly mangle one simple phrase.

With the keening squeal of a pneumatic motor punctuated with the staccato of the impact wrench, Ben worked feverishly at the engine mounts.  He had been handy with a wrench before he got his biomod.  Afterwards it was like as if he had been born with a wrench in his hands.
Benjamin was working on a very special piece of machinery... or at least he considered it to be very special.
The VF-4 Lightning Prototype, personal veritech of his beloved wife, R. Regina Langley.
It was a horrendously complex machine, even by the standards of the VF-1S Valkyrie, or even the highly coveted VR-101P Shadow Dancer Cyclone.  The complexity mostly lay in the transformation.  There were so many moving components that made it possible for the Lightning to transform that some were worried that it would affect the structural integrity of the veritech.
Benjamin not only proved them wrong, but also demonstrated just how superior the Lightning was to just about anything out there with a face-off between Mayonaka in the Magnificent Midnight and Gina in the Prototype.  With that demonstration, BAT was backordered on Lightnings for the foreseeable future.  They were still filling out the ranks of the Roughriders, and not one order would be filled until then.
Mayonaka, who had recently fledged, flitted between the turbine-leg assembly of the VF-4 Lightning Prototype and a very large work bench, setting out parts to be inspected, cleaned, and prepared as well as retrieving tools and getting them back to her father just as at the exact moment he needed them.  To the uninitiated, they would think that the father-daughter team was sharing some sort of telepathic link.  However, those in the know understood that Mayonaka had played a pivotal role in the VF-4's development.  She knew this veritech just as well as her father did.
The two already had the port-side nacelle separated from the rest of the machine, and, in turn, separated the nacelle into its component assemblies.  Fusion torch assembly, arm-and-autocanon assembly, foot-nozzle assembly, power plant assembly, and now the ion turbine engine with its quad-helix focusing array.
That was the problem.  Ben had heard the dissonance, however subtle it had been, when Gina started the engine and immediately called for her to shut it down.  Only he knew exactly what to listen for, being the only person that knew intimately how these arrays work.  (Noah came close since he had the original idea, but Ben had refined it to such a point where if he was being dishonest he could easily get away without paying royalties.)  This was a problem for some of these engines.  Wear and tear in the intricate fractile crystal assembelies inside the focus array sometimes causes a microfacture to develop.  Undectable, save for a very subtle dissonance, it would lead to a catastrophic failure in the focus array, leaving a valuable BAT customer or even a Roughrider down an engine.
Ben was still trying to work out the programming to detect the dissonance.  Once he had it, it would be part of the next group of firmware upgrades.  For now, though, careful bi-annual inspections had to suffice.
One more bolt, and the engine assembly was free.  Mayonaka had already rolled the specially kitted dolly into place and was securing it to the dismount railing.  Ben connected the winch and the air supply.  With an outraged scream of defiance, the winch came to life and began to extract the engine assembly, the tone of the pneumatic motor shifting as it came under load.
Despite being absorbed in his work, Benjamin was keenly aware of the presence watching over him like a hawk.
Gina seethed, her unbound hair and glowing alabaster skin giving the impression of a blast furnace.  Contrasting this was her blue eyes, which were like chips of the purest ice crystals set into her narrowed, baleful gaze.  What made it worse was that she had, in recent years, upgraded to a more mature looking form... one that hearkened unto the great actress, Sophia Loren - a woman that Gina had confessed to admiring with utter unrepentance.
It wasn't that big of a leap.  Had Gina been human, her Eurasian heritage would have given her a close enough skeletal structure to pass for a decendant of the actress.  And that's saying nothing about her eyes hair.
“Ich konnte es inzwischen gelaufen bin!" she muttered darkly once the pneumatic motor was shut off.  "”
This was bad.  Even though Benjamin knew that she was really cheesed off, nothing brought it home better than when she lost all ability to speak anything but German.
"We're only an hour away once we're wheels-up, beloved," Ben said, trying to soothe his wife.
"" Gina bit off angrily.  "