Meanwhile, back at the ranch a sort of clash of culture...
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
Quote:It was a British man. In a spacesuit. Bouncing around the moon amongst the wreckage of a staged shuttle crash gathering supplies and trying to make himself noticeable from orbit.________________________________
"The suit recycles everything to try and keep me alive. It recycles the air I breath out. It even recycles bodily fluids." He sucked on the end of a straw inside his helmet. "It means, in a way, I really am drinking my own pee." He took another sip. "Tastes like strawberries."
"Yuk."
Shinji changed the channel with prejudice, and tried hard not to think about what was going on up the Grey Room. The original Gundam series was on, but Amuro was just painfully whiny.
Click. "That kid has problems."
Part of him wondered if anybody'd ever said that about him. Maybe he was just giving Amuro a hard time. Or was there some android Amuro out there who might be offended?
Some of the disks left for him were just as unapealling. There was something called The Race to 400, with the cover image being an empty desert, with a speedometer. A bunch of Soviet documentaries, labelled with the names of alien planets with a picture of an old space shuttle on the cover. There was a whole series called The Worlds at War.
What was Boskone? Sounded like a cheap videogame villain.
Along with that, some stand-alone films. None of them seemed especially interesting. There were a thousand more things hidden on the recorder under the television itself. He cycled through it, stopping cold halfway through the list. The unmistakeable image of Rei Ayanami, standing in front of a blue moon.
Neon Genesis Evangelion. (1995) Hideaki Anno. Action. Mecha. Psychological. Teen
15 years after the Second Impact nearly annihilated mankind, 14 year old Shinji Ikari is summoned to Tokyo-3 by his father, and forced to pilot the Evangelion in battle against the mysterious Angels.
He stared at it, his mouth hanging open. Half his mind was daring him to push play, just to see what it looked like. The rest of him dreaded the thought of living through all of that again and worse...
He'd get to watch each and every single one of his mistakes, over and over again, with the added penalty of not being able to do a single thing to correct them.
He could hear Misato's voice again. It was the only way he'd ever be able to hear her voice again.
He got enough of it in his nightmares. Begging him to survive. Begging him to fight. The iron taste of blood on her tongue as she gave him that adult kiss.
Shinji turned the television off. He couldn't control when he woke up from his nightmares, but he could choose what to watch on T.V. Silence filled the apartment as he searched for something to occupy his mind and keep it from drifting back to places he was quietly desperate to avoid.
While he busied himself making a more complicated breakfast than was strictly necessary while Pen to the Penth played through the Y's soundtrack again. Kotono Mitsuishi was the closest he'd ever come to Misato's voice.
Misato Katsuragi never existed. He wasn't the Shinji Ikari from Evangelion, but his own person. He desperately hoped she would come through that door anyway.
The knock on the door made him jump out of his socks.
"Who is it?"
Did he dare hope that some form of android Misato had been found?
"S'only me. Ben."
The disappointment was crushing.
Shinji sighed. "Yes."
The door cracked open, Ben's perpetually smiling face appeared. It must be an American thing, Shinji surmised.
"I just wanted to make sure I didn't make a fool of myself yesterday.. Had to burn a little midnight oil to get Gina's Valkyrie running again and might have overdone it."
"No.... it's okay." Shinji tried to smile back, but it just fell utterly flat. What came out was a twisted mass of nerves crushed down and only qualified as a 'smile' on a technical level.
"You mind if I come in?"
"Technically it's not my apartment but..... Kotono won't be back for a while."
It was hard to say no.
"Great." he stepped inside, closing the door behind him "Well, truth be told, I was also kinda hoping to get a look at that cool bike of yours again, and maybe talk a little if you'd like."
"Kotono left a message to say I was supposed to find out more about where I was..."
In other words, he'd really rather not.
"Oh that's easy. Shinji," he grinned broader and broader. "Fenspace is the place where you can try be the person you want to be,"
Shinji was about to say that that wasn't what Kotono'd meant.
"Y'see," he carried on, taking a seat by the breakfast table "I always wanted to be a jet-jockey. I got my start as a courier launching in an old handwaved Volkswagen. And Gina.... she started as a laptop, she wanted to be my spaceship, and ended up becoming my wife and the mother of my daughter. Who was my spaceship."
"Eh?"
Shinji blinked. The man was a bulldozer. No wother Asu.... Gina liked him. They were so alike. They had something to say, and they just sort of said it. Americans had no sense of self restraint...
Ben chuckled. "It's complicated. You should ask her when you meet her. You two'd get along like burst oxygen line on fire."
"Ah," Shinji held his hand up, ready to answer.
"I guess my point is. You really can become anything. That's the magic of it. You could be a real fighter pilot and hero. You could be a fighter jet if you wanted, screaming through space in control of yourself, dancing among the stars. You could remake yourself to be a grown man... or woman. The only limit is what you want, how hard you want to try to achieve it."
Ben almost seemed to be bragging, like it was his own personal achievement somehow. There was a zeal and fire in his eyes.
Shinji gave him a brief glare that betrayed his frustration. "I want to be myself."
Ben's expression grew far more serious, his s*mile dampening down. He glanced at Shinji, then out of the window, clearly thinking it over. Shinji was quietly amazed to realise he'd actually listened...
"That's a damn good start," Ben said, with a smirk on the edges of his lips. "Now, about that bike."
The smile returned. The smile brooked no argument. It just wasn't the Japanese way of doing things.
"I have the user manual for the Judy. It might be able to tell you more about it than me. I never read it. "
Ben snorted. "Yeah, you're related to Jet alright."
Shinji frowned at the man sitting at the kitchen table. The back of his mind reminded him that he should've offered Ben some tea or something, but doubted he'd drink it.
"I got a better idea. Why don't we both head on out for a ride? We can talk on the way. Better for you to show rather than tell I think."
Shinji forced himself to look away from the smile. There was one thing he had to ask.
"Do you mind if I say no?"
Ben shrugged. "Well, if you want to stay here and watch some T.V. or something it's up to you."
Shinji offered him a thin smile. "No. I'll go. It was just nice to have the option."
"Great!"
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